Colony 15.7

Last Chapter                                                                                               Next Chapter

How the hell was I supposed to get medical assistance when the guy I was supposed to ask was looking for a covert way to murder me?

And I did need help.  I was bleeding, for one thing.  It had only started when I’d moved my arm to unstrap my armor.  If I’d known, I would have tried to undo the straps with my bugs.

Worse, the spike had penetrated the bone of my shoulder and any movement of my arm rewarded me with scraping sensations in my shoulder socket that made my skin crawl, not to mention the pain.

I was surprised it didn’t hurt more.  I hoped that wasn’t a bad sign.  My fingers moved without a problem, but the lack of pain could still point to bigger problems.  Pain was a natural response, after all, and the lack of pain was unnatural.

I called Tattletale instead.

“Skitter?” she answered.  “How did it go?”

“Could have gone worse.  I paid Parian off, and she’s leaving the city.  No blood shed, mostly.”

“Mostly?”

“Flechette was there.  I got stabbed.” I remembered that Coil could be listening in.  “I don’t want to bother Coil with it, busy as he is.”

“Being stabbed is serious.”

“It’s not too bad.  Can you lend me your medic?”

“You’re just leaving Dolltown now?”

“Flying home.”

“He should be there before you arrive.  I know you two haven’t gotten along in the past, but he won’t trouble you.”

He won’t trouble me.  Was that her way of informing me that he was safe?  Well, I still felt better than I would be if I were putting my life in Coil’s hands.

My desire to convey the image of someone who was confident, fearless and untouchable had led to me getting impaled in the shoulder.  It was something of a weakness, but I still found myself doing it as I reached my own territory.  I landed Atlas on the beach and made my way into the storm drain, wincing every time my arm moved.  By the time I was inside, however, I was pulling myself straighter, raising my chin and squaring my shoulders.  I tried to focus on my power to remove my attention from my body.  Checking the status of the various cleanup projects, some basic reconstruction, setting up dry and clean sleeping areas, stocking up on food and medical supplies…

Sierra and her little one-handed brother Bryce were there as I stepped into my lair, along with a small cluster of older kids and Tattletale’s medic, Brooks.  I sat down on the stool by the kitchen counter and Brooks started examining my shoulder.

“You guys get the most interesting injuries,” he said, in his characteristic, hard-to-place accent that seemed to put hard emphasis on syllables.

“Interesting?”

“Metal bonded to the bone.  You have some sticking through and into the cavity your socket sits in.  I have no idea how I’m going to get to the far end, cannot pull it out, and if I try sawing it off, I am not sure the shavings and flecks wouldn’t do catastrophic damage over the long run.  I would say you need surgery.”

“Damn it,” I said.  “She probably intended for something like that, and every hospital in the area’s going to be looking for someone with a spike in their shoulder.”

“I could try to handle it, but it’s going to take time to get necessary tools.”

“What tools?”

“At the very minimum, a small rotary grinder, suction, some fine wire, blood…”

“We have those things.”

He looked surprised.

I looked to Sierra, “We did get that delivery of stuff for Dr. Tegeler?”

“The dentist?  Yeah.  But it’s not unpacked.”

I turned to Brooks, “We have rotary grinders that we’ve been using for the cleanup, not sure how clean they’d be.  But the rest of that stuff, we’ve been having it delivered, so the people with medical training can start helping out.  Since we already have an able-bodied dentist, we’ve been setting her up.  It’s kind of surprising how many people will start having issues with their teeth over just a month.”

“Okay.  Let me pack this wound and then I will need to go there.  I’ll grab what I need myself.”

I waited while Brooks unpackaged and pressed bandages in place around the spike.

“How is the pain, on a scale of one to ten?”

“Ten high?  Maybe a three until I move it, then it’s more like a seven.”

“I am surprised you are not passed out already.  Do you have a high pain tolerance?”

“I wouldn’t have thought so.  But maybe.  Or maybe the way it bonded kept it from damaging or exposing nerve endings?”

“Maybe.  Okay.  Ginger girl, show me the stuff?”

“Ginger girl?”  Sierra asked, archly.

Brooks smirked.

“Brooks,” I said, “Treat my employees with respect or I’m going to have words with Tattletale about you.”

“Yes.  I am sorry,” he said, not sounding sorry at all.  “Please show me where I can find the dentist’s equipment.”

Sierra looked at me, and I gave her a nod as my ‘go ahead’.

That left me with the kids and Bryce.  I studied him.  His black hair was cut so short he was nearly bald, and like Brooks he was wearing dark gray cargo pants and a beige sleeveless t-shirt.  He’d put on some muscle since I’d seen him last.  His still-bandaged stump of a wrist tapped impatiently against his leg.

And the kids… they were wearing some of the clothes I’d had shipped in, but they didn’t look like the typical bunch of kids one would see around a schoolyard.  Before taking advantage of what I had to offer, they’d been eating the bare minimum, spending all of their time outdoors.  But diet and exercise weren’t entirely to blame for the lack of softness in their faces or expressions.  They’d seen people they loved die.

I wasn’t sure what to say.  Making small talk seemed like it would lower me to their level.

I used my power to check on progress in the area instead.  I’d had a hand in getting recovery efforts underway and ordering both tools and supplies, so I was fairly in touch with what was going on.  The streets were draining or drained in the areas we’d settled, with sandbags holding back or diverting the flooding.  Crews were filling more sandbags and loading them onto trucks at the beach.  Still others were working to clear the storm drains of blockages where they’d verified that both sides were clear of water and that the storm drains were intact.  The storm drain leading to my base had been classified unsafe for the time being, meaning I wouldn’t find strangers nosing around in there.

Burned buildings were being torn down where there wasn’t any hope of salvaging them, and small crews of people with the necessary skills were working to assess what could be recovered, assigning simple tasks to people who didn’t have the training or know-how.  Massive tarps were going up over roofs and being tied down.

It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t fantastic, but it was something.  My bugs noted a hundred and seventy people at work, one-seventy-four if I included the kids here.

One-eighty-four, I realized.  I’d nearly missed a crew that was working beneath the streets.  The numbers were growing.

It was a little intimidating.  I didn’t have any particular training or talents that really equipped me for a leadership position.  Now I was in charge of this many people.

Well, I’d do what I could.  Supply what they needed, keep an eye on things.

“Your name?” I asked one of the oldest kids.

“Guy.”

“Sierra didn’t have anything for you to do?”

“We’re waiting until Char comes back,” he said, pronouncing it ‘shar’. “She said she was going to put us in charge of some younger kids, then have us run water out to the people working.”

“Good.  For now, you can run an errand for me.  Head out the door, turn right, go two blocks.  There’ll be an open manhole with a cordon around it.”

“A what?”

“Tape and warning signs.  Ignore the warnings, just go to the manhole cover and shout down at them, tell them to get back to work.  I know they’re just sitting in the dark and drinking.  And tell them no power tools, now.  Not if they’ve got alcohol on their breath.”

“Okay.  If they don’t listen to me?”

“I’ll take care of that,” I told him.

He ran off.

“Big bad supervillain, giving orders to little kids,” Bryce commented.

Why did people insist on testing me?  Was it something about being in charge that demanded that they try to establish their dominance?  Did people like Bryce have a natural propensity for bucking authority, with me as the only clear target?  Or was it more that they were angry in general?

Either way, what did that mean for this city in the long run, if anyone who tried to change things for the better was facing this sort of resistance.

“I’m giving orders to everyone.  Everyone contributes, everyone benefits.”

“To be more specific, you’re having my sister give orders to everyone while you go out and get yourself injured in fights with other capes.”

“Don’t you dare,” Sierra said, stalking back into the room.  She put down a plastic tote of medical supplies.  She sounded angry.  And scared?  “Do not pick a fight with my boss.”

“I’m just saying-”

“Don’t.  Don’t ‘just say’ anything.  If nothing else, she saved your life.”

“I wouldn’t have needed saving if she hadn’t been there,” Bryce said.  He gave me a look that was just short of a glare.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Sierra said.  “You were with the Merchants.”

“And things were cool.  Party all day, relax, had a girlfriend.  If she’d left things alone, I’d be okay.”

“I’m surprised Tattletale didn’t mention it,” I said.  “The Slaughterhouse Nine eradicated the Merchants.  Barely one in twenty survived.  The ones that are left are scattered across the city.  If you’d stayed with them, you’d be dead.”

“She did mention it.  But I would have made it.”

Cocky.  “Then you’d be starving to death, dirty, probably sick.  Going through withdrawal, maybe.  Don’t know what you were taking with them.”

He scowled, glancing at his sister.  “None of your business.”

“Hey!”  Sierra raised her voice.  She grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, and he slapped her hand away.  She stabbed a finger into his chest, “Treat her with respect, damn it!”

Again, that note of fear.

“I treat people with respect if they deserve it.”

“She does.  She’s saved us, here.  That’s big.”

“Wouldn’t need saving if it wasn’t for the people with powers being around here in the first place.”

He wasn’t wrong.  As validating as it was for Sierra to stick up for me, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of guilt at the idea that these circumstances were because of capes.  Hell, if I hadn’t provoked the Nine by humiliating Mannequin then this district wouldn’t have come under fire by Burnscar.  There was Dolltown too, and my complicity there.  I was personally at fault when it came to some of the damage that had been done across the city.

“You want a better reason?” she asked.  She stepped close and pulled him down to hiss words in his ear.  She wasn’t being as quiet as she seemed to think she was, trying to hide her words from me and the kids.  “…they attacked me and Char… mauled them…  Mannequin…”

I shifted positions, and Sierra must have seen it, because she lowered her voice to an inaudible hush as she finished.

Rattling off a list of the things she’d seen me do.  Reasons that gave her cause to be spooked if her brother was mouthing off to me.

When we’d met, Sierra had commented that I wasn’t what she’d expected from a supervillain.  Somewhere along the line, I’d painted a different picture.  She clearly had no trouble with me on a day-to-day basis, but she also knew that when I was pushed… well, I’d gone easy on the three ABB members that had attacked her and Charlotte, but that was only in a matter of speaking.  I’d still left them fleeing in mortal terror.

Bryce looked at me and I could see him give me a once-over glance, as if assessing me in a new light.

“Go help Brooks,” I told him.  “I’ll direct you to him with my swarm.”

It took him a second to weigh whether he wanted to or not, but he did turn and step out the front door, following the thin trail of bugs that I was gathering between him and the warehouse we were keeping supplies.

“Want me to go, too?” Sierra asked.

“Your choice.  Might be better to give him space.”

“I keep having to do that.  When do we start being a family again?”

I’m not the person to answer that question.

“If you decide to leave him be, I could use a hand collecting some things so I can make effective use of my time.”

“Okay,” she said.  She seemed to pull herself together a bit.  “What do you need?”

“My laptop from my room, and the surveillance stuff from the cellar.  There’s another set of surveillance gear in the bag beneath the shelves.”

Sierra hurried off to gather the equipment.

The ensuing minutes were a little disorganized, as Bryce and Brooks both arrived with the last of the medical equipment.

“Blood type?”

“AB.”

He took one bag of blood out of the box and placed it on the counter.  “Want to do this in your room?”

“I have an armchair on the second floor I could sit in.”

“Need you reclining.”

“I have somewhere to be tonight,” I told him.  Though this would be something of an excuse to avoid the kill.  “Don’t put me under.”

“This is going to hurt.”

I had another reason for not wanting to be put under.  I wanted to keep an eye on him.  My conversation with Tattletale had suggested he wasn’t a threat, but I’d feel a heck of a lot better if I could verify that for myself.

“Do you have local anesthetic?” I asked.

“Yes.”  He tapped one finger on a tiny bottle.  Lidocaine.  I recognized the name.  “But will not prevent all pain.  I do not want to use too much.”

“We’ll try that, then.”

We headed up to the second level and I settled into my chair.  For additional lighting, I had my ‘switch beetle’ flick the concealed switch that was contained in his terrarium.  They lit up as I settled in.

Brooks hooked up the blood bag but left the tube hanging, unconnected.  Other supplies were arranged on the table he’d had Bryce bring up.  He seemed very particular about the order and what was being kept

“For a field medic you seem pretty well versed in this stuff.”

“Worked in many hospitals,” he replied.  “Many places.  Often with less than this.  Sometimes with more.”

“Okay.”

“We will have to dislocate your shoulder to access the inside of shoulder socket.”

“Okay.”

“You will take muscle relaxant to minimize damage from dislocation.  You will need to exercise arm to prevent more dislocations.”

I didn’t like the sound of that, the possibility that it was actually poison, but the muscle relaxant came from the bottle, and they had the brand logo etched into them.  One potential danger averted.  No way he’d arranged it this quickly.

“I can do that.”  I took the pills with a swig from the offered bottle of water.

Sierra arrived with the laptop and a large bag.  She handed me the laptop and then plugged it in beneath one of the lower shelves.  I balanced it on my armrest, turning sideways so I was sitting with my bad shoulder facing out front, my legs curled around me for as much stability as I could hope for.  Sierra began arranging towels and plastic cloth around the chair.

“This would be easier if you just lay down,” Bryce said.  I saw Sierra scowl at him.

“It is fine,” Brooks said.  He lifted my arm and let it flop back down.  I tried not to react to the pain that elicited.  “Only one that suffers is her.”

“Ever a charmer, Brooks,” I commented, but my attention was on the laptop.  I used the switch beetle to open all of the terrariums, and withdrew collections of spiders, dragonflies, large moths and roaches.

“They should not touch chair,” Brooks said.  “Or anything on table.  Must keep everything as sterile as we can.”

“I know,” I said.

I gathered the components from the bag, using my bugs to draw them out and airlift the miniature cameras, microphones and transmitters into the air.  One by one, I turned them on and used the laptop to connect to them.  I used my free hand to click through each camera in turn, making their feeds the focus of the main window.

Using my bugs, I drew forms around each, vaguely humanoid.  It wasn’t as intuitive as I was forced to use my own eyes to assess the accuracy.  Still, I managed to rearrange each until they vaguely resembled me.  I marched them down the stairs.

“Outside end first,” Brooks said, starting up the rotary saw.

Not my favorite sound.  And the sensation of it sawing at the metal, it brought back even more unpleasant memories.  Being on my back, Bonesaw trying to cut a hole through my skull…

I shivered.

“Don’t move,” Brooks said.

I focused on my swarm-clones, staying totally still while he worked on removing the metal end of the dart.  They were largely composed of flying bugs, but I was bulking each of the forms out as more bugs arrived, giving them a more solid mass.  I used my free hand to pop my ear-buds in.

I felt bad about leaving my territory as often as I had been.  People were spooked, scared and insecure.  Having a leadership figure that was never around wasn’t helping matters.

This would, I hoped, establish a kind of presence that had been lacking.

Sierra had been coordinating everyone, trying to put people with experience in charge of people who were lacking it.  It was interesting, trying to hold multiple conversations at once with the various project leaders.  Difficult, too.  For one thing, my speech with my swarms was somewhat lacking, missing consonants, but I could still make myself more or less understood.  For another, my ears could only process one thing at a time.  I managed by talking with one or more swarm-clone while listening with one at a time.  After too many misfires and moments of confusion, I scaled down my efforts to a single conversation at once, simply standing silently by with my other selves.

I made a mental note to try to practice with that.  Exercising the range of my power hadn’t done anything for me, and there didn’t seem to be any upper limits to how many bugs I could control at once, but there had to be other ways I could train my abilities.  Multitasking was one I hadn’t tried yet.  Trying to interpret the senses of my bugs was another, though I feared it would take a more concerted effort to effect any sort of change.

When Charlotte returned, I was in the middle of helping a foreman with the layout of a building, using spiders to draw out a loose web in the general shape of the planned shelter, lifting bits of wood to make the lines more visible from a distance.  I adjusted the threads as required to meet his needs.  Charlotte climbed out of a truck with five more of my people and made a beeline to my swarm-clone.  One hundred and ninety people working for me.

Word was apparently getting out about this being a safe haven.

My conversation with her was delayed as Brooks enlisted Bryce in twisting and pulling on my arm while Brooks held my neck and torso.  Bryce drove his elbow against my shoulder while it was being twisted to its absolute limits, effectively knocking my arm out of its socket.

I managed to avoid making any noise beyond a guttural grunt, then took a few seconds to try to avoid blacking out from the pain.

As heavily as I was breathing, back in my lair, my swarm-people didn’t show any sign.  I focused the whole of my attention on them, as if I could remove my consciousness from my real body.

“Any problems?”  I asked Charlotte, once I’d recovered enough to pay attention.  Glancing at my shoulder, I could see Brooks making an incision in the skin of my shoulder.  He’d managed to open the tear in my costume.  I hadn’t been paying attention to how.  I deliberately looked away as Brooks tried to forge a path  to the inside of my shoulder socket.

“Not sure,” Charlotte said.  “Have a look.”

It was Parian.  I’d been so focused on my shoulder, the three-dimensional web-blueprint and my swarm-selves that I hadn’t noticed her getting out of the truck.

“You didn’t leave,” I said, when she’d joined Charlotte and my swarm-clone.

“I didn’t think the money would be real,” she responded.

“Of course it was.”

“It’s… it was a lot of money.  Very generous.  But we were talking about it, and split between us, it’s not enough to give everyone all the care they need.  I told them to go ahead, that I didn’t need a share.”

“Sorry.  I was worried it wouldn’t be enough,” I said.  “Are you saying you want more money?  I might have to say no.  There’s a limit to what I can spare.”

“No!  No.”  She hugged her arms to her body, looking around at the people who were working.  “Just… I thought maybe I should hear you out.”

“Okay,” I responded.

“Except it’s not really you?”

My clone shook her head.

“Can I talk with the real you?”

“I’m in my lair, and I’m preoccupied.  You’ll understand if I don’t reveal the location, given who your friends are?”

“Yeah,” she said.  She was still looking around, watching as a group moved by, pushing wheelbarrows of burned wood.  “I… I was telling myself that there was no point to taking your offer, that I could use my power and make more money legitimately.  But that’s not true at all, is it?”

“Walk with me?” I asked.

She nodded.

I led the way through my territory with my clone as I talked.  “Crime does pay.  I made the offer to you because I thought it would be the best way to get your Dolltown residents the money they needed to get their old lives back.  Or get as close to their old lives as possible.”

“I kind of hate you,” she said.

“Why?”

“You’re making it out like I’m a bad person because I won’t betray Flechette and my own moral code to help them.”

“I don’t blame you for your decision.  I don’t think any less of you.”

“But you wouldn’t make the choice I’m making.”

“No.  I didn’t.”

“And you’ve done more to help my people than I have.”

“You’ve protected them to the best of your ability through this city’s darkest hours.”

“You really think we’re past that?  The bad days?”

“Yes.”

I winced as the grinding resumed, this time inside my shoulder socket.  A makeshift rigging inside the cavity caught the metal shavings, while Bryce held the tube to suction the metal shavings out.  So far, no assassination attempts.  Good.

“I don’t know what to do,” Parian admitted.  “This is… seeing it makes me wish I’d done something like it.”

“I’m not going to push you towards one choice or another.”

“I know.  You made that clear when you gave me the money with no strings attached.”

“Look,” I said.  “I know Flechette was saying my perspective is warped, but I think the system… you know, society, it’s like a series of rules and expectations that we established under some general expectations.  But recent events have made it pretty clear that those expectations, those assumptions, they might not apply.”

“Because of us?  Capes?”

“Yeah.  At the end of the day, barring some extreme examples like powerful dictators, there’s always the fact that any bad person who doesn’t have powers can be killed with a gun, a knife, or even a good punch in the right place.  That’s not the case with us parahumans.  The balance of power is pretty damned off-kilter.  Things aren’t fair.”

“Are you making that imbalance better or worse?”

“I’m… addressing the problem.  I’m saying there’s no point to trying to hold on to the old status quo when it’s based on a foundation that no longer exists.”

“So you’re going to take over the city.”

“Yes.  Because at least for right now, I can give these people what they need.”

I moved my clone’s ‘head’ and followed a group of kids who were running away from my lair, carrying six-packs of water bottles.

“And later?”

“I don’t know.”

We walked in silence, past a bonfire where scrap wood was being burned.  Brooks and Bryce, meanwhile, set to shoving my arm back into its socket.  All of the ambient pain disappeared in an instant.

Parian needed the money, she needed the assurance that she could help the people she’d failed.  I understood that.

“I can offer you one last compromise,” I said.

“What?”

“I can’t guarantee it’ll work, I can’t say if anyone else will accept the proposal, and I don’t know what’s going to happen long-term, but we don’t have to call you a member of our team.  We don’t have to call you a villain.”

“But I’d take territory for myself anyways?”

“Yes.”

“Others would call me a villain, just because I wasn’t fighting you guys.  They’d know I was cooperating with you.”

“Not necessarily.  Maybe the people in charge, the Protectorate and Wards, maybe they’d understand it, but the people on the ground level wouldn’t.”

“The media would out me.”

“I think we control the media.  Or enough to throw some doubt into the mix.  The rules are pretty simple.  You take territory, you hold it, and you ensure that there’s no crime or parahumans operating there without your consent.”

“And Flechette-”

“I don’t know her.  I can’t say how she’ll react, but maybe if you explain nicely, maybe if you frame it right, you could convince her it’s for the greater good.  So long as she convinced the other heroes to leave your territory alone, let you enforce the law there all by yourself, you wouldn’t have to fight them.”

“And if she didn’t-”

“That’s up to her.  Or you.”

She stared around my territory.  It wasn’t pretty, there was still devastation everywhere, but things were getting better.  It was maybe the only place in the city where things were improving as fast as they were.  We weren’t taking two steps forward and one step back.  It was all forward momentum.  Not even a week had passed, admittedly, but it was progress.  And it was apparent.

“I don’t think I could accept if Flechette doesn’t agree.”

“Okay.”  The alternative was unspoken.  If she does…

“I hate you,” Parian said, and it was answer enough.

Brooks was finishing stitching up the incision in my shoulder.  I already had two pieces of scrap spider silk at the ready – one to cover the hole in my costume and another to serve as a sling until my shoulder was stronger.  If I adjusted my cape, I could cover the arm so the injury wasn’t too obvious.  I stood from the chair and stretched, then reached for my cell phone.

“I can live with that,” I told her, speaking through my swarm-clone.  I clicked through my contact list and called the man who was plotting to kill me.

Last Chapter                                                                                               Next Chapter

Infestation 11.8

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

I could see Dr. Q grow more irritated with every person that filed into the office.

Ten people in total.  There were the eight that we’d all packed into the car and fake ambulance Coil had sent.  Lisa, me, Bryce, Charlotte, Minor, Senegal, Jaw and Brooks.  Two more, our drivers, had stepped in to verify everything was okay before leaving to stand guard outside the front of the building.

The good doctor took one look at our group, ordered us to put Bryce on the first bed, then sighed and said he’d patch the rest of us up when he was done with the boy.  Lisa suggested me for the next in line, which means I was made to sit down on the bed in the far corner.  It wound up working out on several levels, because it gave Lisa a chance to talk privately with Minor, and it gave me a chance to have words with Charlotte.

Dr. Q ordered the remainder of Minor’s squad to leave until they were called in, which meant there were more people standing guard outside.  I wondered if it was reaching the point where the guards would attract more problems just by virtue of drawing attention to themselves than we’d face otherwise.

Charlotte looked spooked.  Maybe rightly so.  She had to be aware that she was privy to information and details to a degree that we couldn’t just let her go.

I moved into a cross legged position on the bed, adjusting the pillow behind me to keep the headboard from rubbing against my back.  I pointed, and told Charlottte, “Sit.”

She obeyed, but she sat on the edge with her legs dangling, her body twisted to face me, as if she wanted to be able to run at a moment’s notice.

After some consideration, I frowned and told her, “I don’t know what to do with you.”

“You don’t need to do anything?” She made it a question, a request.

“You’re the first person who knew me that knows about this.”  I paused.  “Or knew of me.”

She looked down at her hands, “I- I don’t… I didn’t see anything.”

“Charlotte,” I frowned, “Look up at me.  Meet my eyes.”

Reluctantly, she did.

“I’m not stupid,” I told her.  “And as cute as that whole cliche is, you and I both know you saw everything.  This is serious.”

She looked at the scene to our left, the doctor, Bryce, Lisa and Minor.  Leaning towards me, she whispered, almost plaintive, “Why did you bring me here?”

“Because you’d already seen too much.  There was no avoiding it.  We couldn’t hide it from you without leaving you behind, and neither of us wanted that to happen, right?”

She shook her head with a glum expression on her face.

Seeing that, I answered her question from before, “I brought you here because I wanted you to know that our group isn’t just a few kids in costumes running around.  We’re an organization.”

“I don’t want to know this!” she said, clutching her pants leg in her hands.

“You need to,” I started.  I was about to go on to say something more, but I was distracted as another group of soldiers entered the room.  They carried a white cooler between them, and set it at Bryce’s bedside. I lost my train of thought as I watched to see if Bryce was okay.

The cooler was opened, and bags of blood were hung on the wall beside Bryce.  Once that was done, the soldiers wordlessly carried the cooler out the door.

I sighed, “Look, Charlotte, I’m not your enemy.”

“You saved my life,” she said.

“That’s maybe an exaggeration.  I saved you from being assaulted by those men, probably-”

I could see her shrink into herself.

“-I’m sorry.”  I finished, lamely.

“You’re a villain,” she said, and it took me a second to realize it was more of a non-sequitor than an admonishment for reminding her of what had nearly happened to her.

“I’m a villain,” I agreed.

“And you’re going to tell me that if I ever open my mouth, you’ll kill me.”

“That is one option.  Or, theoretically speaking, I could hurt you or your loved ones.”

She deflated, which was pretty impressive given that she hadn’t exactly been brimming with vigor before I’d opened my mouth.  It was like she didn’t even have the energy to be afraid.

“I’m not going that route,” I told her, “I don’t want to be that kind of bad guy.”

She looked up at me.

“I’m improvising, and you’re going to have to forgive me if my ideas are a little rough around the edges… but two ideas spring to mind.  Number one is that you leave.  I’m offering you an out.”

“Leave?  The city?”

I nodded.  “Leave Brockton Bay.  You have any family here?”

“My mom.  She’s doing the training to join the construction crews.”

“You’d leave the city with your mom.  Put all this behind you, the ruined city, what happened at the mall, me, everything.”

“And I wouldn’t say anything,” she finished my thought.

“Right.  You’d keep your mouth shut.  Because if you did start discussing stuff you shouldn’t know?  Those soldiers, the hackers, the plants we have with police and FBI and government?  My psychic friend over there?  They’d find you.”

I could see her clutch her pants leg a little tighter.

“And believe me, Charlotte, I don’t want to hurt you.  But it would be out of my hands.  I’m not the top dog here.  The person in charge?  They would handle things after that.  Understand?  They would handle you.”

“I’m not saying anything.  Really.”

“I know.  And I know you wouldn’t say anything even hinting at what you know, unless it was to a therapist and you were absolutely sure it was confidential.  That’s what I’m proposing.”

Her head hung, “I… don’t think I can leave like that.  I wanted to, before all of this, but my zaydee, my grandpa, he refuses to leave, and he can’t take care of himself when the city’s like this.  It’s why we didn’t evacuate.”

“You could tell your mom and grandpa some of what happened.  That the Merchants got you, that you got away, that you don’t feel safe here.”

She buried her face in her knees.  “No.”

“Okay.  So that leaves option two.”

“I-” she started.  She stopped when I raised one hand.

“Don’t say anything until I explain it.  I’ll forget what I want to say if I get distracted.  You’re going to work for me.  And every doubt and possibility that just made you tense up at that idea?  It’s not going to happen.  You’ll be safe.  Safer than you were before.  You won’t have to do anything illegal unless you’re willing.”

“I’d still be helping you, I’d be helping a criminal, indirectly.”

“You would.  But I think you’d be surprised at my approach.  I’m not looking to hurt innocents.  I’m not pushing hard drugs, I’m not demanding protection money.”

“Then what are you doing?”

Funny, how everything always seemed to tie back to the beginning.  I was put in mind of the conversation I’d had with the Undersiders on our second meeting.  The same conversation that had led to me joining them.

“I’m afraid the full details only come with membership,” I echoed Lisa’s words to me from back then.

“I don’t really have much of a choice, do I?”

“You do.  More than you think.  Don’t give me a response just yet.  Think about it for a bit.  You’re staying at least until you get those scrapes and scratches looked at.”

Charlotte looked at her hands.  Her knuckles and fingertips were torn up, and she had a shallow cut on the side of her neck.  “This isn’t anything worth worrying about.”

“The way this city is right now?  You’ll get an infection if you don’t get that taken care of.  Relax.  Believe it or not, you’re safer right here, right now, than you’ve been for the past few weeks.  Breathe, think about what you want to do.”

She glanced around, and I could tell she didn’t believe me.  Still, she met my eyes and offered me a nod.

Well, I hadn’t solved the Charlotte problem just yet, but I’d at least addressed it.  If I was honest with myself, part of the reason I told her to wait on her answer was to buy myself a reprieve, give myself time to think.

Maybe that was a bad idea, because being left to ponder let the anxiety build up.  I was worried.  Not just about Charlotte, but about my territory.  Had the Merchants attacked it in the meantime?  Lisa had said they would mostly be at the party, but I couldn’t be absolutely sure.  Grue would have been watching it for me, but he’d be tired, and he didn’t have the same awareness over the area that I did.

I almost regretted leaving for this, for Bryce, even though I knew I’d do it again.

If anything calmed me down, it was seeing Lisa with the two squad leaders.  She laughed a little, and put her hand on the arm of the other squad captain, Fish.  When she caught me looking her way, she smiled and gave me a wink.

When Dr. Q had done everything he could for Bryce, he turned his attentions to me.  I got more stitches, in my arm this time, which was fun.  I also got to see every single one of my cuts and scrapes fizz with foam as he disinfected my injuries, which stung like hell.

He was nearly done when a knock came at the door.  Jaw was on the other side, and he was escorting Sierra, as I’d requested.  She went immediately to Bryce’s bedside.

“His hand,” she said.

“Things got violent,” Lisa said, stepping towards her.  “We didn’t start it, but they got ugly.”

Sierra nodded mutely, then turned to Bryce.  She knelt at the side of the bed and held his intact hand.

“I’m sorry,” Lisa said.

Sierra shook her head, her dreadlocks swinging, “No.  I understand.  The hand isn’t your fault.  He’s here and he’s alive because of you.”

“No.  I’m sorry because I have something to tell you that’s going to be hard to hear.  But you need to know this.”

Sierra looked up, her brow creased in concern, “Did they drug him?  Dirty needles?  Did they… was he-”

“They didn’t touch him,” Lisa reassured Sierra, “But that’s because he wasn’t one of their victims.  He was one of them.”

Sierra shook her head, “No.  You must have misunderstood.”

“The people who attacked the church?  He was with them.  He got hurt helping them fight to win some prize the leaders were offering.”

“No,” Sierra shook her head again.  “He wouldn’t!”

Lisa shrugged, unable to find the words to convince her.

Sierra sounded angry now.  She stood, confronting Lisa, “No!  Where’s Skitter?  Where’s your boss?”

I hesitated.  My secret identity, such as it was, was already falling apart.  It wasn’t that I was that committed to it, since I wasn’t ‘Taylor’ that much of the time these days, but there was always that worry in the back of my mind that I was burning my bridges as far as being able to go back home, or that I was possibly giving out clues that someone could use to trace back to my dad and hurt him.

On the other hand, I could see how Sierra was on the verge of losing it.  I couldn’t tell if she was going to cry, hit Lisa or say something she shouldn’t, but I couldn’t let her do anything that would get her in trouble with the soldiers.  I stood from the bed.

“Sierra,” I called out.

She wheeled on me.  I watched her expression change as she stared at me and realized who I was.

“You got hurt,” she said, looking almost stunned by that realization.  How bad did I look, that my injuries distracted her from her brother?  Or was it the realization that a supervillain could get hurt?

“Things got ugly,” I said.  Then I added, with emphasis, “Lisa wasn’t lying.”

She shook her head, “It doesn’t make any sense.  He wouldn’t do that.  It doesn’t fit with the guy I grew up with, ate dinner with.”

Lisa spoke from behind her, “His parents were in the hospital, his home and school was gone, and he was a scared, confused kid that was offered a community and the power to change things.  It’s like what cults do.  They prey on people who are at their most vulnerable, people who are lost, with no attachments, who are hungry and weak.  It’s easy to underestimate how readily they can get to someone.”

“Fuck!”  Sierra turned to kick the side of Bryce’s bed. “Is that supposed to be an excuse?  No way he gets off that easy!  He joined them, you said!  He wasn’t brainwashed when he fucking decided to go with him!”  She kicked the bed again, hard enough that it shifted an inch or two away from her.

I could see the Doctor start forward in response to the assault on his furniture and patient, but Minor, Jaw and Fish moved first.

“Guys, stop,” I ordered.

They did.  It was kind of strange, to have people listening to me.  Sierra turned and saw the soldiers, and I could see emotions flicker across her face.

“He’s not getting off easy,” I said, “He lost most of his hand.  I’m not a doctor, but he might lose the rest, depending on how the circulation is.”

“He’ll lose his remaining fingers, keep the thumb,” the Doctor spoke.

“So he’ll have the rest of his life with that as a reminder of his bad call,” I told her.  “The real question is what we do with him.”

Sierra was so focused on the responsibility, the blame and the betrayal that I think it took her a few seconds to process the problems that came with getting her brother back.  I could see it hit her, the idea that she might have to repeat the experience of losing her brother, with all of the same pain and worry, the moment he got a chance to slip away.

Dr. Q apparently didn’t care about the drama.  Once he was more or less confident that Sierra wouldn’t be disturbing his patient, he got up and walked over to Charlotte to start patching up the girl.  I walked over to Sierra and led her away from her brother’s bedside to the far corner of the room, next to Charlotte and the doctor, where she wasn’t getting in anyone’s way.

“Can you keep him?” she asked, as we stopped.

“Can I offer him a bed?  Theoretically.  But he’s just going to run.  Not that there’s anywhere for him to run to, but-”

I stopped as I saw a confused expression on her face.

“The Merchants may be done for.”

“Because of you?”

I shook my head, “Someone else.  The leaders got pretty badly embarassed, they may have trouble getting their followers to respect them after getting their asses kicked like they did.  The actual criminals would still be on the streets, probably, but they won’t be as organized.  Add infighting, rival groups, greed… they won’t be as focused.”

“But that girl said my brother was with the people from the Church, he could find them, or they could find him.”

“They’re not a consideration any more,” I told her.

Her eyes widened.  “Because of what I asked you to do?”

What was the proper response, here?  I felt like anything I told her might offend her.  If I said yes, would she be horrified?  If I said no, would she see it as a failure on my part?

“In small part because of that, yes,” I admitted, leaving it vague.

Her forehead creased in a frown.

“Look,” I admitted, “I need to get back to my territory.  If you need a place to stay, you’re welcome to come with, but we do need to decide what to do with Bryce.”

“Can you keep him prisoner?  Until he comes to his senses?’

“I would if I thought it would do any good.  He’s only going to get angry and resentful at being locked up, and he’ll be all the more eager to run.”

“But he’s going to run anyways.”

“Probably.  He won’t believe me if I tell him about his buddies.”  It doesn’t help that Lisa lied to him about Sierra.

“So what do we do?”

I was at a loss for an answer.  I turned and called across the room, “Lisa!”

She broke away from her conversation with Minor and Fish to join us.  “‘Sup?”

“We’re worried the kid will run.  You have any ideas on what would work?”

She shrugged. “What if you give him what he wants?”

“Which is?”

“He wants excitement, he wants to feel like a grown up, he wants respect, and maybe a bit of power at a time in his life he maybe feels pretty powerless, what with losing his house, his family, his safety, all that.”

“Okay.  And we do this by?”

“With your okay, I’d recruit him.”

“That sounds like a monumentally bad idea,” I admitted.

“The soldiers there can keep him in line.  I’ll keep him away from Senegal and Brooks.  Minor, Pritt and Jaw could watch him and instill some discipline in him, and they’re uniquely equipped to track him down if he tries to slip away.  I’d keep him out of trouble, and have him gather information and act as a pair of eyes on the street.  He’ll hate it at first, with the soldiers giving him a hard time, on top of the missing hand, but I think he’ll take to it once he’s actually doing something concrete.  What kid doesn’t want to be a secret agent?”

I had my doubts, but I didn’t want to shoot Lisa’s idea down.  So I looked to Sierra and asked, “Thoughts?”

She frowned.  “Can it be temporary?  I don’t want him to be locked into anything even after schools get going again and we’re trying to get things normal again.”

“It can be temporary,” Lisa assured her.

“He doesn’t get hurt.”

“He’ll have one of those guys with him ninety percent of the time,” Lisa said, pointing to Minor, Jaw and Fish.

I saw Sierra look at me, noting my injuries, and I knew exactly what she was thinking.  Still, she kept her mouth shut on that particular topic.  “Okay.  But I join too, so I can keep an eye on him.”

“I’d love to take on another recruit,” Lisa smiled.  She turned to me, “But she saw you first.”

Sierra looked between the two of us, then asked Lisa, “You don’t work for Skitter?”

“Partners, believe it or not,” Lisa replied.  “We’re controlling different territories.”

“Oh.  Two territories.”

“Nine,” Lisa corrected her.  “Nine villains, nine territories.  The city isn’t getting better and the people in charge aren’t up to the task, so we’re taking over.”

“You’re trying to fix things?”

“Some of us.  Most of us.  Some of us want to help, like Skitter there, and others are doing it because we know that when things are up and running again, we’re going to be a part of the status quo.”  Lisa grinned.

I spoke up, “That’s the basic idea of what we’re doing.  You heard what I said to the people in my territory.  I’m trying to get people fed, I want them safe, and I wanted to help you and your brother.  If you’re working for me, that’s the sort of thing you’re going to be helping me with.”

Sierra shook her head, “I only said I’d join because I wanted to keep an eye on my brother.”

Lisa shrugged, “Then I’ll make you a deal.  You join Skitter’s group, and I’ll give you a contact number.  Whoever is babysitting Bryce will have the answering phone, to give you an update on your brother, anytime, anywhere.  Or put you on the phone with him, if that’s what you want.”

“That’s not-”

“It’s not perfect, no.  But Skitter’s probably going to let you head into my territory to see Bryce any time you want-”

“Definitely,” I interjected.

“-and not to put too fine a point on it, but the guilt over betraying you, coupled with resentment, and the fact that he’s in this rebel-against-your-parents phase and you’re the closest thing he has to a parent right now? It’s maybe best if you give him his space.”

I saw the faintest change in Sierra’s facial expression, saw her look over at Bryce, her eyebrows drawing together.  Lisa’s words had hurt her.  They’d been true, no doubt, but I had to find a way of gently suggesting that Lisa take a gentler approach.

“Okay,” Sierra said to me.  “But I can leave any time.”

“You can,” I replied.

“And I will, the moment you break our deal, or the moment Bryce gets hurt.”

“I believe you.”

She stuck out her hand to me and I shook it.

“Now go,” Lisa said, “I’ll send Sierra your way with one of my boys, when she’s done visiting Bryce and seeing that he’s settled in.  I know you’re itching to check on your territory.”

I nodded.  “Thank you.  For the help finding Bryce, for making this work, here.”

She grinned and waved a hand at me, “No problem, no problem.”

I gave Lisa a quick hug before heading over to Charlotte.

There was no negotiation.  She was close enough to have heard some of our conversation, and she’d seen the bit with Sierra, besides.  Whatever it was, it seemed to have grounded her.  She didn’t look as uncertain as before, and she had one hand extended for me to shake.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Because really, you can leave the city.”

She shook her head, “My grandfather needs to stay.  He’s spent the latter half of his life in his home, and I think it would kill him to leave.”

“If you’re sure,” I told her.  She nodded.

I shook her hand.

■

“Grue?” I hollered into my lair, as Charlotte and I stepped inside.  “Mask on!  Got a guest here!”

Despite Lisa’s relatively cavalier attitude on the subject and my own concessions, there was no point in spoiling his secret identity, too.

“Right!” he called down from upstairs.  In a moment, he came down the stairs, his helmet on.  He stopped as he saw me, “What happened?”

“Bit of a scuffle.”  I replied.  I’d had a chance to see myself in the mirror.  The bruise on my cheekbone had been a nice mottled yellow-green.  I asked, “Any trouble?”

He shook his head.  He wasn’t smothered in darkness, so his voice was normal as he said, “Quiet.  Was your errand successful, at least?”

“Successful enough.  This is Charlotte, one of my new… employees.” What was I supposed to call them?  Henchmen, employees, minions?

“Already recruiting?” he whistled, low.

“Two new hires.  The other girl’s going to be on her way in a while.”

“You’ve gotta slow down.  I only heard what you’d done to take control here after I’d arrived.  I was worried you’d provoked a war and left me to handle things, until Lisa told me the major threats were occupied elsewhere.”

“Sorry.”

“Seriously, you’re moving fast on this.  Imp and I have only just started rooting out the gangs and other criminals in our territory.  We haven’t even talked about who we’re going to recruit or how.”

“I’ll explain later?”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to.  Just… later.”

“I’m getting the feeling I’m in the way,” Charlotte spoke up, “Is there any place I can go to get out of your hair?”

“Kitchen, if you’re hungry, or-”  I stopped as she practically lit up at the suggestion.  I pointed at the kitchen, “Go.  Take whatever, enjoy.”

It was gratifying to see her glee as she started rifling through the cabinets to find piles of stuff ranging from treats to dry pasta to cases of soda.  Grue and I migrated to the empty room that had held the supply crates, where we were able to see Charlotte but not necessarily in earshot.

“If you’re pushing yourself this hard to prove yourself to me-“

“It’s not that.”

“Okay.  But really, you don’t need to prove yourself.  You know Tattletale just called me on the phone?  Ten minutes ago?”

Ten minutes ago, I would’ve just left the doctor’s place, en route for my lair with Charlotte.  I frowned.  “What did she say?”

“Chewed me out big time, about how I was being too hard on you, after the… revelations at the hospital, about turning you down.  Calling me a clod, basically.”

I felt a flush warm my ears.  “I told her not to interfere.”

“Well, she did, and I think she was right to.  I’ve been a bit hard headed.”

I shrugged.  Couldn’t agree without offending him, but I didn’t disagree either.   I’d been stubborn in my own ways too.

He asked, “So do you want to call it even?  I said it before, but I thought maybe we could become best friends, somewhere down the line.  I’d like to go there again, if you’re willing.  If it’s not awkward or-“

I felt the flush deepen and hurried to interrupt him before he could bring up my asinine confession again, “It’s good.  Yes.  Let’s go with that.”

“Good.”  He clapped one hand on my shoulder.  A sign of camraderie, friendship, with the subtle effect of reinforcing that I was at arm’s length.  Or was I reading too much into things?

I could live with it.  It was worlds better than the quiet hostility and hurt I’d been sensing from him as of late.

“Is it cool if I drop by sometime?” he asked.  “So we can keep each other up to date, or maybe just hang out?”

“Hanging sounds good,” I answered him, feeling lame as I said it.

“I’m gonna go sleep.  Long day.  You take care of yourself, alright?” he said by way of a goodbye as he headed for the door.

I nodded, “You too.”

When I walked over to the kitchen, Charlotte had a box of toaster strudels in one hand and a package of cookie dough in the other.  She’d washed her face, and only trace amounts of the caked-on makeup were still there.  She looked worlds younger, and was like a little kid as she asked me, “Can I use your oven?”

“Go for it.  But I get some,” I smiled.

As my new minion set about figuring out the oven, I was able to stop for a moment.  Doubts and insecurities still weighed on me, but I couldn’t feel guilty for not making more progress today.  I’d done what I could to move forward on my plan to help Dinah.  Both Lisa and Brian had acknowledged that I was making great strides forward, and that gave me hope that I might be impressing Coil as well.

Things weren’t perfect, but they were better.  I was on speaking terms with Brian, I was making headway on my plans, Lisa was making headway on her end of things, and in some small way, I felt like I’d finally followed through with that dream I’d had at the start of the year, of being a superhero.

I was a villain.  I’d given the order to let a man die.   Maybe my abandonment of Thomas would weigh on my conscience more after I got some sleep and my thoughts were clearer.  Maybe not.  But I’d also done something to help people, without ulterior motives.   I’d given Sierra her brother back, I’d saved Charlotte.  I was happy about that.

All in all?  If I didn’t think too hard about it?  I could feel cautiously optimistic for the first time in a long while.  For the first time in weeks, months, I could feel like everything just might work out.

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Infestation 11.7

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Newter dropped from the ceiling.  The main part of the mall had only the one level to it, but the roof was arched slightly, and he was dropping from one of the higher points.  I was bad at estimating distances, but what was that?  Fifty feet? Sixty?

He landed in a crouch, a hair behind the girl who was carrying the vial down the pile of rubble to the base of the platform.  As she turned, dust, papers, cigarette butts and fragments of rock stirred around her.  They moved in a counterclockwise orbit, rising, increasing in intensity over a span of one and a half seconds.  Whatever her power did, Newter stopped it, smacking her in the forehead with his palm, almost gently.  She stepped back, as if she’d lost her balance.  The building whirlwind around her dissipated into a billowing cloud of dust and her legs turned to rubber beneath her as she tried to step back once more. She fell.

Newter’s tail encircled the vial before she could drop it, and he flicked it into his left hand.  An instant later, he was racing for the stage, almost casually finding stepping stones as he made a beeline for Skidmark and the rest of the group.  He was going for the case and the vials.

Much of the crowd was running after Newter, rushing for the base of the stage and climbing the heaps of rubble to follow.  In doing so, they were vacating the center of the mall where the casualties lay.  I hated to get closer to the chaos, but I suspected it would be a long time before I had a better chance to find and retrieve Bryce.

“I’m going after the kid,” I said.

“Minor, Brooks, escort her,” Lisa ordered.

On the other side of the mall, Newter had reached Skidmark and pounced for him.  In reaction, Skidmark used his power to coat his cape in a layer of his power.  He raised it between himself and Newter.  Newter was already airborne, unable to change course, but he had the presence of mind to hock a loogie into Squealer’s face.  He bounced off of the cape, knocking Skidmark back, and fell to the ground.

Skidmark used his power to saturate Newter and the ground around him.  As his power took hold, Newter was launched through the rungs of the metal railing and down into the midst of the crowd at the base of the stage.  Skidmark shouted something, but I couldn’t make it out over the noise of the other Merchants.

I tore my eyes from the scene and we hurried toward the heaps of unconscious, bloodied and wounded that lay where the arena had been.  We were halfway there when the entire mall began to brighten.  The barred windows were expanding, and massive torches were lighting on the far sides.  Shafts of orange light extended into the mall’s interior, patterned into diamonds by the meshes of bars Labyrinth had erected.

The wall behind Skidmark and the other ‘upper circle’ members of the Merchants began to bulge inward.  Features took form: a face, ten feet tall.  Protrusions below it, near the floor of the platform, marked emerging fingertips.

Labyrinth wasn’t stopping there.  Minor had to catch my arm and pull me back to keep me from being caught in the path of another effect in the mall’s floor.  The ground cracked and bulged upward as though a mole was tunneling at high speeds just beneath the tile.

“Get back!” someone shouted behind me.  I recognized Lisa’s voice and took her advice, backing away from the hump.  Minor stopped me from backing up into another hump that had appeared behind me.

Stone walls heaved upward from the mounds of broken tile, blocking my path and stopping at a height of twelve or more feet.  As more walls rose around me, I saw a door form to my right, and the corridor to my left had a bend in it.

A maze.  She was living up to her name.

The walls at the outside edges of the mall were altering, now, more faces and body parts making themselves apparent.  Like statuary or reliefs.  Limbs intertwined and nude figures decorated the interior walls of the mall, each tall enough to extend from floor to ceiling, animated so that they moved with a glacial slowness.  With a surprising speed, the interior of the mall was coming to resemble some kind of temple.

I had to admit, I was spooked.  That girl’s power was intimidating when she wasn’t on my side.  She wasn’t all there, mentally, so the only thing holding her back was the person telling her what to do.  If she could make those giant torches, she could set the floor on fire.  Or she could have created spikes instead of walls, without leaving the rest of us any place to run.  That nobody had been hurt was purely by her choice.

Stone poles speared down from the roof.  Looking up, I saw that the edges of the crack in the roof had fanged teeth, and that figures were sliding down the metal poles.  Two female, one obese male.  Spitfire, Faultline and Gregor the Snail?

Not quite.  Faultline and Gregor, yes.  I didn’t recognize the other woman, and she was too tall to be Spitfire with her mask off.  Red haired, slender, older than Spitfire or Labyrinth had been.

She slid down the pole, up until the moment Trainwreck leaped from the stage and caught the base of the pole with his shoulder.  He was built like a football player in a quadruple-thick layer of cast iron protective gear, steam billowing behind him as he tore past the stone pole like it was nothing.  It cracked in four places, and the girl dropped out of the air.

One section of the pole hit the ground in an upright position, and she landed atop it with one foot, wobbling briefly.  Controlling the angle the pole fell, she angled her fall toward a nearby wall of the maze.

It wasn’t enough.  Trainwreck smashed the pole from under her, sending her flying through the air to land in the midst of Labyrinth’s maze.

Labyrinth created a short pillar below the metal case and canisters, and began to extend it towards the gap in the roof.  Skidmark used his power to force the things off the top of the pillar and onto the platform, where they rolled.  A few stray papers fluttered from the case.

There was a crack of gunfire, and I saw the momentary light of the shot to my right.  I couldn’t see over the wall, but I saw Trainwreck lumbering forward, one oversized metal gauntlet raised to protect his head, the only vulnerable part of his body.  I directed some bugs to the scene, and realized that a woman with the exact same proportions as the red-haired woman was firing at Trainwreck.  She’d made it through the maze and back to the skirmish with Trainwreck so quickly?

There was a brief pause in the gunfire, then a single shot fired.  Sparks marked the ricochet between his shoulder, the back of his hand, and the armor that rose behind his head.  He dropped to one knee with a suddenness that suggested he was wounded.

I hurried to the wall.  I could use my bugs to find my way through the maze, getting a sense of the layout, but I needed something faster.  Labyrinth was using her power and adjusting the battlefield with every passing second.  The way things were, given how she wasn’t aware of who I was, I was included among her enemies.  If I didn’t go now and the battle resolved one way or the other, I might lose my window of opportunity to get Bryce.

There was no way I was going back without him.  The intensity of the emotion I was feeling on the subject surprised me.

I hated the idea of going back to Sierra and telling her I’d failed.  Hated the idea of that conversation on top of the news I had about Bryce joining the same Merchants that assaulted her friend with a broken bottle.  I couldn’t do it.  I couldn’t be leader of a territory and know that someone out there was maybe telling others I hadn’t followed through, fighting that constant nagging doubt in the back of my mind that wondered if ‘my’ people were whispering or laughing at me behind my back.

And maybe a small part of it was that my meeting with my father had been a reminder of how important family was.  Bryce was the errant youth, his sister the anxious family member.  Were my emotions here tied to the parallel between them and my father and me?

“Help me over,” I ordered Minor.  There was a crash not too far away as Trainwreck tore through one of Labyrinth’s walls.

“Can give you and Brooks a boost, but not sure if I can follow,” Minor told me, “Maybe if I find a place with something to stand on-”

“That’s fine.  Look,”  I drew an arrow on the wall with my bugs, “I can give you directions.”

There was little surprise on his face at the demonstration of my power.  He gave me a curt nod, dropped to one knee, and wove his fingers together to give me a stirrup for my foot.  I sheathed my good knife, stuffed the spare between the sheath and the strap that attached it to my midsection and stepped inside the bridge of Minor’s hands.  He heaved me up, almost throwing me.

The cut on the back of my arm burned as I found a grip, then hurt twice as much as I hauled myself onto the top of the wall, my toes scrabbling on the untextured surface for traction.  I reached down for Brooks, but he shook his head and waved me aside.  He wanted to come up on his own.

Fine, whatever.

I hopped down into the next corridor.  The far left had an archway leading into one of the more open areas, a circular area that was serving as a clearing for Trainwreck and the red-haired girl to fight.

I crouched down as I reached the doorway, peeking out and trusting my bugs to give me the fuller story of what was going on.  Brooks appeared behind me and crouched, gun raised, his back to the wall.  His breathing was quiet and controlled even after his recent climb and jog.

Trainwreck and the new girl on Faultline’s team were facing off on the far side of this area.  Behind Trainwreck, I saw a section of wall toppling, spotted Faultline dashing through the obstruction as though it were barely there.  She ran up behind Trainwreck and slashed her fingertips across his heel as he was stepping forward.

As he set the foot down on the marble floor, his ankle shattered and his foot broke free of his calf.

He caught the ground with the stump of his mechanical leg, and she darted in close to cut through the knee of his other leg.  He fell onto his back as she slipped between his legs, and she quickly turned to begin using her fingertips to cut down the wall, like a jungle explorer using a machete to hack through brush and vines.  The red-haired woman joined her.

The ground rumbled as sections of the black marble floor rose to form into broad, shallow stairs, leading from the two young women to Skidmark’s stage.  The capes in Skidmark’s group were struggling to find ground to stand on, as they were crowded back to the edges of the platform by the statue that was still emerging from the wall.  A head and two forearms with reaching hands, all in dark stone.

It was eerie, to see the changes that had occurred in our surroundings in the time it had taken me to cross the wall and wait for the fight to pass.  If the attentions of the Merchants had erased any familiarity I had towards the Weymouth shopping center, Labyrinth had cremated the remains and erected something else in its place.  It was a cathedral, dedicated to a goddess that was very real and having a very active hand in current affairs.  Labyrinth.

Which reminded me of the fact that I needed to get through this maze.  Labyrinth’s power was drawing many of the crawling bugs down into the ground as it refurbished the floors and consumed the piles of trash or rubble.  I still had the bugs on the ceiling, but I didn’t want to give our presence away.  Of the relatively few bugs I was willing to use, a share were being used to direct Minor and placing them in strategic locations to get a sense of the layout.  As the maze took shape in my head, I showed Minor the way.

I stepped into the clearing and, double checking nobody was in earshot, I approached Trainwreck.  Brooks followed just behind me, watching my back.

Trainwreck didn’t look like much, just going by the face.  He had a round face, small eyes, greasy hair tied back in a ponytail and scarred cheeks.  He looked like a homeless guy who hadn’t had a shower in a long time.  The only thing setting him apart from the Merchants were the gunshot wound near the corner of his jaw and the steam-powered armor that rendered him strong enough to pound the crap out of Armsmaster.

I asked him in a low voice, “Trainwreck.  Are you still working for Coil, or did you leave?”

He tensed, and his eyes turned my way, though he couldn’t turn his head with the hardware around it.  I stepped back as he used one arm to prop himself up and get a better look at me.

“No idea what you’re saying,” he said.  He gave me a level stare, and I was almost convinced.  But I’d seen him in the parking garage when I first found out Coil was the Undersider’s employer.

“Right, total nonsense, sorry,” I said.  I tried not to show fear as he tried to get to a standing position with his ruined mechanical legs, looming over me.  “But if you were working for the man, maybe you could find some excuse to knock over that wall over there…”

I pointed at the nearest section of wall.

“You’re fucking nuts,” he told me.  He raised his arm, and my legs tensed, ready to leap towards him if he took a swing at us.  As big as he was, without him being able to use his legs, being in close would be safer than trying to leap back out of his reach.

He brought his hand down on the wall I’d pointed at to heave himself to an upright position.  The wall fell as he rested his weight on it.  Using his other hand to help balance himself, he gripped the wall in his heavy gauntlet and flung the section of wall at Faultline and the red-haired girl.  The girl turned and stepped out of the way as the wall rotated in the air, bounced between her and Faultline with mere inches gap between them, and slid back down the stairs.  He didn’t pay any further attention to us as we ran for the gap he’d opened.

My power let me get a general map of the people who were still unconscious or prone, and the bugs wouldn’t stand out too much as they checked the bodies.  I went by body types, trying to find people of Bryce’s height and build.  The path Trainwreck had opened gave us avenues to two people who could have fit the mark, with a third over the next wall.

Good news?  The first of the prone bodies I went to was Bryce.

Bad news?  He was injured.

Scrub’s power had torn through the clusters of Merchants during the fighting, and Bryce’s new ‘family’ was no exception.  The girlfriend was dead, her head and shoulders gone, muscle and fluids flowing out where the flesh had been annihilated.  The girl’s mother was a goner too.  She lay on her back, her face missing.  Had she been behind her daughter, holding her, hit by the same blast?

‘Thomas’ was still alive, the black man with the scar on his lips.  The man who had hurt Sierra’s friend from the church, who had literally torn the guy a new asshole, if I’d gotten Sierra’s meaning right.  Thomas crawled slowly for the nearest arch, breathing hard, his face drawn with pain.  A slice had been taken out of his arm, shoulder, and a section of his back, as though a guillotine had grazed him from behind.  I wasn’t quite sure how he hadn’t died yet, with the amount he was bleeding.

Brooks stooped down to help Bryce, who had gotten off lightly compared to the others.  He was missing a large portion of his right hand, and he’d had the presence of mind to try to loop his belt around the injury to control the blood loss, pulling it tight.  He seemed like he’d lose consciousness any second.  Brooks retrieved some medical supplies from his backpack and began tending to the boy.

I watched Thomas struggle towards the door.

Minor arrived fifteen or twenty seconds after Brooks had started to work on the boy, standing guard while our medic took care of Bryce’s hand.

Brooks helped Minor to get the boy to a standing position, while I watched Thomas struggle on.  He was getting weaker, fast.  The blood loss had been too severe.

Skidmark had several parahumans working for him, and I didn’t know all their powers.  Maybe Thomas would get care.  Maybe Skidmark would attend to his people.

Probably not.  I knew that by leaving him here, I might be leaving him here to die, but the chance of him surviving anyways was pretty slim. Besides, bringing him would slow us down, and I wasn’t sure we could afford that.

I shook my head a little, as if it could cast away the layers of little justifications and excuses I was putting together.  I was searching for a rationale, a reason to leave him behind.  Also, maybe, I suspected I was trying to give a reason to the fact that I had almost no sympathy for the man.

If I was going to leave him there, I’d own up to what I was doing.

Sierra had wanted Thomas and his followers to suffer, and I’d agreed to make it happen.  I couldn’t do anything about Bryce’s girlfriend or her mom.  They were dead, and it had probably been instantaneous and painless.  Thomas, though?

Brooks followed my gaze to Thomas.  In his accented voice, he asked me, “You want me to bandage him up?  Don’t know how much I can do.”

Thomas heard and stopped crawling, dropping onto his belly.  He didn’t look toward me, but I knew he was listening.

“It’s fine,” I told Brooks.  “Focus on the boy.”

He nodded, then helped hold Bryce’s prone form while Minor got a better grip.  Thomas didn’t move, react or say anything.

“Let’s go,” I said.

We ran, and with Brooks keeping one hand on my shoulder to guide me, I glanced behind us to get a sense of what was going on.

The battle was still ongoing.  Gregor the Snail was here, but unlike the others, he wasn’t operating in Labyrinth’s world.  He passed through the walls of the maze, spraying streams of slime at Trainwreck, who had apparently advanced halfway up the stairs by using his hands to help him walk.  Trainwreck retaliated by throwing a chunk of stairs at Gregor with one hand while trying to block the stream of slime with the other.  The section of stairs hit the wall of the maze just in front of Gregor, some of it bouncing over to pass through Gregor.  Not real, as far as he was concerned.

What did this look like to Gregor?  Was he standing in the mall as it had been, while Trainwreck seemed to stand on thin air?  Or was Trainwreck on the ground?  I couldn’t parse it.

Mush had started pulling himself together, but Labyrinth was making his job into a struggle.  His right arm had divided, stretched, forked out and reconfigured until it looked like a mass of reaching veins and arteries.  He plunged it into one of the trash cans that Labyrinth was absorbing into the floor, and when he withdrew it, the tendrils had formed the connective tissue for an oversized hand crafted out of garbage.  His other arm and much of his lower body had already gathered some garbage around it, letting him stand several feet taller than he had before.  The skin of his head and body was peeling off into more tendrils, reaching for more trash and distributing some from his arms to his torso.

From what I could gather, he needed some kind of loose matter to form the body of his other self.  Dirt, compost, trash, maybe even sand.  Problem was, however fantastic his surroundings might have been for this five minutes ago, Labyrinth was screwing him over by cleaning things up, maybe inadvertently.  One upper arm, his naked upper body and his nearly bald head were all exposed and vulnerable.

Scrub had climbed up to one corner of the platform, and was keeping to the edge of the fight.  His intent was clearly to be close enough to Faultline’s group to possibly tag them, but not so close that one of his uncontrolled blasts would catch a fellow Merchant.

My bugs told me we were close to Lisa, Charlotte, Jaw and Senegal.  I caught Minor’s attention and pointed, and he put Bryce down long enough to give me a boost up to the top of the wall that stood between us.  I straddled the wall and waited for Brooks and Minor to figure out how to get Bryce up to me so I could pass him down to the others.

From my vantage point, I could see more of the battle unfolding on the far side of the mall.

One powered Merchant charged Faultline and collapsed through the ground she had strategically weakened.  She kicked him several times in the face before the next member of Skidmark’s group tried to take her on, drawing and pointing a gun.  Faultline drew her feet apart, and then dropped through the floor of the platform in a spray of splinters.

To her right, the red-headed woman was striding towards Scrub.  He aimed a shot and missed by a fraction, and she didn’t even flinch.  Another try, another miss.  As she got close, he let his power go haywire, and a dozen flashes erupted in close vicinity to him.  None touched her.

She had her gun drawn, but she didn’t shoot him.  Instead, she grabbed him by the collar, then wrenched him to one side so he tipped over the side of the platform and fell the twenty or so feet to the ground below.  It wasn’t enough of a fall to guarantee that he was out of the fight, but she seemed confident enough to turn away and move on to the next target before he’d even finished falling.

Gregor was keeping up his steady pressure, alternating between blasting Trainwreck and blasting Mush with one hand and aiming at Skidmark with the other.  Skidmark used his power to push away the worst of the slime, but it was clear he was losing.  His power wasn’t strong, it didn’t have much more push to it than a strong wind.  Any attempt to get it as effective as it had been at the edge of the arena took time and multiple layers of the effect.  In short, Gregor could make the slime more easily than Skidmark could get rid of it.

A knotted bandage tied around Bryce’s good arm was thrown up to me, and I used it to draw his arm up while the others managed his lower body.  Once I had his wrist, I gripped it firmly in one hand, my upper body hugging the top of the wall to keep myself from being pulled off.

Minor gave Brooks a boost and the medic straddled the wall facing me.  We worked together to raise the unconscious boy over the top of the wall and pass him down to where the others waited.

I glanced back towards the fight.  Faultline had emerged from beneath the platform and moved around to the side, and using her power to draw hand holds into the side of the platform.  The cape who’d been aiming at her with the gun stooped over the hole she’d dropped into and looked down to see if she was still down there.  He was oblivious as she hauled herself over the edge of the platform and attacked him from behind, striking him with one elbow, then reversing the turn of her body to sweep his legs out from under him with one extended leg.  The sweep of her foot had apparently coincided with a use of her power, because there was a cloud of stone dust as he collapsed onto broken, uneven ground.  From my angle I couldn’t see for sure, but I thought maybe he’d fallen head first into the hole she’d first descended into.

Brooks and I hauled Minor over, and I waited while he climbed down, since I was already fairly secure where I was.

Skidmark was losing.  It was obvious from where I sat, and I could see his changing expression as he saw Mush collapse beneath Gregor’s sludge and realized he had no friends left.  Gregor, Labyrinth, Faultline and the red-haired woman were all in action, and Skidmark was pretty much alone at this point.

I hadn’t seen Newter or Spitfire, and I couldn’t be sure if he was okay or not.  Sure, the Merchants could have hit him with weapons rather than their bare hands, but he was quick, he had his tail, and he only needed to touch someone to drug them out of their minds.  Spitfire might be the one babysitting Labyrinth somewhere out of the way.

It had to suck for Skidmark, losing like this.  He’d risen to power based on a streak of good luck and momentum rather than any talent, deed or ability.  Now it was falling apart.  He’d lost, he’d had his ass kicked in front of the bulk of his followers, and he would likely never regain what he’d had.  Not that I felt bad for him.  There was a kind of justice to it.

He didn’t even have a power that would let him go down in a blaze of glory.  No, his final act here would be one of petty spite.

His power streaked from his hand to the ground where the canisters and metal case sat.  I could see Faultline’s expression change behind her mask, saw her set her feet and start sprinting for the case before Skidmark’s power even took hold.

The metal box and canisters launched out over the edge of the platform and into the air above the crowd.  Only a few papers escaped the case at first, but his power had saturated the insides of the box.  Just after reaching the apex of its flight, his power seized the contents and the case expelled everything from within.  Papers slid off one another and into the air, forming a small cloud.

“Taylor!” Lisa shouted.

I knew what she wanted.  I drew clouds of my bugs from the ceiling, catching the papers that weren’t saturated with Skidmark’s power, collecting my bugs on them.  I could have maybe carried them directly to me with enough bugs, but I found it easier and more discreet to use the bugs and nudge the papers into floating on the air currents, like paper airplanes without the ‘airplane’ aspect of things.

As they got close, I took a firmer hold over them and moved them directly to us.  The papers crumpled as my hands closed around them.  Four or five pages.  I couldn’t be sure two might have been stuck together.

“We need an exit,” I said, as I hopped down from the wall.  I handed Lisa the papers.

Lisa nodded, “I’ve been thinking on that.  Look.”

She pointed at one corner of the mall.  It looked like any other section, heavily altered by Labyrinth’s powers.  The shops had been almost entirely consumed by Labyrinth’s powers, and were further shrouded by the floor-to-ceiling statues of human figures that stuck out of the walls.  In the corner Lisa was pointing at, there were male and female figures, expressions solemn, hands reaching, moving so slowly I might have thought it was my imagination.  The shop below was nearly gone, the entrance nearly covered up.

“Not seeing it,” I said.

“Look at how they’re standing.  The male figure is sticking out of the left wall, reaching with his right hand, the female figure is doing the opposite.  Look past them, at the corner.”

I did.  Between the figures was the point where the two exterior walls of the shopping center joined… nothing jumped out at me.  The walls were bare.

“I don’t see it,” I repeated, as she tugged on my arm and started running forward.  As a group we started moving toward the corner.  “What am I looking for?”

“Nothing!  There’s nothing there because her power isn’t extending to that corner.  She’s too far away, on the roof at the other side of the mall. Which means the interior of that shop isn’t affected by her power!”

However ominous the giant statues were, they didn’t react to our passing.  The exit was small, barely three feet across.  If Lisa hadn’t given me her reasoning, I wasn’t sure I would have had the guts to go through.  It was spooky to think about putting myself in a smaller space like the store interior and having it close tight behind me.

The bodyguards had to go through the doorway in a crouch, and Minor dropped Bryce to let the others drag him inside, just so he could fit.

As Lisa had suggested, the shop interior was largely unaffected by Labyrinth’s abilities, though it had been trashed by looters and the effects of Leviathan’s attack.  We found the back rooms, and Jaw kicked the door open.  From there, we made our way to the emergency exit, cleared rubble away and escaped into the parking lot.

A handful of others had found escape routes too, I noted.  Merchants were crossing the parking lot at a run, or helping wounded buddies limp away.  We weren’t so conspicuous.

I hurt.  I’d been cut on the arm, and I’d taken my lumps in too many other places to count.  My knuckles and fingertips were scratched raw from climbing the walls of the maze and moving rubble, my cheekbone throbbed where I’d been elbowed, and my fucking contact lenses were still irritating.  Never ever something I could get used to, even with other things taking up my attention.

But we’d made it.

We moved at a light jog for a good distance before Brooks called us to a stop.  We lay Bryce down for him to look at, and he decided we needed call for a pickup to get the boy more serious medical attention.

While we waited for the car to arrive, Lisa, and I sat down on a nearby set of stairs.  The other bodyguards were still on duty, still watching for trouble.  Charlotte stood a distance away, hugging herself.  She looked like she wanted to leave, but lacked the courage to go alone.

I was going to go reassure Charlotte, but Lisa retrieved the papers I’d given her and smoothed them out against her leg, and the widening of her eyes caught my attention.

“It’s a letter or contract from the people who made the stuff, talking to the guy who’d bought this stuff.  Let’s see, we have… page two.  Pages eighteen and nineteen.  Page twenty-seven.  Page sixteen.  Wonder if we can put a narrative together.”

“You probably could,” I said.

She glanced over one page, then handed it to me as she moved on to the others.  I read it.

client one, and clients two through six for confidentiality purposes.  For clarity, and to help ensure that the proper clients receive the intended products, we must restate facts for client one to double-check.  Client one is the negotiator for each of the clients, guardian of clients two and three and is not intending to consume the product.

This cannot be stressed enough.  Client one is not to share or use any of the product intended for other clients.  Ignoring this warning or failing to adhere to any other warnings or directions within this documentation will compel Cauldron to carry out the countermeasures and call in all debts noted in sections 8b and 8c on pages seventeen, eighteen and nineteen.

Clients two through six are noted here in as much detail as is allowed given the agreed-upon confidentiality.
■  Client two is the elder of client one’s two relatives noted here, female.
■  Client three is the younger of client one’s two relatives noted here, male.
■  Clients four and five are client two’s friends.  Client four is female.  Client five is male.
■  Client six is the friend of client three, male.
Both vials and protective containers are noted with the numbers specific to each client, each containing the requested upon products from the catalogue.

I wish to give written evidence of the verbal exchange between Cauldron and client one on February 18 2011.  Client one is informed that client four scored a borderline failure on the psychological testing and that results may lead to a Deviation scenario

“What’s on the other pages?” I asked.

“Sixteen is accounting.  Bank statements, confirmation of money exchanged, a list of what was bought.  Seven figures base price, more for this Nemesis program, still more for some powers.  Don’t have all the pages I’d need to get it, but I’m getting the sense the more unique powers and the stronger ones cost way more.”

‘The sense’, she’d said.  Her power filling in the blanks.

“Pages eighteen and nineteen refer back to something called the ‘Nemesis program’, potentially revoking it, they’re talking about debts, services required by this ‘Cauldron’ using the clients’ powers.  There’s a bunch of specifics on how the time, effort and risk of said services would factor in with one another.”

“People can buy powers?  How many people are doing this?”  I felt a touch offended at the idea.  I’d earned my powers through my hardships.  Most of us had.

“Enough that there’s a whole enterprise here with a private army.  There’s this bit that very politely notes that breaking the rules will get you hunted down and executed by Subjects, capital S.  Clients are warned that these guys are entirely loyal to Cauldron, will not accept bribes.  And these Subjects are apparently something different from Deviations.”

“Cauldron calls us Subjects.  The PRT calls us Case 53s,” a voice said from above us.  “Regular people call us monsters.”

Our bodyguards wheeled on the spot, a set of guns training on Newter, where he clung to the side of the building.  They had been covering the possible approach points from the ground.  They hadn’t been expecting trouble from directly above us.

“I heard of the Case 53 thing,” Lisa told him, backing away.  “The rest is new.  You work for them?  No.  But you’re related to this.”

“Gregor, Shamrock and I were test subjects.  Guinea pigs to test the new formulas, so the buyers don’t get fucked.  According to Shamrock, three in five of us don’t even survive.  One in five Subjects are retained and brainwashed so they can protect the business and enforce the contracts.  Shamrock was going to be one of them, but she escaped.  The rest of us have our memories removed, and we’re released as part of the ‘Nemesis program.'”

“Which is?”

Newter glanced at the papers, “I’d really like to know.”

“So you followed us.”

“Something about the way that one moved,” Newter pointed at Jaw with his tail, “Reminded me of some other mercenaries I’ve come across.  Don’t bother shooting, by the way, I’m too quick.”

Lisa gestured, and the bodyguards lowered their weapons.

Newter frowned, “I gathered you were mercenaries, decided to spy, but finding you’d taken the papers was a surprise.  Who are you?”

Lisa looked at me, without a ready answer for once.  I looked over at Charlotte and sighed.  She’d already put some of the pieces together.  She could probably figure it out from here.  I might as well control when that happened, so I wouldn’t get caught off guard further down the road.

I raised the piece of paper, as if to hand it to Newter, and I directed bugs to cluster on it.  In moments, the half of the paper closest to him was dark with various flies and creepy crawlies.

Charlotte’s eyes widened.  This was apparently her putting the last piece into place.

“Ah, Skitter,” he said.  Apparently my having saved his life once and gifting him a paper bag filled with money didn’t do much to ease his wariness.  He wasn’t any less guarded when he asked, “Why are you here?”

I pointed at the unconscious Bryce.  “An errand.  Didn’t mean to get in your way.  I only grabbed the papers as a spur of the moment thing, and because they would’ve been ruined if they’d just drifted all over in there.”

“That wasn’t much of a concern.  One of my teammates is collecting the papers as we talk, and I expect she’ll find nearly all of them.  The ones that she could find with some luck, anyways.”

“We’re honestly not looking for trouble, and  I have no problem with giving you these.” I banished the bugs on the paper and stepped forward to extend it towards him.

Lisa followed my cue, offering the others, “Wouldn’t mind copies of whatever you’ve got.”

Newter frowned.

Before he could say anything, Lisa hurried to add, “I’m good at figuring stuff out.  I’m a fountain of knowledge.  I want to know more about this stuff, and I could help you guys in exchange for what you’ve already got.”

“I’d have to ask Faultline.  She doesn’t like you.”

Lisa grinned.  “And I don’t like her.  But she’s not stupid, either.  She knows this is mutually beneficial.”  Lisa drew a pen from her pocket and scribbled on the back of one page.  “My number, if you’re interested.”

He took the sheets, looked them over, then rolled them up and stuck them in his back pants pocket.

“We’ll be in touch one way or another,” he said.

Then he was gone, around the side of the building and up to the roof in heartbeats.

I looked at Charlotte, and she shrank back, as if I could hurt her by looking at her.

Which was dumb.  It was fairly obvious to anyone who considered my power that I didn’t need to look at people to hurt them.  Not that I’d hurt her, anyways.  She’d done nothing to deserve any such thing, beyond being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Charlotte, Bryce and Sierra.  The civilians.  I still had to figure out how to deal with them.  My heart sank.  Social interaction: not where my talents lay.

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Infestation 11.6

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

“Is he for real?” I looked to Lisa for an answer.  “Can they do that?”

“Don’t think he’s lying.”

The crowd roared, and I turned to see why, just in time to see the aftermath of the first attack.  One of the Merchants in the ring had just bludgeoned someone with a length of pipe.  Backing away, he found someone he knew, and through some unspoken agreement, they drew together, each protecting the other’s back.

Others were having similar ideas.  Groups of friends were banding together, leaving others alone.  One of the loners found another guy without any friends around, shouted something I couldn’t hear, and they drew together.  His new ‘friend’ turned and struck him down from behind not two seconds later.  The traitor got his just reward when three young men and a grungy looking old man tackled him to the ground and started beating him.

At the corner nearest to us, a woman got smashed in the nose.  The spray of blood landed in the area of Skidmark’s power and shot straight back into the melee.

Inspired by this sight, a man who stood outside the ring grabbed a piece of rubble and threw it down at the edge of the ring.  The chunk of concrete flew into the massed people, striking a man who was crouching and trying to avoid the worst of the fighting.

This act started a chain reaction.  The audience turned on the man who’d launched the chunk of rubble, clustering around him, punching and kicking him, and shoving him to the ground.  Others were inspired by his idea, and did much the same thing, using Skidmark’s power to pelt the people in the arena.  One man helped by a kid who might have been his son upended a trash can on the glowing ground to send rotted food and other rubbish flying into the ring.  Others moved to stop them or shove anyone who got close enough onto the colored ground.  The violence was escalating and it didn’t look to be slowing down anytime soon.

“We should go,” Lisa said.  She turned to Jaw and ordered, “Bring the boy.”

Jaw grabbed Bryce by the shirt and hauled him to his feet.  He pointed at the girl who had been sitting next to Bryce, “And her?”

“Leave her.” Lisa called out, raising her voice to be heard over the screams and cheering.  She said something else, but I couldn’t make it out.

The crack of a gun being fired went off somewhere.  Instead of stopping the crowd, it seemed to provoke them, pushing those who hadn’t been participating into action, like runners who’d been waiting for a starter’s pistol.  It was as though the Merchants felt more secure with their hands around people’s throats than they did trying to get away.

Skidmark gripped the railing as he hunched over it, grinning a smile with teeth that seemed to be every color but white.  His eyes were almost glittering as he watched the chaos he’d set in motion.

We moved as a group, Lisa’s soldiers in a tight circle around us with Bryce, Lisa, the rescued girl and me in the center.  We made our way toward the nearest exit, but our way was barred by an unfolding brawl between two groups a good distance from the main spectacle.  Rivals?  Enemies seeing an opportunity to exact vengeance for some past event?

The girl who’d been on the bench with Bryce ran for the thick of the melee surrounding the ring.  She was shouting, almost screeching, “Thomas!  Mom!”

Bryce struggled in an attempt to go after her, but Jaw held him firm.

I almost missed what happened next.  A woman from the group fighting in front of us ran, and a band of young men charged after her, which brought them just in front of us.

We collectively backed out of the way, but Bryce had other intentions.  The boy wrenched out of Jaw’s grip and threw his shoulder into the small of Senegal’s back.  The man was only barely able to keep from stumbling forward into the charging Merchants, but with his attention elsewhere, Bryce managed to slip past.

I joined Minor and Brooks in giving chase, and though Minor was bigger and stronger, I had the advantage of a slight build.  I ducked between the people and followed Bryce into the thick of the ‘audience’.

Bryce had reached his girlfriend, and wrapped his arms around her.  Still holding her, he turned to see us approaching.  I was in the lead, and Minor close behind me.

He looked the other way, past the glowing perimeter of Skidmark’s arena, and I followed his gaze to where a middle-aged woman with bleached blond hair and a taller black man with a scar on his lips stood.

I recognized them from Sierra’s description.  They were the same people who had attacked the church.

The man -Thomas?- beckoned with a wave of his arm, and Bryce and his girlfriend ran, dropping to the ground as they touched the border of the ring.

“No!” I shouted, as the effect of Skidmark’s power sent them careening into the ongoing free-for-all.  My voice was lost in the cacophony of the screaming, shouting, hollering crowd.

I stared helplessly at the unfolding scene.  The two teenagers managed to get to their feet and gather together with Thomas, the mother, and one or two others.  They were soon lost in the jumble of people that were all punching, kicking and strangling one another, spurred on by adrenaline, self-preservation, alcohol, stimulants and greed.  There was little enough room that when someone fell, they were trampled by those that were still fighting.

Minor reached me and ushered me back to the others, and we backed as far away from the fighting as we could.

The moment I saw Lisa, I asked her, “Should I-” I left my question unfinished.  Should I use my bugs?

“No.  The moment an enemy makes their presence known, Skidmark might try to break this up and send the crowd after any unfamiliar faces.  Not saying they’d get us, but they could, and there’d be other victims too.”

“Fuck.” I looked at the ongoing fighting.  “We should do something.”

“I’m open to ideas,” she said.

“Can we- can’t we run?” the girl we’d rescued asked.

“Look, um, what’s your name?” Lisa said.

“Charlotte.”

“Charlotte, we came to get that kid.  My friend feels it’s important, and she’s usually got a pretty damn good reason for doing what she does.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“So it’s up to her, what we do here”

What were our options.  Using Lisa’s power?  I wasn’t sure how it applied here.  If she had a way of addressing the audience, maybe there was something she could say to turn the tide, or turn them against their leaders… but the only way to do that would be to get the microphone Skidmark had.

We had Lisa’s soldiers, but no matter how well-trained they were, there was a certain point where fighters in quantity overcame fewer fighters of higher quality in a brawl.  Not to mention that some of the Merchants had guns.  The great equalizer.  I was pretty sure Lisa’s soldiers would be packing, but the problem with guns was that they drew attention, and we definitely did not want to fall under too much scrutiny.

This was what the Merchants were.  Even less organized than the ABB, they were humans reduced to pack behavior, with Skidmark and his people acting like kids who would put animals in a cage and shake it set them on each other, instead of house-training them.  None of this made the Merchants any less dangerous, though.  Just the opposite.

I had no options here, in the face of this.  The most I could do would be to use my power on the entire crowd, and that would turn this already disturbed situation into something else entirely.

“We hold our ground,” I told Lisa, “Unless things get bad enough that we’re at risk.  We wait for the fight to end, we see if we can find him, and we make our exit.  Sticking around also means we can get more info on what Skidmark’s got in those vials and where he got them.”

“Okay,” Lisa confirmed.  “That works.”

The minutes that followed were among the longest I’d experienced in my life.  It wasn’t a tedious, slow, agonizing passage of time like I’d experienced in the hospital bed, waiting to find out if I was being arrested or if my back was broken.  No, these minutes stretched on because there was so much going on, and I couldn’t lose my focus, look away or pause for contemplation for a second.

Different groups tried to pick fights with us.  It was nonsensical, given that we weren’t even in the ring, but adrenaline was running high and we stood out because we were apart from the rest of the fighting, isolated.  We had stuff they could take, and warm bodies they could… well, warm bodies.  It was enough.

We tried to hold a formation, with the bodyguards holding the outer perimeter and the less experienced combatants, myself included, in the center.  It quickly became apparent that these things didn’t really hold up in a real combat situation.

For one thing, our enemies quickly figured out what we were trying to do and tried to force Lisa’s soldiers to break ranks.  They would hang back and throw things, or stay just out of reach as they held weapons at the ready, looking for a moment when our front-line fighters were distracted or otherwise occupied.  It forced Lisa’s soldiers to move out of formation to deliver with the enemy with a few decisive hits, then back up to close the gap in the line.

That was the plan, anyways, but sometimes the opponent was too nimble to be taken down, and other times, they delayed Lisa’s people enough that someone could slip through the line and attack one of our less capable combatants, myself included.

I held a knife in each hand – my combat knife and the one I’d taken when we’d rescued Charlotte.  When I was forced to fight, I avoided lethal strikes.  I had a sense of where the major arteries were and avoided them, even when I knew I could make a quick cut at someone’s wrists or neck.  Holding back didn’t do me any favors, and I got smashed in the left ear once, struck in the gut and chest a few times, and a nail that was stuck through someone’s makeshift club sliced the back of my upper arm.

Still, Lisa’s soldiers afforded me time to breathe.  I remained vigilant for any break in ranks and incoming attacks.

My arm smarted where I’d been cut, and my ear throbbed.  I swallowed hard, glancing towards the ring, where people lay in heaps, and only two-thirds of the combatants were either injured, unconscious, dead or playing dead.

Feeling pressured, Senegal reached for his gun, but was forced to duck back and to the side to avoid being bludgeoned by a heavy metal lock one of the Merchants had clipped to the end of a length of chain.  The follow-up swing knocked his weapon from his hand.  Someone else, a stocky man with eyebrows like caterpillars, moved through the gap to charge for me bare handed.

Could be worse.  I set my balance and readied to strike with my knives, waiting until he closed in and-

And I was somewhere else.  It was like remembering something profound that I’d forgotten.  I’d seen this before.

Huge creatures filled my perception.

It was hard to say how I knew they were two different creatures, when each of them existed in multiple parallel spaces all at once.  Countless mirror moved in sync with one another, each occupying the same space, just as solid as the others, differing in how they moved and the worlds they interacted with.  Each of them folded, unfolded, expanded and shifted without taking more or less space.  I couldn’t wrap my head around it, even as I felt there was something like a pattern there.

Some distant part of me realized I’d seen something similar to that folding and unfolding once, in a much simpler form.  A tesseract, a fourth dimensional analogue to the cube.  The difference was that while the cube had six flat faces, each ‘side’ of the tesseract had six cubes, each connected to the others another at each corner.  To perceptions attuned to three dimensions, it seemed to constantly shift, each side folding or reshaping so that they could all simultaneously be perfect cubes, and each ‘side’ was simultaneously the center cube from which all the others extended outward.

The primary difference between these things and the tesseract was that these beings I was looking at were alive, and they weren’t simple models I was viewing on a computer screen.  They were living entities, lifeforms.  There wasn’t anything I could relate to any biology I knew or understood, nothing even remotely recognizable, but they were undoubtedly alive.  They were enigmas of organs that were also limbs and also the exteriors of the creatures, each simultaneously some aspect of the entity as it flowed through empty space.  It didn’t help that the things were the size of small planets, and the scope of my perceptions was so small.  It helped even less that parts of them seemed to move in and out of the other dimensions or realities where the mirror images were.

The pair moved in sync, spiraling around one another in what I realized was a double helix.  Each revolution brought them further and further apart.  Innumerable motes drifted from their bodies as they moved, leaving thick trails of shed tissues or energies painting the void of empty space in the wake of their spiraling dance, as though they were made of a vast quantity of sand and they were flying against a gale force headwind.

When they were too far away to see one another, they communicated, and each message was enormous and violent in scope, expressed with the energy of a star going supernova.  One ‘word’, one idea, for each message.

Destination.  Agreement.  Trajectory.  Agreement.

They would meet again at the same place.  At a set time, they would cease to expand their revolution and contract once again, until they drew together to arrive at their meeting place.

-the Merchant caught me off guard, as I reeled from the image of what I’d just seen.  He caught me across the cheekbone with his elbow, and pain shot through my entire skull, bringing me halfway back to reality.  Someone grabbed me, her chest soft against my back, her grip around my shoulders painfully tight.  Charlotte?  Or Lisa?

The shift from what I had seen to relative normalcy was so drastic that I could barely grasp what I was sensing.  I opened my mouth to say something and then closed it.  I couldn’t unfocus or take in the scene as a whole, as the entirety of my attention was geared for seeing… what had I been looking at?  It escaped me as I tried to remember.  I shook my head, striving and failing to see past the countless minute details or the shape of things: the way the Merchant’s facial features seemed to spread out as he advanced towards me, the contraction of his body as he bent down, the nicks and brown of rust on the knife he picked up, the one I’d dropped.  I still held my good knife.

I closed my eyes, trying to blink and fix the distorted focus, and it only helped a little.  I looked to my left for help, saw Minor and Jaw with their hands full, their movements too hard for my eyes to follow.  To my right?  Lisa was slumped over, and Brooks held her.  Merchants were closing in on them.  Senegal stood in front of me, and though his gun was gone, he was using the length of chain that he’d taken from one of the Merchants to drive our opponents back and buy us breathing room.  It wasn’t enough.  Three capable fighters weren’t able to protect seven people in total.

I used my power, and wrenched my eyes closed.  It helped more than anything, as the tactility of my swarm sense gave me a concrete, solid sense of the things around us.  Many of the Merchants had lice on their skin, in their clothes and on their hair.  A small handful of flies buzzed around the area.  With a bit of direction to guide those flies to where I needed them, I had a solid sense of my surroundings and what the enemy combatants were doing.

With panic and disorientation nearly overwhelming me, I had to resist the urge to use my power to call a swarm together.  Using this many bugs, to get a sense of what was going on?  It wouldn’t attract undue attention.  I let bugs gather on the ceiling of the mall, drawing them down through the large crack where part of the roof had caved in, as a just-in-case.

I kept my eyes closed as I fought back, pulling out of Charlotte’s grip to strike at the Merchant, cutting him across the forehead.  He growled something I couldn’t make out and charged me.  Knowing I wouldn’t be able to beat him in any contest of strength, I threw myself to one side, landing hard on the ground and nearly tripping Senegal.  I brought my knees to my chest, and then I kicked outward to strike him in the calf with both heels.

I wasn’t thinking straight.  I should have predicted that he’d fall on top of me.  His shoulder hit my chest, his body weight heavy on top of me.  His knife hand was trapped under his body, near my waist.  I was more fortunate, with my right arm free, and I pulled the knife’s point across his ribs, aiming for a shallow cut that hurt more than it injured.  He screamed and dropped his weapon, and I scrabbled to slide it back towards Charlotte, Brooks and Lisa.

Senegal turned and kicked my attacker away from me.  While Senegal used the lock on the end of the length of chain to strike the man in the jaw, I tried to stand.

Stupidly, I’d opened my eyes as I stood, instead of trusting to my power to keep a sense of the immediate situation.  Motion sickness hit me like a sack of bricks, and I nearly fell over.  Charlotte caught me to keep me from tipping over, only narrowly avoiding stabbing herself on my good knife.

“Oh my god,” she murmured.  “You’re…”

Had I given myself away?  I hadn’t used that many bugs.

No, it was something else.  I could tell from the flies I’d placed on her head that she was looking up.  Her attention turned to me, then Lisa, and then back to the higher object.  I forced my eyes open, controlling my movement and my breathing to reduce the threat of nausea, and saw she was looking at Skidmark’s platform.

Skidmark was slumped against the railing, struggling to his feet.  Squealer, Mush, Trainwreck and their other subordinates weren’t faring much better.

Skidmark grabbed his microphone and broke into laughter, the nasty chuckles echoing through the area.

“Seems like one of you assdrips just earned his stripes,” he cackled.

I saw a flash of white from within the ring and it dawned on me what had just happened.

Another flash sparked in the ring, then a second.  Both were in close proximity to a boy no older than I was.  White smoke poured from his eyes, nose, ears and mouth, with smaller traces flowing from his scalp, stirring his hair.

He flinched as someone whirled on him and raised their weapon, and a burst of white light appeared two feet to the other person’s left.  A miss.  The person swayed toward where the flash had been, as if it had pulled at him.  The glowing boy stuck one arm out, towards his target, and another flash of white appeared a yard behind his target.

The man charged, and the boy tried a third time.  The blast intersected the man, and when it faded, the man’s upper arm, forearm, elbow, and the right side of his torso and hip were gone.  Blood gushed from the area where his flesh had been carved away by the light, and his dismembered hand dropped to his feet.

The boy screamed in some combination of horror, pain and rage, and flashes of the whiteness erupted randomly around him.  Some caught people who were lying prone on the ground, others hit standing combatants, while most simply hit thin air.

A trigger event.  I’d just seen someone have their trigger event.

But what had happened to Skidmark’s group, Tattletale and I?  I could vaguely remember something, thought about trying to put it into words, as if describing it could help call it to mind in a way that I could describe it, but they disappeared as I reached for them.  I was reminded of Imp’s power.  Before I could get a handle on it, I’d forgotten entirely, and I was struggling to even remember what I was trying to do, my thoughts muddling the idea of it with my attempts to get my bearings.

And Charlotte, who was helping me stay balanced on my feet, was staring at me wide-eyed.  I remembered her exclamation of surprise.

If everyone on stage with powers had been affected, and Lisa and I were reacting the same way, it couldn’t be that hard for her to put the pieces together.  Charlotte knew.

I looked to Lisa, for advice or ideas, but she was still slumped over, and she wasn’t recovering.  Why?  If this was some kind of psychic backlash from someone else having their trigger event, had she maybe been hit harder because of her power?

I hurried to her side, while Brooks turned to rejoin the fight and help re-establish our front lines.

“Lisa!” I shook her.  She looked at me, her eyes unfocused.

“They’re like viruses,” she said.  Her voice was thin, as if she were talking to herself.  “And babies.  And gods.  All at the same time.”

“You’re not making any sense, Lisa.  Come on, get it together.  Things are pretty ugly right now.”

“Almost there.  It’s like it’s at the tip of my tongue, but it’s my brain, not my tongue,” her voice was thin, barely audible, as though she was talking to herself and not to me.  “Still fillin’ in the blanks.”

I slapped her lightly across the face, “Lisa!  Need you to come back to reality, not go further into your delirium.”

The slap seemed to do it.  She shook her head, like a dog trying to shake off water.  “Taylor?”

“Come on,” I helped her to her feet.  She almost lost her balance, but she was still recuperating faster than I had.

Charlotte took over the job of ensuring Lisa was okay, and I moved forward to help back up the other guys.  With a knife in each hand, I stood behind the trio of Brooks, Senegal and Minor, ready to stop anyone who tried to slip by.  I kept my eyes closed.  I could manage so long as I didn’t try to move and keep my eyes open at the same time.  It was swiftly receding.

The last group to tackle us had largely been beaten back.  Another group made some threatening moves, but they seemed to be in rougher shape than us.  Their leader was an amazon of a woman with a wild look in her eyes and matted hair, and I could see concern flash across her face as she looked us over and noted the disparity in the condition of our groups.  It struck me she was in a bad spot, knowing her group would be thrashed if she took us on, but at the same time, she couldn’t order her guys to back off without looking like a coward.

Whatever decision she would have made, we didn’t get to find out.

“Stop!” Skidmark hollered into his microphone.

It took a full minute for everyone to break off in the fighting and back off to a point where they didn’t feel immediately threatened.

So many injured.  How many of his own people had Skidmark just lost in this stunt?

Did he care?  He stood to gain five new parahumans for his group.  Six if you counted the guy who’d had his trigger event.

“If we wait any longer, there’s only going to be one of you cockbiters left in the ring!  We got five of you fuckers left, and that’s all we need!”

Only five?  There had been at least eighty in the ring at the beginning, and still more had joined the fight afterward, one way or another.

I could see the remaining five as the audience moved back to give them space.  A family of three, it seemed, a woman with a gaping wound in her stomach, her hand crimson where it pressed against the injury, and the boy who’d had his trigger event.  I didn’t see Bryce or his new ‘family’ in the mist of the people retreating from the scene.

A flash of light marked another uncontrolled use of the new cape’s power.  It struck close to the ground, removing the leg of someone who lay unconscious or dead on the ground, but it left the ground perfectly intact.  Why?  When it consumed clothing and flesh but not the building itself?

“Boy,” Skidmark pointed, “Approach the stage!”

The ring flashed and disappeared.  The boy turned, as though in a daze.  He flinched as another burst of light sparked a good ten feet away.  He limped toward Skidmark and stared up at the Merchant’s leader.

“You’re gonna need a name, kid, if you’re going to join the Merchant’s upper circle.”

The boy blinked, looking around, as if he didn’t quite understand.  Was he in shock?

“Come on, now.  Let’s hurry it up.”

There was a spark of the boy’s power, and the flash removed a beachball-sized section of rubble beneath Skidmark’s ‘stage’.  The boy stared at it.

“E-Eraser?” he answered, making it a question.

“Like the puny pink nipple on the end of a pencil?  Fuck that,” Skidmark snarled.

“Um,” the boy drew out the noise, all too aware of his audience, probably unable to think straight.

“Scrub!” Skidmark shouted, and the crowd roared.

How in the hell was Scrub better than Eraser?  In what insane reality?

Skidmark waited until the noise of the crowd had died down before he raised the vial, “No point in you having a drink of this shit.  Wouldn’t do sweet fuck all.  Pick someone.”

The boy stared at Skidmark, processing the words.  He flinched as another flash occurred near him.  A hand clutching one elbow, he turned toward the crowd.  When he spoke, his voice was shaky, “R-Rick!  Doug!”

Two people emerged from the massed people who stood around where the audience had been.  One had blood running from his scalp to cover half his face, while the other was coughing violently, blood thick around his mouth and nose.

“Can…  Can I give it to both?  Can they share it?” the boy with the glowing hair asked.

Skidmark chuckled, and it was a nasty sound with very little humor to it.  “No, no.  You definitely don’t want to do that.  Pick one.”

“Doug.  Doug can have it.”

The boy who was coughing looked up, surprised.  The one with blood on his face, Rick, suddenly looked angry.  “What the fuck!?”

A flash of white high above and to the right of the boy with the powers made everyone nearby cringe.  It tore away a chunk of a metal beam that was helping to support the damaged roof.  People were giving a wider berth to the boy with the powers.  I suspected his abilities and his apparent lack of control were the only things keeping Rick from running up and punching him.

Was this division & the hard feelings on purpose?  If it was intentional, if Skidmark was dividing his allies from their former groups and cliques so they couldn’t gang up against him, I’d have to adjust my estimation of him.  Not that I’d like him any more, or even respect him, but I’d give him credit for intelligence.

“You didn’t help me when I got pulled into the ring,” the boy with the powers told Rick, “Doug at least tried.  He gets my prize.”

As Doug approached the stage, taking the long way to keep his distance from his newly empowered ‘friend’, I became aware that my bugs were dying on the roof, where I’d gathered a swarm in preparation during the chaos.  A patch here, a patch there.

No.  Not dying.  They were stunned, their senses obliterated by bursts of chaos and false sensations.  I had an idea of what it was.  I’d felt the same thing before.

I turned to Lisa.  Moving my left hand from the scratch on the back of my upper arm, I discreetly pointed up and murmured, “There’s company on the way.  We should go before there’s trouble.”

She looked up, then nodded assent.  Tapping Minor on the shoulder, she gave him a hand signal, and he notified the others.  We began moving.

The person on the roof was joined by others.  Some bugs died beneath their footfalls.  More bugs were stunned as the first individual crawled forward on all fours, around the lip of the roof and onto the ceiling of the mall, hanging off of it by his hands.  With the building largely unlit, I couldn’t make him out.

Newter was here, and the rest of Faultline’s crew.

We reached the first exit, and no sooner had we reached for the door than the handle disappeared.  The gaps separating the door from the wall filled in, as though wax matching the color of the door was dripping through the gaps.  There were similar things happening at the other entrances, I saw, the doors fading into the walls, becoming little more than discolored blotches.  Nobody else had seemed to notice, with their attention wholly focused on the woman who was making her way down from the stage with the vial for ‘Doug’.

When the fighting had started, Lisa had dissuaded me from using my power, out of a concern that the ensuing riot and chaos would get people hurt, and that the mob might start to hunt for strangers in their ranks.

I had no idea why they were here, but it seemed Faultline was about to crash the party in a far more direct way than we had.  We were about to see that bad scenario unfold, and our escape routes had vanished.

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter