Buzz 7.8

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Stormtiger raised one hand in the direction he’d come and created a blast of wind to clear a path through Grue’s darkness and reveal Hookwolf and Cricket.

“Fancy this,” Hookwolf chuckled, looking down at me, “We decide to attack the blockades and avoid being hemmed in like the ABB was, and we happen upon you?”

“Not looking for a fight,” I told him.

“Stormtiger, find the others of her group.” Hookwolf snarled, apparently not considering my words worth responding to.

“Can’t,” Stormtiger spoke, from where he stood above me.  “Not smelling them.”

“You smelled her.”

“And I smelled the two uniforms from the ambulance.  Other one’s bleeding, sitting near the ambulance somewhere over there.  Darkness boy isn’t around anymore or I’d be able to smell him.”

He was wrong.  My bugs could feel Grue out there.  If the driver had been injured, that might account for why Grue had lagged behind.  But Stormtiger couldn’t smell Grue?

Hookwolf turned to me, “The dog girl.  Where’s Bitch?”

“Not here.”

“I know that,” he growled.  His hand dissolved into a mess of knives, hooks and spearpoints, then solidified into an oversized claw with fingers as long as his torso.  He flexed them experimentally.  How did you even classify that?  Ferrokinetic shapeshifting?

I crawled backward a few feet, trying to maintain distance between us.  Stormtiger reached down and blocked my retreat with one blade-covered hand.

I looked up at Stormtiger and spoke, “We split up earlier today.  One of our members had a source, we heard about the email that went out when the news stations and papers did.  Decided it’d be better to back off, just in case.”  No harm done by admitting that much.

“Don’t believe you,” he snarled.  “Doesn’t explain why you’re here.”

“That’s because-”

I stopped as the two of them turned away.  The ‘paramedic’ a few feet from Stormtiger had bolted, and was drawing a gun as she ran toward the closest patch of darkness.  As she got close to her destination, still running, she turned on the spot and raised her gun to fire at Stormtiger and Hookwolf.

Hookwolf barely reacted as the bullets punched into his chest, and even that was just the inevitable force of being shot.  Stormtiger raised one arm as if to protect himself, but the bullets were already veering off before they could hit him, leaving a trio of hazy trails in the air where they had turned.

“Handle her, Cricket,” Hookwolf spoke, pressing a hand against his collarbone where a bullet had struck him.  The scarred girl with the buzz cut dashed forward, reaching behind her back to draw two scythe-like weapons, each only about as long as her forearm.

Coil’s soldier turned to fire at the incoming villainess, but Cricket ducked to the right, then evaded left, in time with the noise of the gunfire.  The distance between them closed rapidly.  I didn’t see what happened next, as Coil’s soldier disappeared into the darkness and Cricket followed her in.

Hookwolf turned back to me, “Suspiciously competent for an ambulance driver.  Pretty fucking sure that’s one of Coil’s people.  What are you doing with her?”

I didn’t answer.

My bugs reacted to a funny noise from the direction of Cricket and Coil’s woman, but I couldn’t hear it myself.  Grue’s power did strange things to sound.  I had more immediate concerns.

Hookwolf dropped his hand to his side, and I saw how the bullet had penetrated skin, but had failed to get any further than the interlocking grid of metal that sat in place of Hookwolf’s muscle.  He smiled.  “I was hoping you wouldn’t answer.  It means we get to interrogate you.”

Options, options, what were my options?  Bugs?  They were around, but I got the impression that Hookwolf wasn’t going to suffer that much if I swarmed him, and Stormtiger had some kind of aerokinesis, which was bound to be pretty effective against the lightweight bugs.  Knife, baton?  Not much better.   These guys were capable in hand to hand.  I wasn’t.

Where was Grue?  I felt out with my power, and found him at the back of the ambulance with the driver.  Whatever he was doing, I hoped he would do it soon.  I needed his help.

I looked for Cricket, and found her in the blackness, dragging Coil’s soldier back toward us.  I saw her emerge from the darkness, one of the miniature scythes buried in the woman’s upper arm, the other buried in her thigh.  With a full-body effort, Cricket swung the woman forward and pulled the scythes free.  Coil’s soldier rolled onto the ground before Cricket.  If her powers didn’t give her an edge in fitness, she was pretty damn fit for her frame.

Was Coil’s woman dead?  No.  The woman was breathing.  She was making lots of short, fast breaths, not moving, but she was breathing.

Hookwolf watched for a second before turning back to me.  “Maybe I’ll give Stormtiger some practice at getting answers out of people.  Those claws of his?  They’re compressed air.  Every second, he’s drawing in more air, shoving it into that claw shaped space, to make them denser, harder.  And when he releases it…” he offered me a low chuckle.

Come on, Grue.  I couldn’t handle this alone.

“Want to see what happens when one of them is buried inside you when he turns it into one of his blasts of wind?”  Hookwolf asked.  Again, the low laughter at my expense.

Grue was moving toward me with purpose, now.  I stirred bugs from the ground around him to place them on his body, get a sense of what he was doing.  He was carrying something three and a half feet long, nearly a foot wide, a rounded off shape that was all smooth metal.

Shit.

I flipped over and scrambled away.  Stormtiger was behind me, and he kicked me in the back as I tried to rise up and start running, shoving me back to the ground, hard.  I was glad for my mask as my face bounced off the pavement.

Go with it.  Remembering the tips Brian had given me during our sparring session, I used the fact that Stormtiger had created a bit more distance between us and continued to move away as fast as I could manage.

“Running?” Hookwolf laughed, “You can try.”

“Gun oil,” Stormtiger called out, whipping around to face Grue.  “I smell gun oil.”

Grue hefted the long metal object back with both hands, then flung it forward.  He didn’t drop both his arms as he let go.  Instead, he used his left hand to follow up with a directed blast of darkness to cover it as it rolled into the clearing.

I clamped my hands to my ears, painful as it was with the bandage on my right ear.

Grue’s right hand was already withdrawing a gun from his jacket pocket as he backed up.

His arm jerked twice as he fired the gun at the oxygen tank he’d fetched from the back of the ambulance.  The first shot missed.  The second didn’t.

It was so quiet I thought I’d been deafened by the sudden explosion.  Hookwolf’s delayed scream of pain and rage was a bittersweet relief.

Wasting no opportunity, Grue marched forward, gun in hand.  Stormtiger had been farther away, and lay face down on the ground, bleeding badly but intact, from what I and my bugs could see.  Grue stopped, aimed, and shot him once in each leg.

“Hey!” Cricket’s voice was strangled, strained.  I wondered if one of the injuries that had given her one of those scars had done something to her vocal chords.  She lowered one of the scythes toward Coil’s soldier.  “I got a-”

Grue covered her and her hostage in darkness and turned toward me and Hookwolf.  The message was clear.  He wasn’t negotiating.  I was pretty sure I couldn’t have made that call, even knowing that stopping for the woman’s sake was almost inevitably going to lead to a worse situation.

Hookwolf staggered to his feet.  He’d taken more damage from the blast than anyone, and his skin hung off in tatters around the arm he hadn’t yet transformed, most of the trunk of his body and his thigh, with lesser damage over the surrounding area.  Beneath the tatters of skin, as I’d seen with the bullet wound, there was only blood-slick bands and blades of metal.  Hooks and knives all laid side by side in the general shape of human musculature.

Hookwolf thrust his damaged arm out to one side, and the muscles unhinged like a swiss army knife, revealing still more blades and hooks that unfolded, swelled and overlapped to cover and patch the injured area.  His arm grew with the use of his power, and the resulting limb was three times the normal size, ending in what looked like a two foot long fishhook.

“Skitter,” Grue called, “Run!”

I climbed to my feet and hurried toward him.  Hookwolf turned to face me, then lunged my way, closing more distance than I might have anticipated.   I abandoned my attempt to rejoin Grue and headed to my left, straight into the darkness.

My bugs dotted the surface of a mailbox, three paces into the blackness.  I ducked around it as Hookwolf blindly followed me in.  Swinging blindly, he struck a fire hydrant, but no water was forthcoming.  He lunged left, gouging chunks of brick from a wall, then he leaped right, striking the mailbox and cleaving it in half.

I was already scrambling in Grue’s general direction, the mailbox well behind me.

I felt a surge of relief at realizing that Cricket had abandoned her hostage in favor of going after Grue, to initiate a brief exchange of blows.  Unfortunately, my relief was short lived, because the combat wasn’t brief in a good way.  Grue fired the gun twice, and twice she dodged the bullet, standing only ten and seven feet away from the barrel.  It wasn’t superspeed, either, though she was quick.  Her movements were simply too efficient, and if there was any delay in her reactions, I wasn’t seeing it.

He swung a punch as she closed in.  Cricket leaned out of the way, then swung her scythe to rake him across the chest.  From the way he staggered, I knew she’d struck home.  He jabbed, she avoided it as though it were easy, then followed up with two more swings, and he failed to avoid either.  He staggered back, clutching one arm to his chest.

He blanketed the area around them in darkness, filling the clearing, and Cricket immediately switched to swinging blindly and ferociously around herself as she advanced toward where Grue had been.  Grue backed away, but this had the unfortunate effect of putting him closer to Hookwolf, who was doing much the same as Cricket.  Grue turned and ran to create some distance and avoid being hemmed in.

Then every bug in the area reacted to that sound I couldn’t make out, the one I’d heard when Cricket went after Coil’s soldier.  It was loud enough for them to hear through the darkness, but… entirely out of my range of hearing.

I couldn’t say for sure, but I got the impression the ones closer to Cricket had heard it a fraction of a second sooner.

“Grue!” I screamed into the oppressive shadow.  “Move!”

Cricket turned toward him and lunged in one motion, bringing both scythes down in an overhead swing.  Grue moved out of the way just in time.

“She has radar!” I shouted, my voice barely audible to myself.  Didn’t matter.  Grue could hear me.

Cricket passed one of the mini-scythes into one hand and then used her newly freed hand to wipe bugs from her skin.  They were gathering on her, and she was starting to feel it.  Good.

Again, that pulse emanated from her.  She maintained it this time, and my bugs began to suffer for it.  Their coordination suffered, they began to move slower, and their senses – such as they were in the darkness – began to go haywire.

After a second or two, I thought maybe I was starting to feel it too.  A bit off-balance, nauseous.  Grue was hunched over, his hands on his knees, but I wasn’t sure if that was Cricket’s power or the injuries she’d inflicted.  From the way Cricket was moving, I gathered that she couldn’t see us.  Was it echolocation?  Did it not work if she simply blasted the noise continually rather than use it in bursts?

Annoying as it was that everyone seemed to have a way of dealing with my bugs, I was at least putting her in a position where she couldn’t both find us and deal with them.

I was having trouble getting a sense of her powers.  I’d heard of her, seen pictures, read up on her on the wiki and message boards.  She was rarely more than a footnote, typically a suspect in a murder or arson case alongside Stormtiger and Hookwolf.  Never had I come across something like ‘Cricket has limited precognition’ or ‘Cricket is a sound manipulator’.

The bugs started to fall away from her, losing their grip or ability to navigate through the air.  Knowing our advantage would soon disappear, I advanced towards her, drawing my knife.  I checked on Hookwolf, and found him scaling a building a distance behind me.  Was he trying to rise above the cloud of darkness to spot us or get his bearings?

I was three paces from Cricket when I felt the sound die off, then resume again for one brief second.  Another radar pulse.

“Careful!” I shouted, adjusting my momentum and hurrying to back away.  Too slow.  She was already pivoting to swing at me.  The handle of one scythe struck me in the side of my throat, the actual blade hooking around behind my neck to halt my retreat.  Before I could do anything, she pulled me toward her.  I stumbled forward, and she adjusted her grip to swing the other scythe up and into the side of my stomach.

I doubled over and crumpled to the ground.

Grue shouted something, but his words didn’t reach me through the darkness.

Cricket emitted another radar pulse, then lunged for Grue.  She caught him in the arm, this time.  Then she backed off, going for the continuous, sense-warping noise to put my bugs on the fritz once more.

Grue raised his borrowed gun and his arm bucked with the kick.  Cricket was oblivious as the gun fired off several times in a row, but whatever she was doing with her power was screwing with Grue’s ability to aim.  None of the bullets struck home.  He stopped.  Either he was out of bullets, though it seemed too soon for that, or he wanted to conserve ammunition.

I climbed to my feet, feeling my side protesting in agony.  The blade hadn’t penetrated my costume, but the sides of my stomach weren’t armored and the cloth had done little to soften the jab of it, even if it had prevented me from being cut or disemboweled.  Cricket was bigger than me, stronger, and she knew how to use her weapons.  It had hurt.

When I was sure I could move without falling over, I lunged, knife in hand.

I’d hoped that if I was quick about it, I could act before she used her radar again.  I wasn’t so lucky.  She was already moving by the time I realized she’d made another pulse of noise, scythe points whipping around toward the side of my head, where my mask provided only partial coverage.  I had too much forward momentum to avoid walking straight into the incoming blades.

I half-fell, half ducked, and instead of driving my knife into her back like I’d intended, I wound up burying it in the side of her thigh.  Whatever technique let her dodge bullets, it apparently didn’t work if she couldn’t see.

As much as it might have hurt, she didn’t waste an instant in hefting her weapon to retaliate and swinging down at my head.  I wasn’t in a position to get out of the way.

Grue caught her by the wrist mid-swing and pulled her off-balance before she could follow through.

She moved fluidly, considering the blade buried in her upper leg.  She reversed her grip on her weapon with her free hand, stuttered her power to create what I took was another radar pulse, then readied to swing it at Grue.

I twisted the knife, and pulled it out of her leg with a two-handed grip.  Or, to rephrase, I pulled the knife through her leg, dragging it horizontally through the meat of her thigh, toward her hip, and out.

She toppled, and Grue put his hand on my shoulder to pull me back away.  Cricket lay on the pavement, pressing her hands to her injury.

“You okay?” Grue asked me, as he cleared the darkness within one foot of the both of us.

“I’m bruised but yeah.  I should be asking you that question.  How bad is it?”

He banished the darkness around his body, and in the gloom, I saw how the blades had neatly cut through his jacket and t-shirt to draw criss-crossing lines of red across his chest.  An uglier wound marked his right arm from elbow to wrist, all the more visible because the cut had extended to the cuff of his costume, leaving the sleeve to hang loose around his elbow.

“Looks worse than it is.  I’ve fought people like her before, in sparring and fighting classes.  She was showing off with the first few cuts.  Shallow, inflicting pain, not really meant to disable or deal real harm.”

“That’s stupid,” I muttered.  “I’m glad, but it’s stupid.”

“She probably didn’t think about it.  I’d bet it’s something she learned and incorporated into her style while fighting for a crowd.”  He looked over in Hookwolf’s direction, then winced at how the movement pulled against his injured chest.  “We should go.”

“Agreed.”

Grue opened a path in the darkness for the faux paramedic, we checked that she was alive, and then helped her limp to the ambulance, with me doing most of the heavy work for once.  I hurried to grab some first aid supplies, packing ointments, pills and bandages into a bag.  Coil’s soldiers retreated back toward the police barricade before I was finished, each supporting the other.

Grue flooded more of the area with darkness while I gathered most of the swarm back around myself.  I left only the bare minimum of bugs necessary to navigate the sightless world of Grue’s power and the ones I needed to track Hookwolf’s presence.  There were more I couldn’t touch because they were caught helpless in the endless, subsonic drone that Cricket still emanated, but I had enough that I could deal.  We hurried away before Hookwolf thought to attack the spot where the ambulance had crashed.

We were nearly four blocks away before Grue felt it safe to dismiss the darkness around us.  Rationally, I knew we were safer in the shadows, that it would prevent most ambushes, but a primal part of my psyche was glad to be in the light and noise once more.

I shot Grue another worried look as we walked.  “Looks like it’s my turn to give you some stitches.  You going to be okay?”

“Fuck.”  He touched his chest tenderly, not giving me a direct answer.  “What were her powers?  Overclocked reflexes and what was it you said?  Radar?”

“Enhanced reflexes is a better guess than what I’d come up with.  She was making some sort of subsonic drone.  It was the source of that disorientation effect.  She could use it like echolocation or something.”

“It’s times like this I can say it’s worth having Tattletale on the team.  I hate not knowing someone’s powers.”

We stopped at an old church with boards up where there should have been stained glass windows.  Litter and more than one half-full trash bag occupied the ground at the base of the building.  Together, we walked inside.

Regent was perched on the lip of the stage beneath the altar.  Tattletale sat on the back of one of the benches, her feet resting on the seat.  Bitch paced at the rear of the church, the point farthest from the front door, and her dogs moved like gargantuan silhouettes in the darkness of the aisles.  If it weren’t for the light filtering in between the plywood on the windows, I wasn’t sure I would have known they were there.

“Grue!” Tattletale leapt from her seat.  “What happened?”

“Ran across Hookwolf, Stormtiger and Cricket.  Those three like to cut people,” Grue spoke.  “We were lucky to get away as intact as we did.”

“Sit,” I ordered Grue.  Hissing between his teeth, he pulled off his jacket, then turned his attention to his T-shirt, which was sticking to his chest with the blood that had leaked from the cuts.  Rather than have to remove his helmet and drag the cloth over his injured chest and arm, he tore his shirt where it had been cut, and pulled it off in tatters.  He sat down, shirtless, his helmet on.  I began getting the stuff out to clean his wounds

“Did you guys run into trouble?” Grue asked.

“Just enough that we’ve been getting a little restless. Bitch took down some thugs, but they scattered, and word’s probably out that we’re in the area.”

“Purity?” He asked.

“She’s out there,” Regent spoke, in his characteristic distracted, disaffected manner, “We saw the lights and heard the noise as she was knocking down more buildings.  She moved away from this area a little while ago.”

Tattletale turned to me, “Here, give me that.  I’ll work on his arm.”

I duly handed over the cleaning solution and some antiseptic wipes.  I heard Grue mutter, “Shit, I hope Cricket isn’t the type to put poison on her weapon.”

“Don’t say that!” I gasped, horrified.

“Not to worry, either of you,” Tattletale sounded exasperated.  “My power says no.”

I nodded, but my heartbeat was still cranked up a notch from that momentary alarm.  When I glanced up from the stash of medical stuff I’d grabbed from the ambulance to see how Tattletale was doing with Grue’s arm, I saw Grue’s skull-visor pointed at me.  Was he looking at me?  What was he thinking?  What expression was on his face?

“I’m thinking guerrilla strikes,” Grue spoke, turning to Tattletale, “We have the dogs, we use their mobility to harass, catch any roaming groups off guard, take them down, disappear before reinforcements or heroes show.”

Tattletale shook her head, “One problem with that.”

“Which is?”

She pointed at his chest.  “You may not be poisoned, but you’ve lost some blood.  I’d lay even money that you’d pass out if you did something as high exertion as riding the dogs.”

“Don’t take a bet with Tattle,” Regent chimed in, “She cheats.”

“We need to end this fast,” Tattletale said.  “Not just because of Grue’s injuries, but because Purity’s going to wipe out our neighborhood soon if someone doesn’t stop her.  We take the most direct action we can.”

“Direct action,” I echoed her.  I didn’t like the sound of that.

“We go straight for Purity.”

“Fuck that,” Grue shook his head, “There’s no way.”

“Way,” Tattletale retorted.  “It’s not pretty, it’s risky, but it’s our best bet at ending this, one way or another.  Thing is, we’ve got to move fast or our opportunity will disappear.  Skitter, we’d better get started on the stitches, I’ll explain while we do it.”

I swallowed, nodded, turned my attention back to the bag of medical stuff, and found the needle and thread.

“Like you said before,” I told Grue, quiet, pulling the pre-threaded needle free of the spool, “Let me apologize in advance.”

“Damn it,” he muttered.

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Buzz 7.7

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Purity floated above the docks, an oversize firefly against a blue-gray backdrop of sky.  She came to rest over a building that had been half built and left abandoned, a small crane jutting out of the middle of it.  A building I recognized as Bitch’s place.  Her improvised dog shelter.

“Brian!” I called out.  “You want to see this!”

The cameraman tried to zoom in and focus on Purity, but only intensified the lens flare effect that followed her.

He zoomed back out just in time to see her take action.

The beams of light that blasted from her palm weren’t straight.  There was a bit of a spiral to them, as they formed a rough double helix.  The end result was wider than Purity was tall, tearing into the building to topple the crane against one wall.  She turned the light on the other walls, obliterating them.

It took her less than a minute to level the building and pulverize any part of the structure that stood higher than the sidewalk.

She paused, and hovered there in the midst of the dust and the motes of light that had followed in the wake of her power.  She turned and shot the next-closest building, directing a smaller, tighter beam at one corner where the structure met the ground.  She hit the next corner, then swept the oscillating shaft of light through the ground floor to obliterate any supports that stood within.  The building toppled messily with brick walls sloughing off and cresting plumes of dust.

The building hadn’t even finished falling down before she started work on the next two, devoting one beam to each.

“Were there people in there?” I asked, horrified both at the idea and at what this woman was capable of doing. “What about those other buildings?

Brian was behind his couch, watching, “There might have been, and there might be.”

My need to hurry overrode my modesty.  I stood and pulled off my top, leaving just my bra on, making sure to keep my back to Brian.   I removed the sweatshirt I had tied around my waist and untied the arms of my costume.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting ready,” I put my arm through one arm and worked my fingers into the gloves.

Brian walked around the couch and I hurried to raise the top half of my costume and clutch it to my chest, covering myself.  He put his hands on my bare shoulders and exerted enough force to push me back down to a sitting position.  I complied, stiffly, reluctantly.

He pulled his hands away a little more quickly than he might have a day or two ago, jamming them in his pockets.  I hunched my shoulders forward self consciously.

Brian took a deep breath.  “Not your job.”

“They’re doing that because of us,” I adjusted my grip on my costume top to free a hand so I could point it at the TV.  The cameraman was retreating from the scene, and the image was wobbling as the camera rocked with his movement.  The spark of light that was Purity was moving in his general direction as she leveled more buildings.

“Because of Coil, not us.  The heroes will be the ones to take care of it,” Brian retorted.

“They could be hurting innocent people.”

“Given who these guys are, I’m pretty sure they’ve been hurting innocent people for a long time.”

I turned to frown at Brian, “You know what I mean.  We-”

“Undersiders,” A female voice cut into the conversation.  “Protectorate.   Take note.”

Our heads turned back to the television screen.  The camera showed a brilliant glare that could only vaguely be made out as a face.  The view shifted, and I heard her command, “Hold it.”

The camera steadied and focused on Purity’s face, from ground level looking up.  I suspected the cameraman was on the ground.

“You took the most important thing in the world from me,” her voice was without affect, flat.  “Until she is returned, this doesn’t stop.  I will take this city apart until I find you or you come to stop me.  My subordinates will murder anyone, everyone, until the matter is settled.  I don’t care if they are genetically pure or not.  If they haven’t allied with us already, they missed their chance.”

She bent down to take the camera.  While the image swayed wildly, Purity spoke, “Night, Fog.  Demonstrate.”

The camera steadied, fixed on a man and a woman in gray and black costumes, respectively, featuring cowls and cloaks.  Behind and to the side of them was an unnaturally pale and white haired young man.

The man in gray evaporated into a rolling cloud of white-gray fog, moving toward the camera.  Purity took flight, moving up and above the scene, keeping the camera focused on the cameraman.  As the camera rose and the view of the scene expanded, I could see Crusader off to one side, leaning against a wall with his arms folded.

As the mist enveloped the cameraman, Night strode forward, disappearing into it.  The timing of what happened was wrong, too soon after she entered the fog.  There was a ragged scream, and then blood sprayed out of the mist to paint the surrounding road in dozens upon dozens of long splashes of crimson.

The fog moved as though it had a mind of its own, congealing into the man once more.  When he had fully pulled himself together again, there were only a few spatters of blood six or so paces from where the body had fallen, and Night, standing in the middle of the road.  No body, no clothes, no blood remained where the fog had passed.

“We are not the ABB,” Purity spoke, not bothering to turn the camera back to herself, “We are stronger, both in powers and in numbers.  We have discipline, and thanks to you, we have nothing left to lose.  I will have my daughter back, and we will have our restitution.”

Purity dropped the camera, and the view spun lazily as the camera hurtled to the ground.  There was the briefest of glimpses of the trail of light that marked her departure, before the camera hit the ground and the television went black.  After a moment, the ‘BB4 News’ logo appeared on the screen against a blue background.

“Crap,” Brian said.

“So.  If you’re not going to go after them to save people,” I wasn’t able to keep all the bitterness out of my voice.  “Maybe you’ll do it for our rep, after we got called out like that?”

“That’s not- Taylor, I don’t want people to get hurt or killed, either.  I’m not a villain that aims to hurt people.  I’m just being practical.”

“You didn’t answer my question.  What are we doing now, after hearing that?”

“We’re calling Lisa.  Or you are, and I’ll take care of your ear while you do it.”

I nodded.  I took the opportunity to get my top back on while he got the first aid kit, and grabbed my cell phone.  Brian used saline and a wet cotton wipe to wipe around my ear, and I dialed Lisa.  She picked up on the first ring.

“Lemon J,” I told her.

“Bumblebee S,” she replied.  “No immediate danger, but the situation doesn’t look good?”

“Right,” I replied.

Brian put the cotton wipe aside.  It was a red-pink with flakes of my dried blood on it.  He prepared another to continue working.

“You see that bit on TV?” I asked her, “Hold on, I’m putting you on speaker for Grue.”  I’d used his codename for security’s sake.  I fiddled with the keypad to get the phone to speaker mode.

Lisa’s voice was tinny through the low quality speaker.  “Purity?  I saw the bit on TV.  From what I picked up, child protective services and a contingent of capes went into her place and walked out with her baby while she was at work, before she even had a chance to hear about the email.  Mama bear snapped.”

“Tattletale,” Brian spoke, “Did you talk to Coil?”

“Coil says he told Kaiser straight up that he was responsible for the emails.  I believe him.  If Purity and Kaiser’s other subordinates don’t know, Kaiser either hasn’t seen fit to tell them or he’s intentionally keeping them in the dark.”

“What?  Why would he do that?” I raised the phone closer to my mouth to ask her.

“It makes a warped sort of sense to me,” Brian answered for Lisa.  “He lets his people believe we’re responsible, with Purity’s group gunning for us and the Protectorate.  Hookwolf hates us anyways, because of Bitch, so he goes along.  Kaiser lets them deal with us, with all that fury and hate and no-holds-barred torture, murder and maiming that comes with blaming us.  When we’re dealt with, or when it’s convenient, he tells them the truth, turns that bloodthirst against Coil.  His people won’t ever be scarier or more vicious than they are right now.  Why not maximize the damage?”

“Doesn’t that fall apart if Coil admits, publicly or to the members of Empire Eighty Eight, that he’s responsible?”  I asked.

“Yes,” Lisa’s tinny voice replied, “But Coil won’t.  He was willing to talk to Kaiser, fess up to the man himself face to face, but going with a more public route risks putting him in the spotlight, drawing attention to himself, and he’s not going to do that.  I suspect Kaiser knows that and is accounting for it.”

“So what’s next?” I asked, “I think we should do something to step in, but Brian was saying that he thought we should continue to lay low.  Before Purity said her piece, anyways. Not sure if he’s changed his mind.”  I gave him a look.

“I haven’t,” Brian spoke, loud enough to be picked up by the phone.  He dabbed ointment on my ear, making me wince.  “Sorry.”

I wasn’t sure if the apology was over his stance in the discussion or the medical care.

“According to the news and my, um, inside source,”  Lisa spoke, referring to her power, “Purity hasn’t stopped.  She’s doing strafing runs across the Docks.  She moves too fast for anyone but Dauntless or Velocity to catch, and she hits harder than both of them combined.  She’s knocked down four more buildings while we’ve talked, I’m pretty sure. How long before she happens to knock over our hideout?”

Brian pursed his lips.

“And she leads her own sub-group within Empire Eighty Eight, so I’m betting that Fog, Night, Alabaster and Crusader are on the streets, doing their own thing.  I dunno about you guys, but I have friends in our neighborhood.  I’m very not cool with that.”

Brian sighed, “Fine.  We go.  But no direct confrontation until we have a game plan, especially not before we reunite our two groups.  Where are you guys?”

“Holed up on the far side of the Trainyard, with the dogs,” Lisa answered, “Not a bad spot.  Better than the building Purity tore down.  Don’t know why she was set up there instead of here.”

I heard a voice on the other end that was probably Bitch’s, though I couldn’t make out the words.

“So.  We meet?” Lisa asked.

“We meet,” Brian replied.  “I’m going to call Coil for a vehicle, and to ask him a few questions, hear for myself that he talked to Kaiser.  However long it takes for the ride to get here, it should give me time to stitch Skitter up.”

I winced.

“Patch her up?  Why?”

“Not relevant to the current situation.  We’ll explain later,” he said.

“Later then.  Take care of yourself, Skitter”  Lisa hung up.

Brian held up the needle and thread, “Let me apologize in advance.”

■

“You see kids get their ears twisted in the movies and on TV all the time.  What you don’t get is how much it fucking hurts,” I touched the part of my mask that covered my bandaged earlobe.  It was throbbing, due in part to Brian’s ministrations.

“Just leave it alone.  The painkillers will kick in soon.”

“Alright.”

We sat in silence for a few moments.  I stared out the small window at the back of the vehicle.  Very few cars were going in the direction we were.

The interior of the vehicle that Coil had procured for us was filled with medical equipment.  There was a gurney, which I sat on, a second smaller type of gurney that could be disassembled and reassembled as required, up near the ceiling.  The interior was efficiently packed with medical supplies: an oxygen tank underneath the bench where Grue sat, a heartbeat monitor, lifejackets, tubes of all shapes and sizes, lockers and drawers with pills, splints and bandages.

It was, to all appearances, a real ambulance.  I couldn’t say whether it had originally been an ambulance, and Coil had added extra compartments for weapons and for my bugs, or if he’d gone the other way and built the vehicle from scratch, to accommodate his additions.

We slowed down, and Grue leaned towards the front of the ambulance,  “What’s the holdup?”

“Blockade coming up,” the driver spoke.  He and the woman in the passenger seat were Coil’s people, decked out in paramedic’s uniforms.  “No sweat.”

He flipped a switch, and the siren blared.  Seconds later, he was revving up and moving without difficulty.  I looked through the rear window, and saw a line of police cars and PRT vans behind us, moving to close the gap they’d just opened in their formation.

“Hey, are we okay?” Grue asked me.  He was outfitted in costume, helmet on and visor down.

“Hm?”

“I get the feeling you’re angry.”

“If I’m angry at anyone for that thing outside the mall, it’s myself.  Can we just drop that topic forever and forget it ever happened?”

“No, no.  I mean, are you angry that I didn’t jump out of my seat to go fight Empire Eighty Eight, before we knew everything that was at stake?”

“Oh,” I flushed, and my ear throbbed in response to the rush of blood.  Could’ve kicked myself.  “I honestly don’t know.  I wasn’t expecting it.  I see the lengths you go through to take care of your… family member, I think of you as a pretty honorable guy, you know?”  This was veering closer to the conversation-that-was-not-to-be-spoken-of than I’d like.  I deliberately left that thought hanging.

Grue rubbed the back of his neck, “I’m not sure I’m as good a person as you’re making me out-”

An impact rocked the ambulance, tossing Grue out of his seat and nearly knocking me heels over head.  The ambulance veered out of the driver’s control, tipped, and landed on its side, bringing Grue against the underside of the stretcher I’d been sitting on.  The spare gurney and the contents of drawers and lockers around the interior spilled free and scattered around us.

“Fuck!” the driver swore.  “Fuckshit!”

I pulled free of the tubes and the half of a gurney that had fallen around me, and crawled toward the front to look between the two front seats.

It didn’t look so different from Bitch’s dogs in general shape.  It was a little larger, too, maybe, but that was a hard call to make.  It was hollow, its limbs were thinner than the dogs, and I couldn’t really draw a line between what was the actual ‘meat’ of the body and what wasn’t, because the entire thing was a chainsaw whir of serrated blades, hooks and needle points, shuffling and shifting around one another, rising and falling, all moving too fast for the eye to follow.  Altogether, it maintained a general quadruped shape with a tail and elongated snout.

Walking on either side of it were two people.  There was a pale, tall man with the sort of muscle-heavy build you only saw on cons and bodybuilders.  He wore black slacks that were in tatters around his feet, had chains wrapped around his forearms, hands and calves, and a blue-white tiger mask.  On the opposite side of the metal beast was a twenty-something girl with a gymnast’s build and scars criss-crossing her exposed skin.  Her hair was shorn to a bleached blond buzz cut, and her face was covered by a metal cage.

The blender of dangerous looking metal bits dissolved, each of the hooks and blades retracting into the skin of the man at the center of the thing’s chest.  As the front legs withdrew into his shoulders, he dropped into a crouch on the street.  He wore a wolf mask of sheet metal that had been crudely bent into place, framed by long, greasy blond hair.  Hookwolf.

Rumor had it that Hookwolf, back in the day, had been one of the top fighters in a parahuman fighting ring in New York.  He’d grown greedy, killed the man that ran it for access to the vault with the night’s earnings, and had made a good number of enemies in the process.  It had been a group of white supremacists local to that area that had given him shelter and support, happy to side with him because the man he’d killed had been an ‘acceptable target’.  Maybe the ideology was real for Hookwolf from day one, maybe it was an act that had become reality when he found he enjoyed having people celebrate him for enacting his most twisted impulses and racking up a body count.  Either way, I suspected that  there were few things he wouldn’t do for his ‘Empire’ nowadays.

Stormtiger, the man with the chains and tiger mask, and Cricket, the girl, apparently tied back to the same circles of parahuman prize fighters that Hookwolf had once been part of.  I couldn’t begin to guess their motivations for following him, but I suppose it hardly mattered.  Hookwolf was dangerous enough on his own.  With friends?

“We run,” I muttered.  Hookwolf and his buddies had their backs turned to us and were walking toward the police barricade.  Stormtiger flexed his hands, and the air blurred around them, congealed into a half-dozen pale, translucent blades that jutted from each hand.

“We have guns,” spoke the driver, “We shoot them from behind.”

“No,” Brian spoke, “It won’t hurt Hookwolf, and I suspect Cricket and Stormtiger could do something about it, or they wouldn’t be so brazen about walking towards those cops.  Skitter is right.  We retreat.  Ready?”

Grue blanketed the back doors of the ambulance in darkness to mute the noise as he cracked it open to cover the outside as well.  Noiselessly, the four of us backed out of the ambulance.

Grue flooded the block with darkness, and I scattered my bugs out from the surrounding area and the compartments in the ambulance’s interior to follow in the wake of the darkness, spacing them out to cover the ground and the other objects around us, giving myself a swarm-sense of my surroundings.  I grabbed the hand of the woman ‘paramedic’ and pulled her away from the middle of the street, toward the sidewalk.  Brian brought the driver in the same general direction.

My bugs felt someone come after us, fast.  I didn’t have time to get out of the way and lead Coil’s faux paramedic to safety as well, so I shoved her in one direction and leaped in the other.  The man leapt into the space we’d vacated, and I felt a rush of wind set my hair to whipping around my face.

There was an explosion of sorts, a blast of wind powerful enough to lift me off the ground and push away a fair share of Grue’s darkness.  Stormtiger stood in the epicenter of the clearing, reforming the translucent ‘claws’ around his raised left hand.

He used one of the translucent blades on his hand to tap the side of his tiger mask’s nose as he turned to look down at me.  When he spoke, his voice was deeper than Brian’s, “Don’t need to see you, sweetie.”

I was really, really growing to hate enhanced senses.

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Buzz 7.6

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

“So, about that ‘favor’ I just did you…” Brian began.

I glanced around at the other people who were departing the bus, still more were waiting at the stop.  “Can we talk about it later?  In private?”

He gave me a curious look, but he replied, “Of course.”

I knew I was making it worse by procrastinating, that I’d only get more awkward if I dwelled on it.  Whether I admitted my feelings or told him about Sophia, both felt too personal to talk about with the crowd of strangers following us off the bus.

We’d gotten off the bus at a mall I’d never been to.  It wasn’t one of the ones with any major chains or stores in it, but it wasn’t small enough to deserve the label of ‘strip mall’ either.  There were more people milling around than I thought there might be, given that it was still mid afternoon; high school students and nine to five employees wouldn’t be out yet.  I realized there were more than a few people in their late teens or early twenties with backpacks and bags.  College students.

“Next bus going by my place should come in half an hour, but we can stay longer, if you want,” Brian told me.

“What did you want to get?” I asked him.

“Bus tickets and some stuff for breakfast.  This is the closest spot to my apartment that has both.”

“Okay.”

“You need anything?”

“Toothbrush, toothpaste, and I was thinking about grabbing a book.”

“Don’t worry about the toothbrush or toothpaste, I have extra stuff set aside for Aisha when she comes, and replacing that before then is easy.  Want to go to the bookstore, and I’ll meet you there when I’ve got what I need?”

“Sure.”

That might have been the point we went our separate ways, but the grocery store and bookstores were in the same direction.  We walked together, in awkward silence, until we saw a crowd outside a store.

It was an electronics store, with computers and TVs in the window.  The number of people had reached critical mass and was drawing more onlookers, to the point where it was hard to find an angle where we could see the screens.  At least, where I could see the screens – Brian was tall enough to see over the average person.

The images displayed on the screen were the same as the ones I had seen in the email, earlier.  Max Anders and Kaiser.  Kayden Anders and Purity.  The blondes as Fenja and Menja.  The broadcast flickered through all of them: Hookwolf, Krieg, Night, Fog, Stormtiger, Othala, Cricket, Rune, Victor, Alabaster, the Crusader… the list went on.  The screen shifted to two news broadcasters.  In the top right corner of the screen, there was the usual story of the moment image, showing Max Anders sitting at a table at some event, with a swastika followed by a question mark hovering above him.

“Word’s out,” Brian spoke to me, quiet.  “If they didn’t know about this already, they do now.”

I nodded without turning away from the screen.  The broadcast changed to show Armsmaster and Miss Militia with a man in a suit and tie, addressing a crowd of reporters.

“We’re probably not going to see anything new here,” Brian whispered to me, “And we can’t hear anything through the window.  We’ll text Lisa, let her know it’s on the news, and she can handle the information side of things.”

I nodded and joined Brian in walking away.

“It’s clever,” I murmured, glancing around to ensure nobody was in immediate earshot, “I don’t know if I agree with how the boss went about it, I think it sort of crosses a line, but I can see the reasoning.  Controlled chaos, keeping everyone that matters busy and off-balance so he can advance his own agenda.”

“It does cross a line, yeah.  We’ll have to see how that works out.”

I saw the bookstore to my left, “I guess this is where we part ways?”

“Sure.  I’ll meet you in a couple of minutes.”

Being around Brian was tense, in a way.  I found most social situations awkward, and the only way I could cope was by planning out what I’d say, considering and anticipating everything in advance.  Around Brian, though, I got so flustered and distracted that I couldn’t do that.  That led to me feeling like I sounded dumb, created awkward pauses.  It only got worse as I became aware of any of it.  That was where the kiss had been so nice, settling my thoughts and giving me a sense of tranquility for that all too brief moment.

Except things were worse now, and Brian and I had a discussion looming.  Worse, I’d been so focused on not screwing up the dialogue now, in the present, that I hadn’t had time to think about what I’d say in the immediate future.

In short, as much as I liked his company, liked him, I was glad for the break and the chance to calm down and get my thoughts sorted, so I could handle it when the conversation happened.

The used bookstore wasn’t organized in the slightest.  There was a heavy musty smell, and the racks were organized haphazardly.  There were fantasy books and science fiction both classified under ‘fantasy’, which irked me, and non fiction was one broad category that took up an entire wall.  If there was a system to sort the books, I couldn’t see it, and many of the shelves had books on their sides, stacked atop one another, sometimes two or three layers deep.  Some of the fuller shelves had books stacked on the ground in front of them, requiring careful steps to avoid knocking anything over or stepping on a stray book.

The sole occupant of the store was an elderly black man that sat behind the counter, leaning back in a chair with his hands folded on his stomach.  The television played a little too loudly for the store’s old school atmosphere.  Some courtroom show.

After checking out the selection of fantasy books in the middle of the store, I navigated my way to the back, keeping an eye on the signs identifying each section.  The Romance section had way too many books in it.  So did Mystery, as far as I was concerned.  Both genres tended to be a little too repetitive and samey for my tastes.

As I disappeared behind a row of shelves, the man at the counter called out, gruff, “Don’t be shoplifting because you think I’m not paying attention!”

“Alright!” I called back, feeling silly as I said it.  I wasn’t sure how else to respond.

I found the Instructional section and spotted the item I’d come into the store for in one of the stacks on a lower shelf.  Dog Psychology: The Basis of Dog Training.

With minimal experience being around dogs, I needed more information, if I was going to continue relating with Bitch.  I’d known I wanted a book on the topic of how dogs thought & related to others, and I was glad to have found it.

I tucked the book under one arm, then picked up another book on tailoring, as a possible reference for future costume design.  Flipping through it, I wasn’t too impressed.  I checked out another.

My thoughts froze as a hand touched my hair.  I belatedly remembered Brian.  I tried and failed to organize my thoughts.  I’d forgotten to plan out what to say to him, and what would he be doing touching my hair?

I started to turn around, only for the hand to seize my ear and wrench it hard enough to make my legs buckle at the pain.  I was shoved over and my body’s weight and momentum weren’t enough to pull my ear free from my attacker’s grip, with the skin joining my ear to my head paying the price.  I felt like my skin was tearing, and I couldn’t even scream as my breath hitched in my throat.

I collapsed on top of a pile of books, and the white-hot pain surrounding my ear was so overwhelming I wasn’t entirely sure if my ear was still being held or not.  A knee pressed against my side with enough force I had little doubt that most or all of my attacker’s body weight was on top of me.  Long fingernails stabbed into my cheek, forcing the skin in between and against my teeth, as my assailant gripped the side of my jaw.  It not only forced my mouth painfully open with the pressure of my cheek against my own teeth, but it pressed my face hard against the pile of books beneath me.   My cry of protest was reduced to an incomprehensible, muffled noise, which became a primal groan as my ear was twisted again, the opposite direction as before.

“Something you should know about me,” Sophia’s voice was dulcet, “The reason I’m such a good runner?  It’s not that I’m driven to win.  It’s that I really, really hate losing.”

She wrenched my ear again, changing the direction again, and I cried out.  If she went any further, I was positive the skin would tear and the ear would come off entirely.  I struggled, but the books slid beneath my hands and knees, giving me minimal traction.

“And I hate losing the most when it’s to a depressing queef like you,” she rocked her right hand back and forth against my cheek, as if she wanted to drive her fingernails through the skin.  Her thumbnail bit into the underside of my jaw.

I have bugs inside my jeans and backpack.  I can end this.

With both hands, using her grip on my ear and jaw, she lifted my head up and plunged it down hard against the pile of books beneath me.  It wasn’t the worst hit I’d ever taken, but it still left me reeling.

I couldn’t afford to take too many hits to my head.  Though my concussion was more or less healed, I’d be susceptible to a relapse of symptoms and future concussions for a while yet.  I just had to use my bugs to get her off me, buy myself time to get my knife and baton and…

…and then I’d be fucked.  I’d do more damage to myself in the long run, outing myself as the girl with the bug powers.  I’d never be able to go home to my dad.

Sophia let go of my cheek to cover my mouth with her hand.  Using this fresh hold, she wrenched my head as far to the right as it would go, so I could see her looming over me, her hair hanging down around her face.  She looked like a panther, black-skinned, savage, teeth bared just a little as she panted.

She let go of my ear and tapped hard against the lens of my glasses as she continued, “This is your reminder that everyone has their place in life, Hebert, and you should stick to yours.  Trying to act better than you are only embarrasses you and irritates me, get it?”

She yanked on my ear again, as if to make her point clear.

“Nod if you understand, and I’ll let you run off home.”

I glared up at her.

My fingertips traced against the books on the bottom shelf until I found the hardcovers.  I got hold of one, pulled it free, and in the same motion, drove one of the corners of the text into Sophia’s side.

She fell over, and I flipped onto my back to swing again, switching to a two-handed grip to add more power to the swing.  The time it had taken me to get into position for another swing, however, bought Sophia time to get out of the way.  I had Brian’s tips on fighting in mind, keeping on the offensive, and the only way to do that was to fling the hardcovered reference book at her head.  She used her arms to knock it out of the air, then winced, rubbing her arm.

“What the fuck is your derangement?!” I shouted at her.  “In what twisted perspective is it all right to stalk and attack someone because they kissed a boy?”

“It’s not just that,” Sophia started toward me, then stopped when I let my backpack fall to the ground and straightened, ready for another confrontation.  “You got me fucking suspended.  I don’t care about missing class, but I’m off the track team until further notice.  And it’s all because you ran off to whimper for the grown-ups.  I need that shit.”

“Boo fucking hoo.  If I knew it mattered that much to you, I’d have written a letter to your coach days ago, just to drive the point home and make sure you never got back on the team.”

Sophia gave me a look of pure loathing, “You’re a coward, Hebert.  A rat.  You know you’re a nerd, you’re flat chested, scrawny.  Nobody likes you, nobody wants you for a friend, you’re not good at anything.  So you run, you hide, skip school, stay quiet, don’t do anything with your waste of a life.  And if things get tough, if anyone decides to have a little fun at your expense, you go crying to the people in charge, because you can’t take it.”

My ear throbbed.  I put my hand up to tenderly touch the base of it, and pulled away when I felt a bitter stinging pain in response.  My fingertips were red with blood when I lowered them.

“FYI, it was Emma’s dad who called the meeting at the school, not me,” I replied without anger in my voice.  I was sobered by the sight of my own blood.  Odd as it sounded, I felt more comfortable with the situation.  I’d dealt with more serious fights, and I felt like I could handle this better, having seen the blood, knowing the ante was higher.

“You still told someone.”

“So what if I did?  What did you expect, that I’d keep my mouth shut, put up with it?”

“That’s exactly what I expected.  It seems you didn’t get my point about knowing your place.”  Her eyes flickered to the spot where she’d just held me down.  “Maybe you’ll get the message after round two.”

She started toward me, and I had a good sense of how this would go.  She was my height, but she was a stronger than me, with more room for muscle on her frame.  Not that she was fat, or heavy in any way, but her physique was athletic, slender, and mine was that of a scarecrow – just plain thin.

There was also the broader context – I was already hurting, and she was fucking psycho.  If it came down to it, I suspected I’d get the worst of it in the fight, unless I either found a way to get to my weapons in my bag or used my powers.  That didn’t mean I wouldn’t be able to do some damage to her in the meantime, it just meant she’d kick my ass in the process.

If that was how it turned out, I was okay with that.

“Enough,” the male voice cut in.

Sophia halted in her advance.  She turned an impassive expression to Brian, who stood to her left.  He set plastic bags of food on the ground as she watched.  “The boyfriend.”

Brian looked at me, and there was a touch of concern in the expression.

I turned my attention back to her.  “Meet Sophia.  One of the girls that’s been giving me a hard time at school.”

The look of concern disappeared from his face in an instant.  It was replaced by anger.

“She’s lying,” Sophia told him, without the slightest trace of hesitation. “She cheated off me for a test, and got us both suspended and-”

“Shut up,” Brian’s voice was low, not much different from his normal speech, but Sophia got the message.  She closed her mouth.  He turned to me, “Are you okay?”

“My ear hurts like hell, and I don’t even know what she did to the side of my face, but I’m alive.”

“Good.”

Sophia bolted, and there were only two ways to go – through me, or past Brian.  She chose the easy road, dashing toward me, and I lunged for her, aiming to grab her, slow her down enough for Brian to step in.

Except she was faster than I’d anticipated, proving her position on the track team wasn’t just for show, and even my last-ditch effort at grabbing her wrist fell short.

Brian and I gave chase, and were stopped when the guy from the front counter emerged and stepped partway between us and Sophia.

“What’s this?” he looked between us.  Behind him, Sophia turned to face us, assessed the situation and then backed up a few steps with the old man’s back was turned to her.

“She attacked me,” I said.

“Looks that way, sure, but the girl said it was justified, that you stole something from her on the bus.  Asked me to stay at the counter and turn up the volume on my show while she got it back.”

“It’s a lie,” I told him.

The old man ignored me.  He looked at Brian, “I thought you’d be on the other girl’s side, not sure I would’ve let you past if I knew it was any different.”

Why had he come to that conclusion?  Because Brian and Sophia were both black?  I didn’t like that assumption, that I was automatically the bad guy, here.

“No,” was Brian’s curt reply.  “My friend is right.  That girl attacked her.”

Sophia backed away another few small steps, behind the old man.  When Brian moved forward, the old man got in his way, angry.  “Hey now, I’m not going to have any more fighting in my bookstore.”

Sophia saw her chance and ran.  I raised my hand, as if I could somehow reach out and stop her, then dropped it.

It took us another two minutes to wrap things up with the old man.  He accused me twice more of being a thief and gave us a dressing down for causing violence in his store.  When he started demanding we go to the back with him and talk about the damage and mess, Brian grabbed my arm and guided me out of the store, ignoring the old guy’s insults and shouts of protest.  We took the quickest route out of the mall and started walking down the street.

I’d left the dog psychology book behind, I realized.  That bummed me out as much as anything.  I hadn’t really won or lost, as I saw it.  Any injuries I’d sustained were balanced out by the fact that I’d fought back, and that Brian had been there to back me up.

Well, that was my gut feeling, anyway.  It was entirely possible that I’d change my mind after I saw how bad the damage was to my face and ear.

Might as well know sooner than later.  I gestured to the side of my head and asked Brian, “How bad is it?”

“I think that ear’s going to need stitches,” Brian told me.  “You’ve got a tear in the skin by the earlobe.”

I nodded, mute.

“You want to press assault charges?”

I shook my head.  No money to do it, no use in trying.  She had Emma’s dad backing her up, and the only witness was the old guy from the bookstore, who had given me the distinct impression he sided with Sophia over me.

“So that’s what you’ve been dealing with at school?” he asked.

I shook my head.  When I tried to speak, a surge of emotion made my voice reedy.  It took me a second to figure out how to get the words out, and the end result was that my voice sounded hollow and robotic, “That was the worst she’s tried to hurt me physically.  Guess it’s different outside of school.  I can defend myself more, but she has less reason to hold back.”

“So I suppose the,” he cleared his throat, “Kiss on the bus?  It was for her benefit?”

I swallowed hard, in an effort to get my voice more normal.  I probably wouldn’t get another chance.  “Some, yeah.  Some was for mine.”

He turned toward me, eyebrows raised a fraction.

I shrugged, doing everything I could to sound more casual than I felt.  I wasn’t sure how successful I was.  “I, um, I like you.  You don’t need to make a bigger deal of it than it is, I just-” I floundered as I tried to find the words, already regretting opening my mouth.

He didn’t speak, giving me a chance to continue, “I think you’re good looking, I like you as a person.  I respect you, more than any of the others, because you’re smart about what you do, career-wise.  You know.  And because you’re so comfortable in your own skin, so confident.  I admire that.”

“You sound so analytical,” Brian offered me a slight smile, but he looked a little pained, “Going through the points, step by step, like you’re checking things off a list.”

“That’s not- I’m not trying to.”

“I’m not criticizing you.  I’m saying it seems very you.”

“No.  I just thought, um, you’ve gone out of your way to spend time with me, you were meeting me on my runs, invited me to be at your place alone.  I’ve noticed maybe there was more casual body contact, and thought it might be intentional, a signal, guy flirting, I dunno.  The present, the amber…” I trailed off.  It had sounded like a stronger argument in my head than it did out loud.  Except… what was I trying to argue?  Was I trying to convince him he liked me?

“Ah, geez.  I’m sorry if I sent the wrong signals.”

My heart dropped.

“You’ve got to understand, the only girls I’ve spent time around are Aisha and Lisa… Bitch doesn’t count, you know?”

I nodded, tightly.

“Even when I was attending high school, I was always gone the second classes ended.  Meeting my dad at the gym, working, or going home to plan some costumed burglary or whatever.  You know?  I don’t have much experience, being around girls.  I don’t really think that much about the relationship thing, outside of noticing when I see a good looking girl.  It’s something I always figured I’d get to later, when I wasn’t so preoccupied.”

I offered another nod, not trusting myself to open my mouth.

“So if I gave you the wrong impression, I guess it’s partially because I have no idea what I’m doing, and because I’m an idiot when it comes to stuff like that.  I don’t see you that way.  It’s… more like you’re my sister, someone I want to protect, and help, and support.  I like you as a friend, I can even see us being best friends, somewhere down the line.”

Like his sister.  A friend.

“If there was more body contact or if I was spending time with you, or any of that other stuff you mentioned, I promise I wasn’t teasing or anything.  If any of it was conscious on my part, it was meant to make you feel more welcome, let you know you’ve got me around, because I knew you had a rough time of it at school.”

And pity.  There’s the trifecta.  “It’s okay.  You can- you can stop now.”

We walked a few seconds in oppressive silence.

“I’m sorry.  I feel like an asshole.  Like I’m kicking you while you’re down.”

I shook my head, “It’s fine.  Not a big deal.  Just drop the subject?”

“Alright.”

I bobbed my head in mutual agreement and swallowed the lump in my throat.  In a different place or situation, if Brian wasn’t around, if I had privacy, I might have cried.  I didn’t have that luxury, so I focused on putting one foot in front of the other, controlling my breathing, reading street signs and store names, and just focusing on anything that wasn’t Brian or the conversation we’d just had.

The walk back to his apartment was long-ish, maybe half an hour, and was peppered with only meaningless small talk and long, wordless pauses.  We got up to his apartment, and he started putting things away and getting the first aid stuff together.  I turned on the TV to liven up the awkward quiet.

I didn’t have to wait long before something caught my eye.  It was on channel 4, a live update on the Empire Eighty Eight situation.  From the looks of things, there was no doubt in my mind that Kaiser’s people were giving Brockton Bay their response to the email.

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Buzz 7.5

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

“It’s too dangerous to stay here,” Brian spoke.

“What?” Lisa and I asked him, almost simultaneously.

“They’ve got too many heavy hitters and they have absolutely no reason to hold back anymore.  After the ABB thing and the issue with Bitch earlier today, with the number of powered individuals they’ve got at their disposal, they can probably figure out our general location and go on the offensive.  We can’t afford to still be here if they decide to try and root us out or if they lay siege to the Docks.”

“So, what, we run?” Alec asked.

“Tactical retreat.  Just to be safe,” Brian stated, his voice firm, “In case Empire Eighty Eight does decide to organize and come after us in force”

I spoke up, “Even if they don’t blame us for this email that’s outing them, secret identity-wise, I’m betting there’s going to be more than a few that just want to hurt someone and vent their anger… and we did just get in a fight with their people.  It makes us an easy target.  I’m with Brian.  I think we should lay low, at least for now.”

“Okay,” Lisa said, “I’m not sure I agree, but I don’t see any harm in it.  You guys think you can convince Rachel?”

“Already did,” Brian said, “More or less.  She’s packing up at her personal dog shelter, and she’ll be ready to go the moment transportation arrives.  Lisa, first thing, I want you to get on the phone with Coil.  Get that transportation – I’ll text you directions to the place – and get Coil to make a statement, have him make it damn clear to Empire Eighty Eight that he’s responsible for this email.”

“I don’t think he’ll be willing, as far as ‘fessing up.”

“Tell him that I’m not going to sign any deal with him if he can’t own up to this and get the heat off us, when we weren’t informed and we didn’t agree to taking this kind of action.”

Lisa frowned, “Okay.”

“If he’s as clever as he acts like he is, he’ll find some angle to make it work.”

“Alright.  I’ll try.  What else?”

“Take Alec and find a place to stay with Rachel and the dogs.  I think Bitch has more than one shelter like the one I saw today.  If none of those places work, ask Coil for a place.”

Lisa nodded, “Okay.  What are you doing?”

“Taylor and I will stay at my apartment.  It’s out of the way, and so long as we don’t go out in costume, we shouldn’t run into trouble.”

I’d be staying at his apartment?  I could remember the tension from the last time I’d been there alone with him, just how aware I’d been of his presence.  The idea of going there to stay overnight forced me to focus very carefully on keeping my expression impassive and my hands from fidgeting.  I was glad for the distraction of Alec’s response.

“The fuck?” Alec spoke, “You’re telling us to get out of here, stay in some random place with a bunch of stray dogs, while you go home and kick back?”

“Do not get on my case right now, Alec,” Brian pointed a finger at Alec, “As a member of our group, you agreed to answer your fucking phone when it goes off.  I’m not much happier with Lisa, for not having a phone ready, but you’re the one I’m really pissed at.  From what I heard, if things had gone a little differently, one or both of your teammates could be dead.  Because you guys weren’t able to back them up when Taylor asked for it.”

Alec’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t reply.

Brian’s voice was low, his tone controlled.  “I’m angry enough that you should count it as a good thing that you’re not staying at my place and having to put up with me.  That’s why you’re not coming with me.  I also need a level head with you and Rachel, and that means Lisa goes with you two.  I’d leave Taylor instead, but I’d rather spread out the firepower between our two teams.”

“Whatever,” Alec looked back to the TV.  “Forget I mentioned anything.”

Before Brian could get on Alec’s case again, I cut in to ask, “Shouldn’t we all maybe stay together?”

“No,” Lisa answered me, “Brian has the right idea.  Together, as a group of five, we might draw attention from anyone keeping an eye out for our team.  Especially if there’s dogs around.  Having two teams means we can mount a rescue or provide a distraction if one group gets in a bad spot.”

“Keep your phones on and answer them if anyone calls.  We take turns checking in on each other, every half hour, using the same passwords as before.” Brian instructed.

“Got it,” Lisa replied.

“If you really can’t find a place to stay, and the dogs are safely put away somewhere, you can stay at my place.  You’d be crashing on the couch and the floor, though.”

Lisa nodded.

“Hey,” I spoke up, hesitant, “Can I take five minutes to grab a shower and change while you guys hash out the rest of the details?”

Brian made a pained face, but he nodded, “Go.”

Grateful, I hurried to the bathroom, stopping by my room to grab my costume, a fresh outfit, and my towel.

The shower was being more uncooperative than usual, and I didn’t have the time to wait for it to decide to give me warm water, so I jumped in and endured the chilled water just long enough to rinse myself off, scrub the priority areas and get my hair wet.

I cranked the shower off, squeegeed the water off myself with my index finger and thumb, then hopped out of the shower to towel dry and run a brush through my hair.

When I was dry enough, I pulled on a pair of stretch shorts and then started to pull my costume on.  Given that it was all one piece, barring the mask, belt and armor panels, I couldn’t quite wear it under clothing without having to wear gloves and long sleeves.  That kind of clothing wasn’t an option as the weather got warmer.

One option I did have, what I’d been ruminating on, after having my bugs crawl all over me to keep my identity concealed, was only putting it on partway. When the lower half of the costume was on, I folded the top half around at the waist, tying the arms together around me, like a belt.  I put on jeans and a black and red spaghetti strap top that left some of my midriff exposed.  To finish, I tied a sweatshirt around my waist, positioning it over where I’d tied the upper half of my costume.

I sized myself up in the mirror.  The material was fairly thin and it stretched, so it didn’t make me look bulkier.  I’d have to see how comfortable the soles I’d built into the foot portion of the costume were inside shoes, but that was something I could adjust.  Having the main part of the body pulled around behind my back meant I could hide the bulkier portion under the sweatshirt.  So long as I didn’t untie the sweatshirt where anyone could see, I was golden.

I hurried out of the bathroom, grabbed enough tops, underwear and socks to last me a few days.  I rolled them up to make them compact, and stashed them in my backpack around the armor for my costume, my weapons, the rest of my utility compartment stuff, two books and six hundred bucks in cash.  I slung the bag over one shoulder.  Heavy, but manageable.

I left my room to rejoin Brian, tying my damp hair into a loose ponytail with an elastic while I walked.  I paused for just a second to extend one leg, toe down to touch the ground, so a collection of beetles, roaches and spiders could crawl up my leg.  They settled between my costume and my clothes.

I could deal with bugs being on me, so long as they weren’t directly on my skin.

“Ready?” I asked Brian.

He nodded.  He’d pulled off the leather jacket and had it in a gym bag with his helmet.  He was wearing a guy’s tank top, beige, leaving his arms and shoulders exposed.  His skin glittered with the tiniest droplets of sweat, from wearing a jacket in the warm weather.

I pulled my eyes away before my attention could draw notice.  I told Lisa, “We’ll see you guys later.”

“Have fun,” she grinned.

Brian led the way outside, and again, I paused at the door’s threshold to collect some more bugs under my clothing and in my bag while I could still be discreet about it.  It wasn’t a lot, but it was something.

He seemed to be deep in thought, and there was good cause for that, so I didn’t bother him as we walked to the bus stop.

“Am I being paranoid?” he asked me, as we arrived.

“I’m not the person to ask.  As far as I’m concerned, when you’re talking about capes, you can’t take too many precautions.  Especially with a group as influential as Empire Eighty Eight.”

“I’ll rephrase the question then.  Do you think the others will think I’m being paranoid?”

“Honestly?  Probably.”

“Damn it.”

Our conversation stalled when more people joined us at the bus stop.

“I just realized,” Brian spoke, “I never asked if you even wanted to stay over.”

I looked up at him.  I wasn’t sure how to answer without conveying my full feelings on the subject.  Keep it simple.  “I do.  It’s totally fine.”

“After I was first introduced to the others, I did that a lot.  The guys complained about it, and my sister’s mentioned it too.  I take charge, make calls.”

“Really, it’s cool.  It makes sense, given…” I paused, keeping the civilians that were in earshot in mind.  “…the situation, and I like your apartment, so I don’t mind staying there.”

“Yeah?”

“Definitely.  Hell, I’d have you decorate my apartment when I got a place of my own.”

He chuckled, “I’ll do that for you if you make me that outfit we talked about before.”

The costume.  I’d almost forgotten.

“Thanks for reminding me about that.  It sort of slipped my mind.”

“Considering it?”

“Yeah.  Maybe.  It’s a big job, but I guess I have more free time now, and, uh, yeah.  That’s pretty much it.  I could maybe do it, sure.”  Obviously, I couldn’t and wouldn’t mention the fact that my decision to ally myself with the Undersiders for real was a factor.

“Yeah?  I’d owe you.”

“Gives us something to talk about while I’m staying over, too.”

“I don’t think we’ll lack for conversation topics,” he smiled at me.  That boyish smile that I’d noticed on day one.  If I was being honest, I would even say it was tied with his voice for the thing I liked most about him, aesthetically.  It was maybe unfair to think so, but I generally saw the vast majority of teenage boys as awkward people that combined the traits of a child and an adult in the most unfortunate ways possible.  Brian was the opposite, and it was his voice and his smile that really nailed the effect.

I felt my ears warming up in the telltale sign of an incoming blush and looked away, distracting myself with an exhaustive investigation of a brown paper bag by the side of the road.  If I kept on that particular line of thinking about Brian’s better qualities, I was guaranteed to wind up saying or doing something to embarrass myself.

The bus arrived and we climbed on.  I flashed my school ID, while Brian paid with tickets.  I found an empty seat, and Brian stood next to me, holding the pole.  He was close enough to me that his leg pressed against my arm.  Even though I could have moved my arm away, I left it where it was.

I wasn’t the sort of girl Brian would be attracted to.  I knew that.  I could settle for just his presence and friendship.  I could enjoy it if there happened to be casual body contact between us, even if it was a bit pervy.

Our brief conversation had let me relax and start to enjoy the possibility of an evening in Brian’s company, but what I saw next was a bucket of cold water in the face.

The bus had stopped to pick up passengers, and Sophia Hess was among them.  Her sleeveless polo top was long, extending down to her waist, and clung tight to a slender body with curves and a chest I’d never have.  The tennis skirt she was wearing was only barely long enough to be decent.  More than one set of eyes turned her way as she boarded the bus, Brian’s among them.

She was oblivious to the attention and to my existence, preoccupied with a conversation over the phone.  She looked annoyed, bored, and distracted, as the person on the other end did most of the talking.  Probably a parent.

The bus continued on its route, more people filed in, and the people near the front moved further back.  I stared at her, waiting for the moment she would see me and make eye contact.  I wasn’t sure what she’d do, or what I’d do, but that moment held every iota of my focus.

She was Emma’s best friend.  The person who had shoved me into the locker, back on the day I’d gotten my powers.  On countless occasions, she had pushed and tripped me, often several times a day.  She’d knocked me down the stairs, when I was near the bottom of the flight, even got others to do similar things.  Given that she’d been suspended after my last meeting with her, I somehow didn’t think she’d walk away without confrontation if she saw me.

My leg bounced restlessly.  Without thinking about it, I’d readied myself to leap out of my seat, to defend myself, get out of the way, or respond to whatever happened.  My thoughts looped through possible things she might do, things I might say or do in response.

Sophia put the phone away, and gazed out the window for a moment.  When she’d seen everything there was to see of transition point between the Docks and Downtown, she glanced over the bus’ interior.  Her eyes paused on advertisements running along the top of the bus, then settled on Brian.

The appraising look she gave him was unmistakeable.  It lingered long enough that it probably would have been uncomfortable for him, if he’d been aware of it.

Or maybe not.  Maybe he would’ve liked the attention from a girl that looked like her.

Bleh.

She still hadn’t seen me.  I could see why – I was sitting, and she and Brian were standing, and there were others between us, obscuring her line of sight to me.

I startled when something moved to my left.  It was just the person sitting next to me standing to get off at the next stop, but it made me aware of just how tense I was.  I reached up and touched Brian’s elbow.  When he glanced down, I moved over into the empty seat and pointed to the vacated spot.

He smiled and sat down beside me.

My pulse was pounding in my throat, and I couldn’t tell him why, not here.  I waited and tried to organize my thoughts, as people from the front of the bus moved toward the back.  It took some doing, but I avoided looking at Sophia.

I reached up and put a hand on his shoulder, used it to rise high enough to murmur in his ear, “Do me a megahuge favor?  I’ll explain after.”

“Of course,” his voice was barely audible over the noise of the bus.  He turned his head just enough to look me in the eye, and my heart skipped a beat.

“Just play along.”  I put two fingers on the side of his chin, turning his head, and rose out of my seat just enough to touch my lips to his.

I expected electricity, fireworks, all that stuff you hear about.  I thought my heartbeat might race, or that my thoughts might dissolve into that chaotic mess that I’d experienced a few times in the recent pass.

What I didn’t expect was the calm.  The tension melted out of me, and all the worries, anxieties and conflicting thoughts faded into the background.  It was like the sense of peace I got from waking up at the loft, times ten.  All I thought about was the contact, how nice it was, the feeling of his lips on mine.

I broke the kiss and looked him in the eyes as I settled back in my seat.  Even before he opened his mouth to say something, I was giving him the smallest shake of my head.  He closed his mouth.

When I looked away, I felt his arm settle around my shoulders.

I looked and didn’t see Sophia at the front of the bus.  When I checked over my shoulder, I found her near the back.  She was staring at me.

I imagined it wasn’t so different from that primal sense of satisfaction Bitch had felt when she’d set the dogs on me.  Except where Bitch had lorded it over me with a smug smile, I didn’t change my expression from the light smile that was already on my face.  I gave Sophia a moment’s eye contact and nothing more, before turning to face the front of the bus once more.  She wasn’t worth it, wasn’t worth spoiling this.

I avoided looking back to see what she was doing or checking if she was still there.  When Brian asked me if I minded stopping to go shopping before we went to his apartment, I nodded.

I had taken Lisa’s advice, trying to improvise, be more impulsive.  I had also done as Bitch had suggested.  I’d let Brian know I was interested, kind of.  Not to the extent she’d suggested, but it was something.  Definitely something.

Except I’d just forced matters with Brian, and now I not only had to explain, but I had to deal with a night of awkwardness in his company, on top of the threat of action from Empire Eighty Eight.

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Buzz 7.4

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Brian arrived as Bitch and I were trudging through the field with shovels and trash bags in hand.  Not the image I wanted him to get of me, but I was glad to see him nonetheless.

I’d rinsed off using the tap at the dog’s water trough, but I was still covered in dirty paw prints, grass stains, and my skin still itched with the feeling of bugs crawling on me.  I had little doubt that with my wet hair and the state of my clothes, that I looked pretty damn grungy.

“There’s bullet holes in the front door,” Brian spoke from the other side of the chain link fence, raising his voice to be heard over the torrent of barks.  He was wearing his costume and helmet, but had the visor flipped up and he wasn’t shrouded in his darkness.  From a distance, he’d look like some guy in motorcycle gear.

“Quiet,” Bitch ordered, and the dogs fell silent.  Seeing what the other dogs were doing, the few who hadn’t learned the command stopped after one or two more barks as well.

“Yeah, they fired off their guns a few times,” I told him.

“And you’re still here,” he said, in mild disbelief.

“My call,” Bitch told him.

“It’s a bad call,” he admonished her.

“I’m not leaving.”

Brian folded his arms.  “Is your pride or stubbornness worth getting those dogs hurt?”

She scowled and looked down at the dogs.

“The thing they said about the hotdogs,” I spoke, quiet, “About poisoning your dogs.  You couldn’t stop them unless you were here twenty-four seven, and maybe not even then.”

“It’s cowardly,” Bitch spat the words.

“They’re cowards,” I told her.  “Pretty much the definition of anyone who joins a hate group.  But even if they did take a more direct approach, would you be able to handle it?  Could you deal if twenty people showed up with guns?  Or if Night and Fog dropped by at three in the morning, when it was just you and these guys?”

“I can handle myself.”

I sighed a little and planted my shovel in the ground.  I had to think of a way to convince her.  If I lost my patience in the face of her stubbornness, she would win the argument, and we would all lose.

“I know.  But isn’t it better to rely on us?  To actually handle this instead of going it alone, hiding and letting those fuckers have the power?”

“I’m not hiding,” she gave me an angry look.  “I’m protecting-”

Brian interrupted her, “Protecting your dogs would mean taking them somewhere safe.”

She shook her head violently.  “No.  I do that, the fuckers win.”

“I’ve been there,” I told her.  “Really, I know what you mean.  But our number one priority is keeping you and those dogs safe.  Once we’ve handled that, we can focus on dealing with any threats.”

She drummed her fingers against her thigh, looking back toward the building.

“We are going to deal with them?” she made the question a challenge.

“Yes,” Brian spoke.  “I don’t like that these guys are moving into this area.  I don’t like that they’d go so far as to attack a member of our group.  If we don’t do something to respond soon, it’s going to hurt our rep.  We need reputation, it protects us, gives people reason to think twice before they fuck with us.”

Bitch nodded.  “Okay.”

Brian quirked an eyebrow, “Okay what?”

“I’ll go, and the dogs come with.”

He smiled, “Good.  I don’t think I can hop this fence without getting on the bad side of those dogs, so I’m going to meet you around at the front door.  I’ll call Coil on the way”

“Alright,” I said.  As he turned to leave, I raised my hand in the lamest little goodbye wave ever.  Even though I was pretty sure he didn’t see it, I was left mentally kicking myself for doing it.

I glanced at Bitch, who was giving me a peculiar look.

“What?” I asked her, feeling painfully self conscious.

“You like him.”

“N-,” I started.  Before I went on to protest, I had to stop myself.  Bitch would appreciate straightforwardness and honesty more than anything else.  I wasn’t sure I could afford to come across as dishonest or two faced, with her.  “…Yeah.  I do.”

She turned to head back inside.  A horrible thought struck me at that moment.

“Do… do you like him?” I asked her.

She turned her head to give me an angry look, one I couldn’t read in the slightest.

“Because if you do,” I hurried to add, as I started to walk after her, “Hey, you were here first.  I’ll back off and keep my mouth shut if you want to make a move.”

There were about five seconds where she was very quiet.  My pulse pounded in my throat.  Why did I care so much about this?

“You should offer to sleep with him.”

“I-uh, what?” I stammered.  Relief mixed with embarrassment, and the abrupt change of topic left me struggling to get my thoughts in order.

“It’s what guys want.  Tell him you’re available if he ever wants to fuck.  He’ll accept right away, or he’ll start thinking about you as a possibility and he’ll take you up on it later.”

“That’s-  It’s more complicated than that.”

“It’s complicated because people make it complicated.  Just cut the bullshit and go for it.”

“I don’t think you’re wrong about there needing to be less expectations and rules and rituals around dating, bullshit, as you put it, but I don’t think I can do what you’re suggesting.”

“Whatever.”

I realized, belatedly, that she’d actually offered me advice.  As… I struggled to find the word.  As misdirected as her suggestion might have been, especially with Brian, it was probably the most blatant gesture of goodwill I had seen from her, next to her telling Armsmaster that she thought I could kick his ass.

“Thank you, though,” I told her.  “I’ll, uh, I’ll keep it in mind.”

“Don’t care if you do.”

We crossed the building’s interior and Bitch unlocked the door to let Brian inside.  For a second, I thought her bluntness would lead to her telling Brian outright that I liked him, but it wasn’t the case.  She was more focused on keeping the more unruly dogs from slipping outside and stopping them from barking at the new visitor than on our discussion.

“I can’t get hold of Coil,” Brian informed us.

“I couldn’t get Lisa or Alec, before,” I replied.  “You think something’s up?”

He nodded, “Maybe.  You stay here with Rachel.  I’m going to go check on the others.”

“No,” Bitch spoke.  “I don’t need babysitting, and I’m getting annoyed being badgered by you two.  Taylor goes with you.  I’m going to stay here and pack up.”

“Not a good idea,” Brian said, with a shake of his head, “If you get attacked in the meantime-”

“-I have Brutus, Judas and Angelica.  I managed on my own for years, dealt with people tougher than those fuckers.  If there’s trouble, I run.”

“And if they take one of your dogs hostage?” I asked her.  “One of the ones you can’t use your power on, yet?”

A dark look passed over her face as she considered that.  “Then I run… and I get revenge another day, on my terms.”

Brian tapped his foot for a few seconds.  “Okay.  If there’s trouble, it’ll be good to have Taylor at my back.  If and when I get hold of Coil, I’m going to see about getting you some trucks, and people to drive them.  In the meantime, stay alert, and don’t get yourself killed.”

Bitch scowled, but she nodded.

“Taylor, we should go.  The sooner we check on Lisa and Alec, the better I’ll feel,” he was already moving as he finished talking.

The moment we were out of earshot, he pulled off his helmet, tucking it under one arm, and asked me, “What happened?”

I told him, explaining everything after the point Bitch and I heard the ruckus the bottle man and his gang were causing.

“Funny that it’s Kaiser that’s having trouble controlling his people,” Brian mused, when I was done.

I wondered if he was still sore over what Kaiser had said at the meeting.

“Coil upped the pressure the moment the truce against the ABB was broken.  I would be surprised if Kaiser didn’t have his hands full with that,” I replied.

“You’re defending him?”

It wasn’t often that I felt acutely aware of the difference in our skin colors, but being asked if I was making excuses for the white supremacist supervillain was one of those moments.

“I don’t want to underestimate him, is all,” I said.

Brian sighed, “Yeah.  Maybe you’re right.  But Kaiser was willing to demand restitution for the attack on his dogfighting ring, and I’m more than willing to do the same for this attack from his skinheads, if it comes down to it.”

“Both events having something substantial to do with Bitch,” I noted.

“I’m aware of that fact,” he told me, frowning.  “She’s useful, she’s a credit to the team, but she comes with some problems.  We’ve dealt with it in the past, we’ll deal with it in the future.”

“Right.”

“How was she?  Any fights?”

“Nothing serious.  No, it was actually kind of nice.  I might even do it again, if she let me.”

“Really,” he replied, skepticism clear in his tone.

“Really.”

“What changed?”

“I’m figuring her out, I think.  How she operates, how she thinks.”

“I’ve spent ten months on the same team with her, and I haven’t even come close to getting how she thinks.  I can usually keep her from going too far or hurting someone, keep her mostly in line and get her to follow directions, but I haven’t had a conversation with her yet that didn’t make me want to bang my head against a wall.”

“That might be the problem.  You’re in charge, she looks up to you, respects you, but…” I paused.  How could I word this without getting into the particulars of her mode of thinking?  “…But you’re something of an authority figure in our group, and her personality demands she tests authority.  Especially when she’s insecure.”

Brian considered that.  With a note of approval in his voice, he commented, “You have been giving this some thought.”

“I think that you’d have a much easier time handling her if you took an official leadership role in our group.  Not just being the sorta-kinda leader, but actually taking the position.  If you’re not comfortable with that, or if you think the others will make it too hard, well, she’ll probably get more comfortable with relying on you as someone in charge over time, as you prove you can handle it.”

“It’s been ten months, how long does she need?”

“And she’s had how many years, without parents, teachers, bosses?  I mean, even when she had foster parents, I don’t think it was sunbeams and rainbows, y’know?”

He rubbed his chin.  “…Yeah.”

“Tell me she hasn’t gotten at least a bit better in the course of those ten months.”

“Marginally.”

“There you go.  It’ll only improve from here on out.”

He offered me a theatric groan in reply.

Brian was walking with long strides, and he had long legs, which forced me to do little jogging spurts to keep up.  It wasn’t tiring, I was fit enough from my running, but it was embarrassing to feel like a small child trying to keep up with a grown-up.

Either way, we did make good time getting back to the loft.

Brian put his finger to his lips as he pulled on his helmet and flipped his visor down, emanating his darkness to hide the costume.  I grimaced and brought bugs up to cover my face, calling more from the area to form the beginnings of a swarm.  Brian – Grue now – reached out and coated the front door of the loft in darkness, then opened it without the slightest of creaks or squeals.  Before we ascended the metal stairs leading to the second floor, he coated them in a layer of his power to render our footsteps utterly silent.

I didn’t anticipate the scene in the living room of the Loft.

The TV was on, showing ads.  Alec lay on the couch, his feet on the coffee table, a meal on his lap.  Lisa sat on the other couch, laptop resting on her legs, a phone to her ear.  She turned her head as we came upstairs, gave us a funny look, then returned her attention to her laptop.

“Why the fuck aren’t you answering your phones?” Grue raised his eerie voice.  He flipped up his visor and banished the darkness around him.

Lisa frowned and held up a finger.  She continued talking into the phone, “-don’t agree with this, and if you’d asked me, I would have said you shouldn’t do it.  No, yes, I think it’s an effective measure.”

She pointed to the laptop, and I stepped forward, moving the bugs off my face and down to the center of my back, where they would be present but not in the way, resting on cloth rather than skin.  I looked at the screen.

“My problem is that it’s not just them.  It’s their families,” Lisa spoke into the phone.  “Unspoken rule, you don’t fuck with a cape’s family.”

I read the contents of the email she had open.  I felt a ball of dread settle in the pit of my stomach.  I leaned over the back of the couch and put a hand on her shoulder to steady myself as I reached down to press the pagedown key on the laptop.  I read more of the email and then hit the button again to scroll down again.

When I’d read enough of the page to verify my suspicions, I hit the home key to return to the very top of the page.  I checked who else had been Cc’ed on the email and the time it had been sent.

“Fuck,” I muttered.  “Fuck!”

Lisa looked up at me, frowned, then spoke to the person on the other end of the phone, “Can we finish discussing this later?  I’ve got to talk to my team about this.  Kay.  Later.”

The email was a list.  At the very top of the list was Kaiser.  Following his entry were his lieutenants, Purity, Hookwolf and Krieg, and the rest of the members of Empire Eighty Eight.  It wasn’t even limited to people with powers, noting some powerless captains and even some of the lower level flunkies.

The list included pictures and text.  Beneath each of the villain’s names was a comprehensive block of data, noting their civilian names in full, professions, addresses, phone numbers, the dates they moved to the city and the first appearances of their costumed identities in Brockton Bay.  There were pictures of them in costume paired with pictures of their alleged civilian identities, roughly matched in angle and size for easy comparison.  Most of the entries had zip files attached, doubtless with more data and evidence.

Kaiser.  Max Anders, president and chief executive officer of Medhall Corporation, a pharmaceuticals company based in Brockton Bay.  Father of a Theodore Richard Anders and an Aster Klara Anders.  Twice divorced, currently living in a penthouse apartment downtown.  Drives a black BMW.  Native born to Brockton Bay, son of Richard Anders.  Richard Anders, according to the email, was Allfather, the founder of Empire Eighty Eight.  From the pictures, it was clear to see how the armor fit around his face and body, how both Kaiser and Max Anders had the same height and body type.

There were other images as well, showing Max Anders with a gorgeous twenty-something blonde, and Max Anders with an older brunette woman at a coffee shop, their table strewn with what looked like paperwork.  I scrolled down to confirm my suspicions, the blonde appeared in another picture with her twin sister.  Fenja and Menja.

The brunette woman was Purity, according to the email.  Far mousier than I might have thought, given the sheer presence she had in costume.  Real name, Kayden Anders.  Interior decorator.  Single mother of one Aster Anders.  Purity was promoted to Kaiser’s second in command in the same week that Kayden Russel took Max’s hand in marriage to become Kayden Anders.  Their separation occurred within the same time period as Purity leaving Empire Eighty Eight to apparently strike out on her own.  Little citations pointed to files apparently in the attached zip file.

Krieg was alleged to be a James Fliescher.  Head of a pharmacy chain, in turn connected to Medhall.  Father of three, married.  According to the notes in his block of information, he took a vacation twice a year with his family.  The email stated that the zip file had copies of inter-company emails where he’d told his coworkers he went to places like South America or Paris, and flight records showed that he was lying.  He always went to London.  Twice a year, every year, for nearly twenty years.  Not once, during these trips, had Krieg been seen in Brockton Bay.

The list went on.  And on.

Every piece of information connected to others.  Even the info on the mooks like the ones I had met earlier with Kaiser’s business, showing how they were employed as low level employees of Medhall and its derivative businesses.  It seemed like everyone had a criminal record except the people at the top.

In short, It was comprehensive enough it would take a special kind of willful ignorance to not buy into what the email was selling.

The email had been sent not only to Lisa, but to the Brockton Bay Bulletin, a half dozen other local news stations, and several national ones.  Everyone that mattered, and a few that didn’t.

The email had been sent at 1:27 pm this afternoon.  Less than an hour ago.  That was the really bad news.

“Coil did this?”  I murmured.

Lisa nodded, tightly, “Yup.”

“With your help, I’m guessing?”

“Only a little.  He asked me a few times, to give him my thoughts on some stuff, put him on the right path, eliminate possibilities.  I didn’t think he’d get this far, or go this far.  Once I got him on the right track, he apparently used private investigators and hackers to dig up the rest of this and get the photographic evidence.”

“Fuck,” I muttered.

“I don’t agree with it,” she said.  “It’s crossing a line.  It’s not just messing with the enemy, there’s going to be a ton of collateral damage.”

“Why weren’t you answering your phone?” Brian changed the subject.

She blinked a few times, startled, “My phone was nearly a goner, so I grabbed a fresh disposable to talk to the boss.  I didn’t want to use the phone with the rest of your contact info in it, just to be safe.  Alec was with me the entire time.  He should’ve gotten any calls.”

“Check your phone, Alec” Brian spoke, terse.

Alec did.  His eyes went wide, “Oh fuck.”

“Part of being a member of this team is being on call if we need you.  I swear,” Brian growled at Alec, “I’m going to kick your ass so hard-”

Lisa looked from Brian to Alec to me, “Something happened.  Is anyone hurt?”

“Yes, something happened, no, nobody’s hurt.  That’s really not what concerns me,” I told her.  I pointed to the screen, “Did Coil plan this?  Is this a scheme of his, him using his power?  Using his destiny manipulation or whatever to create some general coincidence, put us in a bad spot, and force us to join him?”

Lisa shook her head forcefully, “I didn’t get the sense of anything like that, and that’s not how his power operates.  Besides, he expected we would agree anyways.  He wouldn’t jeopardize that with a gambit like this.  It’s too crude.”

“So it was just him attacking Empire Eighty Eight on a new front, and a fucking bad coincidence for us,” I said, as much to myself as anyone else.

“What’s going on?” Alec asked.

I took a deep breath and tried to explain just how bad the situation was.  “Coil just made a big play against the Empire, and it looks like it was anonymous.  Bitch and I got in a fight with some of his underlings at almost the same time.”

“I don’t-” Alec started.

“Look at it this way,” I interrupted, “Kaiser and every single one of his twenty-ish superpowered flunkies are going to be pissed enough to want to kill someone, after Coil went and turned their lives upside down.  Kaiser and his people know who we are, from our cooperation against the ABB.  Specifically, they know who Lisa is.  So who are they going to blame for this, if not the group his people were just fighting with this very afternoon, the group with the very talented information gatherer in their ranks?”

“Oh.”  Alec said.  “Fuck.”

“Exactly.”

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Buzz 7.3

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

I was nervous, returning to Bitch’s spot with lunch in hand.  It wasn’t just that I’d left her alone with an uncontrollable beast composed almost entirely of fangs, nails, bone and muscle.  It was that it was lunchtime.

Between countless run-ins with the bullies, getting in contact with the Undersiders and the bank robbery, it felt like stuff seemed to go down around noon.

I was relieved when I got back and there wasn’t any carnage.  A dozen or so dogs greeted me, many poking their noses into the paper bag I held.  I navigated my way through them to Bitch, who was sitting on a pallet of concrete blocks by the open back wall.  Sirius was lying beside her with his head on her lap.

“Food?” I offered.

She reached down, so I got a chicken souvlaki wrap and a coke out of the bag and handed them up to her.

As she peeled the paper away from one end of the wrap, I found myself a spot to sit on a part of the wall where it was incomplete or damaged.  The weather had worn at the concrete blocks, and some greenery had managed to grow in the cracks, making for a not entirely uncomfortable seat.  Outside, behind the building, there was a field of uncut grass surrounded by chain link fence.  As they lost interest in the food, dogs wandered out there, chasing one another or baiting others into playing, trampling that long grass flat enough that we could see them.  The view of their playing was accompanied by a soundtrack of endless barks and snarls.

A white dog with a nub of a tail and chestnut colored patches on its body and over its ears approached me, sitting to stare at me as I took my first bite of my wrap.

I swallowed, and I told the dog,  “No.  This is too good to share, and it probably wouldn’t be good for you anyways.”

The dog cocked its head quizzically.

“You are awfully pretty, though,” I told it.

I heard a scoffing noise from Bitch’s direction.  I turned her way just in time to see her glance away.

“What?”

“You should never own a dog.”

That was fairly harsh, especially coming from her.  “What are you basing this on?”

“Most dog owners are retards, and the most retarded are the ones who pick a dog because it’s cute, or because its pretty, without knowing anything about the breed, the temperament, the dog’s needs.”

I sighed, “Fuck off, Rache.  I can say it’s a pretty dog without saying I’m going to take it home.”

“Whatever,” she didn’t take her eyes off the dogs in the back field.

“No, don’t brush me off.  You want to start something, fine.  But if you do, you gotta hear what I have to say.  Listen to what I have to say.  Acknowledge me, damn it.”

She turned to glance at me.  She wasn’t frowning or glaring, but her gaze was so dispassionate it made me uncomfortable.

“Come on, you know me pretty well.  All the others describe me as careful and cautious, though I’m not entirely sure why.  Do you really think I’d pick something as important as a dog, a new addition to my family, without researching, first?”

She didn’t reply.  Instead, she turned her attention back to the dogs outside.

“Right,” I said.  “I wouldn’t.”

I didn’t press things any further.  We finished our wraps, I dug one piece of the foil-wrapped baklava out of the bag, set it down on the paper from my wrap and bunched up the foil around the remainder to throw up to Bitch.  When I was done eating my dessert and licking my fingers clean, I hopped down from my seat on the wall, found a ball and started throwing it for the dogs.

“Here,” Bitch told me.  I turned around, and she handed me the blue stick that had been jutting out of the zipper of the backpack.  It was plastic, molded to have a handle with finger-holds on one end and a cup on the other.  As a dog brought the ball to me, I experimentally pressed the cupped end down on it, and the ball snapped into place.

When I whipped it forward, the ball went flying, five times as far than it had when I’d used my hand.  Most of the dogs stampeded after it, racing to be the first to grab it or chasing after the ones in the lead.

It was nice, enjoying the sunshine, playing with the dogs, having no responsibilities or pressures for the moment.

I turned to look over my shoulder.  “Can you tell me about some of them?  The dogs?”

Bitch frowned, but she didn’t refuse me.  “This is Sirius.  He was bought as a puppy for some twelve year old, then grew too big and unruly to stay in the house.  He was caged outside and ignored, his nails grew too long, and he wound up with an infection in his foot.  They decided it was easier to leave him at a shelter than pay for medical care.  Since he wasn’t trained or socialized, he came off too wild and excitable to get adopted.  I got him in the week he was due to get put down.”

“That’s fucked up,” I looked at Sirius, who was sleeping.  “How do you know the story?”

“I know some people that volunteer at shelters, from when I used to.  They let me know if there’s a dog that deserves a second chance.  Not that many don’t.”

“Ah.”

“The one you were talking to a few minutes ago is Bullet.  She’s the smartest in the group.  Her breed craves exercise, they’re meant to run around all day with hunters… except she was used as a beta to warm dogs up for one of the dogfighting rings around here and her shoulder was torn up pretty badly.  Even with the shoulder healed as well as it’s gonna get, it hurts too much for her to run as much as she needs.”

I spotted Bullet in the crowd.  Sure enough, she was lagging behind the rest.  I thought maybe she was favoring one leg.

“If your power heals, why doesn’t it help her?  Or Angelica’s eye and ear?”

Bitch shrugged.  “Lisa said it has something to do with me making a ‘blueprint’.  It’s babble to me.  All I know is that it doesn’t help older health problems.  It gets rid of disease and cancer, and parasites, and most damage they take when they’re big.  That’s all.”

“I think I get it,” I told her.  I looked at Bullet, who had stopped running and was sitting in the middle of the field, watching others run.  “Do they all have stories like that?”

“Most.”

“Damn,” I felt a pang of sympathy for the animals.

The herd of dogs returned to me, and a shaggy dog dropped the ball at my feet.

“Good dog,” I told it.  I threw the ball, aiming to get it near Bullet, and the herd of dogs rushed off again, with more than a few excited barks.

Bitch and I weren’t conversing, but neither of us were conversation people.  I was too socially clumsy to maintain small talk for any length of time, and Bitch was… well, she was Bitch.  So we sat, minutes passed between each exchange of dialogue, and it somehow didn’t bother me.  It was letting me pick and choose what I was talking about very carefully.

“It’s too bad dogs can’t have trigger events,” Bitch mused aloud.  “If they did, some people might think twice.”

I could have argued the details, pointed out that most people weren’t aware of the ins and outs of trigger events, I could have argued that some things could get worse if dogs could get powers.  It didn’t feel necessary.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

That was the extent of that dialogue.  We enjoyed another long silence and the dogs competed with one another to fetch the ball.

The sound of a breaking bottle and very human shouts disturbed our peace.

“These guys again,” Bitch snarled, moving Sirius’ head from her lap and hopping down from her seat on the pile of concrete blocks.  The black lab turned his head to watch as she stalked towards the front of the building.  Bitch whistled for her dogs and Brutus, Judas and Angelica rushed to her side.

“What’s going on?” I called after her, moving to follow.

“Stay inside,” she told me.

I did as she asked, but that didn’t mean I didn’t try to get closer, to get a better picture of what was going on.  I approached one of the boarded up windows at the front of the building and peeked through a gap in the plywood.

Bitch had her dogs standing around her, and she stood opposite a group of seven or so people.  They ranged from thirtyish to twelve in age.  It wasn’t hard to figure out who they identified with.  Half of the guys were blond or dyed blond, and the others had shaved heads.   The youngest was a twelve-ish girl who’d taken a razor to her scalp, too, leaving only her bangs and the hair hanging around her ears and the back of her neck.  The detail that confirmed my suspicions of their affiliation was the number eighty-three that I saw etched on one of the guys’ t-shirts in permanent marker.

The white supremacists loved codes in numbers.  If you were suspicious about whether a number was one of their codes, the number eight was a good clue, since it cropped up a lot.  The eight referred to the 8th letter of the alphabet, H; Eighty-eight stood for H.H. or ‘Heil Hitler’, while eighteen pointed to Adolf Hitler in the same way.  The eighty-three wasn’t one I’d seen before, but I knew it would have stood for H.C… Heil something.  Heil Christ?

In any case, these numbers had been a way to keep one’s racist feelings on the down low, around those that weren’t already affiliated, until Kaiser’s predecessor formed Empire Eighty-Eight here in Brockton Bay.  The move had pushed an ultimatum on the more secretive racists in the area, forcing them to either join the aggressive, active group in the public eye or retreat further into hiding.   It had also drawn crowds of the more diehard white supremacists from the surrounding regions to Brockton Bay.  When people with powers, Kaiser included, started to congregate in the group, Brockton Bay became something of a magnet for those sorts.  One of the bigger collections of racists above the bible belt.  Quite possibly the biggest congregation of racist supervillains.

The day Empire Eighty-Eight had gotten its name hadn’t been a good day for our city.

A guy, thirty or so, was holding a carton of empty beer bottles.  He held one by the neck, tossed it into the air and caught it again, then whipped it in Bitch’s direction.  I flinched more than she did as it shattered explosively against the front of the door.

“We told you to get of here,” he sneered at her.

“I was here first.”

“Doesn’t matter.  We’re claiming this neighborhood, and that barking is driving me up the fucking wall.”

“You’ve said so before.  Try earplugs.”

He grabbed another bottle and threw it, hard.  Bitch had to lean out of the way this time, to keep it from hitting her shoulder.

“Can’t do business wearing earplugs, you dumb whore,” the man put his hand on the head of the partially bald girl, who made a face at Bitch.

“Then don’t do business.  I don’t care.”

He reached for another bottle, then stopped.  A slow smile crossed his face as he looked to a teenage boy that was standing just beside the bald girl,  “Thing about something as goddamn irritating as that barking, is it gets us talking about how we could deal with it.  Tom, here, had my favorite suggestion.  He said we could soak hot dogs in antifreeze and throw ’em into the field back there.  Whaddya say?”

Fuck. I looked around the inside of the building for something I could use as a mask, but there wasn’t anything.  Why hadn’t I brought my costume?  The situation was a hair away from devolving into a bloodbath, and my civilian identity was plain to see.  I couldn’t even work from inside the building, without risking that someone might have heard about my power or how I operated, and come in after me.

I could only see Bitch from behind, but I saw her turn her head to evaluate the group.  Maybe sizing up how long it would take her dogs to murder them all.

“If you were going to do that,” she said, “You would have done it before now, and I’d kill you for it.  Either you’re too scared to really do something about it, which you should be, or Kaiser told you hands off.”

It was the last attitude I would’ve expected from her.  Bitch, being level-headed?

The man with the bottles sneered, “Nah.  See, we heard that howling earlier.  So did some of our neighbors.  Kaiser did tell us to play nice, but way I figure it, if we tell Kaiser you started this shit, and he asks around to check our story, he’s gonna hear there was howling before there was fighting.”

“You know who I am,” Bitch threatened them, “You know my abilities.  You’re really going to fuck with me, here?  With my dogs around?  Really?”

I heard, rather than saw, the sound of a gun cocking.  The teenage boy, who I identified as Tom, raised a gun in Bitch’s direction.

“Still think you’re tough?” the man mocked Bitch, “Guns are the great equalizer, y’know?  My son here wants a place in the Empire, and to do that, he’s gotta earn his stripes.  Killing you would be a good way to go about it, I’m thinking.”

I didn’t wait to hear the rest of the dialogue.  There was no way this wasn’t going to come to violence, now.  I pulled off my shoes, then ran in my sock feet across the concrete floor, keeping as low as I could.  I found the knife that Bitch had used to open the bags of dog food, then stuck it in my back pocket.  Still nothing I could see that would work as a mask.  I wasn’t even wearing a sweatshirt or enough extra layers to use a piece of my clothing for a mask.  It had been too warm a day.

Which left me one very unpleasant option.

I exerted my power, and was glad to find that the grassy field and the half built building had a fair supply of bugs to work with.  Grasshoppers migrated my way, and I emptied a wasp nest that nestled in the wall above the unfinished second floor.  Blackflies that had been enjoying the copious amounts of dog waste flew my way, and innumerable ants and spiders formed the remainder of the swarm.

All together, they streamed my way to gather on my skin, crawling up my legs and torso, some turning downward to cover my arms.  As one, they covered every inch of my body, even creating a mass over my mouth and glasses to obscure everything.  It didn’t tickle as much as I thought it might, but I did shudder.

I’d need a shower after this.  Ten showers.  And I’d pay to use a gym or pool or something, so I didn’t have to endure the craptacular shower at the loft while I scrubbed my skin raw.  Ninety percent of my rationale for designing a costume that covered my entire body was for this exact reason, damn it.

Why hadn’t I brought my costume?  Why?

I flinched at the deafening roar of a gunshot.  Waited with my breath held, until I heard the murmur of conversation at the door again, Bitch’s voice.  A warning shot?

I grabbed my cell phone from my pocket and sent a text out, selecting Brian, Lisa and Alec as the recipients:

Half a dozen skinheads here.  At least one gun.  Need backup.

My phone vibrated with a reply a few seconds later. Brian:

Omw.  was headin home.  will take minute.

No immediate reply from the other two.  My phone displayed the time as 1:38.  Close enough to lunch for me to mark it as a continuation of the trend.  I was going to develop an anxiety disorder over this.  I texted him directions, informing him to look for the building with the crane.

Enough bugs had gathered to cover me, with plenty to spare.  I’d wanted to be absolutely sure I was covered, so I piled them on top of one another, several layers deep.  It was stifling.  I was forced to breathe through my nose, and my vision was obscured by the bugs that had collected on my glasses.   More than that, it was hot in the midst of the dense swarm.  Still, I was happier enduring it than risking being identified.

I looked out the nearest boarded up window that I could see through, and saw that the group hadn’t moved.  The man with the bottles said something, but I couldn’t make it out.  My leaving to grab the knife and send the texts had carried me out of earshot.

I ran back to the front door, keeping to the same half-crouch as before, to ensure nobody saw me through the gaps in the boards on the windows.  I pulled my shoes back on, straightened, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

“Jesus fuck!” a twenty-something skinhead cursed as I moved to Bitch’s side.  I had a vague sense of what I must have looked like – a tower of swarming insects with vague human definition to it, giving the loose shape of a head, with vague indents in the ‘face’ where my eyes were.

Even Bitch’s eyes widened a fraction as she saw me.

“The hell?” she muttered.

I stayed quiet, keeping my attention on their group.

Bottle man looked me over, then spoke in a low voice, “Tom, was it?  Would you do the honors and deal with this amateur horror show?”

The teenage boy, turned the handgun my way, pointed at chest level.  He smirked and grinned, “My pleasure.”

The scene with Bakuda and her minions hadn’t been so different.  Only difference was, Tom didn’t hesitate a second when it came to pulling the trigger.

The sheer force of the gunshot left me reeling, and it hadn’t even hit me.

I had dropped to a crouch as I stepped outside, leaving most of the bugs where they were above me.  Some had fallen down, but the overall structure had remained more or less stable, each of the bugs gripping one another and spreading out enough to fill in the gap of the vacated head and chest area.

From what my bugs had experienced, I knew the shot had passed only inches above my head, around the center of my chest.  The swarm down where I crouched was denser, to support the structure above them, so I couldn’t see through them as easily.  I could only wait with my breath held, hope that the bugs offered me enough cover to hide my real self.

“The fuck?” Tom spoke.  I moved the bugs in front of my eyes so I could get a partial look at him, and saw him backing away, gun still raised.

I’d borrowed a trick from Grue, and figured it only made sense to borrow one from Tattletale, too.

When I spoke, I hissed the words, and at the same time, I had every bug in the swarm make noise: buzzing, chirping and droning in time with my words, doing everything I could to sound less human.  “Guns are not going to work when my body is like this.”

Putting my hands on the ground, bringing the upright mass of bugs with me, I crawled forward a step.  I saw almost everyone in their group move away.  Only the man with the bottles remained where he was, and he used one outstretched arm to keep Tom from retreating as well.

My ploy was working.  As Tattletale had done with Glory Girl and Panacea, then again with Bakuda, I could sell the idea I had powers I didn’t to mislead and misdirect.

“Shoot, boy!”  The man tightened his grip Tom’s shoulder.

The teenager obeyed, firing thrice more into the swarm, aiming too high to hit me.  Two more shots struck where my chest would have been.  The third passed through my fake ‘head’.

Tom, his eyes wide in alarm, decided to change targets.  He swung his arm to my right to point his handgun at Bitch.

I lunged forward, drawing the knife and swinging it in one motion.  I stabbed Tom in the thigh, as Bitch simultaneously evaded to one side.  Through a combination of my attack, Tom having to adjust his aim and Bitch’s movements, the shot went astray.

As Tom fell over, I collapsed the swarm on top of him.  Avoiding touching him directly, I pulled the gun from his hand, retrieved my knife, and stabbed the point of the knife down on his palm to eliminate any possibility of him retaliating or grabbing for his weapon.

On an impulse, I drew the knife across his forehead.  According to Brian, cuts to the forehead were rarely serious, but they bled enough to look like they were.  It was a fact that people that staged fights often played up, and a technique boxers used to blind their opponents with blood in the eyes.

I left some of my bugs on and around Tom as I moved away from him.  He screamed frantically and struggled to crawl away.

It was more brutal an approach than I might have liked, but as I interpreted it, any effect I generated by injuring him like this, would hopefully prevent others from joining the fight, and would lead to less people getting hurt in the long run.  I didn’t like Kaiser’s followers, I had zero respect for them, but I didn’t want to see them torn apart by Bitch’s dogs.

“This territory is ours,” Bitch growled at them, as people backed away.  Brutus, Judas and Angelica were larger now, their skin split with bloody spikes of bone sticking out of the gaps.  “Leave.”

“Kaiser will hear about this!” the bottle man shouted.

“Leave!” Bitch shouted.

Tom, still mindless with pain and fear, jumped at that command.  He tried to pull himself to his feet and failed, falling to the ground again with a ragged scream.  When he reached out, imploring his friends for help, the skin of his hands and face were almost completely covered in bugs and blood.  It did a lot to help spook the rest into a retreat.  Most of them fled.

The bottle man cautiously moved forward to Tom’s side.  I didn’t move from where I stood/crouched as he bent down to help Tom stand and limp away.

“Fuck,” Bitch muttered.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I hope I didn’t do anything wrong by stepping in.”

She shook her head.

“I mean, maybe if I hadn’t come out, it wouldn’t have gotten violent.”

“He was working up the courage to shoot me,” she spoke.  “It’s fine.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What?”

“I mean, they’re going to come again.  Maybe soon.  Depending on what they say or who they complain to, there might be people with powers the next time around.”

“I’ll manage.”

“I know this is your space, I think it’s perfect, but maybe you should consider moving somewhere-”

She gave me a hard look.  “Do you want to get hit today?”

I shut my mouth.

“I’m going inside to pick up the shit.  You can help, or you can go back.  Doesn’t matter to me.”

I looked over my shoulder in the direction the skinheads had retreated.

“I’ll help,” I decided aloud. “I said I would, and you might need backup if they decide to come back in force.”  Besides, I’d texted Brian to come, and he’d need a proper recap of what had gone on.

She only whistled twice for her dogs to follow her back inside, glancing back to see they were still following.  She looked at me, and I wasn’t entirely sure, but I thought maybe she didn’t look as angry as she usually did.

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Buzz 7.2

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Bitch led the way as we traced a winding path through the Docks.  Her dogs trotted at her side, occasionally stopping to sniff, but never rushing ahead or lagging so far behind that they pulled on the leash.

Glancing at her, I could see how she was more at ease, like this.   When she was walking with the dogs at her side, I could see that the lines of her face were softer, there was less tension in her body.  She wasn’t quite so guarded.

I’d sort of assumed that her days of being homeless and fending for herself were the bad days, to her.  That it was a step up, being with us.  I was beginning to reconsider whether that was entirely true, seeing her stride down the streets and alleys with her dogs beside her.  Here, she didn’t have to worry about dealing with people and the social maneuverings she could no longer grasp.  This was what she was used to.

She glanced my way, and a shadow of irritation touched her expression.

I was intruding on her domain, spoiling that.  If I slipped up and pissed her off, I’d be lucky to get hit just once.

I knew we were close to our destination when I heard the barking.  Angelica yapped back in reply, cranked herself up to ‘excited frenzy’ mode and rushed forward, pulling on the leash.  Bitch stopped her, directed her to lie down with a motion of her finger, and we waited.  When Angelica relaxed and put her chin on the ground, we moved forward again.

We didn’t get three steps before Angelica pulled again, provoking the repetition of orders and another minute long wait.

The third time it happened, Bitch gave me a dark look.  As though it were my fault, or more probable, she might have been anticipating impatience on my part.  I didn’t really mind, though.  It wasn’t like I had anywhere to be, and it was interesting to see her process.

“How long have you had her?”

“Five months.”

“That’s pretty amazing,” I conceded, “I mean, she was abused before you got her, right?  So even with having to get her past that, and she’s already better trained than any dog I’ve seen that isn’t yours.”

“Walk on,” she instructed Angelica.  When Angelica didn’t pull, Bitch handed out treats to Brutus, then Judas, then Angelica in turn, without breaking stride.  “Dogs learn from their pack.  She learns some from imitating Brutus and Judas.”

I nodded.

“Most dog owners are retards anyways.”

“I can believe that.”

We approached the building that all the barking was coming from.  The rusted skeleton of a small crane stood atop a partially constructed building.  Bitch opened the door and waited until I was inside before closing it and latching it shut.  I could hear scratching at the door just past the first room.

When the second door leading further into the building was opened, a tide of dogs nearly bowled us over. I couldn’t count them, but there were more than ten, less than twenty.  All sorts of breeds, different sizes and shapes.

As Bitch moved forward as though the dogs weren’t there, I struggled to even stand.  I leaned against the front door for balance, and all I could think about was that moment Bitch had set her dogs on me, back when we first met.

I couldn’t afford to appear weak in front of Bitch, so I avoided asking for help.

Cement was laid out over nearly half of the building interior, as the floor or foundation, but the work had been interrupted and abandoned partway through.  There were areas where crushed stone had been laid out in preparation for the cement pour, and a combination of wind and rain had mixed regular dirt into the crushed stone a long time ago.  Any spot inside the building that wasn’t covered in concrete was marked by patches of grass and a few scraggy weeds.

Three walls of the ground floor were erect, plywood and drywall bolted to wood frames, with cement blocks piled against most of the exterior walls.  Enough had been done at the front of the building for the construction workers to have started laying out a second floor, providing an overhang between the ground floor and the sky to keep things more or less dry.   Things were too much of a mess for me to tell if the far exterior wall had been left incomplete or if had fallen down.  It stood open to the environment, letting rays of dusty sunlight inside.

Bitch headed to a wood pallet stacked with bags of dog food, which rested atop a pallet of bricks.  She drew a knife across the top of two bags and let them empty into a trough sitting below.  I was grateful when most of the dogs around me rushed off to get their food.

The reprieve didn’t last long.  Several of the dogs began fighting in front of the trough.  A black lab, snarling with his expression pulled into something grotesque, chased a smaller dog directly toward me.  The little dog collided with my legs, and with the lab hot on her heels, it started fighting tooth and nail in its own defense.  A bigger dog, longer and lankier than the lab, with very short fur, crossed the room to join the skirmish, protecting the little one.

“Bitch?”  I asked, doing my best to keep my voice calm as the dogs fought beneath me, bumping into my legs.  I backed up, but they brought the fight right to me once again.

“The black one is Sirius.  He’s the newest, not used to things.  He’ll get better as the other dogs socialize him and I get a chance to train him.”

“They’re, uh, really going at it,” I winced and pulled one leg off the ground to keep it out of the way.

“Let me know if he draws blood.”

The fighting was nerve wracking, conjuring up very vivid memories of Bitch’s dogs terrorizing me.  Why did this spook me so much when being around her dogs in monster form didn’t make me that nervous?

Shutting my eyes, I drew on my power.  My objective wasn’t to do anything with it, but simply to get a little outside my own head, achieve a greater perspective.  Focusing on the big picture, seeing myself as a very small figure against the backdrop of a whole neighborhood, I was able to center myself.  I could ignore the hairy animals shoving up against my legs, jumping up at and around me, pressing their cold noses against my hands and arms.

A mass of bugs in my immediate vicinity lunged between my legs.  My eyes snapped open, and I saw the culprit, placed my hands on him, the dark furred lab.  It wasn’t fleas, either, or ticks or anything like that.  It was a denser mass.  The closest parallel I could draw would be a wasp nest.  Or maggots in a trash bag.

“Bitch,” I spoke, cautiously.

“What?” She sounded… annoyed was the wrong word.  She sounded ready to kill me, for interrupting her from setting the dogs up with fresh water.

“I think one of these guys is really sick.”

Her head snapped in my direction.  “Show me.”

The dogs stopped fighting as she stalked toward us.  I took the opportunity to gingerly take hold of Sirius’s collar as she ushered the rest away.  She glowered at me, “Explain.”

It was hard to organize my thoughts, even without accounting for her intense scrutiny.  “Worms.  But not, like, tapeworm.  I-I can’t see through their eyes or anything.  Um.  I don’t know what they are, so I can only tell you what I know.  They’re mostly juvenile, only a few adult, um-”

“Above the heart, here?”  She pointed to a spot low in his chest.

I nodded.

“And the arteries?  There’s one from here,” she pointed at the lab’s shoulder, “To here?” she traced her finger along his spine.

“That’s where a lot of them are.  But they’re not just there.  They’re everywhere inside him.”

“Fuckers.  Those fuckers,” she growled.  “I warned them.”

Taking hold of the lab’s collar, she ordered the dog, “Come along, Sirius.”

The dog resisted until Brutus moved forward, then went along, though he still pulled and twisted against the grip on his collar.

“I don’t know dogs,” I said, following her into the herd of dogs just inside the building.  “I never had a pet, so I’m clueless here.”

“It’s heartworm.  Something dogs are supposed to take medicine to prevent, every month.”

“The owners didn’t, then?”

“The shelter didn’t.  Lazy, cheap-ass motherfuckers.  This is the second dog I got from that place that wasn’t taken care of.  And people who do adopt get a sick dog?  Fuckers, fuckers, fuckers.”

“What are you going to do with him?”  I tried to ignore the dogs milling around me, to keep moving forward and follow Bitch.

“We are going to help him.”

I shook my head.  “I don’t think I can get the worms out without hurting him.  I mean, they’re in his bloodstream and the closest thing to an exit would be his lungs, and I think they would bleed too much.  I’m not even sure I can move them.”

“Grab that chain.”  She pointed across the room, still holding on to Sirius.

I saw several lengths of heavy chain, spotted with rust, looped up and hung on the wall above a pallet of weather worn brick.  I hurried over and hauled it down.  It was heavy enough I had to drag it on the grass to bring it to her.

“Backpack,” she told me.  I took it off and handed it to her.  She opened the front and handed me a carabiner, a metal loop with a locking hinge.  “Go tie the chain to something solid.”

I did, looping the chain around the base of the crane that was bolted to the concrete pad, toward the center of the room.  I fed the length through the carabiner  and headed back to Bitch.

Judas, Brutus and Angelica were already halfway to full size.   Bitch took the chain and began extending it around the struggling dog, winding it through a half dozen carabiners so it extended around his neck, body and stomach, and between his legs.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m using my power on him.  And he’s not trained.”

“Wait.  Didn’t a dog kill some people, back when you first had your powers?”

“Yup.”

I felt my heartbeat speed up a notch.  “So this is really dangerous.”

“Yup.”  She tugged on the chain at his neck.

“Okay.”  I exhaled slowly.  “What can I do?”

“Keep out of the way for now.”

Sirius started to grow.  Muscles rippled underneath his black coat, and he yelped, pulling away.

“Couldn’t we maybe get him tranquilized, first?” I asked, watching the lab try to get away, despite the chains binding him.

Bitch held the length of chain in her hands, keeping him in place.  “No.  My power would burn away the drugs.”

“He doesn’t like it.”

“It takes getting used to. But this is better than what he’d go through if a vet took care of it.  Safer.”

Not for us, I thought, as Sirius pulled back.  Bitch pulled him closer to her, shifting her grip to the chain at his neck and chest to feed the slack through it and give Sirius more room to grow.  His ears were pulled back, his face etched in fear and rage, teeth bared.  I would have been terrified he would snap at me, given how easily he could take half of someone’s face off with a single bite, but Bitch never flinched or broke eye contact with him.

Something moved to my right, and I saw Brutus pacing.  The other dogs, the ones I didn’t know, stayed back a fair distance, kept at bay by Brutus’s watchful presence.

There was a sound of shuffling chain as Bitch adjusted the chain again.

“Judas, Angelica!” she called out, releasing Sirius and backing away.  “Hold!”

Sirius, pupils narrowed to dots, lunged at her.  Judas stepped between them, while Angelica struck at the lab from the side, knocking him to the ground.  In a moment, the two dogs were on top of him, Judas holding Sirius’s throat in his jaws, while Angelica lay astride his hindquarters.  Even with two full size dogs piled on him, Sirius managed to put up a struggle.

“The heartworm?” Bitch glanced at me.

I felt out with my power.  Whatever was going on inside Sirius’ body, the worms were being churned up, disintegrating and dissolving.

“Almost gone.”

She nodded.

She turned her attention to Sirius, who was lying prone, his chest heaving.  “Heartworms have a bacteria inside them.  When they die, the bacteria gets released into the dog.  Having a vet treat it is a long process that involves injecting arsenic into muscles and lots of antibiotics.  Like this, his body won’t just kill them, but it can kill the disease.  He’ll be fine by tomorrow.”

Sirius let out a long, mournful noise, somewhere between a whine and a howl, loud enough that I had to turn my face away and cover my ears.

When I was sure he wasn’t about to do it again, I dropped my hands.  I asked Bitch, “Have you done this before?”

She shook her head.  “I’ve used my power on most of them, but only a little, to keep them healthy.  Sirius is the only one I’ve made this big since Angelica, Brutus, Judas and Rollo.”

I almost asked who Rollo was, but I kept my mouth shut.  It was a habit of mine, I found, that I usually pushed a conversation with Bitch too far, gave her an excuse to get pissed at me.  I could prioritize other things over my curiosity.

Besides, as I thought on it, I realized Rollo might’ve been the first dog she used her power on.  The one with the body count.

“Time?” She asked.

I found my cell phone, fumbled with it to press a button and display the time.  “Nine minutes past eleven.”

“We’ll give it fifteen minutes,” she reached for the chain and held it.  “Takes about that long for it to wear off.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t need you here.  If you want to be useful, there’s a shovel by the door.  You can go pick up the shit in the short grass over there.”

“Fuck you,” the words spilled out of my mouth before I could censor them.  I wasn’t positive I wanted to censor them, but it bugged me that I’d done it without thinking it through.

“What?” she growled at me.

“Fuck you,” I repeated myself, “I came to help.  Thought maybe I was helping, by pointing out what was wrong with Sirius.  That doesn’t mean I’m going to be your slave, or that it’s an excuse to give me the worst jobs.  You want me to pick up the poop?  Cool, but I’ll do it when you’ve got a shovel in your hand too, and you’re working beside me.”

“You told me I could hit you, free and clear, if you pissed me off,” she threatened me.

“Yeah, but if you do it here, for this reason, I’m hitting back,” I didn’t move my eyes away from hers, even as every awkward part of me twitched to look away and leave.  If she really did default to interpreting social interactions in dog terms, then eye contact was important.  I didn’t know much about animals, about dogs, but I did know that it was the submissive dog, the dog lower on the totem pole, that backed down.

“I’ve got Brutus, you wouldn’t win the fight,” she told me.

Almost definitely true, I thought.  But I couldn’t give in.  I resisted the urge to look at Brutus and told her, my voice low, “You want to go there?  Try it.”

She set her jaw, stared at me for several long moments.  Then Sirius made a noise, a smaller version of that whimpering howl he’d made earlier, and she turned her head.

I waited a minute, watching as Sirius got the strength to struggle again, nearly standing up, before the weight of the other two dogs pressed him down again.

“Bitch- Rachel.  I’m getting the impression you might be here a while, to keep an eye on Sirius, give him some attention after he’s back to normal so he knows everything’s okay?”

“What about it?”  Her voice was hard, and she didn’t look my way.

“Do you want me to pick up something for lunch, so you can stay here with him?”

“…Fine.”

“You know this area better than I do.  Where-” I stopped.  I needed to convey more self confidence than simply asking her for the info.  She might even see it as begging.  I told her, “Tell me where to go.”

I was crossing my fingers she wouldn’t go nuts over me giving her an order.

She was too preoccupied with watching Sirius to argue with me.  “There’s a Greek food stand if you walk in the direction of the Boardwalk.  You’ll smell it before you see it.”

“Okay.  What do you want?”

“Anything with meat.”

“I’ll be back,” I told her.

She didn’t reply, leaving me to make my way through the crowd of dogs to the front door.  I stuck my shaking hands into my pockets and headed off to grab our lunch, leaving Bitch with the monster in chains.

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Buzz 7.1

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Brian was quicker than a guy his height should’ve been.  He stepped back out of the way of my jab, then turned his body in what I was learning was going to be a kick.  Thing was,  I didn’t know where that kick would be directed, and he generally didn’t hold back with his kicks the way he did with his jabs.  Knowing this, keeping to his instructions on being unpredictable, I threw myself forward and awkwardly tackled him.

His thigh caught me in the side as he brought his leg around, which hurt, but not as badly as the kick would have.  Even so, I succeeded in knocking him to the ground.  Any sense of victory I might have felt was short lived, because I fell with him, and he was more prepared for what came next than I was.  We hit the ground, he used the leverage of his hands and his still-raised thigh to heave me to his right.  Before I had my bearings, he flipped himself over in my direction and straddled me.

I jabbed a hand for his side, but he caught my wrist and twisted my arm around until my elbow was pointing at my bellybutton.  I grabbed at his shirt with my other hand, hoping to maybe buck him off me (fat chance), and he grabbed that wrist too.  He adjusted his grip on my twisted right arm and pinned my arms down against the ground, stretched out over my head.

“It’s a start,” he smiled down at me.

Realizing the position he had me in, feeling the pressure of his thighs against my hips, his weight resting partially on my lower body, I must’ve blown a synapse.  My thought process ground to a halt.  It didn’t help that the first place my mind went was interpreting his ‘start’ as being this position leading to something else.

“We keep this up, and you could be quite the scrapper,” he elaborated.  “When we were on the ground, here, and I pushed you to one side, you should have rolled with it.  Get yourself some distance.  If you were really quick about it, you could have even been on your feet before I was, which would be a good position for attack.”

“Mmm,” was the most coherent response I could manage.

“You going to let her up, or are you enjoying this too much?” Lisa asked him, from where she sat on the couch.  She had her arms folded over the back of it, her chin on the cushion.  Her hands were folded in front of her mouth, hiding what I suspected was an amused smile.

Brian smiled as he stood, “Sorry, Taylor.  You want to go a round, Lise?”

“Not dressed for it, it’s too early in the day, and I wouldn’t deny Taylor her fun,” she spoke, without raising her head.  When I gave her an irritated look, she winked at me.

Brian and I stood and faced each other, then both of us hesitated, me staying just out of his reach.

“I’m surprised you’re up for this, you two,” Lisa commented, “Aren’t your legs sore from the jumping around last night?  You especially, Taylor.  You went on a run this morning, and now you’re sparring?”

“If my knees could talk, they’d be screaming in agony,” I answered her.  I raised my hand as Brian moved to attack while I was distracted, and he backed off again.  “But staying active keeps my mind off stuff.”

“Everything okay?” Brian asked me.  I shrugged, glanced at Lisa.

“Taylor went home,” Lisa explained, “Got in an argument with her dad, came back here.  Might be staying a while, yeah?”

“Yeah,” I echoed her.

“Sorry,” Brian sympathized.

“Me too,” I spoke.  I stepped in closer, trying to provoke him to move, but he didn’t fall for it.  “I love my dad.  I never really had that phase others did, where I felt embarassed to be around him, where we didn’t understand each other.  I thought we were closer than that, until last night.”

“Are things going to be okay?”

“Don’t really know,” I replied.  Changing the subject, I admitted, “Okay, I’m stuck.  I’m standing here, facing you, and I don’t know what I can do that isn’t going to wind up with me getting hit or thrown to the ground.  I move forward, there’s a million things you could do to kick my ass.  What would you do, in my shoes?”

“Honestly?  Hmm,” he relaxed a bit, “Good question.  I guess I’d go for the nearest thing I could use as a weapon.”

“Besides that.  There’s nothing I could grab that would work for sparring without really hurting you.”

“I guess I’d do what you’re doing, wait for the other guy to make a move.”

“Okay.  So move.”

He did. He stepped closer, feinted high with a kick, then ducked low to try and kick my feet out from under me.  I could handle that much – I hopped a little to avoid his foot as it moved beneath me.  Still, he was one step ahead of me, getting his footing with the extended leg and shoulder-checking me onto my ass.  I took his advice from earlier, going with it, scrambling backward to create some distance, but he had the advantage of having both feet on the ground.  He half-turned and followed after me, bringing his knee forward, stopping a few inches shy of my face.

“You’re learning,” he said.

“Very slowly.”

“You’re learning,” he stressed, “You listen to what I say, you keep it in mind, and I almost never have to remind you of something twice.”

He offered me his hand, and as I reached up to take it, he gripped my upper arm.  I gripped his, and he hauled me back up to my feet.

“I come bearing coffee and breakfast,” Alec pronounced, “That a certain team leader was too lazy to fetch.”

“Aw fuck off, Alec,” Brian replied, without any venom in his voice.  He let go of my arm to grab a coffee.  “I grab you something nine days out of ten, on my way here.”

“That’s your tax for the inconvenience of you living off site,” Alec replied, moving toward the couch and handing Lisa and me our coffees.  Lisa took the paper bag and fished out some muffins, handing me one.  I sat on the couch next to her.

“So,” Brian addressed us, as we all walked to the couches.  “I think it’s important to get a few things out of the way, now that we know who we’re employed by, why, and our possibilities for the future.”

Bitch settled on the other couch with her dogs hopping up around her as she pulled her feet up beside her.  That left Brian to sit in the empty space between Alec and me.  I felt painfully conscious of where his calf and arm were touching my leg and shoulder.  I’d been running and sparring, I was probably sweaty.  Did I smell?  Would that gross him out?  I couldn’t help but feel self conscious, but I would’ve stood out more if I did something about it.  I tried to focus on the discussion instead.

“First off, I don’t think we should do a majority vote for this thing Coil proposed.  As far as I’m concerned, this is too important, too game-changing, for us to go ahead with it if anyone’s going to be unhappy or upset.  We come to a consensus or we don’t do it.”

I wasn’t the only one to nod in silent agreement.

“Second, Alec, I gotta ask about what Coil said.  Past identity, your dad.  Is this something that’s going to come back and bite us in the ass?”

Alec sighed and leaned back against the arm of the couch with a roll of his eyes, “No chance we can ignore that?”

“I dunno, can we?”

“My dad runs his own group in Montreal.  I was working for him before anything else.”

“Who is he?” Brian pressed.

“Nikos Vasil.  Heartbreaker.”

My eyebrows went up at that.

Lisa whistled, “After Coil let that detail slip, I made a mental list of possibilities.  Had it narrowed down to four.  Heartbreaker was one, the pieces fit, but it was so hard to believe.”

“He’s big,” Brian said.

“No,” Alec shook his head, “He’s scary.  He’s newsworthy.  But he’s not all that.”

Heartbreaker was what you got when someone had a power like Gallant, the ability to manipulate emotions, and absolutely no compunctions about using it selfishly.  Unlike Gallant, Heartbreaker didn’t need to shoot you with any blasts of energy to affect you.  He just needed to be near you, and the effects were long term or permanent.

Despite Alec’s attempts at downplaying who and what his dad was, it was hard to ignore the fact that I’d grown up hearing what this guy had done on the evening news, that I’d come across mentions of it online since I started browsing the web for cape stuff as a kid.  Heartbreaker found beautiful women, made them love him, really love him, and formed a cult-like group with them serving him hand and foot, committing crimes for his favor.  They worshiped him to the extent they were willing to die for him.  Drawn to their natural conclusion, his methods meant he had lots of kids.  Alec included.

“Damn,” I muttered.  I asked Alec, “You grew up with that guy?”

He shrugged, “It was normal to me.”

“I mean, what was it like? I can’t even wrap my head around it.  Were the women nice to you?  What- how does that even function?”

“My dad’s victims had eyes only for him,” Alec said, “So no, they weren’t nice to me or my brothers and sisters.”

“Details,” Lisa said, “C’mon.  Talk.”

“I’m not a talkative person.”

“Talk or I kick your ass,” she threatened.

“Seconded,” I added.

He scowled briefly, then crossed one foot over the other on the coffee table, settling deeper into the couch with his coffee resting on his belt buckle.  “We had everything we could ask for, as far as money and stuff went.  Dad’s victims took care of the chores, so the only thing us kids would have to do was take care of the babies sometimes.  Didn’t have to go to school, but some of my brothers and sisters did just to stay out of my dad’s way.”

“Why?” I asked, “Or is that a dumb question?”

“Eh.  It’s hard to explain.  He cultivated us, bred for us, went miles out of his way to get us back if a member of his ‘family’ was taken from him.  Mounted a freaking crusade if it came down to it.  But when we were around, he paid almost no attention to us kids.  When he did pay attention, it was to discipline us or test us.  Discipline usually meant getting a dose of paralyzing terror for not listening to him, insulting him or even looking him in the eye, sometimes.  Testing happened on our birthdays or if he’d had a bad day… he’d try to set up a trigger event.  Not supposed to be so hard, given that we were second generation capes, obviously, but he started when we were eight or so.”

“How old were you?  When your powers showed?” I asked, quiet, feeling intense pity not only for Heartbreaker’s victims, but for the kids in that situation.

Whatever my feelings, Alec managed to look bored with the topic.  “Hard to tell.  Since I didn’t go to school, and nobody really kept records, I lost track of the years.  Ten or eleven, maybe.  I was his fourth kid to show powers, and there were eighteen or so of us when I left.  Most of ’em were babies, though.”

Which made him, not Grue, the one of us with the most experience and seniority.

Alec shrugged, “So yeah.  I worked for him for three or four years.  We did jobs, I learned the family trade.  Called myself Hijack at first.  He started to get on my case.  I think maybe he was having trouble affecting me the same way he did before my powers kicked in, so he compensated for that by riding me.  Pushed my limits, made me do stuff that was dangerous, stuff that was hard on my conscience.  Wanted me to break, beg him to stop, so he’d have leverage to get me to do what he wanted.”

“And?”

“And he ordered me to kill this foot soldier for a group trying to push us out of their territory.  After I was done, he told me I did it wrong, that I had to do it again with a captive we’d taken, and I knew no matter what I did, he’d make me keep doing it.  Just another way of pushing my limits.  I had convinced myself I didn’t care about the people I was hurting or about this guy I’d just killed, and maybe I didn’t.  Maybe I don’t, still.  Dunno.  But it was so pointless.”

He shrugged, “I didn’t see a real reason to stay.  Walked away.  Changed my name, got fresh ID, changed my villain name too.”

He’d killed someone on his father’s orders, which made him the second killer in the group. Armsmaster must have dug up that detail & drawn the right conclusions after connecting Alec to his prior alter ego.

“When did this happen, this killing?” I asked, quiet, “How old were you when you killed that guy?”

“Hmm.  I’d been gone for about two years before the boss got in touch with me, which was about this time last year, so three years ago.  I would’ve been twelve or thirteen.”

Was that forgivable?  He’d been made to do it, he’d been in fucked up circumstances with no real moral compass to go by, still a kid.  The way he described it, though, it didn’t sit well with me.  Cold blooded murder.

“You said he goes after his kids if they leave,” Brian spoke, “Will that happen here?  If he realizes you’re one of his?”

“Dunno.  Maybe.  I’d bet he’d send one of my brothers or sisters to talk to me, ask me to come back before he did anything else.  If that happened, I’d probably leave before he came in person.”

“Or we could back you up,” Brian pointed out.

“Or that,” Alec agreed, apparently oblivious to the show of camaraderie.  “Anything else?  Any more questions for yours truly?”

“Dozens more,” I said, “But I think we need to get to the other big topic of the day.”

“Yeah,” Brian agreed.  “I’m less than thrilled you didn’t mention this, I have my concerns about the possibility that a guy like him might come after you, after us, but there’s nothing we can do about it for the time being.  Let’s focus on more pressing matters.”

Lisa pulled her feet up beside her on the couch, “Thoughts on the deal?  Before we vote?”

“Makes sense to me,” Alec replied.  “It’s something I figured I’d end up doing eventually, controlling a territory, being boss of an area, letting the green roll in without any major effort.”

“Could be a lot of effort,” I spoke, “Depending on how secret he manages to keep this, and how successful he is.  If this goes bad, it means us against however many capes the Protectorate decides to throw at us.  We could wind up with the teams from Boston and New York coming to deal with the problem, if word gets out about what we’re doing.”

“Call me an optimist,” Alec said. “I don’t think it’ll be that bad.”

“Taylor just reminded me of what I said about the bank robbery, and what wound up happening.”  This from Brian.  “We’ve been successful because we, by and large, pick our battles, go on the offensive, and catch our enemies off guard.  In situations where we haven’t done that, and I’m thinking specifically about our fight with Bakuda, we really struggled.  That’s when we came closest to getting killed.  Consider that we’ll be the ones on the defensive, if we’re holding this territory and taking on all comers.”

“We can work around that,” Lisa replied, “Plans, information gathering, pre-emptive attacks. I’ve got the inside info, and there’s nothing stopping Taylor from using her bugs to keep an eye on the neighborhood.  Besides, Coil didn’t say we couldn’t hire other parahumans, just that anyone who wanted to work in Brockton Bay had to bend the knee to him.  So we could theoretically recruit other parahumans, if we needed to, bulk our forces.”

“My problem,” I chose my words carefully, “Is it sounds too good to be true.  What if it doesn’t work out?  What if we wind up miserable, or if he screws us, or if he isn’t as good as he thinks he’ll be?  Do we walk away?  Will we be able to?”

“I got away from my dad,” Alec said.  “Would it be so hard to get away from Coil?”

I didn’t have a good answer to that.  “I guess we don’t know enough about him or the resources he’s got at his disposal to say.”

“I do have my reservations,” Brian spoke, “But I get the impression Coil’s going ahead with this regardless of whether we’re in or not.  I’d rather be in on this than sitting on the sidelines, watching it happen.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “I think that right now, what we stand to gain by saying ‘yes’, and being right, far outweighs what we stand to lose.”

“So, who’s for the deal, then?” Lisa asked us.

I raised my hand.  Alec, Brian and Lisa joined me in raising theirs.  That left the one person who hadn’t participated in the conversation over Coil’s deal as the sole nay vote.  Bitch seemed unconcerned as she rubbed Brutus’ shoulder.

“What’s up?” Brian asked her.

“I don’t like it.  Don’t trust him,” she didn’t raise her eyes from Brutus.

I leaned forward, “Not saying you’re wrong in not trusting him, but why?”

Angelica, the one eyed, one eared terrier, nuzzled her, and Bitch scratched her behind the ear.  Bitch explained, “He talks too much.  Only reason people talk like he does is if they’re covering something up.”

“I don’t think he’s covering anything up,” Lisa said, “My power would probably clue me in if he was hiding something.”

“I’m going with my gut, and my gut says no.  Besides, things are fine the way they are.”

“But they could be better,” Alec said.

“Your opinion, not mine.  We done here?  You said we wouldn’t accept the deal unless everyone was cool with it, and I’m not.”

Brian frowned, “Wait.  I assumed we’d discuss this, hear each other out.”

“Nothing to discuss,” Bitch stood up and whistled twice.  Her dogs hopped down from the couch to follow her.  “I’m going to work.”

“Come on,” Brian said, “Don’t-”

Lisa stopped him, “Let’s wait, then.  He said we had a week, we can afford to wait a day or two.  Bitch, go do your thing, get it out of the way.  But maybe try to be more open to negotiation and discussion when it comes up again.”

Bitch’s eyebrows knit together in a glare, not directed at anyone in particular.  She turned her attention to collecting the things she needed – plastic bags, a few energy bars, leashes, and a backpack with a bright blue plastic stick jutting out of a gap in the zipper.

“Hey,” I spoke up, “Can I come with?”

I’d told myself I wanted to connect with these guys, and that wasn’t going to happen if I just sat back and participated only when invited.  I had to put myself out there.  Given what I was giving up to be here, I figured I owed it to myself.

Bitch, though, was less than impressed.  The look she gave me could have sent a small animal fleeing for its life.

“Fuck you,” she spat the words.

“Hey.  What?” I was stunned.

“You want to come and bug me to change my mind.  Well fuck you.  You’re not coming into my space, getting in my business, to make me do or say anything I don’t want to do.”

I started to raise my hands, in a placating gesture, but I stopped myself.  Bitch had a different standard for handling social situations.  She didn’t understand stuff like tone, stress, sarcasm, and precedent had led her to assume sarcasm and aggression from any statement.  And it wasn’t just statements, I had a suspicion that the gesture of raising my hands could be seen as aggressive, or something like an animal trying to make itself look bigger, intimidating.

I had to communicate with her in a way that left the least room for misinterpretation.

“You’re going to take care of the rescued dogs, right?  That’s what you do when you go out?  Your ‘work’?”

“None of your business.”

“Coil said you’re overloaded.  I’m offering an extra set of hands, so you can give the dogs more of the attention they need.”

“Bullshit.”

“Enough,” Brian started to rise, “You need to calm down-”

I put my hand on his shoulder and pushed him down.  “I’m fine.  Rachel, I’m going to make you a deal.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“I thought my last deal was pretty fair, so hear me out?”

“Fine.”

“Let me come along.  I’ll help out where I can, we’ll maybe talk, but we won’t talk about Coil, unless you bring it up.  In exchange, if I do bring it up, or if I try to manipulate you one way or the other, you get a free shot at me.”

“A free shot.”

“One punch, however you want it, wherever you want to stick it.  I know Brian said something about there being no repeats of the day we met, no fighting inside the group or whatever, but this would be a freebie.  Totally allowed.”  I glanced at Brian, who only gave me a concerned look and a small, tight shake of the head.

“Nah,” Bitch answered, “You’ll just piss me off some other way.”

Impulsively, I told her, “Then how about this?  If we finish, we get back here, and it turns out I’ve ruined your day, you get that free shot.”

She stared at me for a moment.  “So I just got to put up with you for a few hours, and then I get to knock your teeth out?”

“No,” Brian said, raising his voice.

“Yes,” I told her, giving Brian a pointed look.  “If I mention the meeting before you do, or if I piss you off.”

She looked me over, “Whatever.  If you’re that eager to get hit, it’s your funeral.”  She took off the backpack and threw it at me.  I caught it with both arms.  Heavier than it looked.

As I hurried her way to get my running shoes on, Alec hissed at me, “You’re crazy.”

Maybe.  Probably.  But I couldn’t think of a better way to reach out to Bitch.

I hoped this wasn’t something I was going to regret.

 

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

 

Interlude 6

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Paige’s jaw hurt.  Being muzzled like an animal did that.

The other restraints weren’t so bad, but that was only in a relative sense.  Her hands were buried in a pair of reinforced metal buckets, each filled with that damn pastel yellow foam.  The buckets themselves were linked together behind her back, with comically oversized chain links.  It would have been intolerably heavy if it weren’t for the hook on the back of her chair, which she could hang the chain on.

Strips of metal had been tightened just under her armpits, near the bottom of her ribcage, her upper arms and waist, with two more bands around each of her ankles.  Chains seemed to connect everything to everything else, preventing her from moving her arms or legs more than a few inches in any direction before she felt the frustrating resistance and jangling of the chains.  The heavy metal collar around her neck, thick enough around it could have been a tire for a small vehicle, blinked with a green light just frequently enough that she forgot to anticipate it.  She got distracted and annoyed by its appearance in her peripheral vision each time it flashed.

The irony was, a pair of handcuffs would have sufficed.  She didn’t have enhanced strength, no tricks to slip her restraints, and she wasn’t about to run anyways.  If any of that was a real possibility, she wouldn’t have been allowed in the courtroom.  The prosecution had argued that she could have enhanced strength, that she could be a flight risk, and her lawyer hadn’t done a good enough job of arguing against it, so the restraints had gone on.  Which meant she got trussed up like Hannibal Lecter, as though she were already guilty.  Unable to use her hands, her hair, the vibrant and startling yellow of a lemon, had slipped from where it was tucked behind her ears and strands now hung in front of her face.  She knew it only made her look more deranged, more dangerous, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it.

If she had been able to, she would have had a comment or two to make about that, or at least she could have asked the lawyer to tidy her hair.  She would have argued with the man that had been hired as her defense, instead of waiting hours or days for a response to each of her emails.  She would have demanded that her basic rights be met.

But she couldn’t say anything.  A leather mask reinforced with the same metal strips that were on her body and a cage-style grille of small metal bars was strapped over her lower face.  The interior of the mask was the worst thing, because the arrangement extended into her mouth, a framework of wires keeping her mouth fixed in a slightly open position, her tongue pressed down hard against the floor of her mouth.  The barbaric setup left her jaw, her tongue and the muscles of her neck radiating tension and pain.

“Silence.  All rise, please.  This court is now in session, the honorable Peter Regan presiding.”

It was so hard to move with the restraints.  Her lawyer gripped the chain running between her armpit and her upper arm, to help her get to a standing position, but she stumbled anyways, bumped into the table.  There was no way to be graceful when you were wearing restraints that weighed half as much as you did.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?”

“We have, your honor.”

Paige watched as the clerk delivered the envelope to the judge.

“In the matter of the state of Massachusetts versus Paige Mcabee, as to the count of attempted murder, how do you find?”

“Not guilty, your honor.”

Paige sagged a little with relief.

“In the matter of the state of Massachusetts versus Paige Mcabee, as to the count of aggravated assault with a parahuman ability, how do you find?”

“Guilty, your honor.”

Paige shook her head as well as she was able.  No!  This wasn’t fair!

She almost missed the next line.  “…sexual assault with a parahuman ability, how do you find?”

“Guilty, your honor.”

Sexual assault.  The words chilled her.  It wasn’t like that.

“Is this your verdict?”

“Yes, your honor.”

“Paige Mcabee, please direct your attention  to me,” the judge spoke.

She did, eyes wide, shellshocked.

“Determining sentencing for this case is not easy.  As your lawyer has no doubt made you aware, you do fall under the umbrella of the TSPA, or the three strikes act.  At the age of twenty three, you have been convicted of no prior crimes.

“According to the witnesses heard in this court, you first demonstrated your abilities in early 2009.  You were vocal about not wanting to become a member of the Protectorate, but you also expressed a disinterest in a life of crime.  This state, in which an individual does not identify as hero or villain, is what the PRT classifies as a ‘rogue’.

“It is in our interests to promote the existence of rogues, as the proportion of parahumans in our society slowly increases.  Many rogues do not cause confrontations, nor do they seek to intervene in them.  Instead, the majority of these individuals turn their abilities to practical use.  This means less conflict, and this serves the betterment of society.  These sentiments mirror those that you expressed to your family and friends, as we heard in this courtroom over the last few weeks.

“Those facts are in your favor.  Unfortunately, the rest of the facts are not.  Understand, Miss Mcabee, our nation uses incarceration for several reasons.  We aim to remove dangerous individuals from the population and we do it punitively, both for justice against transgressors and to give other criminals pause.

“Each of these applies in your case.  It is not only the heinous nature of the crime that must be addressed by the sentencing, but the fact that it was performed with a power.  Laws are still new in the face of parahuman criminality.  We become aware of new powers on a weekly basis, most if not all warranting careful and individual attention in respect to the law.  In many of these cases, there is little to no precedent to fall back on.  As such, the courts are forced to continually adapt, to be proactive and inventive in the face of new circumstances that parahuman abilities introduce.

“It is with all of this in mind that I consider your sentencing.  I must protect the public, not only from you, but from other parahumans that might consider doing as you did.  Placing you in standard detention proves problematic and exorbitantly expensive.  It would be inhumane and harmful to your body to keep you under restraint for the duration of your incarceration.  Special facilities, staff and countermeasures would have to be arranged to keep you in isolation from other inmates.  You pose a significant flight risk.  Finally, the possibility of you re-entering society, by escape or parole, is particularly concerning, given the possibility of a repeat offense.

“It is with this in mind that I have decided that there is sufficient cause to sentence you outside the scope of the TSPA.  Guilty on two counts, the defendant, Paige Mcabee, is sentenced to indefinite incarceration within the Baumann Parahuman Containment Center.”

The Birdcage.

The noise in the courtroom was deafening.  A roar of cheering and booing, movement, people standing, reporters pushing to be the first ones out the door.  Only Paige seemed to be still.  Cold, frozen in stark horror.

Had she been able, that might have been the moment she lost it.  She would have screamed her innocence, thrown a fit, even swung a few punches.  What did she have to lose?  This sentence was little better than an execution.  Some would say it was worse.  There would be no escape, no appeals, no parole.  She would spend the rest of her life in the company of monsters.  With some of the people that were kept in there, the ‘monster’ description was all too literal.

But she wasn’t able.  She was bound and gagged.  Two men that were bigger and stronger than her placed their arms under her armpits, practically carrying her out of the courtroom.  A third person in uniform, a burly woman, walked briskly beside them, preparing a syringe.  Panic gripped her, and with her having no way to express it, do anything with it, the hysteria only compounded itself, making her panic more.  Her thoughts dissolved into a chaotic haze.

Even before the syringe of tranquilizers was jammed into her neck, Paige Mcabee fainted.

■

Paige woke up and enjoyed five seconds of peace before she remembered everything that had happened.  Reality hit her like a splash of cold water in the face, somewhat literally.  She opened her eyes, but found them dry, the world too bright to focus on.  The rest of her was damp, wet.  Beads of water trickled down her face.

She tried to move, and couldn’t.  It was as though something heavy had been piled on top of her.  The paralysis terrified her.  Paige had never been able to stand being unable to move.  When she had gone camping as a kid, she had preferred to leave her sleeping bag unzipped and be cold rather than be confined inside it.

It was that foam, she realized.  The restraints weren’t enough, they’d sprayed her with the stuff to ensure that everything below her shoulders was covered.  It gave a little to allow her to exhale, she could even shift her arms and legs a fraction, lean in any given direction. The harder she pushed, however, the more resistance there was.  The second she relaxed her efforts, everything sprung back to the same position with the foam’s rubbery pull.  She felt nausea well in her gut, her heartbeat quickening.  Her breathing increased, but the mask made even her breath feel confined.  The water made her mask damp, so it clung to her mouth and nose.  There were slits for her nostrils and mouth, but it was so little.  She could not take a deep breath without drawing water into her mouth, and with her tongue depressed, she could not swallow easily.

The room lurched, and she had to stop herself before she lost her breakfast.  Puking with the mask on, she might choke.  Dimly, she realized where she was.  A vehicle.  A truck.  It had passed over a pothole.

She knew where it was taking her.  But if she couldn’t get free, she was going to lose her mind before she got there.

“The little bird’s awake,” a girl spoke, with a hint of a nasal Boston accent.

“Mmm.”  A man grunted.

Paige knew the ‘bird’ reference was due to the stray feathers that stuck out of her scalp.  Her powers had come with some extremely minor cosmetic changes, turning her hair the bright yellow of a banana or baby duck.  It affected all the hair on her body, even her eyelashes, eyebrows, the fine hairs on her arms.  The feathers had started growing in a year ago, the exact same shade as her hair, only a handful at a time.  At first, alarmed and embarassed, she’d clipped them off.  Once she’d realized that no further changes were occurring, she’d relaxed and let them grow in, even showed them off.

Paige turned her attention to the two people in the vehicle with her, glad for the distraction from her burgeoning panic.  She had to force her eyes to stay open, painful as the light was, wait for her eyes to focus.  Sitting on the bench beside her was a girl about her own age.  The girl had an Asian cast to her features.  Her eyes, though, were a very pale blue, betraying some Western heritage.  The girl wore the same orange jumpsuit as Paige, and every part of her except her shoulders and head were covered in the yellow-white foam.  Her straight black hair was plastered to her scalp by the wet.

The man sat on the other bench.  There was more foam around him than there was around Paige and the other girl combined.  Topping it off, a cage of metal bars surrounded the foam, reinforcing the setup.  The man was Asian as well, no less than six feet tall.  Tattoos swept up the sides of his neck and behind his ears, into the midst of his wet black hair; Red and green flames, and the head of what could have been a lizard or dragon, drawn in an Eastern style.  He was glowering, his eyes hidden in shadows, oblivious to the endless spray of mist that sprinklers in the truck’s roof were generating.

“Hey, little birdy,” the girl sitting across from Paige spoke.  She was staring at Paige as if those cold eyes of hers could look right through her.  “Here’s what we’re going to do.  You lean to your right as hard as you can, then shove yourself left on my signal.  But you keep facing the back door there, alright?”

Paige glanced to her right.  The back door of the truck looked like a vault door.  She quickly glanced back at the Asian girl.  Did she really want to turn her back to this person?

The girl seemed to note Paige’s hesitation.  She lowered her voice to a hiss that made Paige’s skin crawl.  “Do it.  Unless you really want to gamble on the chance that I’d be able to find you in the prison, if you don’t do as I say?”

Paige’s eyes widened.  This was the sort of person she was going to be locked up with.  She shook her head.

“Good, little birdy.  Now lean to your right, look at the door.”

Paige did, straining her body to move as close to the door as she could.

“And back!”

She heaved herself the other way, eyes still on the door.  Something heavy cracked against the back of her head.  She tried to pull away, sit upright again, but was stopped as the mask caught on something.

When she felt hot breath on the back of her neck, she knew what she’d caught on.  The other girl had gripped the strap of the mask in her teeth.  There was a tug, then the girl lost her grip, and the two of them were pulled back to their individual positions by the rubbery foam.

“Shit,” the girl growled, “Again.”

It took two more attempts.  On the first, the strap came free of the buckle.  On the second, the girl gripped the mask itself and pulled.  Paige turned her head in the girl’s direction so the pacifier-cage on the inside of her mouth could be pulled free.

Tendrils of drool extended down from her mouth as she worked her jaw and tongue, trying to swallow properly.  She let out a little whimper as sensation returned to the parts of her face that had gone numb.

“Two qweshionsh,” the Asian girl mumbled, her teeth still gripping the mask’s leather between them, “Youh poweh?”

Paige had to work her jaw and mouth a second before she could speak, “My power?  I sing.  Really well.”

The Asian girl frowned, “Whaf elth?”

“I… it makes people feel good.  When I get going, I can affect them, alter their emotions, make them susceptible to following instructions.”

The girl nodded, “Teh collah?”

Paige looked down at the heavy metal collar around her neck, “It’s set up to inject tranquilizers into my neck if I sing or raise my voice.”

“Okah,” the girl mumbled, “Take teh mahc.”

“Why?”

“Take ih!”

Paige nodded.  They leaned away from each other, then swung together, the girl passing the mask to her.  She clenched it in her teeth, feeling her jaw ache.

“Drop that and I’ll turn you inside out,” the girl spoke, “Lung.  Hey, Lung?  Wake up.”

The man sitting opposite them raised his head a fraction, opened his eyes.  Maybe.  Paige couldn’t quite tell.

“I know it’s hard with the stuff they pumped into you, but I need your power.  Birdy, lean forward, show him the mask.”

Paige did her best to push herself forward against the foam that was layered against her chest and stomach, gripping the strap in her teeth, the mask dangling below her chin.

“I need you to heat the metal, Lung,” the girl spoke.  “Get it fucking hot.”

Lung shook his head.  When he spoke, there was no Boston accent in his voice.  The accent that was there made his words clipped, clearly not the voice of a native English speaker.  “The water.  Is too wet, too cold.  And I cannot see it well.  My eyes have not healed entirely, and it is hard to see through this spray.  Do not bother me with this.”

“Try, you miserable fucker.  Failure of a leader.  It’s the least you can do, after getting your ass kicked by a little girl, twice.”

“Enough, Bakuda.” he growled.  He slammed his head back against the metal of the truck’s wall behind him, as if to punctuate his statement.

“What?  I couldn’t hear that,” the girl, Bakuda, grinned with a hint of mania to her expression, “Your voice is too fucking high pitched for my range of hearing!  You pathetic… halfbreed… eunuch!”

“Enough!” he roared, again slamming his head against the wall of the truck.  “I will kill you, Bakuda, for these insults!  I will tear your arm from your socket and I will shove it-“

“Pissed off?!” she interrupted him, practically screeching, “Good!  Use it!  Heat the motherfucking metal.  The metal strip around the edges!”

Still panting with the exertion of shouting, Lung turned his attention to the mask.  Paige winced at the blast of heat against her face, started to pull away, but stopped as Bakuda spoke.

“Focus it!” Bakuda shouted, “Focus on the edges!”

The radiation of heat ceased, but Paige became aware of a stringent, smoky smell.

“Hotter!  As hot as you can get it!”

The smell was too strong, too acrid.  Paige coughed a few times, hard, but she didn’t lose her grip on the mask.

“Now, birdy!  Same maneuver as before, but don’t let go!”

Paige nodded.  She leaned away, then swung in Bakuda’s direction.  What followed surprised her more than when Bakuda had bitten into the strap of the mask.

The Asian girl set about savaging the red hot metal with her teeth, digging into it even as they had to pull away.  Softer with the heat, the thin metal strip pulled free of the mask itself.  The metal that ran along the strap cut Paige’s lip as it came off.  She almost -almost- dropped the mask, but managed to snap her teeth to catch the buckle in her teeth before it could fall to the floor.

As the strip came free, Bakuda pulled back and jerked her head to one side, hard, impaling herself in the shoulder with one end of it.  She screamed, and blood ran from one of the burns on her mouth.

Paige looked at Lung.  The huge man did nothing, remaining silent.  He only watched dispassionately as Bakuda’s chest heaved with the exertion and pain, her head hanging down.

“What the hell are you doing?” Paige breathed.

“No hands, have to make do,” Bakuda panted, “Again.  Before my body realizes how badly I’m hurting it.”

Paige nodded.  She wasn’t about to argue with the supervillain that was threatening to turn her inside out.

The ensuing attempts weren’t any prettier or easier.  The second long metal strip was freed and Bakuda impaled that one in her shoulder as well.  The metal grilles from the exterior and interior parts of the mask were next to be pulled free.  Paige was left holding only the leather portion of the mask, the straps and the covering that had gone over her mouth and nose.  Seeing Bakuda gingerly balance the metal grilles on her free shoulder, against the tacky foam so they wouldn’t slip down, Paige did the same with the leather of the mask.

“What did you do to get sent here?” Paige asked.

“Last I heard, before we lost power to our neighborhood, the body count was almost at fifty.”

“You killed fifty people?”

Bakuda grinned, and it wasn’t pretty, with her lips as ravaged as they were.  “Injured more, too.  And there were those who got brain damage, one or two might’ve gone homicidally insane, and I know a bunch got frozen in time for a hundred years or so… it gets blurry.  Crowning moment was the bomb.”

“Bomb?” Paige asked, eyes widening.

“Bomb.  They said it was as powerful as an atom bomb.  Idiots.  They didn’t even understand the technology behind it.  Philistines.  Sure, it was about that powerful, but that wasn’t even the real damage.  Amazing thing would’ve been the electromagnetic wave it generated.  Wipe every hard drive, fry every circuit board for every piece of machinery over a full fifth of America.  The effects of that?  Would’ve been worse than any atom bomb.”

Unable to even wrap her mind around that, Paige glanced at Lung.  “And him?”

“Lung?  He’s the one who told me to do it.  Man in charge, he is.”

Lung’s head moved fractionally, but with the shadows under his brow, Paige couldn’t tell if he was watching.

“You?”  Bakuda asked Paige. “What’d you do to get sent here?”

“I told my ex to go fuck himself.”

There was a pause, then Bakuda started cackling.  “What?”

“It’s complicated,” Paige looked away and down.

“You gotta explain, birdy.”

“My name’s Paige.  My stage name was Canary.”

“Ooooh,” Bakuda spoke, still cackling a little as she gripped one of the metal strips that was spearing her shoulder and pulled it free.  Holding it in her teeth, she spoke, “That’sh no good.  You calling yourshelf Canary in prishon?”

“I didn’t intend on going to prison.”

“Who doesh?”

“I mean, I’m not even a supervillain.  My power, it makes me a fantastic singer.  I was making a lot of money doing it, there was talk of record deals, we were moving to larger venues and my shows were still selling out… everything was perfect.”

Bakuda let the strip swing from her teeth until it dangled, then carefully maneuvered it until she was gripping the far left side of it.  She leaned back, her head facing the ceiling, as she slid the other metal strip, the one impaled in her shoulder, into her mouth as well, so she was holding one end of each strip in her mouth.  Pausing, she asked, “Whaf haffen?”

Paige shook her head.  It was the testimony she’d never been able to speak out loud, at her trial.  “I’d just finished my biggest show yet.  Two hours on stage, a huge hit, crowd loved it all.  I wrapped up and went backstage to rest, get a drink, and ran into my ex.  He told me that since he was the one who pushed me to get out on stage in the first place, he deserved credit.  Wanted half the money.”  She laughed a little, “Ridiculous.  Like I’m supposed to ignore the fact that he cheated on me and told me I was never going to make it for real when he left.”

Bakuda nodded.  She pulled away from the strips, where she’d managed to tie them in the semblance of a knot.  She used her teeth to bend the now-joined strips into an L-shape.  With the end that wasn’t impaled in her shoulder now in a position in front of her, she closed her mouth on it.

“We argued.  Then I told him to go fuck himself.  He left, and I didn’t give it a second thought… until the police showed up at my door.”

Bakuda pulled her mouth away from the end of the strip.  She’d bent it into a loose ‘v’ shape.  She frowned at it, then glanced at Paige, “And?”

“And he’d done it.  I- I guess I was still amped up from my performance, and my power’s effects were still empowering my voice, or he was in the audience and was pretty heavily affected.  So when I told him to go fuck himself, he, um, he did.  Or he tried, and when he found it wasn’t physically possible, he hurt himself until…”  Paige closed her eyes for a moment.  “Um.  I won’t go into the details.”

“Mmmm, shucks to be im.  Oo ‘oo” Bakuda raised her eyebrows, still working the metal strip inside her mouth.  She pulled away, verified the end as being in a rough ‘o’ shape, and then gripped the strips in her teeth to pull the entire thing out of her shoulder with a grunt.  She placed the end she’d just reworked against the bench and slid her mouth down the length of the metal, so she could get a grip on the other end.

Taking hold of it in her teeth, she turned her attention to the wall of the truck between herself and Paige.  There were locks placed at regular intervals against the wall, meant to secure the chain of standard handcuffs in place, for those not doused in foam.  She began feeding the metal strap through the loop of the lock.  Beads of sweat mingled with the water running down her face as she worked.

The knot joining the two straps jammed in the hole.  Bakuda pushed a little harder, and wedged it firmly in place.  The L-bend in the metal placed the closed ‘o’-shaped loop of metal close to Paige’s shoulder.

“Any bets on Oni showing up?” Bakuda asked Lung.

“I would be surprised,” he rumbled his response.

She gripped one of the metal grilles in her mouth and began working at it with her teeth.  It was all one thin piece of metal, bent and woven like chain link fencing, albeit a tighter mesh.  Now that it was no longer held securely in place by the metal strips, Bakuda was free to start unwinding and straightening it.

When it was almost completely unwound, she adjusted her bite on it and clenched the second mass of wire, the one that had been in Paige’s mouth, in her jaws, bunching it together into a cylindrical mess about four inches long and one inch across.  Still biting it, she turned her head so the mostly straight four-foot length of wire was pointing at Lung, not two feet away from his face.  Her mouth still around the tangle of wire, she mumbled, “Need end hot.”

Lung growled, but he did as he was asked.  When the end was white hot, Bakuda quickly adjusted her grip, letting go and biting again until the tip was near her mouth.  Lips pulled back, she bit down on it.

“How can you do that?” Paige asked, “Doesn’t it hurt?”

“No uffing hit ih urhs,” Bakuda growled.  She pulled away, set it so the handle was against the bench, the length of wire against her shoulder, and examined her handiwork.  “But tooth enamel is tougher than you’d think.”  She spat a measure of blood out onto the floor of the truck, then bit down twice more, pausing between bites to turn the length of metal with her teeth, lips and tongue.

When she extended the length of wire in Paige’s direction, sliding it through the ‘o’ shaped end of the metal strip, Paige realized what Bakuda had spent this much time setting up.  She didn’t even need to be asked to bend down against the foam restraints and crane her neck to one side, to put her collar in reach of the overlong makeshift screwdriver.   The metal strip with the loop in the end served to hold the portion closest to Paige up, so Bakuda could direct it more easily.

It wasn’t fast work.  Bakuda had to use her teeth, jaw and a turning of her head to rotate the screwdriver, and it was a chore to get it back in position if she lost her grip on it.  Ten long minutes of silence and grunting were broken only by the sound of two screws dropping to the metal bench, before Bakuda stopped to take a rest and ease her jaw.

“You won’t be able to do anything to my collar without setting it off,” Paige spoke.

“Dumb bitch,” Bakuda muttered, sticking out her lower lip and peering down as if she could investigate the degree of damage to her own lips.  “I’m a bomb expert.  I understand triggers and catalysts on the same fundamental level you understand walking and breathing.  I can visualize mechanical things in a way you couldn’t with five college degrees and a hundred years.  Insult me like that again and I’ll end you.”

As if pushed to prove herself, she gripped the screwdriver in her teeth again, and set to work again.  A panel was pried off, and the unscrewing was resumed, deeper in the collar.

Paige hesitated to talk again, knowing how easy the girl was to provoke, but the silence was crushing.  “I guess it’s a good thing this is a long drive, from Boston to British Columbia.”

“You were asleep a while,” Bakuda pulled away from the screwdriver, talking softly, as if to herself.  “Not as long as you think.”

Paige felt something come free from the heavy collar around her neck, saw Bakuda tilt the screwdriver upward, sliding a glass tube with something glowing inside down the length of the metal bar  After another few minutes, another piece of machinery joined the glass tube, as though it were a high-tech shish-kabob.

“Tragic,” Bakuda spoke, on her next rest.  “This is beautiful work.  Not the actual assembly, that’s crap.  It’s obvious the tinker that designed this intended it to be put together by regular schmoes.  Wouldn’t have screws and shit, otherwise.  But the way it’s designed, the way everything fits together… makes a scientist proud.  Hate to butcher it.”

Paige nodded.  She didn’t know enough about that sort of thing to risk commenting.  As scary as this situation was, as curious as she was, she felt the lingering effect of tranquilizer in her system, an impending boredom.

She closed her eyes.

It didn’t feel like her eyes were closed for more than a minute before she was woken by a shout of “Birdy!”  Paige jolted awake, turned to Bakuda, and saw the work was done.  Bakuda hadn’t just disabled the collar, but had assembled components into a roughly sphere-shaped setup of metal and wires.  It dangled from the remains of the mask and strap, which Bakuda held in her teeth.

Lung spoke, his voice low, slightly accented, “We have stopped.  Her device will buy us time, and you will use it to sing.  The bomb will not do much damage, but it will slow them and dose anyone hit with a small amount of sedatives.  This will make it easier for you to control them, Bakuda says.  You will then get them to free us.”

Paige’s eyes went wide.  She nodded.

There was a loud sound outside the truck, and Bakuda started swinging the device left and right like a pendulum.  The metal doors at the back of the truck slammed open, and Bakuda let go.  The device rolled out the door.

Paige sang, not stopping as the device detonated, rocking the truck.  Her song was wordless.  She was her own accompaniment, using the acoustics of the truck’s interior to generate echoes.  She charged her voice with her power, willing those who heard it to obey, to submit in a way she’d never done before.

It might have worked, if there was anyone around to hear it.

A giant metal claw entered the back of the truck, closed around Lung, and dragged him out.  When the claw returned to claim her, she stopped singing, started shrieking instead.

“No!” Bakuda’s screams joined her own, behind her, “Fuck you!  No!  No!  I had a fucking plan!”

The arms moved along slats in the ceiling, carrying them through what looked like a massive underground bunker.  Everything was concrete, and the room was so vast that Paige could not even see any of the walls.  There was only the ceiling twenty or thirty feet above them and the floor, extending endlessly around them, lit by florescent lights at regular intervals.  The only thing breaking up the empty expanse was the armored truck bearing the PRT identification on the side and a black square attached to the ceiling, further down.

The arms arranged them in front of the black square – an oversized monitor.  A face, clearly a CGI rendering intended to mask the real identity of the speaker, appeared on the screen.  When the voice came from the speakers, the filter intended to disguise the woman’s voice didn’t quite hide her strong accent.  Paige tried to place it.  Not Southerner, not Cockney, but maybe similar?  She’d heard someone with that accent before.

“Prisoner 599, codename Lung.  PRT powers designation Brute 4-9 asterisk, Blaster 2-6 asterisk, fire and heat only.  Individuals reading or viewing this log are directed to see page three and four of prisoner’s file for particulars on powers.  Recommended protocols were properly carried out with sprinkler system and added restraints.  Chance of escape following interment in the Baumann Parahuman Containment Center rests at a fairly steady .000041% with no gross deviations in any likely scenarios.  Within acceptable limits.  Will be processed to cell block W.”

“You’re Dragon,” Bakuda spoke, eyes widening, “No shit.  Best tinker in the fucking world.  I’d say I’m a fan, but I’d be lying.”

Paige couldn’t help but react to that as well.  Dragon had designed the Birdcage and much of the gear the PRT used, including the containment foam.  She was head and shoulders above any of the other tinkers that went out in power armor.  Dragon sported a wildly different suit each time she deployed.  Her stuff was so advanced that a group of criminals who had gotten away with stealing a damaged suit of her armor were now using that same technology to operate as top of the line mercenaries – the Dragonslayers.

Dragon was also Canadian, which was the detail Paige needed to peg her accent as that of a Newfoundlander.  Not an accent one heard very often, these days.

“Prisoner 600, codename Bakuda.  PRT powers designation Tinker 6 with bomb speciality.  Recommended protocols were not properly carried out.”  The formal tone of the voice dropped away as she muttered, “I hate to get someone fired, but I’m going to have to report this.  Supposed to be in an S-class containment truck and placed no less than six feet from other prisoners… well, at least nothing came of it.”

“Fuck you, Dragon,” Bakuda snarled.

“…Chance of escape from the Baumann Parahuman Containment Center is .000126% with potential gross deviation in the event of introduction of contraband material or a matter producer.  With monitoring this chance drops to .000061%.  Will be processed to cell block C.”

“Prisoner 601, codename Canary.  PRT powers designation Master 8.  Recommended protocols were properly carried out, with provided restraints and no human personnel being brought within three hundred yards of said individual’s position.  Hi Canary.”

Paige blinked a few times in surprise, “Hi?”

“I followed your trial.  I thought it was a damn shame things went like they did.  I get that it was a reckless accident, but you don’t deserve to be here.  I even wrote a letter to your judge, the DA and your governor saying as much.  I’m sorry it wasn’t enough.”

The sympathy hit Paige hard.  It was all she could do to stop herself from bursting into tears.

“I’m afraid I’ve got to do my job, and that means carrying out my role in enforcing the law.  You understand?  Whatever my feelings, I can’t let you go.”

“I- Yes.”

“Listen, I’m sticking you in cell block E.  The woman that put herself in charge of that cell block goes by the codename Lustrum.  She’s a pretty extreme feminist and misandrist, but she protects the girls in her block, and it’s also the block furthest from the hole the men opened into the women’s half of the Birdcage.  If you’re willing to play along, buy in or pretend to buy into her way of thinking, I think she’ll keep you safest.”

Paige didn’t have words to reply.  She just nodded.

“Ok.  Prisoner 601’s Chance of escape from the Baumann Parahuman Containment Center is .000025% with no gross deviations.  Do you three understand why I’m telling you this?”

“Our chances of escaping are pretty slim,” Bakuda spoke.

“Yes.  The Baumann Detention Center is a structure so complex I had to design an artificial intelligence to put it together.  It’s situated inside of a hollowed out mountain, the walls of which are lined with layers of a ceramic of my own design, each such layer separated by volumes of dormant containment foam.  If you punched a hole in the outside of the mountain, you’d only wind up with more foam than you knew how to handle.

“That’s the mountain.  The prison itself is nicknamed the Birdcage because it is suspended in the center of the empty mountain, hanging only by the same network of tubes that supplies prisoners and food to the cell blocks.  Both the interior of the tubes and the interior of the mountain itself are vacuums.  Even if an individual were to have powers allowing them to navigate the vacuum, I have three thousand antigrav drones in position at any given time, laying dormant in that lightless void, waiting for any signal, motion, energy or air leakage to awaken them.  Once awakened, a drone will move to the location of said anomaly and detonate.  Many of my drones contain a loadout of containment foam, but others contain payloads designed to counteract various methods one could theoretically use to traverse the vacuum.  Some are quite lethal.”

“These are not the only measures I have taken, but it wouldn’t do to inform you of everything I have done to secure this facility.  Know only that your chance of successful escape is negligible, and the chance of you dying or being maimed for attempting it is much higher.”

“Know that while I do retain control over the structure and the ability to observe those within, enabling me to respond to emergencies such as natural disasters, you will not be able to manipulate this to your advantage.  I will not, cannot intervene should a hostage be taken, or if an individual should threaten or perform damage to vital or luxury resources.  There was no other way to run the prison effectively than to have you police and protect yourselves.  I stress: nothing you do can convince me to free you.  The elevators to the Baumann Detention Center go one way.  Down.”

“I will be depositing you in the elevators now.  You will be provided with a limited measure of oxygen, sufficient only to carry you safely to the bottom.  Should you slow or stop the lift, or attempt to scale the interior of the tube, I expect you will likely fall unconscious, suffer brain damage or die for your trouble.  A counteragent for the containment foam will be applied as you descend, so that you are free before you reach the bottom.”

Lung and Bakuda were carried off in different directionis.  Paige was the last to be carried away by the robotic arms.

“I am sorry, Paige Mcabee,” Dragon’s tinny voice sounded, as the arm set her down.  “Good luck.”

The ground beneath her shifted, and then she descended.

■

Lung walked with confidence to the ‘hole’, a word with double meaning, as it referred to the actual hole in the wall, as well as the more vulgar term for why many in the men’s half of the Birdcage went there – it was the sole route into the women’s prison.

A group of women were on guard on the other side of the hole, standing or sitting at various vantage points there.

“Who’re you?” one of the women asked him.  She was a striking woman with coffee colored skin and a mouthful of teeth that looked like knife blades.

“I am Lung.”

“You’re new?”

“Yes.”

“Which cell block are you in?” this question came from a heavyset woman that looked more like a middle aged soccer mom than a prisoner.  Lung noted, however, how each of the other girls that were on guard turned to listen when she spoke.

“W, ma’am,” he spoke, taking extra care to not offend.

“You want a girl?”

“I am here only to visit one of my subordinates.  Cell block C.”

“Even if you aren’t buying, can’t let you through for free.  Gotta pay something.  Marquis runs your cell block, still?  Divvies up the cancer sticks from his food crates fairly enough?”

“Yes.”  Lung reached into his pocket and retrieved a half-carton of cigarettes.  He handed them over.

“Good boy.  Listen, Glaistig Uaine runs the cell block you’re going to.  You keep some of these sticks, you give them to her, so as not to insult her.”

“I will.  Thank you for this advice.”

“I do like a polite boy.  You run along, now.”

He bowed his head in respect, then walked briskly to the next cell block.  A smaller contingent of guards awaited him there, and he handed over the remaining cigarettes, specifying them as a gift for Glaistig Uaine.  The guards parted to let him through.

He found Bakuda in a cell all to herself.  The walls of the prison were all metal of some sort, painted a dark blue, but Bakuda had scratched formulas and sentences into the walls of her cell, where they glittered silver-gray in the right light.  Her cot was pulled into the center of the room to give her more surface to write on.

“Bakuda,” he spoke.

“Lung!  This place is amazing!” she grinned maniacally, her scarred lips spread wide, “I thought it would suck, but it’s… it’s like being inside the fucking Mona Lisa of architecture.  Genius shit.  She wasn’t lying about this place being inside a vacuum, but what’s amazing is what happens when you breach the outside.  See, she didn’t make this place tough.  It’s fragile.  Like she built the most complex house of cards ever.  You knock a hole in the wall, and you’re not only pretty much guaranteed to off yourself, but the change in air pressure changes the room configuration, seals off the space so the breach doesn’t affect anyone in other rooms.  And even if you stop the main bits from sliding down, the drop in air pressure carries into the next room, and that room seals off.  I could spend a decade figuring out how she did this.  And that’s the simplest part of it.  In busier areas-“

“I do not care about this,” Lung interrupted her breathless rambling.

Bakuda stopped and wheeled around, still grinning.  “Ok.  How you doing?”

“Satisfactory.  My eyes are healing, but I am still having trouble seeing color.  I do not like the leader of my cell block, but he is a fair man.  He has given me his favor in exchange for telling him about Brockton Bay, a place he once operated.  This has helped ensure I am not bothered.  That, and the prisoners seem to wait to see what each new inmate can do before they pick him as a target.”

“Yep.  It looked pretty grim for me for a few days, but when the freaky girl in charge of this block found out I could fix the televisions here, things suddenly got a lot easier.”

“I see.”

She raised an eyebrow, smiling.  “So.  Why the visit?  Feeling lonely?”

“No.”

She dropped the smile in the blink of an eye.  “Then explain.”

“This is your first time in a prison, yes?”

“Yep.”

“I was in prison before I came to America.  There are four ways one can survive in such a place.  You can join one of the gangs or groups in charge.  This was not possible for me then, for I was known to be half Japanese, half Chinese, and there was no gang willing to include such a person.  It is not a possibility for me now, either, for I am too used to being in charge to bow and scrape for any length of time without losing my patience.  It is the route I see you have taken here.”

“Sure,” Bakuda eyed him warily.

“The second option is to be somebody’s bitch.  They give you their protection in exchange for the most base of services.  You understand why I would not take this route.”

“I get it, yeah.”

“The remaining options are to either kill someone or to be seen as a madman.  In such cases, one demonstrates he is too dangerous or unpredictable to be fucked with.”

“So what are you doing?”

“I thought I would choose the third and fourth.”

Bakuda’s eyes went wide.  She backed away, then realized the futility of the move.  Lung stood in the middle of the one doorway that led out of the cell.  “Why?”

“You insulted me.  You failed me.  Because I must kill someone, and killing a subordinate of mine who others have cause to protect should also mark me as sufficiently unpredictable.  Others will fear me after this.”

“I… I insulted you to get your power going, you know?” she squeaked, “I did it to help our escape.”

“I might have overlooked it for this reason, but we did not escape. You failed me, both here and in the city.”

She flicked her arm, and an arrangement of bedsprings and twisted scrap metal dropped from her sleeve into her open hand.  “I’ll punch a hole in the outside of the cell if you come any closer.  Air flows out of the room, door seals shut, we both suffocate.”

“You are not fast enough.”

“Wanna bet?”

He did.

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Tangle 6.9

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Dear Miss Militia…

Was it wrong to start with Dear?  Was that implying more friendship or intimacy than there was?  Would it seem taunting?

Miss Militia, we met earlier tonight…

No.  If I went that route, she might throw it aside alongside all the other fan mail she got.

Miss Militia, you know me as Skitter, but you don’t truly know me…

Better, but I didn’t like the tone.  I’d leave it as is, move on, and come back to it later.

…You see, I’m not a villain, despite…

Despite what?  Despite the fact that I’d terrorized and hurt a lot of innocent people?  Despite the fact that I’d nearly killed Lung and later cut his eyes out?  That I had nearly two hundred and eighty thousand dollars in illegitimate money to my name?

I shivered, pulled my hands from my pockets and did up my sweatshirt to cover my exposed stomach.  After we’d arrived at the Loft, Brian had suggested that we were all too tired to discuss Coil’s proposal, so we tabled all discussion until the morning.  I was glad for the excuse to avoid hearing or seeing anything that might make this any harder.  Besides, I’d promised my dad I would be home tonight.

It was past nine, so the bus from the ferry was only arriving every ninety minutes.  I’d figured it was better to walk home than wait.  I could use the stretching, too, given the abuse my body had sustained while I was riding Judas.

Sticking my hands back in my pockets, I returned my thoughts to how I’d word my letter to Miss Militia.  Scratch ‘despite’.  Another approach, maybe?

…Believe it or not, my intentions all along have been good.  I joined the Undersiders in the first place to assist you.  To assist this city…

Was that entirely true?  No.  If I was being entirely honest with myself, part of the reason I’d joined and stayed with the Undersiders was because I had been lonely.  What if I offered some honesty?

…It caught me off guard just how easy it was to like them.  I was in a bad place, and they accepted me.  So writing this email to you is difficult.  But it is necessary.  In the end, I decided to go this route because it serves the greater good…

That was what I had told myself, earlier today, before we left for the job.  That sticking with those guys would pose the greatest risk to innocents, that it would eventually lead to someone getting caught in crossfire, or me getting arrested for something serious.

But now I had Coil’s agenda to consider.  Was he really being honest about how he planned to help this city?  I had no reason to believe he was lying, and Tattletale was vouching for him.  But at the same time, Coil’s motif was a snake, and Tattletale had hedged the truth and misled me before.

Question was, was I taking this route because it served the greater good?  No.  Or at least, I wasn’t sure enough either way for it to be the reason I was doing this.

Why was I doing it, then?

It had been a hard question to answer hours ago, and it was doubly hard now.  Enough that it spooked me.  How had I gotten to this point?

I was put in mind of a time I’d sat in on one of my mom’s university classes.  I couldn’t have been older than ten, my dad had been busy and my mom hadn’t been able to find a babysitter.  So I’d been precocious, proud as hell to be sitting in that English lecture with the teenagers and twenty-somethings and understanding what my mom was saying.  We’d even read the book together, over the prior few weeks, so I knew the material.  Oranges are not the Only Fruit.

While I’d been sitting and listening, an older man had come in and sat next to me, in the back row.  In a kind voice, he’d murmured a comment about how my mother was an excellent professor.  Then, a few minutes later, when I got up the courage to raise my hand and answer one of her questions, he’d complimented me, got up and left.  All my pride in myself and my mother aside, what had struck me about the encounter was the man’s hair.  A ridiculous comb-over.

After the class was over and my mom had been taking me home, I mentioned the man, and she’d identified him as the head of her department, her boss.  Then I brought up the comb-over and how bad it looked.

“Look at it from his perspective,” she’d explained.  “Maybe, a long time ago, he started to lose a little hair, but he could brush it to one side in a way that made it not show so much.  Every year that passed he brushed his hair over a bit more.  It was gradual, something he slowly got used to, seeing it in the mirror every morning and every night.  Lots of small steps.”

“Why doesn’t someone point it out?”  I’d asked her.

“He doesn’t have anyone to point it out for him,” she had replied, “And anyone who knows him well enough doesn’t want to hurt his feelings, even if it might be better in the long run.”

“You could,” I’d told her.

So she had, later that week.  Ripped off the band-aid for the old head of the English department.  According to her, he’d gotten a haircut, then thanked her at a later date.  That event and what my mom had done afterward always stuck in my memory.

I swallowed past a lump in my throat.  It always caught me off guard, just how frigging much I missed her, when I thought about her.  I’d give anything for a thirty minute conversation with her, right this moment.  I didn’t have the slightest doubt in my mind that she could have made sense of everything, put things into terms so simple that working it out looked easy.

I had to stop, look up, blink back the tears in my eyes, and take a deep breath before I moved on.

Was my situation the same as the old man’s?  Had I let myself gradually slip into a bad spot, because of my lack of perspective beyond what was going on inside my own head?

I hadn’t been thinking about this clearly.  I was still confident enough I could send that email, make the call… but before I did that, I had to get my thoughts in order.  Composing the letter in my head wouldn’t work, I needed the words on my computer screen in front of me, concrete words in black and white.

I walked around the back of my house and reached into my pocket for my keys.  Before I could get them, my dad opened the door.

“Taylor.  It’s good to see you safe and sound.”  My dad looked tired, years older than the last time I saw him.

I gave him a brief hug, “Hi, Dad.  You got my message, saying I’d be late?”

“I did.”  He shut and locked the door behind me.  “What happened?”

I shrugged as I pulled off my sweatshirt, made sure my pepper spray, phone and keys were all in the pockets, then hung it up by the door.  “Nothing big.  I was at Brian’s, helping him put furniture together, then his sister and his sister’s social services caseworker came without any warning.  I couldn’t find a way to leave without it being kind of awkward.”  Which did happen, pretty much, just at an earlier time.

“I see,” he murmured. “Were you two alone?”

“No,” I lied, to stop him from getting the wrong impression.  “At least, not for long.  Lisa left a few minutes before the caseworker dropped by.”

“And you have a new shirt, I see.  It’s nice.”

“Lisa’s,” I fibbed, squirming a little under the scrutiny.

“Ah,” he nodded.

“I’m going to go to my room, if that’s alright?  I’m kind of wiped.”

My dad shook his head, “I’d rather you stayed to talk.”

Not what I wanted to do.  My mind was jammed with enough crap and internal debates that I didn’t want to worry about concocting more lies for my dad.

“Can we do it tomorrow morning?” I offered him, retreating toward the door to the front hall, pressing my hands together in a pleading gesture. “I really need to sit at my computer for a minute and organize my thoughts.”

I pushed on the door and it didn’t open.  Strange.  I tried the doorknob, and it didn’t help.

“Door’s jammed,” I said.

“Door’s locked, Taylor.  So is the door to the living room.”  My dad answered me.  When I looked at him, he showed me the old fashioned key in his hand.

As I watched, he pulled out two chairs from beside the kitchen table, placed one in the middle of the room, then placed the second chair against the back door and sat down in it.

“Sit.”

“Dad, tonight’s not really-”

“Sit.”

My heart dropped out of my chest.  Or at least, it felt like it.  I felt an ugly sour feeling in my stomach.

“I talked to your school today,” he informed me, confirming that ugly feeling.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’ve missed nearly a month of classes, Taylor.  Three weeks.  You’ve missed major tests, project due dates, homework… they’re saying you might fail, if you haven’t already.”

“I- I’m sorry,” I repeated myself.

“I could maybe understand, I know what you’ve been dealing with, except you didn’t just leave me in the dark.  You lied to me.”

I couldn’t form the words for another apology.

“I called the school to get an update on how you were doing, and they said you hadn’t been to class in some time, and I didn’t know what to do.  I just- I felt completely lost.  I called your Gram.”

I winced.  Gram was my mom’s mother, an austere woman who’d never fully approved of my dad as a match for her daughter.  It wouldn’t have been easy for him to make that call.

“She convinced me that maybe I’ve been too focused on being your ally, and not focused enough on being your parent.  If she’d told me that a week ago, I would have hung up on her.  But after talking to your school, realizing how badly I failed you-”

“You didn’t fail me,” I told him.  I was caught off guard by how my voice broke a bit with emotion.

“I did.  It’s clear that whatever we’ve been doing hasn’t been working, if you’re in this situation, if you can’t talk to me.  No more secrets, no more half truths.  So we’re going to stay here all night if need be.  I’ll even call off work tomorrow if I have to, but we’re going to talk.”

I nodded and swallowed, hard.  I still hadn’t sat down in the chair he’d left in the middle of the kitchen.

“I, um, need to use the washroom.”

“Okay,” he stood.  “I’ll walk you there, and I’ll walk you back here to the kitchen afterward.”

“You’re treating me like I’m a prisoner?”

“You’re my daughter, Taylor.  I love you, but I know there’s something going on, and it’s not just the bullying, or it’s something to do with the bullying that you haven’t mentioned yet.  I’m scared for you, Taylor, because you’re avoiding me and staying silent even if it means failing.”

“So you force my hand by making me your prisoner,” I replied, letting anger and hurt creep into my voice, “Do you think this is even remotely cool, after all the times I’ve been cornered by those bitches from school?  I’ve got to come home to this bullying power-abuse shit, too?”

My dad answered me with the utmost patience, “I hope you know that I’m doing this because I love you.”

I did.  Thing was, that didn’t make it even slightly easier to handle.

“Do you need to go to the bathroom, Taylor?”

I shook my head.  What I needed was to get out of this room.  I saw him purse his lips, knew he was aware I’d just been looking for an escape.

“Talk to me, Taylor.”

“Don’t feel like talking.”  I walked across the room to try the other doors, to the living room and basement.  Locked.

“Why are you so insistent on escaping?” he asked.  I could hear the pain in his voice, which didn’t make me feel any better.  “Please, just relax, sit down.”

I felt the crackle of my power at the edges of my awareness, realized I was clenching my fists.  Why was it that the people I was supposed to be able to rely on were the people who turned on me, cornered me, made me feel the worst?  Emma, the school, Armsmaster, now my dad?

I kicked the chair, hard enough that it made a mark as it hit the fridge.  My dad’s eyes went just a bit wider, but he didn’t move or speak.  I could feel the tug of my power as bugs throughout my neighborhood began to move to my location.  I had to willfully cancel out the order to make them back off and return to their normal behavior.

Not feeling even remotely better after my abuse of the chair, I shoved the cookbooks and printouts off the shelf beside the fridge, letting them spill to the ground.  A picture frame that had been hidden in the middle of the pile broke as it hit the ground.

“Damn it,” I muttered.  I still didn’t feel better, and I was having a harder time keeping the swarm at bay.

“Possessions can be replaced, Taylor.  Vent however you need to.”

“Dad?  D-” I had to stop for a few seconds until I felt like I could catch my breath and talk without my voice breaking up, “Do me a favor?  Stay quiet for a bit and let me think?”

He gave me a careful look before he answered me.  “Okay.  I can do that.”

With nowhere else to sit, I put my back to the wall under the bookshelf I’d just cleared and let myself sink to the ground, my legs making their protests felt as I brought my legs up against my chest.  I folded my arms, resting them atop my knees, and buried my face against them.

I knew it had been 9:24 when I got in.  By the time I’d suppressed the bugs, got my power under control and felt safe to raise my head, it was 9:40.  My dad still sat in the chair.

I let out a long sigh, quiet, then buried my face in my arms again.

What now?

Come on, Taylor.  You’ve faced down Supervillains in life or death situations.  You faced down Armsmaster earlier tonight.  Is it that hard to face your own dad?

No.  Ten times harder.

But I had to face the problem the same way.  Catalogue my options, my tools at hand.  Physical violence was out.  So was using my power.  What did that leave me?

The situation was ultimately the same, I decided.  I still had to write that letter to Miss Militia, organize my thoughts.  Problem was, now I had an additional thing to deal with.  I had to fess up to my dad about what I’d done.

I wasn’t sure I could say it.  My throat was thick with emotion, and I doubted I could organize my thoughts enough to convince my dad that I’d done everything for the right reasons.  I’d open my mouth to tell him, stammer out the basics of it, maybe he’d even look concerned at first.  Then as I kept talking, failing to adequately describe what I’d done and why, I could see his face turning to confusion.  After that?  Disgust, disappointment?

A little part of me died inside at the thought.

I’d write it.  I raised my head abruptly, looked to the papers scattered around me.  I found a manilla envelope, the kind you put documents inside.  Then I found a marker.

Along the top of the envelope, I wrote the words: “I AM A SUPERVILLAIN.”

I stared at those words on the brown envelope that rested against my legs.  Then I looked up at my dad.  He was reading a book, his right ankle resting on his left knee.

I imagined handing him the envelope as-is.  Just that one line.

“Fuck.”  I muttered.

“Did you say something?” my dad looked up from his book and reached over to put it down.

“It’s okay.  Keep reading,” I said, absently, annoyed at the distraction, still pissed at him for cornering me like this.

“Okay,” he agreed, but he didn’t look at the book for longer than three seconds before glancing up at me again, as if to check on me.  I tried to ignore him and focus on the envelope

What to write?  After a second, I began writing below the title I’d put on the envelope.

I like Brian and Lisa.  I even like Alec and Rachel.  But they’re supervillains too.  I joined them with the idea that I would get details the Protectorate needed and then betray them.

I raised the marker and frowned.

Why was this so damn hard?

I put the cap on and nervously tapped the marker against my knee.  Thinking about stuff, trying to gauge my feelings, exploring my thoughts to see what it was that made that knot deep in my gut get tighter.

My dad?  Was I too conscious of what he would read, how he would perceive it?  Yes.  But it had also been hard to write when I’d been mentally writing it for just Miss Militia.  That wasn’t the whole picture.

Was I scared of arrest?  No.  Well, I’d seen bureaucracy at work with school, I didn’t trust the system, I fully expected to get screwed over somewhere down the line.  But that wasn’t what was driving my choices.  It was something more personal.

The team.  Was I worried over how they would take it?  Over possibly having them as enemies?  Like Coil had said, there was no guarantee any action against them would be wholly successful.  Tattletale would probably be able to tell a PRT team was there before they could get in position, and the team was good at making an escape in a pinch.  Then I’d have one or more enemies after me, who knew everything they needed and had all the tools to make my life a living hell.

Warmer.

It did have to do with those guys, and it slowly dawned on me what it was.

I stood, then walked over to the oven.

“Taylor?” my dad spoke, quiet.

I folded the envelope lengthwise to hide the words, turned on the oven burner, then held the tip of the envelope to the flame until it ignited.

I held the burning envelope over the sink until I was sure my message was obliterated.  I dropped the remains of the envelope into the basin and watched it burn up.

I didn’t want to send that email to Miss Militia because I liked those guys.  That wasn’t the big realization.  What made me stand up and burn the envelope was the realization that I liked those guys, I was fond of them, I trusted them to have my back…

Yet I’d always held myself at arm’s length.

It was stupid, it was selfish, but I really, desperately wanted to see what it would be like to get to know Lisa, without worrying that she would find out my scheme.  I’d like to see what it was like to interact with her without having to censor myself out of fear that I’d provide that damning clue.  I wanted to get to know Bitch and Alec better.  And Brian.  I wanted to be closer to Brian.  I couldn’t phrase it any better than that, because I didn’t know if there would be any future with him beyond a simple friendship.  I didn’t expect there to be.  It still mattered.

I’d let myself think that I’d tried a friendship with these guys, that I had grown as a person, so it was okay to go ahead with my plan.  But I hadn’t.  I’d never let myself truly open up and connect with them, and I was realizing just how much I wanted to.

My reasons for going ahead with my plan were thinning out, getting harder to justify.  My reputation was probably in shambles, I’d made enemies of everyone that mattered, and I had a number of felonies under my belt.  As much as I might try to ignore all that and tell myself I was doing it for the greater good, my conversation with Coil had left me less sure.  That wasn’t to say I believed him wholeheartedly, or that I thought he’d be as successful as he thought, but I was less sure.

Damn it, I wanted to hang out more with the Undersiders. Knowing I was out of reasons to justify sticking with the plan, all the crap that would come raining down on my head if I did go ahead with it, how much I’d loathe myself for betraying friends?  This little desire for a real, genuine friendship was enough of a nudge in that direction.  I could change my mind.  I wouldn’t be sending any letters to Miss Militia.

I ran the tapwater over the smoking remains of the envelope, watched the remains get washed away.  I watched the water running down the drain for a long time after the last scrap of burned paper was gone.

I turned off the tap, stuck my hands in my pockets, and crossed the kitchen to lean back against the door leading to the front hall, glancing briefly at the handle and lock before I leaned against the door with my back to it.  I called some bugs from the living room, hallway and heating vents down the front hall and up to the door, into the mechanism of the lock.  Could they move the necessary parts?

No such luck.  They weren’t strong enough to manipulate the door’s internal workings, and any bugs that might be strong enough wouldn’t fit inside.  Go away, I told them, and they did.

Which left me no good way to avoid dealing with my dad.  I felt more guilty than ever as I looked across the room at him.  He looked so bewildered, so concerned, as he watched me.  I didn’t have it in me to lie to his face again.

But whatever I did was going to hurt him.

I crossed the room and he stood up, as if unsure as to what I was going to do.  I hugged him tight.  He hugged me back tighter.

“I love you, dad.”

“I love you too.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for.  Just- just talk to me, okay?”

I pulled away, and grabbed my sweatshirt from the hook by the door.  As I crossed back to the other side of the room, I fished in the pockets and retrieved the phone.

I started typing out a text.

“You have a cell phone,” he was very quiet.  My mom had died using a cell phone while driving.  We’d never talked about it, but I knew he’d thrown his out not long after the accident.  Negative connotations.  An ugly reminder.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Why?”

“To stay in touch with my friends.”

“It-it’s just unexpected.  I wouldn’t have thought.”

“It worked out that way.”  I finished the text, closed the phone and stuck it in the pocket of my jeans.

“New clothes, you’re angrier, lying to me, missing school, this cell phone… I feel like I don’t know you anymore, little owl,” he used my mom’s old pet name for me.  I flinched a little.

Carefully, I replied, “Maybe that’s a good thing.  Because I sure didn’t like who I was before.”

“I did,” he murmured.

I looked away.

“Can you at least tell me you’re not doing drugs?”

“Not even smoking or drinking.”

“Nobody’s making you do anything you don’t want to do?”

“No.”

“Okay,” he said.

There was a long pause.  The minutes stretched on as if we were both waiting for the other to say something.

“I don’t know if you know this,” he spoke, “But when your mom was alive, and you were in middle school, the subject of you skipping a grade came up.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re a smart girl, and we were afraid you were bored in school.  We had arguments on the subject.  I-I convinced your mom you would be happier in the long run attending high school with your best friend.”

I coughed out a laugh.  Then I saw the wounded look on his face.

“It’s not your fault, dad.  You couldn’t have known.”

“I know, or at least, I have that worked out in my head.  Emotionally, I’m not so sure.  I can’t help but wonder how things would have played out differently if we’d gone ahead with what your mother wanted.  You were doing so well, and now you’re failing?”

“So I fail, maybe,” I said, and I felt a weight lift, admitting it out loud.  There would be options.  I’d picked up enough that maybe I could still pressure the faculty to let me skip a grade.  I would be old enough to take online classes like Brian was.

“No, Taylor.  You shouldn’t have to.  The staff at the school knows your circumstances, we can definitely get some exemptions made, extend deadlines…”

I shrugged.  “I don’t want to go back, I don’t want to beg and plead for help from those assholes in the school faculty, just so I can return to the same position I was in a month ago.  Way I see it, the bullying is unavoidable, impossible to control or prevent.  It’s like a force of nature… a force of human nature.  It’s easier to handle, if I think about it like that.  I can’t fight it, can’t win, so I’ll just focus on dealing with the aftereffects.”

“You don’t have to give up.”

“I’m not giving up!”  I raised my voice, angry, surprised at myself for being angry.  I took a breath, forced myself to return to a normal volume, “I’m saying there’s probably no fucking way I’ll understand why she did what she did.  So why waste my time and energy dwelling on it?  Fuck her, she doesn’t deserve the amount of attention I’ve been paying her. I’m… reprioritizing.”

He folded his arms, but his forehead was creased in concern.  “And these new priorities of yours are?”

I had to search for a response.  “Living my life, making up for lost time.”

As if to answer my statement, the back door opened behind my dad.  My dad turned, startled.

“Lisa?” He asked, confused.

Lisa revealed the key she’d taken from the fake stone in the back garden, then placed it on the railing of our back steps.  Unsmiling, she looked from my dad to me.  She met my eyes.

I shoved my way past my dad, and he grabbed my upper arm before I was clear of the doorway.

“Stay,” he ordered me, implored me, squeezing my arm.

I wrenched my arm free, twisting it until he couldn’t maintain his grip, and hopped down the back steps, felt my knees ache at the landing.  Three or four strides away, I turned back in his direction, but was unable to look him in the eyes.

“I love you, dad.  But I need-”  What did I need?  I couldn’t form the thought.  “I, uh, I’ll be in touch.  So you know I’m okay.  This isn’t permanent, I just… I need a breather.  I need to figure all this out.”

“Taylor, you can’t leave. I’m your parent, and this is your home.”

“Is it?  It really doesn’t feel like that’s the case, right now,” I answered.  “Home’s supposed to be a place I feel safe and secure.”

“You have to understand, I didn’t have any other options.  You were avoiding me, not talking, and I can’t help you until I get answers.”

“I can’t give you any answers,” I replied, “And you can’t help anyways.”

He took a step forward, and I quickly stepped back, maintaining the distance between us.

Trying again, he told me, “Come inside.  Please.  I won’t press you any further.  I should have realized you weren’t in a place where I could.”

He took another step toward me, and Lisa took a little step to one side to get in his way, as I backed up again.

“Lisa?” My dad turned his attention to her, looking at her like he’d never seen her before.  “You’re okay with this?”

Lisa glanced between us again, then carefully said, “Taylor’s smart.  If she’s decided she needs to get away and work stuff out for herself, I trust it’s for good reason.  There’s plenty of room for her at my place.  It’s not a problem in the slightest.”

“She’s just a kid.”

“She’s more capable than you give her credit for, Danny.”

I turned to leave, and Lisa hurried to catch up with me, putting an arm around my shoulders as she reached my side.

“Taylor,” my dad called out.  I hesitated, but didn’t turn around.  I kept my eyes fixed on the gate of the backyard.

“Please do keep in touch,” he said, “You can come home anytime.”

“Okay,” I replied.  I wasn’t sure if my voice was loud enough for him to hear.

As Lisa led me to her car, I had to steel myself to keep from looking back.

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter