Cell 22.6

Posted on May 16, 2013 by wildbow

591

Dragon’s craft closed the distance to the rooftop’s edge, using precise adjustments to almost freeze in mid-air as it hovered. It was gentle and graceful in comparison to Defiant’s squat, durable tank. I wondered how intentional that was. Just looking at it, I had little doubt that it was even longer range than any of the other models I’d crossed paths with. I was put in mind of a sniper rifle, long, narrow, sleek and focused in its almost singular design. The stability it had fit with the idea. A stark contrast to Defiant’s craft, which seemed more like the type to be in the thick of a fight, fighting alongside him and complementing his fighting style.

Not that the aesthetics of Dragon’s work was really a priority right this moment.

“A mistake,” I said.

“We know how she operates,” Defiant said. “Dragon, Miss Militia and I have each worked directly under Alexandria at some point. It’s something of an unofficial policy to have anyone that’s being considered for a leadership position working under each member of the triumvirate for a time.”

“Must have been real fun for you guys when you found out what they’re really like, last month.”

“Not fun at all,” Miss Militia said. She had to stoop to exit the ship and step onto the roof’s edge.

“We’ve seen how Alexandria handles interrogations,” Defiant said. “She reads microexpressions. Shapes every statement and action to get the responses she wants.”

“And she wanted this?” I asked.

Defiant shook his head. “Knowing her, this was a gambit. It wouldn’t do to have one workable outcome. She pushes you, and if you attack, she has cause to finish you off or send you straight to the birdcage without a trial. If you don’t attack, she knows she has leverage against you and the Undersiders. She’d see which way you were leaning, then refine her approach further.”

“And here I was,” Miss Militia mused, “Thinking you didn’t have a head for this sort of thing, Defiant.”

“I’ve had help,” he said, glancing at Dragon.

“But she didn’t get either of those results,” I said. “At least, not like she wanted. For all her brains, for all this apparent ability to read me, she… didn’t understand what my friends mean to me.”

“I think she understood well enough,” Defiant said. “But the mistake, the tragedy in all of this, was that she didn’t get an accurate read on you. Much, I expect, for the same reason my lie detector could never seem to. She was working with bad information, and she pushed you too far, too fast.”

An eerie parallel to mistakes Tattletale had made in the past. And I killed Alexandria and Tagg because of it.

“And… my friends? Just to make sure. They’re okay?”

“Alexandria didn’t touch them. The ones she brought into the building were body doubles, and the real Undersiders are poised to attack in-” Miss Militia reached for her phone.

“Fifteen minutes,” Defiant said.

“Fifteen minutes,” Miss Militia said. “In the meantime, we’re trying to deal with your lawyer, who got his hands on the footage of the interrogation and is threatening to bring hell down on our heads-”

Earning his pay, I thought.

She continued without pause. “-And we still have to find a way to handle this without a complete PR catastrophe. Once the media gets hold of this, we lose the ability to control the situation.”

“Dragon is managing the details as we speak,” Defiant said. “She can isolate and track digital communication, but she can’t stop the spread of word of mouth. Chevalier’s doing what he can on his end, but the PRT agents that confirmed Alexandria’s death won’t be able to keep their mouths shut forever, not with something as grave as this.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Miss Militia said.

“Fourteen,” Defiant cut in, correcting her.

“Fourteen minutes,” she said, “That’s our working timeline. Even if Skitter were to call off the Undersiders, we have information leaks.”

“Then what if we let it leak?” I asked. “We say ‘fuck it, the PRT is fucked, Alexandria is a monster, let people figure it out for themselves.'”

“You don’t really want that,” Miss Militia said.

“The system is fucked,” I said. “Everything that’s happened, it’s taught me a few things. People are fucked up, for one thing. And any organization that has people in control is going to be fucked on an exponential level. But for all that, people are a hell of a lot tougher than we give them credit for. We survive. We innovate. So yeah, I’m seriously thinking along those lines. I wouldn’t mind seeing the PRT burn, damn it, because I think we’ll make it regardless.”

“Why?” Miss Militia asked. “What changed your mind from the moment you decided to surrender? Your friends weren’t at risk, you already knew something about Tagg and Alexandria.”

“You,” I told her. “You were part of it.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Exactly.”

“You can’t blame me for standing out of the way. You had a plan, Alexandria told me she had a plan, and nobody shared anything substantial with me. I couldn’t take a step without risking that I’d get in someone’s way.”

I frowned.

“You’re hurt, you’re angry, you’re still reeling from what you thought happened,” Miss Militia said. “Fine. That’s fair. But we don’t have time to work through that. You said you wanted to work together, to compromise. Do you stand by that? Are you willing to at least try a workable solution? Or are you going to keep fighting us?”

I glanced at Defiant. “I’ll hear you out.”

“We need you to call your team and get them to stand down. We can’t have bloodshed, and we can’t have Tattletale divulging critical information.”

I folded my arms. “Meet me halfway.”

“Twelve minutes,” Defiant said. “This isn’t the time to be hard-nosed. You don’t want this fight any more than we do. If this happens, your team will be at a very real risk of death or arrest. Three of the A.I. models, Dragon’s, mine, the Brockton Bay heroes and no less than ten visiting heroes.”

“This is exactly the time to be hard-nosed. The Undersiders get left alone. Those are my terms. Figure it the fuck out.”

There was a pause, an exchange of looks between Defiant and Dragon.

“We’re talking to Chevalier and the Chief Director,” Defiant said.

“Good,” I answered him.

A few seconds passed. I glanced at the sun, dipping beneath the mountains to the west.

“Miss Militia will fill in as an interim PRT director,” a male voice sounded from the speaker at Dragon’s shoulder. Chevalier. “I’ll arrange it. We have leverage, with the current state of emergency and the issues that are liable to come up with the announcement that we can make use of the portal.“

“And I’ll remain hands off, unless I’m replaced or I have no other choice?” Miss Militia said.

“We’ll keep you in position for as long as we can, postpone any changes or replacements until people get more comfortable with the idea. With luck, we can segue into keeping you in position on a permanent basis. Failing that, we tap someone sympathetic to our aims.”

“Damn it,” Miss Militia muttered. “I feel like my lifespan just got cut short. Double the work, too.”

“We’ll figure out a way to make it work,” Defiant said. He looked at me. “Satisfactory?”

“Yes. Phone?”

Miss Militia tapped out a password, then handed me hers.

I dialed Tattletale’s number.

When Tattletale didn’t pick up on the first ring, I felt my heart jump into my throat. She’d never done that.

“‘Lo,” Tattletale said. I let myself breathe a sigh of relief. She continued, “Call display says PRT Phone server. Who am I talking to?“

“It’s me,” I said.

“You! You wouldn’t believe how worried I’ve been. Or the headache I have. You know they gave you bad info?”

“I know,” I said.

“The stuff you were writing, it didn’t match up. Tried to tell you, but you couldn’t understand me.”

“I know,” I said. “Just tell me… everyone’s safe?”

“Everyone’s accounted for. Shit, what did they do?”

“Tattletale-”

“They tried something. What happened?”

“Tattletale,” I said, raising my voice a notch. “Time’s short. Call off the hounds, literal or otherwise. Delay.”

“Delay?”

“They’re making temporary offers,” I said, eyeing the heroes, “We can make some temporary concessions.”

“Okay. But I can’t hold back some of the bastards we put into play. I can stop them, but that’s it. They’ll leave, and we’re that much weaker.”

“That’s fine,” I told her. “These guys are at a bit of a disadvantage too.”

“Okay… let’s see… alright. Holding off for… half an hour? Adding fifteen minutes to the clock?” Tattletale asked.

“Longer?” I asked.

“Any longer and more mercenaries start walking away, deciding to take the half we paid up front.”

“That’ll do, then, I guess.” I said, giving the heroes a thumbs up.

“You said they’re weaker, huh? So it’s true. I didn’t want to use my power to verify… but the rumor mill is right? Alexandria bit it?“

“Yes. I-” I stopped.

“You? You did it?” Tattletale asked. “Guys-”

Her voice faded as she turned away from the phone.

“Don’t tell them,” I said, once I realized what she was saying.

It was too late. I could hear jeers and whooping from Regent and Imp in the background. I couldn’t make out everything Grue was saying, but I caught something along the lines of ‘Jesus H. Fucking Christ.‘

“It’s too late to matter, honey bear,” Tattletale said. “I don’t have much juice powerwise, but I don’t need any to know this much. Word’s already out about Alexandria.”

“Word’s out about Alexandria,” I said, for the benefit of the heroes.

Defiant folded his arms.

“Anything else I can do?” she asked.

“Stay near a phone. Thank you,” I said. And keep the jailbreak specialists on hand, I thought. Not that I could say that with the Protectorate members around me.

“One disaster averted,” Miss Militia said.

“Held at bay,” Defiant said. “The word’s spreading. It’s starting to pop up on isolated channels.”

“We’ll need to get our official word out first,” Miss Militia said.

“What do you even say?” I asked. “She’s dead.”

“And that will make a lot of people lose hope,” Miss Militia said. “We have other ideas, but we need something bigger, more concrete.”

“But she’s dead,” I said. “The only way to change the reaction is to convince everyone we have a winning game plan anyways. That the PRT isn’t fucked, which it is.”

“The A.I. craft,” Defiant said, turning to look at the Pendragon. “Expendable, versatile, devastating in their own right, and there’s image attached to them. They’ll get the public’s imagination fired up.”

Miss Militia shook her head. “There’ll be doubts, it’s not enough. Behemoth can generate electromagnetic waves that wipe out electronics. Even many reinforced electronics, if he’s close enough. The Simurgh can scramble coding. We don’t just have to convince the public. We need to convince the heroes, and they know these things.”

“And they know what the difference is going to be, without Alexandria on the front lines,” Defiant said. He sighed audibly. “Four times now, she’s been the deciding factor in beating the Simurgh back early. Once with Leviathan, when I was new to the Protectorate.”

“We can reduce the impact of the loss with careful word choice and a good speech,” Miss Militia said. “If Skitter is willing to call off her other dogs.”

I glanced at the phone in my hand. “Okay.”

“No demands this time?”

“Believe it or not, I want to fix things,” I said, as I dialed Mr. Calle’s number. “We’re on the same side here. The difference is I consider my friends to be a part of a workable scenario. I have my issues with you guys, but I’m extending the benefit of a doubt again, and I’m hoping it doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass. Again.”

The phone rang. Mr. Calle answered. “Quinn Calle speaking.”

“It’s Taylor Hebert.”

“Ah, excellent. I’d feared they’d executed you or sent you to be incarcerated.”

“I’m sorry for, um, that,” I said.

“They had one of your good friends in a body bag, or they led you to believe they did. You reacted as many would, with anger and pain. You were simply, how to put it… better equipped than the rest of us mere mortals to express that anger and pain.”

“I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d left.”

“Rest assured, Ms. Hebert, I’ve dealt with worse.”

“Okay,” I said. “I need you to back off on whatever threats you’re directing at the PRT.”

“No can do, I’m afraid.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because, right at this moment, you’re in the custody of the heroes. They’ve given you a phone, no doubt, and they’ve caught you at an emotionally vulnerable moment. For your benefit, I can’t assume you’re of sound mind or that you aren’t being coerced.”

“How do we change your mind?”

“I wouldn’t mind an invitation to the discussion.”

“We’re sending a vehicle your way,” I said. “Where are you?”

“The lovely little shop with the donuts I visited this morning.”

“Okay,” I said, putting my hand over the mouthpiece, “He says-”

I stopped. The armored suit Miss Militia had left was already moving, heading directly for my territory. She’d been listening in.

“Never mind.”

“Let’s talk about our game plan,” Miss Militia said. “We’ve got the peripheral stuff in the works. You’re bringing the suits in?”

“Yes,” Defiant said. “She is. Chevalier is on the way as well, and we’ve contacted the media.”

Miss Militia nodded. “The two major crises are being held at bay, thanks to Skitter’s cooperation. We can’t keep the word from spreading through other channels, so let’s cover every base we can. We only get one shot at this.”

“Key points being Skitter’s role in this, and addressing how we deal with Alexandria’s demise,” Defiant said.

“My role?” I asked. “I thought you wanted me to call off the attack?”

“No,” Miss Militia said. “There’s more.”

I narrowed my eyes, very conscious of the fact that there were three rather powerful capes and one mechanized suit in my immediate vicinity. “What more?”

She glanced at Defiant, then back to me. “We’d like you to be there for the conference with the media. Dragon’s going over footage, and so long as your lawyer doesn’t release the unedited content, we can hide the worst of the details from the media. Shape the narrative.”

“You’re lying,” I said.

“We’re revising the truth,” she said. She paused. “Yes. We’re lying.”

“And you want me to participate in that?”

“Yes. Your presence will lend a degree of legitimacy to what we’re saying. We’re on opposite sides, in the public eye, making it all the more meaningful if we agree on what happened.”

“Are you fighting to keep the PRT going, or are you working to rebuild it?” I asked.

“Rebuild it,” she said. No hesitation.

“And you’re doing it by starting with a lie. Just like they did.”

“Yes,” she said. Again, there was no hesitation. “There’s no pretty, perfect answers, and concessions have to be made. Questions and issues on a greater scale mean more repercussions for failure, and they call for bigger concessions if we want to ensure success.”

“And this is a big event, a lot of power,” I said. “Big concessions?”

“Yes,” she said. She looked ten times as tired as she said it.

I folded my arms. I couldn’t disagree. I didn’t like it. But I’d been a leader. I’d made shady calls. I’d hurt people. Had lied, cheated, stolen, killed.

The sun was gone, hidden by the mountains, and the clouds were changing from purple to black. How long until the new deadline? Twenty minutes?

I could see Defiant, saw him conversing with Dragon and Miss Militia.

I saw how he folded his arms, still holding his spear, so it rested against his shoulder. How he planted his feet further apart. A warrior’s stance.

It inspired a memory, of my first night out in costume. The bad guy lying defeated on the street below, the city quiet around us, the dark sky overhead, with only meager light illuminating us. Framing the situation, talking about options and priorities.

Not so different from the scene here. The villain wasn’t here. Alexandria had fallen a distance away. But the city was quiet, the area still blockaded, the sky was dark, and the topic of discussion…

I thought of something, one moment in that night’s discussion when I’d thought that maybe Armsmaster could live up to the reputation, that he could really truly be someone who I could look up to.

“Hey,” I said.

Heads turned my way.

“As far as Alexandria goes, what if we turn it around?”

“Turn it around?”

“Way back, when I first started out in costume, I had a talk with Armsmaster. He told me that I should be happy I was mistaken for a villain, because it meant I didn’t have to fight the Undersiders. This was before I joined them. It reminded me of how I’d been trying to deal with the shit I was going through back then, turning negatives into positives. I think we can do that here.”

“How?” Miss Militia asked. She glanced at Dragon’s craft, just now arriving to bring my lawyer to us.

“So long as we’re lying,” I said, “Let’s go wholesale. We present Alexandria as the villain she was.”

“That’ll make the situation worse,” Miss Militia said.

“It depends on how we present the idea,” I said.

Dragon’s suit once again came to a stop at the edge of the roof, as it had when it had delivered Miss Militia. It turned sideways, and the body opened, revealing my lawyer, looking more stressed than I’d seen him, in the midst of a rather compact cockpit.

Mr. Calle accepted Miss Militia’s offered hand in stepping down to the rooftop, and seemed to relax the instant his feet touched solid ground.

“Whoo,” he said. “Never let it be said that my job isn’t an adventure. You’re well, Ms. Hebert?”

“I am.”

“You haven’t made any deals?”

“Nothing permanent.”

“Good.”

Dragon touched my shoulder. When I turned her way, she set her fingers in my hand, pulling me after her with the light contact of two of her fingertips. Gentle, easy to avoid, but clear enough.

I followed as she led me to her hovering Dragon-craft, Mr. Calle a step behind me. Mr. Calle had longer legs than I did, but he was the one who hesitated at the gap before stepping into the open cockpit.

Once I was on board, Dragon reached over to the wall and opened a shallow drawer, no more than three inches deep. The drawer opened with a noise like something from a science fiction movie.

I stared at the contents.

“How?” I asked, and all of the confidence was gone from my voice. “Wait, nevermind. You’re fu- you’re tinkers, damn it.”

Mr. Calle stepped up beside me, placing one hand on my shoulder in an uncharacteristic need for some support. He looked down. “I take it we’ve reached something of a consensus here?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“Yes,” Defiant said, from the rooftop.

“Then it seems I need to draw up some paperwork,” Mr. Calle said. “For formality’s sake, if nothing else.”

“Do it in five minutes,” Miss Militia said, from Defiant’s side. “We’re out of time. The media’s here.”

“Five?” Mr. Calle seemed momentarily pained. “Paper, fast.”

Dragon handed him a sleek keyboard, pointing to a screen. He started typing.

“I’ll credit you this, Ms. Hebert,” my lawyer said, as he typed away, tabbing to different windows to draw up pages he could copy-paste from. “You manage a great deal of grief and chaos in very short spans of time.”

■

Chevalier had arrived, and stepped into the cockpit. Gold and silver armor, his cannonblade resting against one shoulder. He briefly clasped hands with Defiant.

I stopped tidying my hair long enough to take the stylus from Dragon, scribbling my signature on the offered pad. Others were already present – Miss Militia’s and Defiant’s. The Chief Director’s signature appeared as the document was signed from a remote location.

“You’re ready?” Chevalier asked me.

I shook my head. “No.”

“But you’re willing?”

“Yeah,” I said. I rubbed my arms, then zipped up my prison-issue sweatshirt. “Has to be done, doesn’t it?”

“It’s not pretty,” he said. “There’s a lot of ugliness in this. But yes. This gives us the best chance.”

I nodded. I still had Miss Militia’s phone. I dialed Tattletale.

“Yo?“

“Turn on the TV,” I said. “And call them off. Unless something goes horribly wrong, this is it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah,” I said. No, I thought.

I hung up.

All together, we stepped out of the cockpit and walked around the craft.

The Wards were here. Clockblocker, Vista, Kid Win and Crucible, standing on guard.

Rounding the corner, we approached the open street where the crowd of reporters waited. Television cameras shifted to focus on the reporters announcing our arrival, or to follow us as we walked. Tripod-mounted lights cast shafts of light across the road, all converging on one point, the makeshift stage – the flat ledge of the Dragon-suit’s wing, five feet off the ground. Voices bubbled around us, a million questions, almost a singular noise.

Chevalier stepped forward, and they simultaneously drew quiet. He had a presence, a kind of nobility that garnered respect.

“Today, not two hours ago, Alexandria was killed.”

I could barely see the reporters past the massive lights that were shedding light on the stage, on us. They were solemn, focused on every single word. They didn’t even flinch at the news. They’d already known.

“Alexandria was a veteran among capes. She was one of the first capes, one who was present for almost every major catastrophe in the last twenty years. With every challenge she surmounted, she reaffirmed our belief in her, showed us how strong she was, how impervious and noble she was.”

He lowered his head. I resisted the urge to fidget. This was showing live, to homes across America.

On a rooftop nearby, capes teleported in. Other capes, flying, were touching down on top of a news car. Dovetail, with Sere beside her.

“If that was it, this would be hard enough,” he spoke. “But she was a mythic figure in her own way. She was a living symbol, recognized across the world. She was a leader among us. She was a friend to some of us.”

I sensed rather than saw Eidolon, hovering well above the reach of the lights. Legend was close too, though less intent on hiding.

I steeled myself for what came next, willing myself to stay calm, to not give anything away.

“And she was a traitor.”

That garnered a response from the news reporters. Shouted questions pierced the silence that loomed in the wake of Chevalier’s words.

He continued. “When Alexandria was slain, earlier today, it was done by individuals standing on this stage.”

Every word carefully chosen, so it was technically or at least partially true. Alexandria was a traitor, with her involvement with Cauldron, she had been slain at the hands of someone on the stage.

“There are individuals out there right now, who have kept quiet about recent events. Only last month, there was an event in this city, a threat that was theorized to be a nascent Endbringer. In the wake of that event, Alexandria was revealed to be partially responsible.”

The reporters, I noted, were deathly still. Deer in the headlights.

“Good capes,” Chevalier said, “Burdened by conscience, walked away from the PRT. Without them to serve as our backbone, we were left gutted. There has been rampant speculation on what has been going on within the PRT, on what might have caused so many capes to abandon it. We –they– couldn’t speak because Alexandria held a position of power, because she was purportedly invincible, unassailable. Because of the threat she posed, and the resources she had at her disposal.”

Others were joining the crowd of reporters. Civilians, returning now that the blockades had been taken down, maybe going home, only to see the scene, the heroes in the spotlight. They clustered, or parked at the periphery of the crowd, getting out of their cars.

How many millions were tuning in right this moment?

“Some of us left, because their consciences couldn’t bear serving a corrupt power. Others, many of us on the stage included, stayed, because we felt the PRT, the Protectorate, the Wards program and the teams that draw on us for resources were too important. I’m not here to say one decision was better than the other, or to lay blame with those who sided with her. In coming weeks and months, our capes, accountants and lawyers will be meeting with anyone and everyone in a position of power within the Protectorate program or the PRT, ensuring nothing of this scale occurs again.”

Something moved into my range. An insect. Large.

Atlas.

I moved him experimentally, and felt how incredibly weary he was. His reserves of energy were drained, his body dying. His forelegs touched the walls around him. He’d been placed in the back of a van.

And the occupants of that van – bugs entered open windows to make contact with the others. Lisa, Brian, Alec and Aisha. I could hear the echo, time delayed by five seconds, as they watched Chevalier speak on a tablet PC.

“Alexandria betrayed us on a fundamental level, and the whole cape community has felt that. The public has felt that. I urge people not to blame her. She had no less than eighteen fights against the Simurgh. We had been led to believe her powers rendered her immune, but she was clever enough to hide and alter the evidence. She was a victim, and it’s a testament to her character that she fought off the Simurgh’s influence for as long as she did.”

And there’s the first egregious lie, I thought.

With luck, nobody would believe anyone that was callous enough to point it out. Nobody would want to believe them. It was an ugly thought, that Alexandria could be twisted to act against our interests just because of who she was. She’d worked with Cauldron, had experimented on humans, all in the interest of… what? Creating powers? Selling them?

I swallowed hard. I knew what came next.

“It was due to a concerted effort this evening that we were able to stop Alexandria before more damage could be done.”

Chevalier reached out, put a hand on my shoulder. He drew me closer to him, until I stood in front of him and he had both hands resting on my shoulders.

“Many will recognize Taylor Hebert, revealed to be Skitter in a controversial confrontation at the school just a week ago, a confrontation Alexandria ordered. Taylor Hebert played a crucial role in stopping Alexandria in a moment of crisis, ending the fight.”

And now half the world hates me, I thought, staring forward. The glare was so intense I thought my eyes might start crossing. And the other half… I don’t know what the other half thinks.

I’d agreed to share ‘credit’ for the kill, but only because there had been a consensus that people wouldn’t believe it if I took sole responsibility.

Chevalier wasn’t speaking. I saw a red light go on at the corner of my collar. The microphone Dragon had clipped there was live. The signals would be received by all equipped, official cameras. Something the PRT had arranged for convenience’s sake some time ago.

I had a chance to speak in my own defense, in front of countless tens or hundreds of millions of eyes, and the words were dying in my throat.

My thoughts were grinding to a standstill. What was I supposed to say? We’d barely had any time to prepare. We hadn’t had time to prepare.

There were whole lines I was supposed to give. Ideas I was supposed to express, striking the right tone, and I’d gone blank.

I couldn’t defend myself like this, even with rehearsed lines.

Chevalier rescued me. He spoke, his voice clear. “This isn’t a happy day.”

It was a reminder of what my line was supposed to be. I’m not proud, I’m not happy that it came to this…

“It’s not a happy day, but it’s a good day,” he said, skipping ahead two or so minutes. “It marks change, and it marks a step forward. A chance to fight Endbringers and other threats without sabotage, without worrying who stands beside us, or whether our leadership is compromised.”

Dragon’s ships descended from the sky above. My hair and the hood of my sweatshirt flapped as the vessels landed to either side of us. Eleven vessels. The ones we’d destroyed had been rebuilt, updated. Others, old Dragon suits, had apparently been set up with A.I. to fly on their own. They gleamed, various shades of chrome and gunmetal, with trim in different metals and colors for decoration and highlighting.

She had more made, I thought.

“A chance to fight Endbringers without as many casualties,” Chevalier said. “And hope. We’ve investigated the portal to another world, and confirmed that there are resources and even shelter, a possibility of escape in a time of emergency.”

I stared at the van where the Undersiders were.

“And new allies, as unlikely as they might be.”

His hands dropped from my shoulders.

I reached up to the zipper of my sweatshirt. I pulled it down, then shrugged out of it. Chevalier took the piece of clothing in one hand.

I bent over and stepped out of the loose-fitting prison sweats as well.

Defiant handed me my new mask, and I pulled it on. Electric blue lenses, the opposite of the yellow I’d worn before. They helped with the glare, though they weren’t so good against it as my old lenses.

Light gray fabric where I’d had black. Armor panels in the same dark gray as before, albeit with cleaner lines, less bulk, and less in the way of edges. I had no points at the tips of my gloves, and both the mantle around my shoulders and the cloth that hung around my belt were marked with an electric blue border, with my gang emblem in miniature at each corner, flipped upside down so they faced skyward, altered to match my new color scheme.

“I admitted to reprehensible things,” I said. “I won’t challenge that, or pretend I didn’t say or do those things. By all rights, I should go to jail. I may serve a sentence, if the courts will it. I won’t challenge that.”

I paused. For a terrifying moment, I thought I’d forget what to say again. Then I fixed my eyes on the windshield of the van, at the far end of the crowd.

It struck me that I hadn’t suffered stage fright. It had been something else entirely. I hadn’t wanted to speak, because there would be no going back.

When I finally spoke, I didn’t follow the cues I’d been given. My eyes didn’t leave the spot where the Undersiders were watching from.

“I seized a territory in Brockton Bay. I led the local villains, and we defeated all comers. I was secure in my position. I had wealth, friendship, love and respect. People depended on me. It was everything I’d ever wanted, if not quite the way I’d initially imagined it. I could have stayed and been comfortable.

“Except there are bigger things. More important things.”

The eyes and cameras on me made me feel like I was deep in the ocean, a crushing weight pressing down on me.

“I believe in the idea of a new PRT that Chevalier is talking about. I believe in it enough that I was willing to turn myself in and take action to bring it to fruition. That I was willing to leave everything I had behind. If I have to serve time in jail first, then so be it. If I face the Birdcage… I hope I don’t. But at least I could tell myself that seeing the supervillain step up might convince others to come back. Change the minds of heroes who gave up on the PRT for one reason or another.”

A lump welled in my throat. I knew I didn’t have many more words left before I wouldn’t be able to speak.

“This is what I want to do, above all else,” I said, and I said it to the Undersiders. “Given the chance, I’ll serve the people. As I fought Leviathan, the Slaughterhouse Nine and other evils, I’ll fight to the last gasp to protect all of you. When-“

A howling in the distance interrupted me.

Moments later, others took up the cry. Ten dogs, then twenty. Others took up the cry around the city, from various shelters and homes. A hundred, two hundred dogs, and the wolf cub that had started them off.

“-When and if I do take up the job,” I finished, speaking around the growing lump in my throat, “You can call me Weaver.”

Chevalier set a hand on my shoulder.

“That’ll be all,” the hero said. “We’ll have another statement and a conference to answer questions early tomorrow, when we know more for sure.”

The reporters were already calling out questions. Is this the first time you’ve recruited a villain? How did Alexandria die? What crimes did she commit, exactly?

Cell 22.5

Posted on May 14, 2013 by wildbow

427

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Abandoned.

The word hit me before I was fully conscious, as though my brain had grasped the idea before I even had half of a brain functioning.

My father, gone. My lawyer was gone as well. Not such a big surprise. I’d gone all out, held little back, and I’d given no apparent justification. To them, to my dad especially, I would have looked like a monster.

Fitting, because I’d been one. I was one. Was that a label that was affixed to me permanently, now?

My mind was wandering more than it should have. My head hurt. I tried to focus, turning to my bugs.

Except my swarm was nearly gone. Only a small fraction remained. Hundreds, if that. My bugs had carried out the last order I’d given them, to attack, before I was knocked out. I knew that. What confused me were the other behaviors my bugs had performed.

They’d spread out and searched my surroundings, and they’d been gunned down en masse by Kid Win’s drones. I could sort of understand that, especially if they were actively searching for the last targets I’d given them. That, and I could picture myself unconsciously wanting to check for incoming threats and assess the battlefield before the tranquilizer took hold. Odd, fucking inconvenient, but understandable.

But the fact that bugs had spent the time I was out to weave lengths of silk cord? That was unusual, something out of place. It was something I’d taken to having my bugs handle in the background at any given moment, but why would I carry it out in my sleep? I was pretty sure I hadn’t given that order, which left only three real possibilities. Either my unconscious mind had willed it while I slept, or my passenger had. Unnerving.

More unnerving was the third possibility – that there wasn’t a real distinction between my unconscious mind and the passenger.

I sat up, contorted in pain as I felt bruises and cuts making themselves known, and then groaned as my expression shifted and I felt the damage above and around my eye. There was a wound: my skin had split, and the tightness coupled with the crusty wet sensation suggested drying blood.

My glasses were screwed up too. Tagg had knocked one lens out of the frame when he’d slammed my face into the table. My vision was oddly dreamlike, blurry through my right eye, too crisp through my left. I moved my hands to move the glasses, and felt the heavy-duty cuffs encasing them. The sort of handcuffs reserved for low-level Brutes, that covered my hands entirely, each hand welded to the other.

I was in the PRT offices. I was back in my cell.

As far as I could tell, the building was empty. My power reached five blocks, and… nothing. There were no people. Computers were active, television screens were glowing with shifting images, and cars sat in the middle of the road outside, but the people were gone.

Evacuation? When my power hadn’t stopped, the PRT would have ordered people to clear out of the area.

Maybe they weren’t sure if my power would keep going if they shot me.

I stood and rolled my shoulders, feeling things pop, grind and sing with pain in response to the movement. I’d had my hands fixed in front of me for the better part of the day, with only a brief respite in my cell while I’d showered.

Showering… it made me think of being in my lair after the first night I’d been with Brian.

I pushed it out of my mind, and Rachel appeared instead, stepping to fill the blank in my mind’s eye.

As if I were suddenly channeling her, I struck at the door with the restraints that encased my hands. Metal struck metal, the strike barely denting the brushed stainless steel of the door’s surface.

A rapid, high-pitched beeping sounded from above me. I looked up at the orb just in time to see it lighting up. I threw myself to the ground, felt the shock jolt through me.

If I’d been sore before, the jolt cranked it up to ten. I felt my mind go white, heat coiling through the interior of my body, as though it were dancing around my internal organs and bones. The strength went out of me; my cuffs were too heavy, and I didn’t have the ability to hold them up. I fell, as though the restraints were an anchor pulling me down.

I could feel my muscles twitching in a way that seemed like it was intentionally making the sorest parts of me move.

“Do not disturb the peace of your cell. This deterrence measure was calculated at twenty percent of your overall capacity. The next response will be at twice the strength. Thank you,” the automated voice informed me.

For long minutes, I lay there, spasming and searching the building with surviving bugs, because doing anything else was impossible or futile.

Needed out.

How had they unlocked my cell and the interrogation room? They’d had phones. PRT issue, probably, and had tapped the phone against the wall.

Phones… there were no PRT officers in the building.

In the morgue… there was a body bag. Bugs clung to it.

Brian? Rachel? Someone else?

I sent bugs over to explore it. One centipede to latch the zipper, other bugs to haul it back.

It was Tagg, dead.

I’d killed a man, and I had done it with my power, which somehow felt more intimate than the gun that killed Coil. My power made the bugs an extension of myself, and I’d used them to murder the man. It was little different from wrapping my hands around his throat and squeezing, or biting him in the throat and tearing deep enough that he couldn’t survive.

I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything meaningful about it. I wanted to. I wanted to think of his daughters, apparently college students overseas, and his apparently loving wife, and the fact that I’d just taken a member of their family from them, much as my mom had been taken from me. I wanted to feel terrible, to cry, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I felt bad, but not as bad as I should have.

No. I could only see the bully, the monster, the threat he posed to the city or the world. To my team.

Or was that the threat he had posed? Was it too late to save them?

I couldn’t check the time without sacrificing bugs to the patrolling drones. However long I’d been out, the remainder of the Undersiders could be embroiled in an all-out war.

Tagg, I thought. Have to focus.

His phone was in his jacket pocket, his key ring in his pants pocket. Getting the items to me would be harder. There were closed doors, vents, the elevator and the blocked elevator shaft. The morgue was in a separate building, joined to the PRT office at one corner.

Worse, the numerous skirmishes in, outside and around the building had led to there being a great deal of renovation and rebuilding. New things were that much harder to get bugs through. There were no open grates, no gaps in air conditioning ducts or anything in that vein.

There had to be a way. I was down to a few hundred bugs. Barely enough to matter. I wasn’t about to brute force my way through anything.

I thought of the hole Alexandria had put in the roof during her hurried exit. It was the most indirect way, getting bugs from the basement of one building outside, to the roof, and back down to the basement of the next building… but it was a path. If there were barriers I wasn’t sensing, I’d handle them.

Working together, bugs began dragging the keys and smart phone down the hall to the mortician’s office. Windows, squat, looked out at the parking lot, no doubt intended more to bring natural light into the office than for the sake of the view. I knew before approaching them that the windows were open – there was fresh air flowing into the hallway, and my bugs could sense the shifting air currents.

A screen blocked the way. Not a serious issue. The bugs started chewing through the individual wires, while the bugs with the phone and key ring began binding the items in silk, connecting them to a line.

Minutes passed while the bugs made their way up to the hole in the roof, down the shaft to the Wards headquarters one floor below me, and to the elevator.

The stairwell was blocked off, the elevator… the buttons.

I had the largest bug ram it.

Nothing. Feeble at best.

The wiring. Could I hotwire it like someone hotwired a car?

Getting into the walls wasn’t as hard as it should have been. Rachel had done a little damage when she’d attacked with the dogs a week ago. Even though they’d shored it up and sealed the exterior from the interior, there were gaps that I could use to get inside from the building’s interior, much as I’d done when disconnecting the outlet for Kid Win’s drone recharging station.

The actual connection… the damn thing seemed to be reinforced, with thick wires and a button mechanism that was too heavy to move from within. The bugs themselves couldn’t form a live connection between the button and the contact.

A workaround. I used cockroaches to carefully strip away insulation, two centipedes positioning themselves so their mandibles were above two respective pieces of wire, their tail ends entwined with one another. Then they let themselves drop. Their bodies bridged the gap between the wire behind the contact and the wiring by the button.

The centipedes died in an instant, and the door opened.

I dragged the smart phone and keys in, being careful to use bugs to bridge the gap so the phone and the keys wouldn’t fall through, and then let the elevator carry the bugs to the floor above. The doors opened automatically as the elevator arrived, and I brought the items out the same way.

The bugs began the slow process of bringing the phone to a point high enough on the wall. I spent the time recovering, flexing my muscles until I was sure they moved right. I had to draw out more silk to have a line strong enough, and set to reeling it in, anchoring end at the corner of the door frame, pushing up with the bugs and looping any slack around the corner of metal.

It wasn’t halfway up when the heroes arrived to collect their prisoner. A vibration through the building as a heavy vehicle landed on the helicopter pad on the roof. Four legged, with turbines in the place of wings, and a neckless head. A man stepped out. Defiant.

Dragon arrived as Defiant reached the elevator door on the rooftop. My bugs inside continued the glacial process of raising the phone to the necessary height, while the ones outside clustered on Defiant and Dragon. They knew I was here. There was no reason to be subtle. The only thing I had to be careful of was keeping Defiant from killing the swarm with one of his bug zapping tricks.

His focus was on his phone and the door, instead. He was typing something. A password?

If one was required to access the phone, I was screwed. If it was access specific…

I memorized the sequence. Now I had the problem of using it on the touch screen of the smart phone.

If it was pressure sensitive, then I could use it.

If it was heat-sensitive…

Bugs approached the fluorescent lightbulbs in the hallway outside, warming themselves until their wings and legs threatened to burn up.

The pair of heroes was halfway to the elevator on the top floor when the phone reached the correct height. Bugs I’d warmed on the bulbs moved to the keyboard, copying the same sequence of movements I’d tracked with the bugs on Defiant’s glove and phone.

The door slid open.

I dropped to my hands and knees to get the phone in my teeth, stooped down so the bugs with the keys could latch on to my gauntlet-restraints, then speed-hobbled for the elevator, chains at my ankles clanking.

I hit the button a second before Defiant hit the one on the top floor. The doors opened immediately.

They hadn’t reacted yet. The delay before the elevator moved hadn’t registered with them. Once they saw the elevator moving… they would expect me to run, cut me off.

Fuck that.

Had to second guess them, which was harder than it sounded, because they weren’t dumb. If they expected me to make a break for the ground floor, I’d have to do something else.

I leaned back against the wall and used my bare toe to hit the button for the first and third floors. That done, I turned my attention to the keys. The phone went into one pocket, moved by a swarm of bugs and the slope of my arm. When that was done, smaller bugs searched the keyhole at the base of my restraints to gauge the width. Other bugs marked the keys that fit the same size, yet others holding the ring against my restraints so I could use my teeth to pick through them, sliding them around the ring when they weren’t appropriate. Cockroaches wedged themselves in between keys to speed the process along.

Defiant and Dragon were moving. Dragon opened a window and moved outside, while Defiant headed into the stairwell. They wanted to cut me off on the ground floor.

They could communicate without talking. Some kind of system built into their masks. It made this harder. I couldn’t listen in and anticipate what they were saying.

By the time I passed the first floor, they were turning around. I hurried to the stairwell, and took the stairs two at a time in a hurry to get up to the second floor.

Just inside the door, I used my toes to ease it closed, then crouched to stay out of sight as Dragon patrolled outside, peeking in the windows.

I tried a key, sliding it into the hole before successfully turning it with my teeth. My lips came in contact with the cockroaches I was using to guide the metal into place. I didn’t care.

Disease, filth, disgust, they all came in a distant second to other priorities. I felt numb, and it wasn’t the electrocution. They’d taken away someone important to me, pushed me. My dad was gone, my lawyer, my team… my team wasn’t here.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know why they hadn’t come to the rescue, or why the mercenaries we’d hired hadn’t been called in.

I had an ugly feeling in my gut that something was wrong. Something beyond what had just happened here, beyond the possibility that someone I loved, romantically or platonically, was gone.

I got the cuffs off, set them down on a computer chair and slid it neatly under the desk so the cuffs wouldn’t be immediately apparent.

My hands were free. I needed tools and I needed weapons.

I scooped up silk cords from the floor, where they’d been abandoned by the bugs that had been working on them. Not much. Most were short, but it was something. I set my bugs to splicing them together. One twenty-foot rope was more use to me than ten cords that were each two or three feet long.

Other priorities. Those fucking drones. I could see them, footballs with one end sawn off, carried aloft by antigravity panels like the ones from Kid Win’s skateboard. I could see one switch modes, unfolding and reconfiguring to an entirely different setup, from white to red.

I used my body to block its line of sight to my swarm, trusting that it wouldn’t do any serious damage if there was a human in its line of sight, then grabbed the thing out of the air and shoved it into a desk drawer. I shut the drawer firmly before blocking it with a box of paperwork.

I’d slipped out of the pair’s grasp for just a moment. I had little doubt they’d pull some other solution out of their tinker caps before long. I crossed the room to get to a second drone, picking up a trash can from beside one desk, catching it like I might a large butterfly in a net, and then planting it on the ground, moving a monitor from someone’s desk to sit on top.

Once the way was clear, my swarm worked to catch up. Tagg’s phone wasn’t good for anything more than access until I figured out his password. A check of the phones failed to give me a dial tone. Dragon’s work?

This floor was where the PRT officers worked. It was where they got briefed and debriefed, and where they typed up their paperwork. I’d observed them at work with my bugs, had seen the patterns and figured it out in advance. I’d also seen where they kept their stuff.

Tagg’s phone and the code Defiant had used served to open the supply room. In the same moment the lock opened, Dragon turned around and made a beeline for the stairwell, using her jetpack to pick up speed. Defiant changed direction only a moment later.

She’d tapped into the security system, no doubt. Defiant would know the building’s layout if he had any of his old technology. I couldn’t give them any advantages, and if she had eyes on the security system, it would eliminate any possibility of me evading them. I set bugs to chewing on the lines that fed into the building from outside.

The boxes were locked, but I had Tagg’s keys and nothing to lose. Fully aware of Dragon and Defiant’s approach, I worked my way through the keys in much the same way I had with the keys for the cuffs.

The lights abruptly went out. After a moment, the lights came back on, with a dim red glow. The backup generator. I started to work on that as well. I could fight in darkness. I wasn’t sure they could.

I could hear them walking by the time I got the box open.

Grenade launchers, with special shells. I turned a grenade launcher over in my hands before figuring out how to open it and load the cartridges. Each was color coded, with a symbol and two-letter code stenciled on it. A green cartridge with a face, eyes squinting, mouth open with tongue extended, T.G. beneath. A red cartridge with the letters I.G. and a flame. A blue cartridge with a stick-man stuck in goop, C.F. no doubt standing for containment foam. A yellow cartridge with a lightning bolt and E.M. beneath.

I loaded the last, aiming out the open door of the storage area, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

A bar of black on the back of the grip lit up with letters, running vertically from above my thumb to the bottom of the grip. ‘NONCONFIRMED’.

They’d either learned since we attacked the fundraiser, or they took stricter measures with their more dangerous weaponry.

I investigated, but there didn’t seem to be a place to input any code.

The footsteps drew closer, heavy. I could sense Defiant with my swarm, only a short distance away, looking into the briefing room to see if he could spot me.

Fingerprints, I thought. Except there wasn’t a flat panel to press the finger against. The grip was textured, and nothing about the barrel suggested it was meant to read anything.

The gloves.

I used the same key that had opened the box to access the locker with the armor the PRT officers wore. I found a glove and began pulling it on.

Defiant appeared in the doorway. He aimed the butt of his spear at me, and the display on the gun dissipated.

He lunged, and the butt of his spear caught me just below the collarbone. With that alone, he pushed me into the lockers with enough force that they rocked against my back, rendering me pinned.

I let the grenade launcher fall to the ground.

Dragon appeared behind him, setting one hand on his arm as she passed through the door. He eased back on the pressure.

I glared at them, but they didn’t speak, and Defiant didn’t move to release me. Were they talking with one another?

“Fine,” I said. “You got me. I had to-”

Defiant was shaking his head. He tapped his mask.

Bugs flowed over the outside of his armor, and he didn’t seem to mind. There were no openings, no apertures, no air holes or gaps I could work a bug into. He was playing the same game Mannequin had, to counteract my power. Fuck it. I wouldn’t be able to sting him. Dragon either, apparently.

He couldn’t talk. I wasn’t positive he could even hear.

He shifted his grip, then grabbed my upper left arm. Dragon took hold of the right. They half-walked, half-carried me towards the stairwells and elevator. I walked more to keep them from putting more strain on my already sore shoulders than out of any need. Their grip left me little doubt they could have held me off the ground if they wanted.

Defiant stopped mid-stride, then glanced at Dragon and me.

Without letting go of me he charged the very air with a current from his spear, frying each and every one of the bugs I had in the area. It included, unfortunately, the two groups of bugs that were following me, each group discreetly escorting specialized canisters from the grenade launcher. I could feel my hair shift in reaction to the strike, the little hairs on my arms and the nape of my neck standing to attention.

I wasn’t sure if it would have worked, but my hope had been to possibly drop the grenades from overhead after we’d reached the roof. No such luck. I hung my head as we entered the stairwell, making our way up to the roof and the waiting vehicle.

This was my escort, apparently. Heroes with the tools to disable and defeat my most common methods, sealed in suits that my bugs couldn’t touch, overloaded with firepower, while I had none.

Unfair. All of it. On so many levels. Too many situations, all together, with no perfect, right answers. Over and over, being faced with lose-lose situations. Cutting ties with the Undersiders versus helping Dinah. Leaving my dad versus abandoning the people in my territory. Leaving the city versus letting the world blow up in some unknown, undefined end of the world scenario.

And maybe I could have lived with that, could have accepted that things weren’t fair and the world was biased, but I wasn’t the one paying the price. All too often, it was others around me who paid the price. My dad had suffered for my decisions before. And now? This.

Emotion was starting to creep back in. Anger, frustration, despair, heartbreak.

I blinked rapidly, to keep my eyes as dry as possible.

The anger, of all things, was comforting. It was something that pushed me to act, to move, when I wanted nothing more than to give up. I hurt everywhere, I had nobody left to rely on, and I felt drained. The fear, the hopelessness, it was seductive. It was urging me to give up.

The lights in the stairwell died as the bugs severed the output from the generator. I tried to use the surprise to pull free, but Defiant and Dragon didn’t even slow down. Their grips were firm.

I gave up when the struggling became too much of a chore with the pain in my shoulders. I still had the silk cord, if nothing else. Escape wasn’t a good option. Offense, then.

When we stepped out of the stairwell and onto the rooftop, the light momentarily blinded me. Defiant’s vessel was a mechanized dragon painted in black and green, glossy, with gold framing the shield at the dragon’s forehead, at the ‘wings’ and shoulders. The sleek form focused the light cast by the reddening sun at the horizon’s edge. It felt like the design had all been engineered to direct a hundred gleaming daggers of light right into my eyes.

To the people out there, barring those within a third of a mile who had been evacuated, this was a diversion. It was little more than something to discuss at the dinner table, or watch on the late night news. The area being evacuated, the fighting, the destruction. Even the demise of the PRT director wouldn’t have a huge impact on the average citizen of Brockton Bay. Spotting Dragon’s heavy vehicle-suit circling overhead would barely warrant twenty words in small talk. It wasn’t so noteworthy to the people down there, probably wouldn’t change the course of their weeks or evenings.

To me, this was everything. It was the rest of my life, my friends, my father. I’d lost someone. Brian or Rachel. The only people who would fit the bag. I was doing what I could to avoid dwelling on it, glad that I hadn’t yet confirmed it either way, because it let me feel like it was Rachel when I was thinking about Brian, or vice versa.

It couldn’t end like this. I didn’t want to get taken in. I had to find a way. My plan, as minor and feeble as it was, was easy enough to put into action, with him holding me like he was. My bugs moved down the length of his arm, then traveled around his midsection, twice, with the cord following them. There were only two people to tie Defiant to. Doing it to myself would be nearly useless. That left only Dragon.

I bound the other end around her left foot. The slack trailed several feet behind us. A cord as thick around as two of my fingers put together, as strong as steel.

“Before you take me in,” I said, “Could I have a word?”

Dragon turned to look at me, but didn’t speak.

“A word with Defiant,” I said. “I’m not going to try anything. He doesn’t even have to say anything. It’s sort of a last request.”

Defiant’s mask opened with a barely perceptible noise.

“A last request,” he made it a statement rather than a question. “We can talk in the Pendragon. There’s no need.”

“I spent the day in a cell, I wanted some fresh air. Sue me for thinking you actually meant something when you apologized, that you were sorry for not being fair to me back then,” I sounded more petulant and bitter than I liked.

He glanced at Dragon, and the silence suggested there was a dialogue happening.

“It’s rude to whisper,” I said. Again, more petty than I wanted to be.

“She can’t speak out loud,” Defiant said. “It’s complicated to explain. She’s under certain restrictions, many related to the PRT, and we’d agreed we didn’t want to win like that, back at the school. The only way for Dragon to stop was if I stepped in and made her stop, and she was hurt in the process. The recovery is slow.”

Only if he made her stop? Because the PRT would be harsher with her, with whatever leverage they had over her? I thought. Was that something I could use? What did they have on her that they didn’t have on the hero-on-probation?

“Thank you,” I said, to Dragon. “For doing that.”

She gave me a curt nod in response.

“I’ve been trying to grow as a person, with Dragon’s help,” Defiant said. “I’m willing to listen, but it’ll have to be fast.”

“Okay,” I said. I glanced at Dragon. I almost hated to do this, but I’d already started, and I couldn’t go to jail. Not with things as they stood. “Can I talk to him in private?”

Defiant and Dragon exchanged a look. He nodded once, and she took flight, heading towards her airborne vehicle-suit.

The cord went taut, and Defiant’s grip on my arm was wrenched away as he was dragged back. Heavy as he was, Dragon’s jet was powerful, and he wasn’t on his guard. It took him seconds to realize what was happening, to get his footing and shift his center of balance lower to the ground.

I was already moving, chasing him. There was no point to trying to escape if they were right on my heels.

He came to a stop at the edge of the roof, but I was already arriving, taking advantage of his lack of balance to throw myself into his upper body.

Not the first time I’ve fought a dragon-man on a rooftop, I thought, as I felt Defiant move in response, all of his sturdiness and armor nothing with a strong push at the right moment. One to mark the start of my career in costume, the other to mark the end?

If he’d had a mind to, he could have grabbed me and taken me down with him. Maybe Armsmaster would have.

But Defiant twisted as he tilted backwards, drawing his folded-up spear and striking out in the same motion. It bit into the concrete of the rooftop’s edge, the head expanding for a more secure grip.

I kicked the spear, as if I could dislodge it, but only succeeded in hurting my foot.

Dragon caught me a moment later, pushing me away. She offered Defiant a hand, and he used both her grip and the spear to right himself, pulling himself back from the edge.

He stepped forward and gripped me by the front of my oversized prison-uniform t-shirt. “Stop that.”

I only glared.

“Stop trying things,” he repeated, as if he thought repetition would get through more than articulation.

“Fuck you,” I said. I didn’t like how I sounded. The guise of confidence I was so used to wearing was slipping away. “Fuck you and the people you work for.”

“I don’t know why I-” he said, then he stopped abruptly. Was Dragon interrupting?

“You bastards,” I said. I could feel the veneer starting to crack. The tears that had threatened earlier were now promising to overflow.

“You don’t have any conception of what you did, do you?” he asked.

“I have some,” I said. “But no, you assholes knocked me out. I don’t know anything that’s been going on. I attacked Tagg and Alexandria-”

“They’re dead,” Defiant said.

Dead. I hadn’t believed Alexandria would die like that. She’d flown away. Surely there were methods.

“A family man-”

“A bully,” I said. “Twisted by the Simurgh, probably-”

“He was vetted,” Defiant said. “But he’s not important. You killed one of the strongest recognized heroes in the world, at a time we needed her most. Her image, her courage, her help. Do you know what’s going to happen, now?”

“I do,” I said. “It’s going to crush the morale of our defending forces, and it’s going to break the hearts of billions of people around the world. I knew it when I made the call, but I did it anyways.”

“And you doomed us all.”

“She doomed us all. She was the one who did it, her and Tagg.”

“Maybe. Probably. They forced your hand. I understand that, and I’ve been trying to be lenient. Gentle, even, though it’s not familiar to me.” His tone changed, “You’re making it hard, you keep trying things. Trying to kill me.”

“You would have survived,” I said. “A six-story fall in armor like yours? I could have run while Dragon looked after you. Gotten my hands on another weapon or something.”

He didn’t answer right away, but there was nothing indicating an exchange between him and Dragon. His voice was tight with restrained anger when he said, “You could make this easier.”

“I don’t want to make this easy,” I said. “As long as you work for them, I’m going to fight you. You want to know what Alexandria did? She and Tagg convinced me that the PRT is more trouble than it’s worth. If we have to rely on them to win this, then we don’t deserve to win.”

“That’s a choice you just made for a whole planet of people,” Defiant said.

“A choice I’m making for me. I think we can find a way past the end of the world, it can’t be impossible to survive the meantime without the PRT.”

“This isn’t going to work.”

The voice was female, and it came from Dragon’s direction.

“I’m having my doubts as well,” Defiant said.

“We’re low on options,” the voice sounded. It wasn’t Dragon, but someone communicating through a speaker on her shoulder. I recognized the voice. Miss Militia.

“Where is she?” I asked.

Defiant pointed at Dragon’s airborne craft.

“You’re not just here to arrest me?” I asked.

“No,” Defiant said. “Or we weren’t, until you decided to try to push me off a building. Now I’m reconsidering.”

“Tell her the plan,” Miss Militia said, through the speaker, “We don’t have any more time, for reconsidering or anything else.”

Time?

I glanced over my shoulder at the sun on the horizon. It was still twenty or thirty minutes from sunset. I must have been out for an hour or so.

But… the deadline didn’t matter anymore, did it? The Undersiders should be attacking already, after being attacked, it was almost inevitable, if Grue or Rachel…

I shook my head. “No. No, no, no. No.”

“Skitter-”

Too many things that hadn’t made sense.

The fact that the Undersiders hadn’t gone on the offensive, or rescued me here after the PRT left me in my cell.

Alexandria keeping to her schedule, the little clues she’d given, like reminding me she could be drowned. The baiting, the pressure, even from the moment Tagg was introduced.

Even the way she’d avoided stopping Coil, avoided stopping us. The way she hadn’t stepped in against the Nine, or against Echidna, at first. There had been something bigger going on.

“Why? For what?” I asked. “A ruse? Playing me?”

“Yes. With one tragic mistake that we’re all about to pay for.”

Last Chapter Next Chapter

Interlude 20 (Donation Bonus #1)

Posted on April 4, 2013 by wildbow

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Last Chapter Next Chapter

“Park there,” Stan said, pointing to a space off the side of the road.

“We’ll be facing uphill, and we still have to unload the equipment,” Nipper piped up, from the back seat.

“There’s a method to my madness. Park, Marshall. I’ll even deign to help unload and carry this time.”

He got a glimpse of Marshall rolling his eyes, but the boy steered the van to a parking spot.

True to his word, Stan was out the door, rolling up his sleeves. Didn’t hurt: the humidity was brutal outside the air-conditioned van. His dress shirt was already sticking to his back.

They were on a hill, and the vantage point afforded them a view of the city. Cranes dotted the skyline, and the buildings themselves were gleaming, the whites and colors brightened by the ambient moisture in the air. It might have looked attractive, but there were spots where buildings were missing, whole areas where the construction was only just beginning.

He could see the white building, not too far away, which was taller than even the skyscrapers immediately around it. He’d investigated it just a few days ago. They’d erected a tall white tent, holding it up with a crane, they’d reinforced it with plexiglass panels and iron reinforcement, and now a more solid construction was going up around it. Slow, painstaking, careful work, filled with redundancies. The workers would be glad to be free of the hazmat suits in this heat.

Brockton Bay wasn’t lacking in stories to tell. The quarantine building alone was one.

“Need a hand,” Nipper said.

He hurried around to the back of the truck. The van had been parked at the side of the road, emergency brake cranked, wheels turned so it would ride up onto the sidewalk if the brake failed, but the steep incline was making it hard to unload the equipment. Much of it was set up to be slid out of the back of the van at a moment’s notice, but that same convenience was an obstacle, here. The stuff was expensive, and if it slid to the road…

He found a space beside her and reached to get a grip on the far end of the camera. It might not have been a problem, but Nipper was short, petite, built more like a thirteen year old than a twenty-three year old college graduate.

She wasn’t suited for the job. She knew the equipment, she was capable with a computer, she had good eyesight, and the tattoos and array of piercings on her right ear were as good an indicator of her creative edge as anything else.

But this wasn’t the job she’d been working towards. She wasn’t one to complain, but she didn’t have stamina, she didn’t have strength, and this, all of this, it was too fast paced for her. She’d have been better, maybe even happier in the newsroom, managing the feeds, maintaining the systems and working on post production.

Marshall hefted the bag out of the back of the van. All the wires, the tripod, the lighting, packed into a dense case. The boy didn’t look like a professional, hadn’t quite adapted to the job he’d been pulled into: from intern to a jack of all trades, filling in the gaps in Stan’s team. Set up, interviewing, driving, gopher… anything and everything. He was drawing in a paycheck, but he was definitely working for it, facing all of the hassles, the intense stresses and dangers of the job, for eleven dollars an hour.

Dangers, Stan thought. Images flickered through his mind. Everyone at the station had seen the feeds, had watched them several times over. Purity taking the camera from Manzaneres, a guy from channel four, then setting her monsters on the man. A man with a wife and a newborn had been murdered, just to make a point.

There was a reason for the shortage of field reporters. It wasn’t limited to Manzaneres, either. The problem was a chronic one. This was a job that put ordinary people on the fringes of events that were dangerous for capes.

“Set?”

Marshall closed the back of the van and locked it. “Set.”

Stan set off, with Nipper and Marshall following, Nipper almost jogging to keep up with his long strides. “Reason we’re parked here is that the school’s on top of the hill. We don’t know how much parking there’ll be, with students possibly taking up spaces, and if we have to drive by, searching for a spot, then someone’s liable to spot us and take measures.”

“Measures?” Nipper asked, a touch breathlessly.

Right. She didn’t have the experience to know. “You’ll see what I mean.”

There were students gathered outside the walls that bordered the school. Police cars were parked at the front, along with PRT vans, but it was the uniformed guards with ‘Arcadia High School’ stenciled on their sleeves that caught his attention.

Guards? It conjured up an image of a prison, rather than a school.

“Nip, get some footage of the uniforms,” Stan said.

She hefted the camera and trained it on the nearest of the uniformed guards. She had to slow her pace to keep the shot steady, but she kept following him. When a group of students obstructed her vision, she shut off the feed and hurried to catch up.

They reached the gate, where a woman with a colorful scarf was talking to a PRT uniform. He signaled Nipper, and the young woman raised the camera.

“Damn it,” the woman with the scarf groaned, as she saw them. The police officer took the opportunity to step away.

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Stan said, “We’re not the enemy.”

“You’re here to bog down an overcomplicated situation,” she said. “I have enough problems without vultures descending.”

“We’re here for the story, that’s all. You’re in charge here?”

“I’m in charge of the school. Principal Howell.”

He made a mental note. Howell, Howell, Howell. She wasn’t the prettiest woman, with old acne scars riddled across her cheeks, a short stature and a nose that didn’t quite fit her face.

“Stan Vickery, channel twelve news,” he flashed her his best smile and extended a hand. She didn’t take it.

“You’re not allowed on school property.”

“I would be if you gave me permission,” he said, dropping his hand. The job was politics as much as it was investigation, creativity and presentation. What did she want? Peace and quiet. “Give us fifteen minutes to talk to your students and shoot a few takes in front of the doors, and I’ll get the word out that we got the story first. Other stations are playing it safer, these days, less crew, less willing to act on sloppy seconds.”

The principal made a face.

Stan smiled, “Sorry. You get what I mean. Give us fifteen minutes, and we’re one less thing you have to worry about today. With luck, I’ll be the only local reporter you see today.”

“With all due respect, Mr…”

“Vickery,” he said, already told you my name. “But you can call me Stan, Mrs. Howell. Fact of the matter is, you let me in the school, and I owe you one. I pull strings or emphasize certain aspects of a story. Not just this one either. Who knows? The next incident could be worse, or more sensitive.”

“Mr. Vickers,” she said. “I’m fully aware that you’re trying to bait me into giving you a sound bite. I won’t comment on this situation, and I won’t be letting you onto school grounds. I don’t want you talking to any of my students.”

“Fine,” he said. “Come on, guys. Let’s go talk to the cops.”

“Seriously? We’re giving up?” Nipper asked.

“Yes,” he said, he took long strides away from the front gate of the school, until he was sure the principal wasn’t in immediate earshot. “No. She’s liable to get on our case if we don’t pretend to play along. Howell has no authority outside of the school walls, so we interview students there. Marshall, head back in the direction of the van. Talk to students, see if they want to be on TV. Look for the talkative ones and the emotional ones, and point them my way.”

“What about the cops?” Marshall asked.

“They’ll be around later, and cops have better memories than civilians. It’s the students who were at the scene. Go. We don’t know how long we have before other crews show.”

It was a shame the principal hadn’t let him into the school, Stan mused. Silly of her, too. That favor he’d offered her was gold, all things considered. Something she could use to bail a superior out of an awkward position and advance her own.

Your guanxi could be better, Mrs. Howell, he thought. He loved the idea behind the Chinese concept of guanxi. It fit in the same general category as the concepts of friends, family, acquaintances, but it was more based in business and politics. Guanxi was about being able to call up a person one hadn’t seen in years and ask for a favor. To have enough people in one’s debt that there was more implied leverage to use when seeking favors from others.

He’d been introduced to the idea a few years ago, and he attributed much of his recent career advancement to it. It was something to be aware of at all times, and it changed his perspective on things.

He approached a group of teenage girls who were gathered in a group, observing the police and PRT officers. He flashed one of his best smiles at them. He could see one of them glance him over, her body language changing subtly. He directed the smile at her, “I bet you’re dying to talk about what happened here. Exciting stuff.”

“Sure,” the girl replied. “Supervillain doesn’t attack the school every day.”

“Wasn’t an attack. She showed up, and they came after her in her civilian ID.”

“I know it wasn’t an attack,” the first girl replied. “I was just… It’s what others have been saying.”

“Skitter, wasn’t it?” Stan chimed in. He snapped his fingers, and Nipper pointed the camera at the girls.

“Yeah. The bug girl,” another girl spoke up. “I guess she goes to Arcadia.”

“No way. I heard she was a student at Winslow, before Leviathan came. Geeky kid, was having a hard time with some jerks, apparently. I think her name was Taylor, but you’d have to ask someone from Winslow.”

He prodded, “What happened? Was there a fight?”

“Dragon and this new guy Defiant showed up, along with the two new heroes. Don’t know their names.”

He’d memorized the names. “Adamant? Clasp? Dovetail? Halo? Crucible? Rosary? Sere?”

“Sere and Adamant,” one girl replied.

“Sere and Adamant,” he said, making a mental note.

“And two of the Wards. Clockblocker was one of them. Anyways, she got away.”

“She didn’t do anything to provoke them?”

“Didn’t hear about anything.”

“And they mobilized on the school?”

“Sure.”

He started to ask for more details, then stopped. Marshall was approaching, with a kid in tow.

“Cell phone video,” Marshall said. “Long conversation between Defiant, Dragon and Skitter in the cafeteria.

Stan raised his eyebrows, looking at the girl with the phone, “Pay you twenty bucks to let us copy it.”

“A hundred,” she said.

“Twenty. If you got it on camera, others did too, and someone‘s going to take the twenty.”

She glanced at Marshall, then back to Stan. “Fine.”

“You have the equipment?” Stan asked Marshall.

“Laptop and a cord. Give me a minute.”

“We’ll watch it later,” Stan said, absently. He turned his attention back to the girls.

This wasn’t the first time he’d walked into a situation almost blind. The job was a stressful one, but he thrived on stress. Racing against the clock, to be the first to the scene, the first to report on the situation. But even reporting was a kind of challenge unto itself. The scene had to be investigated, the story teased out, details verified. To top it off, it had to be presentable.

He’d been the producer, before Coil had blown up the camera crew and reporter that had been covering the mayoral debate. He had an eye for this. Had to, because there was nobody back at the studio that would be able to cover this base for him. Sad and ironic, really. There weren’t enough people in the bay, resources weren’t consistent. So they’d reduced the size of the staff, cut back on hours. Then six people had died, including their lead reporter.

Nevermind the rumors that the PRT was, on Miss Militia’s behalf, investigating ties between Coil and the killed reporters and camera crews. He’d itched to look into that more, but it didn’t fit with his philosophy.

“Were you there, in the cafeteria?” he asked the girls.

“No.”

“Right. Alright. Any thoughts? Were you scared, knowing there were so many capes in the school?”

Twenty more seconds, to grab more details and reaction clips, and then he was moving, searching for others to talk to.

Two more groups questioned, and he didn’t have much else. He knew Skitter’s name, and Channel four had arrived, and the race was on.

“Got the video!” Marshall called out.

Stan took the offered laptop. To watch now, it would mean delaying interviews. Memories would fade.

But he needed the narrative. How had things unfolded? What were the key, crucial points at the heart of this? That the school was unsafe? It would work, grab attention and viewers, but it felt cheap. No, the public knew that the Protectorate was imploding. There had to be a connection, tying this to something greater.

“Thank you,” he said. He’d decided. “Now, I need you to find me someone who knew Skitter in her civilian guise.”

Marshall nodded.

“He or she will be one of the students who attended Winslow.”

“On it.”

Stan retreated to the van with the laptop. He took the extra time to open the video in an editing suite before playing it.

Without being asked, Nipper hooked it into the van’s computers. A little icon notified him that he was connected to the studio.

“…There for the S-class threat downtown. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I think maybe I deserve to, a little. I’ve done my share. You don’t turn around and reveal my identity in front of a crowd.”

On a notepad of lined paper, he penned down ’20th’ followed by a question mark. The video continued playing, and he noted down times and key phrases, along with questions. When a critical comment was shown, he was sure to copy the clip. There were a few times where the volume was too quiet, the voices too low or things were drowned out by background noise. Nipper worked to tune the sound so they could make it out, raising the volume or filtering out the noise.

D&D picked fight? Pushed by authorities?Drag past convo with Skitter. When?
Putting children at risk
Violation of truce

“…And you seriously expect me to keep my mouth shut about all the dirty little secrets I’ve picked up on over the last few months…”

What does Skitter know? App’tly important.

“…the Slaughterhouse Nine. Either you’ve abandoned that chase, or you’re about to tell me that there’s something more important than stopping them…”

S9? D-check events post-Boston.

Hospital? Skitter & Defiant?

D&D negotiating with villains? Possible cooperation? Corruption?

“…Stand if you side with me!”

Both video and audio were distorted by the movements of students, rising from tables, pushing away from the jumble of bodies.

Stan smiled. There.

He cut out the scene in question, the students siding with Skitter over the heroes, and gave the clip a title. ‘The heart of this story?’

A second later, a note appeared on the side of the window. The crew at the studio had a R.A.T. connecting them to the laptop, and freedom to make changes or add their own details.

Yes – Ed

He had it. The editors at the station were on board.

Now to cobble it together into a story.

He opened a file and began sketching out the script. At the very top, he put up notes, clips he’d need from the station.

There was a knock on the door of the van. Stan opened it to see Marshall with an awkward looking young man. Fifteen or sixteen. He looked despondent. Hangdog.

“He says he was her friend, once.”

“No,” the boy said. “Not exactly. But we sort of knew each other. Had classes together, did group work. And I owe her.”

Stan smiled.

■

“…take you now to reporter Stan Vickery.”

“Thank you, Nick. One thousand and two hundred students made their way to Arcadia High for their first day back at school, earlier on this sunny day. They hoped to readjust and get a taste of normal life after weeks spent away from home, or enduring the long series of incidents to afflict Brockton Bay. Less than halfway through their day, those hopes were dashed.“

A video clip replaced the blond man with the mustache and a face lined by years of stress. A massive metal suit, looming at the far end of the school’s parking lot, a mechanized dragon.

“The school became the site of a confrontation between Dragon, a heroine known across the world, and local warlord and leader of the Undersiders, Skitter. Within moments of their meeting on school grounds, Dragon revealed Skitter’s identity as Taylor Hebert, a sixteen year old student. With this revelation came a dozen more questions…“

“Change the channel,” a boy in prison sweats said. “News is boring shit.”

“No,” Sophia said.

Skitter was Taylor. A dozen things fell into place.

Anger boiled within her. Outrage. That cringing, whiny, pathetic little scarecrow was the ruler of Brockton Bay’s underworld? It didn’t fit. It demanded an answer of some sort.

But she couldn’t. As the voice droned on, Sophia turned her attention to the bracelets she wore. There was a live current running through them, and they could be joined together to fashion handcuffs, but even like this, they were bondage. She couldn’t enter her shadow state without passing through the insulated sheath that protected her.

She couldn’t leave, as much as she wanted to, right this moment.

Glowering, a confused, impotent frustration building within her, she fixed her eyes on the television. It swelled within her until she could barely think. She clenched her hands, but she couldn’t squeeze hard enough to release any of the building emotion. She unclenched her fists, extended her fingers, as if reaching for something, but there was nothing she could grab.

There was no release valve for this, no way to vent.

Taylor’s face appeared on the screen in the same moment she hit her limit. She rose from her seat, aware of the guards advancing on her, and kicked the television screen, shattering it, amid the protests and swearing of her fellow inmates.

A second later, they were tackling her. Two guards at once, forcing her to the ground.

She screamed something so incoherent that even she would have been hard pressed to interpret it.

■

“Who was she? And what motivated these professed heroes to mobilize on a school, risking the lives of students and staff? Skitter herself wondered aloud about their willingness to put hostages within her reach…“

A clip appeared on the screen. Taylor, sitting on the edge of a counter. She spoke, filled with confidence, almost nonchalant. “You put me in a room with three hundred people I could theoretically take hostage. Why? You can’t be that confident I wouldn’t hurt someone…”

A student abruptly shrieked, thrashing and falling to the ground in her haste to get away.

“Danny,” Kurt said, settling a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “You don’t need to watch this.”

Danny shook his head. Kurt looked down the man. He hadn’t even spoken, from the moment he’d opened the door and Lacey had wrapped her arms around him.

“This is bait, isn’t it?” Taylor’s voice, oddly out of place coming from the television.

“The tone of the conversation even implied there were unspoken secrets that Skitter was aware of, that the Protectorate sought to silence,” Stan Vickery spoke, reappearing, with Arcadia High behind him as a backdrop. “Raising questions about what those secrets might be.“

“…You seriously expect me to keep my mouth shut about all the dirty little secrets I’ve picked up on over the last few months?” Taylor’s voice, again.

Danny put his face into his hands, pushing his glasses up to his forehead in the process. Kurt rubbed his back, while Lacey looked on, sympathetic.

“What did Skitter know, and does it relate to the event on the twentieth of June? Why were Defiant and Dragon willing to abandon their pursuit of the Slaughterhouse Nine?“

“Is…” Danny started to speak, but his voice cracked. He paused, then spoke again. “Is this on me?”

“No!” Lacey said. “No, honey.”

“Those aren’t questions I’d hope to pose any answers to today,” the news reporter said. “The real question is bigger than that, and smaller at the same time. What forces drive a child from this…“

A teenage boy, his eyes downcast. “She was nice, quiet. I know people won’t believe me when I say it, but she was a genuinely good person. Is. Is a good person. At heart. I’m sorry, Taylor.“

“To this?“

It switched to Taylor’s voice, calm, unruffled, accompanied by the same long-distance, low resolution footage of her sitting on the counter in the school cafeteria. “You’d be surprised what I’m capable of. I’ve mutilated people. Carved out a man’s eyes, emasculated him. I’ve chopped off a woman’s toes. Flayed people alive with the bites of thousands of insects. Hell, what I did to Triumph… he nearly died, choking on insects, the venom of-“

Kurt turned off the television. Danny was frozen, unmoving, staring down at his hands.

“It was context,” Lacey said, quiet. “She was acting. I’m sure-“

She broke off as Kurt shook his head. Doing more damage than good.

“We’re going to stick by you, okay, Dan?” Kurt spoke. “Let’s have you come by our place. Better you aren’t alone right now, yeah? And it’ll get you away from those reporters.”

Danny didn’t respond. He stayed hunched over the kitchen table.

“Unless you want to wait here for her, in case?” Lacey asked.

“She already said goodbye,” Danny replied, pushing against the table to help himself rise to a standing position. “I think that’s it.”

■

“You’d be surprised what I’m capable of. I’ve mutilated people. Carved out a man’s eyes, emasculated him. I’ve chopped off a woman’s toes. Flayed people alive with the bites of thousands of insects. Hell, what I did to Triumph… he nearly died, choking on insects, the venom of a hundred bee stings making his throat close up.“

“And what drives dozens of students to reject the heroes of this city in favor of the villain in charge?” Stan asked.

The widescreen television showed the students rising from the tables, joining Skitter. Another clip followed, showing students actively wrestling with the heroes.

“Christ,” the Director spoke.

Beside her successor, Piggot was watching in silence, elbows on the table, hands folded in front of her mouth.

“This could have been avoided,” the Director said. “On multiple levels.”

“Most likely,” Defiant replied. He stood at one end of the long table, Dragon beside him.

“If you would have cut off the feed, deleted the footage from phones, we would have had time to do damage control.”

“We won’t ignore people’s first amendment rights,” Defiant said.

“…The PRT and the Protectorate have refused to comment, and the silence is damning, in light of what occurred today,” the reporting continued in the background. “Brockton Bay has become the latest, greatest representation of the troubles the world faces in this new age, and perhaps a representation of the world’s hopes…“

“You’re better than this, Dragon,” Piggot spoke. “To the point that I’m left wondering… did you steer all of this in this direction?”

“If you try to place the blame on us,” Defiant replied, “I think you’ll be unpleasantly surprised.”

“This event,” the reporter spoke, “Points to something else entirely, a fatal flaw in the system, the latest and greatest representation of the Protectorate’s steady collapse.“

Director Tagg, Piggot’s latest successor, picked up the remote and muted the television.

Defiant shifted his weight, clasping his hands behind his back. The body language was smug, somehow.

Piggot glanced at each of the people who were seated at the table. Mr. Tagg, the Director of Brockton Bay’s PRT, Director Armstrong from Boston, and Director Wilkins from New York were all present. Mr. Keene sat opposite her. A camera mounted on the table gave the Chief Director of the PRT eyes on the meeting, where she watched from Washington.

Nobody else seemed willing to answer Defiant, some simply staring at him, others watching the segment on the wall-mounted television. She spoke, “I would remind you that you are on a strict probation, with terms you agreed to.”

“I am,” Defiant said. “Would you arrest me for being insubordinate? Or would it take something more substantial?”

“Test us and you’ll find out,” Director Tagg responded.

“And what would happen then? Would you send me to the Birdcage?” Defiant asked.

The question was heavy with the reminder that it was Dragon who maintained and managed the Birdcage.

Emily Piggot was caught between a desire to feel smug and quiet fear. She’d warned them. She’d communicated her concerns at every opportunity, through channels that Dragon wouldn’t be able to track. She’d been dismissed, shrugged off, when she raised the question of what might happen if Dragon was killed in battle, or if Dragon turned against them.

“I’d like to hear a response from Dragon,” Piggot said.

Dragon turned her head to look at her, face hidden behind an expressionless mask and unblinking, opaque lenses. There was something about the movement that seemed off. Both the movement and the silence that followed was oddly disturbing.

“No? No response?”

“A consequence of our recent visit to Brockton Bay,” Defiant said. “I’m hoping she’ll be better in a few days.”

Curious, Piggot observed, the note of emotion in his voice, at that simple statement.

As if eager to change the subject, Director Armstrong said, “Mr. Keene. Thoughts? How does this affect your department?”

Piggot turned her attention to the man. She’d only had limited interactions with him, but the man had earned her respect quickly enough. He wasn’t a Director, but rather the liaison between the Protectorate and various other superhero teams worldwide, organizing deals, ensuring that everyone held to the same code of conduct, and ensuring that the groups could all coordinate in times of emergency.

“It’s catastrophic,” Keene said. “I can manage some damage control, offer further aid, manipulate the grants available, but I can’t build on a foundation that isn’t there.”

“Where do our biggest problems lie?”

“The C.U.I. is first to mind. The Suits and the King’s Men will cooperate, because they have to. For the American teams, it varies from case to case. But we’re in the middle of negotiations with the C.U.I., and this won’t reflect well on us. That is, it won’t if we can’t get our footing here and make a strong showing at the next major event.”

The next major event. The idea seemed to give everyone pause.

“Something needs to change,” Defiant said.

“Somehow, Colin,” Piggot replied, “I think our ideas on what needs to change are very different.”

“Very likely,” he said, his voice hard. “But this was a last straw for us, in many ways. We have a few stipulations for our continued assistance.”

“Defiant,” Tagg interrupted him. “You’re not in a position to make demands.”

He’s a hard man, Piggot thought. Army, PRT squad leader, a general, not a politician. Ironic, that they’d butt heads. “Director Tagg, you asked me here as a consultant, so allow me to consult.”

Tagg turned his attention to her.

She continued, “I don’t like this scenario any more than you do. But let’s hear Defiant’s demands before you reject him out of hand.”

Director Tagg didn’t reply, but he turned his attention back to Defiant and he didn’t speak.

“Dragon and I have discussed this in-depth. We need the present Directors to admit culpability for the incident, and we need to clean house, with in-depth background checks and investigations into any prominent member of the PRT. We can’t maintain things as they are with the spectre of Cauldron looming over us.”

“You’d have us fire any number of PRT employees at a time when we’re struggling to retain members?” Tagg asked, almost aghast.

“And relieving capes from duty at the same time,” Defiant said. “With so few employees, it’s ridiculous to continue working to shut down leaks and control the flow of information. Dragon has expressed concerns over having to do this in the past, and between the two of us, we’ve agreed that the censorship stops tonight, at midnight.”

Tagg rose from his seat, opening his mouth to speak-

“I agree,” Piggot spoke before her successor could.

Heads turned.

“It’s a misuse of resources,” she said, “And we do need to clean house.”

“You don’t have a position to lose,” Tagg replied.

“I wouldn’t lose it anyways,” she retorted, “I’ve had no contact with Cauldron.”

Keene clapped his hands together once, then smiled, “Well said. We have nothing to fear if we aren’t connected to them.”

“You realize what they’re doing, don’t you?” Tagg asked. “How does this investigation happen? Dragon has her A.I. rifle through all known records and databases. We defeat the sole purpose of the PRT, by putting the parahumans themselves in a position of power!”

“That ship has long sailed,” Keene commented, “With the revelations about Chief Director Costa-Brown, if you’ll pardon my saying.”

“You’re pardoned,” the Chief Director’s voice sounded over the speaker, crystal clear. “I think this would pose more problems than it solves. We’ll have to turn you down, Defiant.”

“Then I don’t see much of a reason for us to stay,” Defiant replied.

“And if you leave, the assumption is that we’ll be left without Dragon’s ability to maintain every system and device she’s created for us. The PRT without a Birdcage, without our computer systems or database, without the specialized grenade loadouts or the containment foam dispensers.”

“An unfortunate consequence,” Defiant said.

“Not a concern at all,” the Chief Director replied.

There was a pause. Dragon glanced at Defiant.

“No?” Defiant asked.

“No. We’ve been in contact with an individual who has a proven track record with Dragon’s technology. He feels equipped, eager, almost, to step into Dragon’s shoes should she take a leave of absence.”

“Saint,” Defiant said. “You’re talking about the leader of the Dragonslayers. Criminal mercenaries.”

“My first priority is and always has been protecting people. If it’s a question between abandoning the security the Birdcage offers the world at large or requesting the assistance of a scoundrel-”

“A known murderer,” Defiant said.

“I wouldn’t throw stones,” Tagg replied, his voice a growl.

“-A known murderer, even,” the Chief Director continued, as if she hadn’t been interrupted. “I will take security without question.”

Defiant looked at Dragon.

“The second dilemma I have to pose to you two,” the Chief Director continued, “Is simple. What do you expect will happen when the next Endbringer arrives? Between Dragon’s brilliant mind and Defiant’s analysis technologies, I’m sure you’ve given the matter some consideration. Without the Protectorate, how does the event tend to unfold?”

Piggot studied the pair, trying to read their reactions. They were so hard to gauge, even if she ignored the armor.

“It doesn’t go well,” Defiant said. “It doesn’t go well even if we assume the present Protectorate is coordinated and in peak fighting condition.”

“We can’t afford a loss,” the Chief Director said. “You know it as well as I do. Now, tell me there isn’t room for a middle ground.”

Dragon turned to Defiant, and moved with a careful slowness as she set one hand on his arm.

“We get through the next fight,” Defiant said. “Then we clean house.”

“I think that’s an acceptable compromise.”

■

“This event,” the reporter spoke, “Points to something else entirely, a fatal flaw in the system, the latest and greatest representation of the Protectorate’s steady collapse.“

“Too rich,” Jack commented, smirking. “Across the board, I love it. Fantastic.”

Hookwolf, pacing on the opposite side of the television, grunted a response.

Bonesaw was crouched by the side of a machine. She watched with hands on hips as Blasto ratcheted in a bolt at the base of a tall, black-handled lever, his movements jerky with the internal and external mechanisms that forced them.

“The Protectorate declined to comment, and in light of recent events and allegations of deep-seated secrets, their silence is damning.“

“Almost ready,” Bonesaw said, her voice sing-song. “You’re next, Hooksie.”

Hookwolf glanced at her, and then at the contraption.

“Don’t tell me you’re scared,” she said, her tone a taunt.

“Not of… this. I’m questioning if this is the path we should take.”

“I’m expected to bring about the end of the world,” Jack said, still watching the television. “But this is rather tepid for my tastes. I’d like to hurry it along, inject some more drama into the affair.”

“…event at Arcadia High School is sure to draw attention from aross America. We, the public, want answers. The death of Vikare marked the end of the golden age, the end of an era where becoming a superhero was the expectation for anyone and everyone with powers, and even those who decided to work in business or public affairs with their abilities were termed ‘rogues’…“

Bonesaw took ahold of Hookwolf’s hand and led him to his seat. She stepped back, glancing over the contraption. The only light was cast by a small desk lamp and the glow of a computer monitor, an island of light in the middle of an expansive, wide-reaching darkness. Desk, engine, and tinker-designed seats, surrounded by an absolute, oppressive darkness.

“It doesn’t sit well,” Hookwolf said. “I can’t articulate why. My thoughts are still cloudy.”

Bonesaw hit a button, and the lights began to flicker, the engine beside her starting to hum with a progressively higher pitch. With the flickering of the lights came glimpses of the things beyond. Light on glass and wires.

“I’d rather a Ragnarök than-“

Bonesaw hauled on a white-handled lever, and Hookwolf’s voice cut off. The flickering of the lights ceased, and the room returned to darkness.

Jack sighed.

“…threatens to mark a similar occasion…“

Bonesaw stepped over the body of a dead tinker in a lab coat, stopping in front of Jack. “Strip.”

Jack shucked off his shirt, and then pulled off his pants and boxer briefs. The blades that hung heavy on his belt made an ugly metal sound as they dropped to the tiled floor.

“…and cover yourself up,” Bonesaw said, averting her eyes. “Shameful! You’re in the company of a child, and a girl, no less.”

“Terribly sorry,” Jack said, his voice thick with irony, as he cupped his nether regions in both hands. He stepped back and took a seat, leaning back against the diagonal surface behind the short bench. Cold.

“...The reality is clear. The repercussions of what happened today will change the relationship between hero, villain and civilian. It remains up to them to decide whether it will be a change for the better, or a change for the worse.”

The segment ended, and the television turned back to the news anchors at their desks.

“Pretentious, isn’t he?” Jack asked.

“Likes to hear himself talk,” Bonesaw replied. “Which do you think it’ll be? Change for the better or change for the worse?”

Jack smiled.

“It’s a given?” she asked. She pressed the button, and the lights started to flicker again.

“I think so,” Jack commented. “But I almost hope things do turn out well.”

The lights were flickering more violently now, to the point that periods of light matched the periods of darkness. Between the spots in his vision, Jack could see more and more of their surroundings.

Row upon row of glass case lined the underground chamber, each large enough to house a full-grown man, though there were only fetal shapes within at present. Each was labeled. One row had cases marked ‘Crawler’, ‘Crawler’, ‘Crawler’… ten iterations in total. The next row had ten cases labeled with the word ‘Siberian’. The one after with ten repetitions of ‘Chuckles’.

One column of cases dedicated to each member of the Nine, past and present, with the exception of Jack and one other.

“Makes for a greater fall?” Bonesaw asked.

“Exactly,” Jack replied. He glanced at the one isolated case, felt his pulse quicken a notch. It was the only one that was standalone. ‘Gray Boy.’

“I guess we find out soon!” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the whine of the engine.

Bonesaw only laughed. She hauled on the switch with both hands, and the room was plunged into silence and darkness.

Last Chapter Next Chapter

Chrysalis 20.5

Posted on April 2, 2013 by wildbow

908

Last Chapter Next Chapter

The appearance of the heroine in gleaming power armor had brought the room to a hush. The silence only allowed Dragon’s words to carry, bouncing off the hard floor, reaching the assembled students and staff of Arcadia High.

A low murmur ran through the room like an almost imperceptible aftershock, informing anyone and everyone who hadn’t been in earshot.

I could see Emma too, or I could see glimpses of her, between the students that were backing away from the front of the room. Already pale in complexion, she was white, now, staring.

I exhaled slowly, though my heart was pounding as if I’d just finished a hard run.

Defiant advanced a step, with the door to the kitchens behind him, while I took a few steps back toward the rest of the cafeteria, putting both Dragon and Defiant in front of me. Some of my bugs flowed in through the gaps around the door he’d rammed through. He’d slammed it shut behind him, but the metal had twisted around the lock, giving smaller bugs a path.

He slammed his spear against the ground. The entire cafeteria flinched at the crackle of electricity that ripped through the air around him, flowing along exposed pipe and the heating ducts in a path to the door. Every bug in the hallway died.

No use bringing bugs in that way.

I looked around me. This wasn’t an optimal battlefield. There were counters all around me, limiting my mobility, while barely impacting theirs. Someone had signaled Kid Win, Clockblocker and Adamant. The three heroes were heading our way. Sere remained tied up outside.

Five capes against me. With the bugs that had flowed into the building with Kid Win, I had maybe a thousand flying insects and some spiders. Not nearly enough to mount an offensive. I had neither a weapon nor swarm to give me an edge. I didn’t have my costume, either, but that wasn’t liable to matter.

Once upon a time, I’d had trouble getting my head around what Grue had been saying about reputation, about image and conveying the right impressions. Now it was all I had.

I let out another slow breath. Calm down. I rolled my shoulders, letting the kinks out. There was something almost relieving about the idea that things couldn’t get much worse than they were right now. Let the tension drain out. If they decided to drag me off to jail or the Birdcage, there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

They weren’t attacking. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought. Were they not here to arrest me, or were they covering major routes my bugs might travel, to minimize my offensive strength?

Or did I have leverage I wasn’t accounting for?

I backed up until I’d reached a counter, then hopped up onto the edge, tucking one leg under me. It was a vantage point that gave me the ability to look directly at Dragon, with Defiant at the far left of my field of vision and many of the students to my right, Emma included.

“Low blow, Dragon,” I said, finally. “Outing me? I thought you were better than that.”

Another murmur ran through the room, at what was essentially an admission. Emma was frozen. Her expression wasn’t changing; eyes wide, lips pressed together.

“I try to be,” Dragon replied. “I’m only following instructions.”

“I guess your bosses are a little annoyed at the armored suits my team trashed? Are they demanding that you make up for it by dragging me into custody?”

Dragon shook her head. “Putting the armored suits up against you Undersiders was a beta test, and identifying major flaws is par for the course. I do wish you hadn’t melted down the Azazel… It was expensive. But that’s not why we’re here.”

“There are rules, Dragon,” I said. “Expectations. I fought Leviathan, I fought the Nine. I was there for the fight against the Class-S threat downtown. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I think maybe I deserve to, a little. I’ve done my share. You don’t turn around and reveal my identity in front of a crowd.”

“It wasn’t by choice.”

“You choose to follow them. It’s not like twenty or thirty heroes haven’t walked away from the Protectorate, recently.”

“It’s not that simple, Skitter,” Defiant said.

“It’s never simple. But sometimes you have to take the hard road. Sometimes you have to recognize that the people calling the shots don’t know what they’re doing. Because this? Picking a fight in a school? There’s no way this makes sense.”

“The Protectorate is doing what they can to pick up the pieces,” Dragon said. “Things are a little disorganized. The best of us are working twice as hard, with half of the information, or incorrect information. If there are any errors in judgement on that front, I’d hope they’re somewhat excusable, given circumstances.”

“Sure, but it’s the rest of us who pay the price. The last time we really talked, you were lecturing me about priorities. Do you really want to have this conversation? Where I have words with you about your priorities, in light of everything that’s happening with the Protectorate?”

I left the threat hang in the air.

“You won’t,” Dragon said. She stepped closer, and I raised a hand, gesturing for her to stop. I didn’t really think about it. She stopped where she was.

Why? Why was she actually listening when I told her to stop? If she’d advanced on me, grabbed me, there wasn’t much I could do besides kick and scream.

When I didn’t say anything, she added, “It’s not in you, Skitter.”

“You’d be surprised what I’m capable of,” I said. “I’ve mutilated people. Carved out a man’s eyes, emasculated him. I’ve chopped off a woman’s toes. Flayed people alive with the bites of thousands of insects. Hell, what I did to Triumph… he nearly died, choking on insects, the venom of a hundred bee stings making his throat close up. Even Sere, outside at this very moment. He’s not very happy.”

Defiant and Dragon exchanged a glance.

“Your swarm shouldn’t be able to get near him,” Defiant said.

I shrugged. Image, confidence, reputation. I hated myself for doing it, but I was thinking of Jack Slash. He didn’t wear a mask or a costume. His power didn’t make people shit their pants. What he had was his presence, an atmosphere of confidence.

Weeks or months ago, I might have had a hard time wearing that confidence the way Jack did. The history, the long sequence of events and conflicts where we’d come out ahead in our respective teams, it could just as easily be a burden, the accumulated weight of the various precedents we’d set, but we’d made it into our armor, something to make our enemies hesitate at a critical juncture.

“I’m guessing you’re trying to contact Sere somehow,” I said. “And it’s not working.”

“Is he hurt?” Dragon asked.

I didn’t have to give a response. Fear was a tool I could use, here, and I could achieve that through uncertainty and the unknown.

I’d been thinking of Jack Slash before, but now I was thinking of Bakuda. She’d been the first one to introduce me to that concept.

“You’ve got me thinking,” I said, ignoring the question, “Why set me up like this? You two are too smart to put me in a desperate situation with this many hostages in arm’s reach.”

“Is Sere hurt?” Defiant growled the words.

“You put me in a room with three hundred people I could theoretically take hostage. Why? You can’t be that confident I wouldn’t hurt someone…”

Emma was sitting to my right. She hadn’t budged from her position, safe in the midst of several of the school’s staff. I directed a centipede to crawl across her hand, and she shrieked. In her haste to get up from the bench, she fell. She scrambled to put distance between us. Both Dragon and Defiant tensed.

I raised my hands in a placating gesture, assuring the heroes I wasn’t taking it any further. “…or you wouldn’t be worrying about Sere right now. You wouldn’t have reacted like you just did. Sere’s fine, by the way, though I’m not saying he’ll stay that way.”

Defiant relaxed a fraction. I could see Adamant, Kid Win and Clockblocker entering the room behind Dragon. She turned to say something I didn’t catch, and both Adamant and Kid Win retreated. They’d be going to find Sere, I could only assume.

I met Clockblocker’s eyes, then looked to Dragon. “This is bait, isn’t it? You or the people who are calling the shots want me to take hostages. Because you have an answer handy, something that will stop me before they’re put in any serious danger. I take hostages to try to secure my release. You… I don’t even know. You gas us, or use some kind of controlled charge, like Defiant’s bug zapper, and every bug in the room dies. You get to be the heroes, I go into custody, and word gets around that the Undersiders aren’t so benevolent. The villains who own the city lose both their leader and the trust of the public, all at once.”

“It wasn’t our plan,” Dragon said. Her voice had a faint accent, just barely filtering through the sound filter of her mask. “I’ve studied your record. I suspected it wouldn’t work based on the decisions you’ve made to date. Defiant agreed, though he based his judgement on your powers and versatility.”

“But you went ahead with it.”

“Orders,” Dragon said, again. “And because we discussed the matter, and neither of us really believe you’ll do any serious harm to any hostages.”

“You seem to be giving me a lot of credit, assuming I’ll play nice. And you seriously expect me to keep my mouth shut about all the dirty little secrets I’ve picked up on over the last few months, after you’ve played your last card and revealed my identity? An identity you found out because I helped?”

“That wasn’t how I discovered it,” Dragon said. “And you will keep quiet, because you know how important it is.”

“Maybe,” I answered her. “Maybe not. If I’m going to die or going to jail anyways, why shouldn’t I scream what I know to our audience, here?”

“Because you won’t,” Dragon said, “And you can’t.”

“Why don’t we move this conversation somewhere else?” Defiant asked. He shifted his hold on his spear to a two-handed grip, threatening without being threatening.

“Out of earshot of all of these people?” I asked, extending an arm in the direction of the gathered students. “I don’t think so. If nothing else, I’m entitled to a jury consisting of my peers. I’ll settle for you two taking a hit to your reputation if and when you attack or kill me.”

Which was why I was sitting on the counter. I was less mobile, less able to get out of the way if they attacked, and that was a good thing. A detail that our audience wouldn’t consciously register, but they’d take something away from the fact that my opponents were being aggressive while I was so defenseless.

“We’re not going to kill you,” Dragon said. “We’ve been instructed to take you into custody. I’m sorry we have to do it this way. I’d hoped… we’d hoped to simply talk to you.”

“The both of you? I wouldn’t have thought Arm- Defiant had anything to say to me.”

“We entered Brockton Bay’s airspace, and I was informed that there’s a major quarantine in effect here, relating to the portal downtown, and that the airspace is being strictly controlled. We were forced to announce our reason for coming to Brockton Bay, and PRT members with higher clearance co-opted our mission. We were ordered to confront you directly, here, and to bring you into custody.”

“Why?” I asked. “Those suits you deployed against my team were supposed to be used to hunt the Slaughterhouse Nine. Either you’ve abandoned that chase, or you’re about to tell me that there’s something more important than stopping them.”

“That is something we can discuss while we are in transit,” Defiant told me.

“Defiant-” Dragon said, her tone a warning.

“I could say more here,” he added, “But there are too many prying ears. If you were willing to move to a room nearby, I could explain.”

“No thanks,” I said.

“You’d still have your power, and I know you can communicate with that power,” Defiant said. “You’re just as capable of communicating any secrets to them from elsewhere in the school.”

“If I moved somewhere out of sight and out of earshot,” I said, “My words wouldn’t have the same dramatic effect. Besides, I suspect our audience is the only thing that’s ensuring that you play fair. They have cameras, and you have reputations to uphold.”

“My reputation isn’t a priority,” he said. Dragon nodded, but I wasn’t sure if it was approval or agreement.

“You have your organization’s reputation to uphold. For those of us who stuck around in Brockton Bay, we had reasons. Something kept us here. There was something to protect, or people to support. Some were just scared, because actually leaving was scarier than staying. Others didn’t have any place to go. With the Protectorate slowly folding in on itself like a house of cards, I’m thinking you had a reason to stay, a reason you’re following orders you don’t want to. You’re not about to rough up an unarmed, uncostumed girl and make them look bad on camera. Not when you have that big a stake in things.”

Defiant glanced in the direction of the crowd. A handful of students had cell phones out, watching the scene.

“Remind you of the hospital?” I asked. “Similar scenario.”

“Yes,” he replied. He didn’t elaborate.

“We could grab you,” Clockblocker chimed in. “I can, or he can just walk up to you. No violence necessary.”

“No,” Defiant said. Again, there was no elaboration.

It dawned on me. Defiant and Dragon were playing it safe because they thought I might have a trick up my sleeve, like I had at the fundraiser. I’d disabled Sere, despite the fact that he was supposed to counter my power, and I hadn’t even made a big deal of it. They knew what I’d done to Echidna, and several other events besides.

They were worried I’d pull something.

Defiant had a grasp on my powers, Dragon had a grasp on me as a person, and they’d gauged that I wasn’t a risk to the others in the room. Which, if I was being honest with myself, I wasn’t. They had the upper hand, they lost nothing by letting this play out, and so they weren’t making a move. They’d talk me down, so to speak, and if I did something, they’d use one of their gadgets or tricks to counter my play.

One of the worst possible things had just happened to me, with my secret identity becoming public knowledge, and here I was, unarmed without a single idea on how to get out of this… and the good guys were playing it safe. I smiled; I couldn’t help it.

“Fuck me,” Clockblocker muttered to Dragon. I might not have made out his words if it weren’t for the bugs I’d planted on the heroine. “It just sunk in. It’s really her.”

Why only just now?

Adamant had distorted his metal armor to create a completely form-fitting metal suit, with only the thinnest possible slits for his eyes, before venturing outside. He’d waded through my swarm, mostly blind, and he’d only just found Sere beyond the wall at the school’s perimeter. He reshaped an armor panel into a weapon to start cutting Sere free.

Could I have caught Adamant too? Probably. But it wasn’t worth the effort, not when he could reshape metal, with enhanced strength and durability on top of that.

Now that I understood what was going on, I felt like I had something of an edge. Now, how could I leverage it?

“I’m sorry,” Defiant said.

That threw my thoughts off track. I tensed, but he wasn’t apologizing for an imminent attack. “What?”

“In the past, when we’ve crossed paths, I should have made efforts to meet you halfway. I didn’t. I’ve had time to reflect, I’ve had another person to talk to and give me some objectivity, and I’ve come to regret how things played out between us. I could say more, but it would come out like excuses, and I doubt either of us want to hear those.”

“That’s what you came here to say?”

“In large part,” Defiant said.

“We’d hoped to talk to you, one cape to another,” Dragon elaborated, “About the immediate future, with the Undersiders running this city, and your expectations in particular, Skitter. But both Defiant and I thought he needed to say something to you along those lines, and perhaps you needed to hear it. If anything pushed us to come here, it was that.”

I didn’t have a response to that. It was easier when the opposition were assholes. Expressing remorse? How was I supposed to parse that?

Except, they’d done one thing that was assholish. One incongruent element in all of this.

“One last question, then,” I said. “Why? Why out me in front of everyone? It doesn’t fit with the idea of Defiant being remorseful, it flies in the face of the unwritten rules, and I know my team has played fast and loose with those rules, but I wouldn’t expect you to break them like this, Dragon. Not Defiant, either, if he’s reinventing himself.”

Defiant and Dragon exchanged a look.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s better you don’t know,” Dragon said.

“What is? And better for who?”

“Better for everyone involved,” she said.

“Tell me.”

She glanced at Defiant, but he didn’t turn her way. “A precog told us it was our best option for bringing you into custody.”

A precog? The incongruous elements fit together. A plan of action that was riddled with little flaws and contradictions when seen from an outside perspective, that made sense when seen through the lens of someone who’d seen the future and worked out what criteria needed to be met to get the desired end result. This, mobilizing on the school, it was the same kind of setup I might expect from a plan that Coil would have hashed together after a long question and answer session with Dinah, his ‘pet’ precog.

Dinah.

“Who was this precog?” I asked, the question abrupt.

“Skitter-” Dragon started.

“Who?”

“You know who,” Defiant told me.

It knocked the wind out of me in a way that I hadn’t experienced with the revealing of my secret identity. My blood ran cold, and all of my confidence just plummeted, as though it had fallen into a pit so deep I couldn’t even see the bottom.

It was. All of the lengths I’d gone to, the lines I’d crossed, to get Dinah away from Coil, to get her home to her family, and… this?

I was acutely aware of the crowd to my right. They’d backed away from the front tables, and were clustered at the far end of the cafeteria. Still, they’d be hanging on every word they could make out. They were watching my every movement, every facet of this conversation. There were cell phone cameras turned my way, and every second of footage would no doubt wind up on Parahumans Online or some video site.

I barely cared. I felt a little numb as I swung my legs around to the far side of the counter and hopped down. I wasn’t standing as straight, and some of my hair had fallen down around my face, obscuring it.

“Did they force her to give up the information?” I asked. My voice sounded funny. I couldn’t pin down whether I felt angry, sad or any of that. I had only the external clues, the way my voice had the faintest of tremors, and a strange hollow feeling inside.

I stepped away from the counter, away from Dragon and Defiant. My foot had started to fall asleep where I’d been sitting on it, and I felt a touch unsteady anyways.

“You don’t want to hear the answer to that question, either,” Defiant spoke, behind me.

Dragon and Defiant had flown in, apparently to say hi, and so that Defiant could make something resembling an apology as part of his twelve step assholes anonymous process. With the chaos the PRT had been facing as of late, and their own preoccupation with their mission, they hadn’t been notified of the quarantine procedures. They’d been questioned, they’d divulged that I was here, and the bigwigs giving the orders used Dinah to plot out a means of attack that would be likely to get me into custody.

Each idea seemed so much worse than the other, if I considered it for even a moment: either the PRT was using Dinah just like Coil had, or that Dinah had volunteered the information of her own free will.

I was willing to take Defiant at his word. I didn’t want to hear the answer.

“What are the odds?” I asked. “Do you know?”

“I can ask,” Dragon said.

“Please.”

She paused. “Ninety-six point eight percent chance we bring you into custody,” Dragon said. “We have the numbers on general paths you might take to escape. You understand if I don’t give you the chance of success on those numbers, but you should know that violence won’t work. Less than one percent chance of success.”

“Ah.” It was all I could bring myself to say.

It explains why they’re playing it safe. It’s not just that I have a penchant for problem solving. Dinah told them to watch out for it.

I glanced at the crowd. They were still listening. Emma was there, hugging her arms to her body, eyes wide and uncomprehending.

Not even a factor. On the list of things I had to deal with, she wasn’t even in the top ten, not even in the top one-hundred. I felt irrationally offended that she was here, as if she was only doing it out of some kind of self-importance. As if she’d had a choice.

A part of me, bigger than I’d expected it to be, wanted to lash out. To hurt her just because I could, to answer that outrage I was experiencing, in regards to something she had no control over.

It wasn’t like I had much to lose.

“Skitter,” Dragon said. She made it a warning, almost like she had with Defiant. I couldn’t be sure what she was warning me about. Was my line of thinking that obvious?

“I never liked that name,” I said. “Skitter. Never quite fit.”

“If there’s something else you’d like us to call you…” she trailed off, inviting an answer. Her voice was gentle, as if she were talking to someone on a ledge. I noticed Clockblocker was standing beside her, his glove pointed at me, fingers outstretched.

Was I on a ledge, in a matter of speaking? I could hardly tell.

“No idea,” I said, as I walked around a table to put students between myself and Clockblocker. “Felt like commenting on the subject.”

“You know how capable the precog is,” Defiant said. “Come quietly, and we can all talk to the authorities together. If it would help, I can admit some culpability in your current circumstance. All of us together might be able to get you a more lenient sentence.”

I was aware of the eyes of the other students. There was the cluster at the back of the room, the ones who were backing away from me, cringing, cowering. Others hadn’t left their seats, and were arrayed around me, their heads turning to watch me as I walked down the aisle. The ones who’d stayed, less afraid, or more willing to face their fear.

He was admitting it, loud enough for everyone to hear. He was partially to blame for me being… this. A crime lord. A villain. Partially. Much of the fault was mine.

Strange, to be confronted with the realization here, at school. Not the place where it all started, but close enough.

“Okay,” I said, more to myself than anyone else.

“Yes?” he asked, taking a step forward.

“No,” I told him. He stopped in his tracks. “That was more of an okay, I’ve decided what I’m doing.”

I could see him tense.

“Students!” I called out, raising my voice.

“She’s taking hostages,” Dragon said, her jetpack kicking to life.

“…a clear shot,” Clockblocker said. He was walking briskly to his left, his glove still trained on me.

“I’m not taking you hostage,” I said. “It’s really your choice how this plays out. I’m not sure if you heard me say it before, but I described you as a jury. Now it’s time for you to vote.”

“That’s not how it works, Skitter!” Defiant shouted. He stepped forward, then whipped around to kill the swarm that was flowing in through the doorway behind him. I could divert some to the air ducts, but it didn’t amount to much. He was stuck near the door, unless he wanted to let the bugs stream in.

“Stand if you side with me,” I called out. “I won’t make any big speeches here. That’s not who I am. I won’t feed you lies or guilt you into this. It’s your call.”

What had I expected? A handful of people, Charlotte included? A slow, gathering buildup?

Of the three hundred or so students in the auditorium, nearly a third stood from the benches where they’d sat. As a mass, they migrated my way, gathering behind me. Charlotte stood just to my left, staring forward without making eye contact with me.

Since I’d entered the school, I’d been acutely aware of the distinctions, the difference between then and now. The sense of the Undersider’s presence in the school had followed me, nagging at me.

What use were followers if we couldn’t use them?

I heard movement, and glanced over my shoulder to see Charlotte’s friend, Fern, breaking away from the mass of students at the very back of the room. Nineteen out of twenty of them were the clean, pristine, bright-eyed kids who’d left the city when the trouble started. As Fern advanced, eyes to the ground, others broke away from the crowd to join my group. Not many. Ten or twelve. It was still something.

A hundred students and change, a small handful of bugs. I could see Emma, standing on the sidelines, her fists clenched. She was saying something, repeating it over and over, under her breath. I couldn’t spare the bugs to listen in. I wasn’t sure I cared.

“This is reckless,” Defiant said. His voice had a strange tone to it, and it wasn’t just the digital twang that I was hearing at the edges of the words.

“Probably,” I replied, raising my voice enough that it could carry across the room. “But not as much as you’d think. We’re not fighting. I stress, we’re not engaging you.”

“What are you doing, if you’re not fighting us?” Clockblocker asked.

“Defiant and Dragon wanted to use the hostages against me, putting me in a lose-lose situation where I was caught between them and having to hurt people to try to escape. I think I’m turning the tables, now. We’re going to walk out of this school as a group. If you want to stop us, you’re going to have to hurt us, and you aren’t capable of doing that to people any more than I am.”

“Skitter!” Dragon raised her voice.

“Taylor,” I answered her. “I’m just Taylor, for just a little while longer. I suppose I’ll be retiring my civilian name, one way or another, by the end of the night. Fuck you for that, by the way. I won’t forget it.”

“… wasn’t me,” she said, and I doubted even Clockblocker heard her, from where he stood beside her.

“It wasn’t your choice,” I said, “But as long as you choose to follow them, you’re as culpable as they are.”

I hadn’t even finished my sentence when I raised a hand and pointed. There was a moment’s hesitation, and then the group advanced. I waited a few seconds, and then joined them, falling in step.

Clockblocker used his glove, and the fingertips shot out with explosive force, with what looked like gleaming white fishing line stretching between the digits and the glove. The tips punched into a wall. A fence of thin lines, not much different from my spider silk.

Dragon put her hand on the glove, and the tips retracted just as fast. My bugs could hear her speaking. “…’ll hurt … civilians.”

A few members of the group broke away before getting too close to the capes. Others joined in. The group marched forward, reaching the front of the room.

Someone pushed a piece of clothing into my hands. A sweatshirt. I pulled it on and flipped the hood up. I took my glasses off, sliding them into a pocket.

Clockblocker was pressing through the group. He’d used his power, but the press of bodies was actually causing some damage, as people unwittingly pushed others into the frozen individuals. He was fighting to reach me.

“Link elbows,” I said, my voice low, “Surround him. He’s only about as strong as you are.”

It took a second for people to get organized. He passed perilously close to me, but his eyes moved straight past me. A few heartbeats later, the members of the group who had managed to get themselves linked together had him surrounded.

“Everyone to my right, head for the front door. Everyone to my left, to the kitchen. Straight past Defiant.”

The man barred the door. We were only a dozen feet away when he slammed the butt of his spear into the ground. Electricity and hot air ripped through the serving area of the cafeteria, with visible arcs dancing along the edges of sinks and the metal rails meant for the trays at the front.

“Steady forward,” I said. “First ones to reach him, grab him. You don’t need to do anything except hold on. Dogpile him, and he won’t be able to move for fear of hurting you.”

I saw some people hesitating. The group almost lost its forward momentum.

“He might not be a good guy,” I murmured. “But he’s a hero. Trust in that.”

Or is it the other way around? That apology sat oddly with me.

He held his spear out horizontally, barring our path. It was Charlotte that quickened her step, reaching out to fold her arms around the spear and his left hand.

Others soon did the same. He stood tall in his armor, nearly seven feet, and people almost had to climb on top of him to find a place to hold on.

I almost wondered if I’d had a second trigger event, if I was controlling them, the image was so bizarre.

Then I took a better look at them, at how some weren’t listening to me at all, retreating. Others were being far less consistent, showing a wide variety of emotions. Sheila, the girl with the side of her head shaved, was among them. Her face was etched in anger, of all things, as she clung to Defiant.

A hundred students had joined me, and a hundred students had their individual stories. Their sleepless nights, their individual tragedies and moments of terror. That was all this was.

I wasn’t sure if that was a relief or if it was scarier.

Dragon flew over us, her jetpack carrying her into the air, over the crowd. Students were following beneath her, running. One or two leaped onto tables and jumped to try to catch ahold of Dragon’s foot, but she veered easily to one side.

With Defiant occupied, I was free to bring bugs in through the back door, not having to worry about them being bug-zapped to oblivion. I directed them straight into the vents on the jetpack that were sucking in huge quantities of air. One second it was like a vacuum, drawing in air, the next it was clogged. She lost lift, floating to the ground, and deftly batted aside the reaching hands of the students who were getting in her way.

Her jetpack expanded with an almost explosive motion, fanning out to have four times the number of intake vents, four times the number of output charges, and two laser turrets that curved over her shoulders.

There was no way she could pack that much machinery in that much space. Either it was all crammed into her torso, which was impossible, or Armsmaster-Defiant had tweaked it.

She had liftoff, and she was faster.

And I’d already slipped past Defiant, stepping into the kitchen, and into the narrow hallway. She didn’t have room to navigate, with the other students who were crammed into the entryway.

She turned herself around a hundred-and-eighty degrees and flew out the entrance of the cafeteria, heading outside.

Only twenty or so students were with me, now. Dragon was stopping beside Adamant and Sere. Adamant took her hand, and she lifted off, carrying the pair of them.

Still had to deal with three heroes…

And the massive armored suits that the two had ridden in to arrive. Two.

“No,” Defiant said.

“You were supposed to protect us!” a girl shouted. Sheila, the one who’d been angry, who’d brought a weapon to school and had left the school rather than relinquish it.

“I won’t,” he said.

He was talking to someone else. The vents on his mask were open, hot air flowing out. Was he trying to disperse heat so he wouldn’t burn any students?

“It’s still crude,” he said, “… do more harm than good.”

There was a pause.

“…r freedom isn’t worth possibly losing you.”

Defiant, still at the serving area of the cafeteria, moved. With nine students clinging to him, he was glacially slow, careful to a degree that I might have called agonizing, if it weren’t so much to my benefit.

He needed two hands on his spear to remove the panel in the middle of the shaft. I filled it with my bugs, and he shook it, to try to get them loose. When that failed, he disconnected his glove, letting it strike a student that clung to his leg, before falling to the floor.

I tried to use my bugs to bite his hand, but I found it was a smooth texture, not flesh. Metal or plastic, or something combining the two. He found three buttons in the mechanisms inside the spear and typed in a sequence.

Dragon veered toward the ground, depositing the two capes there before staggering forward in four or five rapid footsteps, dispersing the rest of her forward momentum. She fell into a crouching position.

We made our way outside. The armored suit that Defiant had piloted to the school loomed before us, a four legged mechanical dragon perched on the athletics field, replete with panels of knightly armor. This thing… this wasn’t a fight I could win. Simple A.I. or no, Dragon would have shored up any weakness in logic.

It didn’t move.

We walked between its legs on our way to the parking lot. There wasn’t really another route.

Dragon stood, abrupt, and I flinched.

She turned her head our way, but she didn’t pursue, as we walked through the parking lot to the main road. Adamant and Sere were too far away, Kid Win hadn’t been willing to venture outside a second time, after the faceful of bugs I’d given him before.

Stray bugs drew out an arrow, pointing him to his things. No use letting some stupid kid get their hands on it and blow their faces off or something.

I watched Dragon with my swarm, for as long as she was in my range. I was well out of sight by the time she finally moved. The students had released Defiant, and he approached her side.

She extended a hand, and it tremored, the movement stuttering, palsied.

Defiant seized it in his right hand and pulled her close, wrapping his gloveless arm around her shoulders. He set his chin on top of her head.

My escort and I walked as a group until we were three blocks away from the school.

“Stop,” I said.

They did. The remaining members of the group backed away, turning towards me.

What was I even supposed to say? ‘Thank you’ seemed so trite. They were all so different. There was Fern, and a boy who didn’t look like one of the ones who’d stayed in the city. Some looked nervous, others showed no expression at all. There was no response that encapsulated all of them.

I tried to think of something to say, but the harder I tried, the less anything seemed to fit.

“You saved my dad,” Fern said, as if answering a question I hadn’t asked.

Saved her dad? When?

It didn’t really matter.

“Imp found the bastard who was threatening to do shit to my little sisters,” one guy said. “Tied him to a traffic post. And you work with her, right?”

“You fought the Slaughterhouse Nine.”

“…those bastard ABB guys…”

“Fed…”

“…when Shatterbird…”

“…Mannequin…”

“…Leviathan showed up at the shelter, I heard you were…”

“…Empire…”

A collection of voices, a jumble, to the point that I couldn’t take it all in.

■

I didn’t have a group with me as I walked down Lord street. I turned right, onto familiar territory, my heart heavy.

It wasn’t long before I was close enough. My range was longer, now. Odd. It was supposed to get longer when I felt more trapped, but ‘trapped’ wasn’t the word I would have chosen.

My bugs rose at my command, tracing over the area. It wasn’t so unusual, that there were flies, bumblebees and ants about: the heat of summer, the humidity, the imbalanced ecosystem… Nobody paid them any heed.

A small butterfly found its way into the house. It traced over the glossy smooth armor and helmets of PRT officers, touched the badge on the chest of a police officer.

It touched my dad’s shoulder, moved down his bare arm to his hand. He was sitting at the kitchen table, his head in his hands.

An officer swatted at the bug, missing. The action drew someone else’s attention.

“It could be her,” the woman in the PRT uniform said.

“Fan out!” someone else ordered.

They spilled out of the house. Orders were shouted, and people climbed into cars, peeling out.

Still at the kitchen table, my dad reached out for the butterfly. I had it settle on his finger. Cliche? Overdramatic? Probably. But I couldn’t bear for my possible last contact with my dad to be through anything ugly.

“Taylor,” he said.

Six and a half city blocks away, I replied, “I’m sorry.”

The butterfly and I took off at the same time.

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Chrysalis 20.4

Posted on March 30, 2013 by wildbow

471

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From the moment Charlotte had sent her text, I’d been bracing myself for the worst case scenario. I’d resolved the situation with Greg, and I’d had just enough time to let my guard down before things started falling apart for real.

A guard stopped me in my tracks before I was three steps out of the office, arresting me mid-stride by setting his hands on my shoulders.

I resisted the urge to fight him. I wasn’t sure I could, without a weapon, my armor or powers, and it threatened to make the situation worse. He peered down at me, but I averted my eyes, staring down at the ground so he couldn’t get a straight look at my face.

“No running, kid,” he said.

He let me go, and I resisted the urge to breathe a sigh of relief.

My thoughts were a mess, a jumble of half-finished thoughts, ten times worse than it had been earlier in the day. Somehow, in the midst of it, I managed to establish a few priorities. Slip out, get rid of evidence, assess the threat, and then address it.

I walked slower. I had the papers I’d removed from the clipboard, and I started tearing them up as soon as the guard had disappeared through the doors of the office.

On a more strategic level, I drew on a share of the handful of bugs in the school to get a sense of my surroundings. I’d be letting people know Skitter was present, if they noticed the odd movements of the flies and ants, but I had good reason to believe someone already knew.

Either the people after me were the good guys, and it didn’t matter if I clued them in, or it was one of my other enemies, and the heroes showing up could be a good thing.

Arcadia High consisted of two longer buildings joined by a third, joining them to form something like a capital ‘H’. The main office, where I was, and all the other administrative and staff-related facilities seemed to be located around the center. The only exits from this immediate area would open into an open space where I would be surrounded by walls lined with windows, all looking down at me. Worse, the doors all had the heavy horizontal bars that suggested they were emergency exits, and an alarm would sound if I used them.

Assuming I had someone after me, I couldn’t afford to put myself in that position.

That left me two options. I could head into the building to my left, which featured four stories of classrooms, the cafeteria and a gymnasium, with a door that led to the student parking lot at the front of the school, or I could head right, into a building that was much the same, though longer, with an auditorium and the front doors of the school in close proximity to one another, and quite a few more classrooms.

I headed for the front door, to my right, depositing the scraps of paper in a trashcan on my way. I moved as fast as I could without drawing undue attention, discreetly placing bugs on all of the guards I could find.

I stopped in my tracks as my bugs made contact with two other individuals. Adamant and Sere were in the company of two guards, moving from the front door to the intersection immediately in front of me.

Making a sharp right, I headed for the stairwell, ducking away before they could advance far enough ahead to get a glimpse of me. I’d worried they were making a beeline straight for me, but they stopped at the junction where the two hallways met. I was already reaching the hallway below. The guidance counselor’s office and staff meeting rooms sat behind floor-to-ceiling windows with the same glass that the exterior windows had: hexagon-shaped cells blending near-seamlessly into one another. Looking straight at it, I couldn’t tell the difference, but the light caught each cell differently if I viewed it at certain angles, making them stand out. Measures against Shatterbird?

Behind one of the windows, I could see two guidance counsellors sitting in a circle with a dozen students. Nobody, not even the guard who was standing on the other side of the glass door, gave me more than a glance.

The exterior windows of the building were all securely closed. The building was cool despite being a greenhouse of sorts, but it made getting my bugs into the building a difficult matter, and that left me with a relatively small swarm. I gauged the number of bugs I could spare, and situated the less mobile bugs on doors and at the points where the walls met the floor or ceiling. I might have preferred a denser collection, to map out my surroundings, but it gave me a sketchy mental picture of how the hallways were laid out.

A small cloud of flies was only now reaching the front office, slipping inside as a student opened the door, navigating between legs and feet to make their way to the principal’s office.

Listening in required conscious thought, but I’d been working on training my brain to follow human speech with the insects’ alien hearing. It was easier, the more I had nearby, but I’d have to make do.

“…fight on my campus…” she spoke into the phone.

I had some information now, for as long as she was on the phone. Not much, and it required me to divert some focus to translating, but it was something.

“…of my students are …ly sensitive … to … them feel unsafe…”

It was an unfamiliar school, and while I had a basic sense of the layout, particularly on the exterior, the interior was something of a hurdle. The hallway I was on ended in short staircases at either end, each of which led up to the main hallways of the larger buildings. I made my way towards the one furthest from Sere and Adamant.

“…if that’s an order… yes… fine…”

The principal hung up the phone, placing it on her desk. She didn’t act right away. I quickened my pace.

The bugs I had on her pant legs informed me that she was swiveling around. I had to think about the layout of her office before it clicked. The computer.

I was at the top of the stairs, the door that led to the parking lot at my left, when the signal went through. Every single guard in the building reacted in the same moment, as did Adamant and Sere. Some withdrew things from their pockets -phones, I could guess-, while others were already kicking into action.

It wasn’t just the guards. The bugs I had on classroom doors informed me of some students slipping out of class. Two students, both boys.

My enemy was the Protectorate, or someone with strong connections in the Protectorate. Nobody else would be able to pull this.

Guards stepped into the building and shut the doors behind them. The heavy, mechanical sound of the doors locking echoed down the hall around me; the doors leading outside were all being sealed shut.

The gate at the front of the school was closed, and a guard was heading for the chain-link barrier at the edge of the parking lot as well.

Could I run? Maybe. Fight my way past the guards? It was possible. I could cloak myself in bugs, use my limited repertoire to disguise myself, to disable and/or distract them while fighting my way outside. Could I get to the end of the parking lot in time? That, too, wasn’t impossible.

All together? With barely a hundred bugs available? I wasn’t so sure. Any fight took time, it involved a risk to myself, and I wasn’t wearing my costume. If any of the guards had a weapon they’d confiscated or if one of the capes in the area caught up with me, I’d be more than screwed.

I didn’t have any bugs on my person. I’d been concerned about a pat-down at the gate, and I didn’t want to have bugs crawling throughout the inside of my pant leg or in my pockets when a guard searched me for weapons. I wasn’t wearing my costume for much the same reason. Stupid of me.

I was stuck.

“May I have your attention please?” Principal Howell’s voice sounded from speakers throughout the school. “The school is now being locked down. For your own safety, please remain in your classrooms. Students not in an assigned classroom should proceed in a calm and orderly fashion to the nearest seating area. Students in the north wing of the school will need to make their way to the auditorium. Students in the south wing should gather in the cafeteria. Remain calm and rest assured: there is no immediate danger.“

The noose was constricting around me. The students would be contained in select areas, and classrooms would be cleared one by one. If the Protectorate was involved, I wasn’t even sure I could find a proper hiding spot. Didn’t Kid Win have some ability to see through walls or detect heat signatures with his goggles?

The two boys had reached a room on the bottom floor, near the gymnasium, and were quickly changing into their costumes. Clockblocker and Kid Win.

What did the good guys know? They’d been alerted that I was in the school. I’d been in the office only minutes ago, and the principal had put my name into the computer. That was probably the catalyst, given how fast things had proceeded in the minutes since. The principal got the phone call, and had ordered the lockdown as a consequence. The fact that she’d warned me, it didn’t jibe with the lockdown: she probably hadn’t wanted to do it.

It struck me that they didn’t know that I was in the school now.

Inside of the building, I was largely defenseless. Outside, I did have my bugs. I doubted I could get out without drawing attention, but I could theoretically get them to call off the lockdown.

My bugs moved from the surrounding blocks and collected near one of the fire doors I’d noted earlier. They formed into a decoy, a rough copy of my general silhouette, covered in bugs, and then began moving toward the school gates.

One of the guards standing by the auditorium saw and shouted for Sere. The white-shrouded hero hurried for the door.

Sere was a long ranged cape, probably capable of killing my swarm with little difficulty. I split my swarm off into further copies, maintaining their movement towards the gate and the walls.

Another announcement was broadcast throughout the school. “A supervillain is currently near the school entrance. Students in the central areas of the school should relocate to the cafeteria. Anyone already in a secure place should please remain where they are.”

The office was emptying, now, and guards were breaking away from their groups to ensure that every student that had been sitting around in the hallways was moving to the appropriate areas. Emma was among the forty or fifty students heading toward the cafeteria, nestled in the midst of the group, while the principal followed at the rear with two guards in her company.

Behind me, the guidance office was evacuating as well. The glass door opened, and the soundproof seal broke. I could hear one of the counselors speaking to the twelve or so teenagers around him. “Let’s go to the cafeteria. If this takes a while, we’ll at least be able to eat.”

He spotted me and gestured for me to join the group.

I could have argued and asked to go to the auditorium instead. There were any number of excuses that could have worked, including ‘I have an issue with one of the students who’s in the cafeteria’.

But I was more interested in being invisible. Better to play along, to think of a plan and execute it, while doing as little as possible to draw attention to myself. Here, at least, I’d be hidden among others. I joined the crowd moving in the direction of the cafeteria.

More guards were directing other students to the cafeteria, the groups merging into a single mass, with the cafeteria doors as the bottleneck. Inside, everyone was spreading out to find tables. Again, I noted the distinction between the two varieties of student. The bright and cheerful ones were collecting together, filling up every space at the tables closest to the door and to the front of the cafeteria, where all of the food was available. Others were spreading out, alone or in groups of two to five.

The principal and other staff members were standing by the door, seeing that everyone filed peacefully into the room. Emma was sitting at one table with all of the secretaries and a few of the teachers who I supposed hadn’t had a class to teach. She glared at me as I walked into the room.

I found Charlotte, too, identifying her by the cube of paper with the ladybug inside that I had my more prominent minions carrying these days.

“Taylor!” she hissed, as I made my way towards a table at the back of the room.

I was dimly aware of Sere striking down one of the decoys. The moisture in the air zipped to his hand, and nearly half of the decoy was ruined, the bugs dazed or unable to move.

The spiders, I noted, suffered worse than most. They used a kind of biological hydraulic system to move. Shit. I liked my spiders. They were particularly useful.

I reached Charlotte and murmured, “Best if you don’t know me.”

“Hey, Taylor,” she hissed the words, twisting around in her seat. When I didn’t reply, she repeated herself, “Hey. Is this about you?”

“I think so,” I muttered.

I took a seat at a table near the back, folding my arms in front of me and resting my chin on the back of my hands. Staying out of sight, while keeping an eye on everything. It also allowed me to focus on my swarm.

My bugs were discreetly tracing back routes and other options. Was there a place where the cafeteria staff unloaded the day’s food? Some back way leading from, say, a gym or custodial entrance? A way onto the roof, even? I didn’t have enough bugs to spare that I could leave them on walls. I was forced to personally memorize every corridor and feature of the building that might be important.

Outside, Sere was working at destroying my decoys. I split off more copies, and then moved one group to him to see if I could blind him.

The bugs were being sucked dry of moisture as they got too close to Sere; I wouldn’t be able to disable him with just my swarm. He drew more water from a cloud of bugs, desiccating and killing hundreds.

The number that died was indicative of something, though. As devastating as the attack was, the effect didn’t cover a massive area. It was a roughly cone-shaped area, with a long reach, but narrow breadth.

If he was surrounded by moisture, maybe I could use that against him? My flying bugs started doing bombing runs. They picked up small stones and dirt, using the fine tarsals that helped them cling to walls. There wasn’t the suction, but it served to allow them to pick up specks at a time. They flew in tight loops, staying high over Sere as they dropped the fragments, touched ground to collect more dirt, and repeated the process. I was careful to spread them out and collect the fragments from multiple places so he couldn’t kill too many at a time.

Dense moisture and dirt could become a thin mud, and it might serve to blind him or distract him where my bugs couldn’t.

In the cafeteria, another group of students was filing inside. Fifty or sixty in all, they each bore telltale signs of the kids who’d stayed. Many were drenched in sweat, and the teacher with them held a basketball. Had they been in the gym, burning off nervous energy, working on building social bonds and all that?

There were maybe three or four hundred people in the cafeteria, now, as students from all over the school streamed in, including most of the ones from the auditorium. With the increasing number of students, it was impossible for anyone to have a table to themselves. A group of three boys claimed the far end of Charlotte’s table, and she stood up.

She had issues around unfamiliar men. It might have served as a push for her to do what she’d been debating doing anyways. She joined me at my table, sitting close enough that our shoulders touched.

“What’s going on?” she whispered.

“You know when Tattletale vetted everybody?” I whispered back.

Charlotte nodded.

“She made a list of names, some vetted people along with some others who were safe. Mixing it up. She gave the list to the principal, with the idea that maybe she could cut us some slack and we’d help keep the peace in the school in exchange. So she had an idea that I was related to the Undersiders, she told me to run and hinted someone might be after me,” I said.

Charlotte nodded again, mute.

“I tried,” I whispered, “but I couldn’t cover enough ground in time. Someone forced her hand and ordered her to put the school on lockdown. I can’t slip out without drawing attention to myself, I’m not in a position to fight, and it’s only a matter of time before they find me.”

“Shit,” she said.

“Exactly,” I said. “I won’t blame you if you want to move somewhere else.”

“I’ll stay,” she said.

“Char-”

“I’ll stay,” she repeated.

I relented. I couldn’t afford to focus on this, when I needed to control my bugs and memorize any possible escape routes or hiding places. “If anything happens, get clear. You don’t know me. Your ‘little brother’ is counting on you, and he should be your priority.”

“Little brother?” she asked. I saw the realization as she remembered our code word. ‘Little brother’ referred to all the kids in her charge.

“Oh. Right,” she said.

Kid Win was making a beeline for the front door. I clustered bugs on the surface of the door, blocking his line of sight as much as I was able.

It didn’t work. The thermal goggles. Which means he can tell there’s no body inside any of the decoys. He pushed the door open and shouted, “Sere!”

That was about as far as he got before my bugs descended on him, filling his open mouth.

“What are you going to do?” Charlotte asked. With the degree of attention that I was devoting to what was going on, she sounded almost distant.

Even with the murmuring of hundreds or so students conversing, the cafeteria was eerily still and quiet compared to what was going on outside. Adamant was standing at the doorway to the auditorium, simultaneously trying to keep an eye on the stray students from the north building and the fighting outside. Clockblocker was making his way to the front. He was slightly different; he wore what seemed to be a gauntlet, out of proportion with the rest of his body.

“I have a few options,” I whispered my response. “I could be aggressive, take on the people at the door. I think I could slip away.”

“Why didn’t you do that already?”

“They were too guarded, and they were anticipating trouble from within the building. My bugs are causing some chaos outside, now, and they’ll have their backs turned. I’ll have time to improvise a mask, which I didn’t, before.”

“You have to get out of the cafeteria first.”

“I’m not too worried about that,” I said. “There’s two or three possible escape routes I’ve been able to find, if I can get my hands on a set of keys or create a big enough distraction to get away with making some noise. The principal has my back, and she might make it easier. I’d ask her for a key, but I’m not sure she would be willing to risk it, and there’s too many people around her.”

Including Emma, I noted. One person I could count on to pay attention to me.

“What if she’s the one who made the call to these people who are after you?”

The principal? I shook my head. “Her priority is keeping this school and its students safe. Besides, I overheard her communicating with someone on the phone. If she was playing both sides, there’d be no reason for her to maintain the ruse when I wasn’t anywhere nearby.”

“Unless she knew you could hear through your bugs,” Charlotte added.

“Unless she knows,” I echoed her. “I don’t think she does.”

Kid Win was suffering at the hands of my swarm. He drew a weapon, but my swarm was already prepared with lengths of silk. They constricted the weapon and prevented it from unfolding. Sere, for his part, had his hands full trying to take down the decoys. A large part of what I was concentrating on was the decoys, getting enough details right, and splitting them off in a way that suggested I could be any of them, while simultaneously keeping them far enough apart that he couldn’t attack more than one at once.

“Taylor,” Charlotte whispered. “If they know who you are, they know. They could find you again, or put your face on the news.”

“If they did, it would be breaking a good few unwritten rules. Especially if they only knew who I was because I helped with the Echidna situation. They can’t afford to punish villains for helping against the big threats. It would mean fewer people showed, and they need all the help they can get. Here, at least, they could say I was intruding on neutral ground.”

The explanation felt feeble.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Charlotte whispered, echoing my line of thinking. “Doing it here, at a school, with so many potential hostages around. Breaking the code?”

“I’m thinking…” I replied, “I’m thinking everyone knows the Protectorate is falling apart. Legend’s gone, Eidolon’s announced he’s leaving as soon as things get quieter, the head of the PRT stepped down, a whole bunch of rank and file members left, and so did Weld and a lot of the more monstrous capes. Maybe there’s pressure from the top to put one in the win column, remind people why the Protectorate exists.”

And who better to take down than the creepy teenage supervillain who’s leading the team that took over a city?

“But in a school?”

I didn’t have any guesses to offer on that count. I focused on the fighting outside instead of responding.

Getting too close to Sere was killing my bugs just as easily as his long ranged absorption attack. I had to attack him from range, and the rain of dirt and small stones wasn’t doing anything, as far as I could tell.

I turned to a tactic that had crossed my mind while fighting Echidna. She, like Sere, had been tricky to get close to. Unlike Sere, she’d been too big to really tie up.

Spiders drew out lines of silk and formed them into cords, weaving them into one another to form extended lines, fifty or so feet long. With the combined efforts of dozens of flying insects, half gripping one end and half gripping the other, the lines were flown in Sere’s direction, so he was caught by the middle.

The bugs holding the ends then continued onward, keeping the cord taut as they circled him, one group flying clockwise, the other flying in the opposite direction. In this manner, they orbited him, winding him up in a single length of cord.

With five cords being wound around him in that fashion, I soon had him hampered, his arms and legs restricted in movement.

He kept moving forward, attacking my decoys. As he passed a signpost, I hurried to have my bugs wind the remaining lengths of cord around it. Lines went taut, cords constricted around him, and he fell. He struggled, but it didn’t seem he would be on his feet anytime soon.

With Kid Win on the ground, thrashing, that was two down.

The other two, I was pretty sure I could deal with them if it came down to it. I wasn’t sure what Clockblocker’s glove did, but I had a suspicion. Adamant’s armor was just begging to have silk cords wind through the chain links and armor plates.

My bugs rifled through Kid Win’s pouches and armor compartments. Masses of bugs and teams of the larger, stronger bugs working to pull silk cords helped to divest him of various tinker tools and components. His smart phone, a cylinder with a trigger on the front and a button on top, a sphere with a hole through the center, with screw-like rifling and electrical connectors in the interior. There were two devices like tuning forks, too, with tines that wound around one another without touching, and wires beneath the handles. Bugs in his ears helped to work an ear bud out of position and carry it off.

Once he was denied as many of his tools as I could move, I dragged them away. It was only when I was sure that he wouldn’t be able to use them against the swarm or against me that I eased up on him. I let my bugs drift in the general direction my decoys had gone, as though I were leaving or gone.

He stood, gagging and choking. Sere wasn’t in sight, and I’d taken Kid Win’s phone. There was only one place for him to go if he wanted to communicate with the others and touch base. He headed back into the school.

I was ready. Bugs flowed out of his pockets, gaps in his armor and from where they’d clustered at the small of his back. I tied his wrist to the door handle.

It took him a long few seconds to realize the door wouldn’t swing shut until he moved. That bought the remainder of my swarm time to turn around and flow through the open entryway. They headed straight for the guards, and swept into their pockets the same way they had with Kid Win’s pouches.

Keys? Yes.

While Kid Win and the guards were blinded, my bugs fetched the keys.

I stood from the bench of the lunch table. “I think I’m set.”

“Just like that?” Charlotte asked.

I looked at the front of the room, where other students were feeling hunger and teenage appetites overcoming their fear of what was going on elsewhere in the school. Only a dozen or so. Maybe they don’t have a steady supply of food where they are, I mused. There were areas of town which weren’t in good shape.

There’re pizza slices, I noted. It was a reminder of how the day wasn’t going as I’d planned.

“It shouldn’t be a problem,” I said. Get out, then see what Tattletale can manage as far as damage control. “Wish me luck. I’ll send you a message and meet you at the lair after school if everything goes according to plan.”

I crossed the cafeteria, heading for the buffet tables and sneezeguard-protected counters with empty trays waiting to be filled by staff. Emma was at her table, I noted, surrounded by secretaries and teachers. I was joined by other hungry students, eager for their free food, and their bodies helped to block me from the sight of both Emma and the staff.

Confidence, I thought. I stepped around the counter and through the doors that led into the kitchen. Confidence made it look like I knew what I was doing; being furtive would only arouse suspicion. My bugs were still carrying the keys, bringing them along an air vent. I’d need to find a way to open a vent cover and retrieve them, but it was among the smallest of the problems I’d face today.

I found a door to the outside. My bugs clustered on the other side, my hand pressing against my own, separated by an inch and a half of door. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure I hadn’t been followed, then started looking for a way into the air conditioning duct.

The smallest of the problems I’d face today.

There was an impact, heavy enough that the lights flickered. Even the bugs I’d gathered on the door were knocked loose, both by the force of the landing and the flying dust and debris.

Right outside the door.

I didn’t need to move my bugs to search out the identity of this antagonist.

A figure strode through the swarm of bugs. He tapped the door with the end of his weapon, and the breath was knocked out of me. Every bug within thirty feet of the door died, including the ones in the air conditioning duct.

I was still reeling as he pushed against the door. It was deadbolted, but the metal of the door’s surface buckled, and it tore free of the frame.

He was wearing armor, forest green and gold, with the stylings of a lizard’s frills or bat wings on the trim, and a faint etching of scales to the green portions. His spear, too, bore a distinctive design, with an etching like a lizard’s skull worked into the heavy spearhead.

He advanced, his spear point leveled at my chest, and I backed up, maintaining a distance between us. To do otherwise would mean letting him drive the weapon into my chest.

On the other side of the campus, another heavy armored suit touched ground, somewhat more gently.

He stopped when we were at the front of the cafeteria. I kept backing up, knowing it was futile. Dragon had exited the other suit, and was using a jetpack to navigate the hallway, flying towards us with an accuracy and ease of movement that belied how fast she was moving.

I didn’t have an escape route. The woman stopped directly behind me, at the entrance to the cafeteria.

“Dragon,” I said. “And Armsmaster.”

“The name is Defiant,” Armsmaster corrected me. His voice had a funny sound to it.

“Skitter,” Dragon answered me, loud enough for everyone to hear. Her voice was almost gentle. “I’m sorry it worked out this way. My hand was forced.”

Last Chapter Next Chapter

Interlude 19 (Donation Bonus #1)

Posted on February 28, 2013 by wildbow

207

Last Chapter Next Chapter

Rey hesitated at the door. He cast a wary glance over his shoulder, but life elsewhere in the city continued as normal.

If he touched the doorknob, any number of things could happen. A pit underfoot, a guillotine blade from overhead.

It took a measure of courage to raise the door knocker and slam it against the front door of the old Victorian-styled house.

The door opened right away.

“Blasto,” Accord greeted him. “We finally meet.”

“Uh huh,” Rey replied. He glanced around. The inside of the house was nice. Must be nice to not have to reinvest ninety percent of your earnings on tech.

“No mask?” Accord asked.

“Yes,” Rey replied. He folded one corner of his face back. “It’s a fungus. Same texture as human flesh.”

Accord’s own intricate mechanical face shifted in response to his underlying expression. “Lovely.”

“I’m still not sure about this, given our history,” Rey said. He accepted the invitation into the front hallway of the house, carefully removed his shoes and set them on the tray to the right of the door.

“I’ve given you my word that you’ll be safe, provided you cooperate.”

“Damn Nazis,” Rey said. “My whole lab, gone.”

Accord didn’t offer any sympathy. “Come.”

Rey followed. Peering into the rooms he passed, he saw libraries and sitting rooms, old furniture. Everything was finely made, nothing cheap or throwaway. Knowing Accord, it was all too possible that the man had hand-crafted everything in this house.

And in each room were people in costume. Other teams had themes, natural or otherwise. Their costumes matched, or they unconsciously mirrored one another in style of dress or quality. Accord’s people were much the same, but it was very deliberate. Each wore fine clothing, elegant dresses and suits, and each had their hair neatly combed into place, oiled to the point that it looked wet. The ‘costumes’ were in the color of their chosen formal wear and badges or brooches they wore, as well as the finely crafted masks that hid any trace of their real expressions.

“You’re not expecting me to dress like them, are you?”

“No,” Accord said. “Truth be told, I fear you could never meet my standards, and I’m going to do my level best to ignore the fact that you exist. You’ll want to keep to the areas I designate and use the back ways out of the building, so that I never see you.”

“You’re not going to imprison me, are you?”

“No. This is a business transaction. I will give you the opportunity to get back on your feet, you will do what you can to eliminate our mutual enemies, being careful to avoid any damage or criminal activity within my territory, and in exchange, you will give me half your territory when all of this is over. Following such an event, I hope we can avoid any further aggression between us for the future.”

“Sure,” Rey said.

“The individuals in question are Menja, Stormtiger, Cricket, Rune, Othala, Niflheim and Muspelheim. I’ll see you have all available records. Best to enter any confrontation with your eyes wide open.”

“Okay.”

“My people will not be available to you, understand. Our bargain presumes you are working alone.”

“I get it.”

“You’re quiet. You don’t have questions? Requests?”

“Wouldn’t mind some grass.”

“Turf?”

Rey smirked, “In the slang sense. I meant-”

“Say no more. I understand what you meant. Provided you stay out of my way, you can do whatever you wish in the assigned area. That said, I and my people will not provide intoxicants, and if you are inebriated in any way in my company-”

“It’s fine,” Rey cut in. “I get it.”

“Here. Into the basement,” Accord said.

Accord led the way, and Rey hesitantly followed.

The basement was expansive. There were no walls – only pillars. The floor was concrete covered in a no-slip perforated rubber mat, the various desks were stainless steel, each on wheels that could be locked in place. Each desk, in turn, had glass cabinets or drawers. As far as Rey could see, they were fully stocked.

But it was more than that. Rey was used to the usual labs, which held years of old material. Tools that had long since fallen into disrepair. Trays of solutions that nobody had touched in years, too old to use but too expensive to throw away in good conscience. There were slides that were stained, tools that didn’t always work. Even when he’d started his lab, it had been with tools stolen from his old University, things bought on the cheap.

This? This was a dream. He stepped over to a glass case, large enough to fit a person inside. There was a case attached to one side with room for a solution to be poured in, and what he took to be an attached tank of distilled water, with a control panel to select the rate and degree of mixture. Another tube would vent the contents into a biohazard case.

A glance told him that everything would be here. There were neatly ordered bins of chemicals, tools laid out in neat rows. Everything was pristine. The cages on the other end of the room with the captive animals, even, were clean, with none of the animal scent or vague smell of waste that accompanied such. There were troughs filled with rich smelling earth, thoroughly mixed and free of clumps.

Rey Andino could create life from raw materials, fashion a homunculus from the most basic ingredients and elements. He could make monsters, loyal beings that would do as he wished, with only time and things he’d picked up from a drug store. Faced with this laboratory, he felt small, insignificant. He knew he would soil it, that things would break as he used them. It was wrong.

“Satisfactory?” Accord asked.

“It’ll have to do,” Rey replied, trying to sound casual.

“It will. Now, I’d like you to know that I recently acquired some samples and records. I’d intended to hold on to them as a bargaining chip at a critical moment, or something I might offer you as incentive to leave this city.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’ll find them in the far corner of the room. The computer contains the database and the attached machine arm will withdraw any samples on request.”

“Sure,” Rey said.

“My ambassadors will be taking turns observing you. Short of a critical emergency, they won’t be reporting anything to me. Citrine will be first.”

Rey nodded. He was already heading to the computers, to find what Accord would feel was so powerful or valuable that Rey would leave the city to get his hands on it.

The computer was fast. Rey started to empty his pockets and smooth out the papers with the few blueprints he’d been able to salvage when the white supremacists had come storming through his old lab, and the computer was already idling at the desktop screen by the time he’d finished.

A black window with text in bold white letters showed a menu. Two options:

A: View Database
B: View Samples

He took the first option, typing the letter in the keyboard and striking the enter key.

It was names. Cape names. They kept appearing, so fast he could barely read them, and the window kept scrolling until he hit the enter key again to interrupt it.

He scrolled up until he found one name. He clicked it.

Blasto, Real Name Unknown
Classification: Tinker 6 (sub: master 5, blaster 2, shifter 2, brute 2); plants.
Disposition: Villain (B)
Last Known Location: Boston (Allston area, east).

Crime lord of East Allston since est. date of April 2009. No subordinates. No past history as a subordinate. Criminal history indicates cap of second degree murder, tendency to mass damage to property and persons. Produces uncontrolled lifeforms that are incapable of replication. Adversarial relationship with Accord (#13151), Spree (#14755) and Chain Man (#14114).

Note: High risk of Class-S classification. Should creations self-propagate, kill orders are pre-authorized.

A: More information/History
B: More information/Powers
C: More information/Contact & Network
D: Back

There were signs of degraded data, but it was there. Accord had somehow acquired the PRT’s system data and records on all parahumans they’d encountered.

No big surprises on the possible kill order. He’d been made aware of it some time ago, and had grumbled, groaned and grudgingly avoided making any lifeforms that could breed in the years since.

“How the hell did you get this?” he asked. He turned around.

It wasn’t Accord behind him. It was a young woman in a formal, silk dress, yellow trimmed with gold, and a mask in matching colors. A gemstone stood out on her forehead, with matching earrings dangling from her ears like chandeliers. Her hands were clasped in front of her.

“I didn’t,” she said.

“You’re one of his… what did he call you?”

“His ambassadors.”

“That’s right. Do you have a name?”

“Citrine.”

“Ok. How did he get this?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Because you don’t know or because you won’t say?”

“Yes.”

He sighed, turning back to the system. He selected the last option in the menu at the bottom of the page, then reloaded the master list, stopping when it had progressed far enough.

Eidolon. There was a full set of details.

More information? Nothing. Data not found.

Powers? Nothing. Data not found.

Legend was the same.

Maybe someone less prominent. He selected Chevalier and got the standard information. More details.

Powers? He selected the option, and received pages upon pages of testing data. Rey’s eyes pored over the results, soaking them in. It was like reading Shakespeare. One could listen to a line, and be momentarily baffled, but skimming it or assuming a general foundation of knowledge, it was possible to pick up the gist of the message; The underlying meanings, if not the exact definitions of the individual elements.

The work of a tinker wasn’t typical science. Refining it was science, but the blunt, raw use of the power? It was almost the opposite.

Good science meant starting with the conditions, forming a hypothesis, making a prediction, and then testing it. Repeat, repeat, repeat, until there was a solid base of knowledge. That knowledge let one establish further conditions, refine hypotheses.

But tinkers started with the end result. A moment of inspiration, glimpses of the major steps one would need to take to get there. It involved working backwards, up until that moment the means came into view. Rey could see it at work, could see Chevalier’s power as raw data, something he could replicate by traveling an entirely different path. He would need a sturdier frame. Something big. This wouldn’t be a hybrid of a stray dog and a plant. This would need to be something closer to a bear.

Or, he realized, a human.

He backed out of Chevalier’s data until he was at the original screen. He checked the samples Accord had provided him with.

Select sub-database:
A) PRT (Protectorate, Wards) samples
B) Non-PRT (evidence database) samples
C) Misc samples

Further investigation revealed the full truth. Accord had gotten his hands on a database of DNA from countless members of the Protectorate and the Wards, as well as scraps of material from certain powers, where traces remained behind.

He selected C, expecting little. His eyes widened.

Many were samples from lifeforms that various tinkers and masters had created. His own were in there. That wasn’t the surprising fact.

He selected the last option on the list. To the right of the computer, in a hermetically sealed case, a robotic arm extended and deposited a microscopic sample on a slide.

A fragment, so small as to be nearly impossible to see, of one of the Simurgh’s feathers.

“You keep making these little oohs and ahhs,” Citrine commented. “It sounds like you’re pleasuring yourself.”

“I am, believe me,” Rey replied, not looking her way. “Where did he get this stuff? Does he even comprehend what he gave me?”

“I’m sure he does.”

He’d considered replicating Chevalier’s power, with a solid enough frame. Maybe a bear, maybe a human. Small potatoes.

He went through the contents he’d unloaded from his pockets until he found a piece of paper he’d folded into an envelope. He tore it open and tapped out the contents.

Each seed was about the size of a pea, tapered at each end, a mottled white-brown. He hurried over to one of the large glass tubes and fiddled with the controls until it started flooding with water.

“Are you one of the talkative ones?” Citrine asked.

“What?”

“I mean, maybe it’s a dumb question, because you’ve stuck pretty much to monosyllabic grunts since this whole thing started, but I’m wondering if you’re one of the capes that likes to rant or one of the quiet ones.”

“Quiet. Why?”

“Honestly? I’m bored. Not like I can go on Facebook with my smartphone or anything. That sort of thing gets you killed, when you work for Accord.”

“You want me to entertain you?”

“I doubt you’re capable. But you could distract me, help while away the minutes.”

He eyed the woman. Rey wasn’t one of the quiet ones by choice. He’d just fallen into the habit of being alone because it was easier to stay in the lab than it was to be out in the larger world. People in the larger world sucked. Up until the Nazis from Brockton Bay had turned up and claimed the building at the other end of the street from his lab, it had been a place he could retreat. A place where his work and his art could occupy his thoughts and distract him from reality.

Art. It was a good starting point for an explanation, and she was probably the most attractive person he’d spent more than one minute around in the last few months…

He forced a smile. He was a little rusty on that front. “What we do, what tinkers do, it’s more art than science. Every step we take is made with an end goal in mind. Just now, looking over these samples, I think I decided on an end goal.”

“What’s that?”

“My usual methods, well, you know them. You’ve fought my creations before.”

“Yes.”

“These seeds,” he raised one hand, a seed pinched between index finger and thumb, “Are like stem cells. They harbor the potential to become virtually anything. Wherever information is missing, they fill in the gaps.”

“Like using frog DNA for dinosaurs.”

“Like using frog DNA for dinosaurs, right. The way I worked it, they’ll decode the information in a very brute force way. The seed starts by forming two bodies, attached by a central hub. I kill the least viable one, it buds and splits again, with copies that are derivatives of the survivor. Usually two to four. Kill all but one, repeat.”

“Until you have something viable.”

“Exactly! Takes anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Then I have what’s essentially a plant-animal hybrid, and I nudge it in the direction of my enemies. Or give it simple programming that I can use. Training half-plant rodents to fetch shiny objects, for example.”

“How?”

“Trade secret,” Rey said. “I’m not dumb. I won’t give away the essentials.”

“Okay. So what’s today’s project?”

“Oh, I’ll have a dozen projects in the work before I let myself go to sleep. But the big one is that I want to replicate an Endbringer.”

He glanced at Citrine, saw that she’d gone still.

“I may need to go talk to Accord,” she said.

“No need,” Rey said. “I suspect he already knows. He gave me these samples, no doubt with the idea that I’d use it.”

“And you can’t even control it? Or he can’t control it? It doesn’t sound like him,” Citrine said.

Rey paused. It didn’t sound like Accord. Was there another explanation?

Accord might be planning on killing him after the project was done. Rey kept his creations in line with pheromones, spraying them liberally around his lab and the surrounding neighborhood. They would move to the nearest unaffected location as soon as they were free. Once he did that to Accord’s home, the place would be rendered immune to his own attacks, at least for a little while.

But it still seemed too reckless for the perfectionist. Was Accord that eager to kill the white supremacists? Or was there another plan in the works?

“You’ve gone quiet,” Citrine said.

“Thinking,” he said. “No, I need things quiet for a minute. There’s a TV in the corner. Watch that.”

“I can’t. Accord would be upset,” the woman in yellow replied.

Rey sighed. He crossed the room to the television, turned it on, set it to mute and turned on the closed captions. “He won’t be upset if I turn it on, will he?”

“No.”

“There.”

He returned to the computer and started working with the Simurgh’s tissue. It was hard to cut, and harder still to slice to the point that he could look at it under a microscope.

“Crystalline,” he murmured, as he focused on it. The feathers were like snowflakes when viewed at 40x magnification. He scaled all the way up to 800x magnification before realizing that there were no individual cells.

Was it just the feather? Was it dead tissue, on par with the keratin of fingernails or hair? He used the computer to access a sample of Leviathan’s ‘blood’, and let the hands handle the arrangement of preparing the slide. Being liquid, the blood was easier than the feather.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to use Leviathan’s tissue. Growing a miniature Leviathan in a vat would be a bad idea if that vat was filled with fluid.

Using Behemoth’s tissues would be just as problematic. The Herokiller could ignore the Manton effect at a range of up to thirty-two feet. Even semi-conscious inside a glass case, it was too risky.

Had to be smart about this.

Leviathan’s blood was the same as the feather. Crystals, dense and so opaque that light wouldn’t pass through them.

There were more tissues. Flesh. More blood. Hair. Damaged tissues and intact ones. He went through each.

All of it, the same. Crystals. No individual cells. Even the crystals barely differentiated from one another. Truth was, there was more difference in crystals collected from deeper inside the Endbringer than there was in crystals that had come from different parts of the Endbringer’s body; hair as opposed to blood.

He scraped off a bit of his seed, then added water and the catalysts to splice it with some of the Simurgh’s feather. Sure enough, it started to grow. Each end of the scraping formed into buds, and the buds started to form into basic, foetal shapes, one quadruped, one vaguely humanoid.

But neither lived.

The weaker tissue was easier to work with. Assuming it was deriving patterns from the crystals, insofar as the crystals could create or support life, he could use that to work out the peculiarities of how the Endbringers were able to sustain themselves.

No vascular system, no sign of emergent organs.

Of course the emerging lifeform wasn’t viable. It wasn’t capable of life in the first place.

He’d have to take another route. He withdrew a sample of Myrddin’s tissue, then started splicing it with one seed and the ruined fragments of the Simurgh’s feather.

It was lunacy, tampering with Endbringer-related materials, but he couldn’t shake the idea that he was on to something. He’d sustain the Endbringer tissues with other living tissue that could feed it energy or nutrients. His seeds would bridge the gap. It would take ten or fifteen minutes before he saw any real results. There was other work to do in the meantime.

A sedated monkey plus a sample of his own tissue and one seed, and he had a homunculus in the works. It would be roughly as intelligent as a very stupid person in most respects, but it would share his own understanding of chemistry, biology, science and botany. It would serve as a lab assistant, and he would need one for a lab this big.

The rest of the seeds went into another vat to replicate. He’d need more.

He walked over to the glass tube where the Simurgh-Myrddin-plant hybrid was in the works. One had wings rather than legs. He directed a laser to kill it. The other had four arms, but two resembled wings. It would work. He conducted a charge through the fluid to reset the life cycle. It would split in two or three, and he’d kill the remainder.

Accord must have based this equipment off of the stuff he’d had in his last lab, the one Accord had forcibly ejected him from. The lasers being built into the glass tube were a nice touch, kept everything hermetically sealed.

In a fit of whimsy, he directed the lasers to a pure light form, then had them fire into the glass case itself. Letters lit up, labeling the projects. Regrowth for the plant that was growing and budding with more seeds. Homunculus for the monkey that was gestating in the second tube.

And for his real project? It would have to be something fitting.

Morrígan.

Beautiful. He studied the three foetal forms that were developing inside, killed two, narrowing down the results he wanted. Like pruning branches.

The TV started making noise. Rey wheeled around to see Citrine and one of her fellow ‘ambassadors’ standing in front of the TV. The man in the suit with a green dress shirt and a copper lizard mask was the one turning up the volume.

“I’m trying to work here,” Rey said.

“Something’s going on. Look,” the man spoke.

Rey impatiently left his work behind. If he waited too long, a bad growth could be carried on to the young. Wouldn’t do.

The TV showed a reporter talking. Why was he supposed to care?

Then it changed to a camera view of an ongoing conflict. Three gigantic armored suits were in open conflict with a small group of people.

The Slaughterhouse Nine. Here, in Boston.

One of the suits was deploying swarms of drones, but they were getting cut out of the air as fast as they appeared. Another member of the Nine had a loose-fitting coat of human flesh draped over him. He stretched it out to grab surrounding buildings and anchor himself in place as a mechanical lizard with a giant wheel on its back tried to haul him in with what looked to be an immense suction.

The Siberian had made contact with and was tearing apart a third suit.

A suit high in the air fired off a laser beam, and the Siberian jumped to put herself in the line of fire.

Whatever happened next, the camera didn’t catch it. The concussive force of the laser hitting was enough to knock the cameraman over, and the image shorted out.

Rey sniffed. He’d like to see more of Dragon’s work, not because it had anything in common with his own, but because it was good work. But for now, his focus was on his projects.

With a quick glance, he assessed and executed two homunculus-offshoots and one derivative of the Morrígan. Electrical charges restarted the gestation process.

The thing was starting to resemble the Simurgh, though both feathers and hair were brown-black in color, it was hermaphroditic and the flesh was more translucent than white. Veins stood out.

Rey studied it while the thing cracked in the middle, the individual halves separating with a thread of flesh between them. Each of the halves began dissolving and forming anew.

If it was even half as powerful as the real Simurgh… well, this would be a game-changer.

And Accord had to know that. Had to be aware that Rey would be working with the Endbringer tissues on this level.

It wasn’t as though the method of control was that difficult to master. One set of pheromones would make the creation feel fond of something, the other would have an negative effect, drive them away from a person or area. Still another would provoke feelings of anger or hatred, useful if he wanted to bid them to attack.

If Accord found the pheromones, he could be rid of Rey, and he’d have whatever creations Rey had put together in the meantime.

It would be at least a day before the Morrígan was fully grown. He had that long to think of an answer.

The door slammed shut. Citrine had gone upstairs. The lizard-masked man watched the television.

Time passed, and he watched the results with interest. The Morrígan was now forming with two arms, two legs, and vestigal wings. He let it develop to the point that it was roughly two months old, then killed the offshoots. He started running x-ray scans and doing biopsies, picking through the results to fine tune the internal changes and monitor how much of the lifeform was Simurgh, versus being Myrddin or plant-based. He was judicious and merciless in executing the offshoots, keeping them from growing to a point where there was even a chance of them being sentient.

The lifeform did, he noted with some pleasure, have a Corona Pollentia; a lobe in the brain that would allow for powers if it developed fully.

While the man watched the unfolding news, Rey took the opportunity to brew and spray himself with a set of pheromones. His creations would be more favorably inclined towards him now.

The door at the top of the stairs closed. He turned to see that the lizard-man was being relieved. Had that much time passed already?

“You being good?” the woman asked. She wore a black evening gown with a slit all the way up to her hip. It would have been alluring, but her mask was black, with black lenses and spikes radiating from the edges. Her brooch was of a black star.

“Making headway,” Rey responded.

“One of your fucked up creations broke my leg last year. Please give me an excuse to hurt you. Please.”

“I’ll pass,” Rey said, turning his attention to the homunculus. He calibrated the signal, pressing two electrodes to his own forehead, then sent the readings out to his creation.

When it was done, he drained the fluid and vented the chamber. The glass sank into the floor, and the homunculus crawled out, using its knuckles to walk. Its skin was peeling, more like loose bark crossed with scar tissue than flesh.

“You retain any English?” He asked.

The homunculus nodded.

“Spanish?”

Another nod.

“Go dispose of the slides. Consider everything a top priority biohazard.”

The homunculus found a pair of rubber gloves and began cleaning up the mess from the early experiments.

Rey studied the Morrígan. Alarms were set to go off if it approached one month of age. With Myrddin’s brain tissues and the current state of growth in Simurgh-derived parts, there was little to no chance that it would achieve any degree of self awareness.

A glance out the window that overlooked the street showed that it was getting dark. He’d been here all day.

The door slammed at the top of the stairs. He sighed in irritation. Time was passing too quickly. Would this one threaten his life too?

There was a crash, and he nearly jumped out of his skin. He wheeled around.

The woman with the black dress had slammed into the television set. She had holes in her as though she were a piece of Swiss cheese, and more of her had been torn to shreds.

A body fell down the stairs. The man with the lizard mask. Dead, though not so mutilated.

The woman who came down the stairs had an unusual body type accented by her style of dress. She was almost like a boy, she was so thin, and her strapless dress hugged her upper body, but the lower half billowed around her. Her hair was long and white, her eyes wide with irises and pupils small. Her lips had been painted black.

Her arms though… machinery had been crammed into the arms, and they’d been extended to nearly twice the length, the fingers drawn out long. Sparks flew as the woman moved one arm, and she winced.

The second individual skipped down the stairs, stopping at the bottom to admire the laboratory.

Her eyes fell on Rey.

“I know you!” she said.

“I know you too, Bonesaw,” he said. Without breaking eye contact, he tapped a key on the computer, prompting a flood of nutrients into the Morrígan’s solution.

“Nice lab.”

“It’s not mine.”

“Man, it’s… this is nice stuff. Being constantly on the move, you miss out on stuff like this.”

“My old lab wasn’t this good,” he said. Make small talk. “Who’s that?”

“Damsel of Distress, with some modifications by yours truly. Damsel for short. Better at controlling her power now.”

“Hi Damsel.”

Damsel looked at him, spoke in a whisper he couldn’t make out.

“And who’s this?” Bonesaw asked. She approached the glass case with the Morrígan inside.

“Morrígan.”

“Looks like the Simurgh.”

“She is. In part. The other half of the genetic base is from Myrddin’s tissue. Everything that bridges the gap is a really complex fungus.”

“Cripes. How do you even manage something like that?”

“Trade secret,” he said. He watched as Damsel approached the widescreen TV, picked it up where it had fallen to the ground, and held it in front of her, staring at the image, no doubt some mention of what the other members of the Slaughterhouse Nine were up to in Boston.

“I’ll get the answer out of you, you know.”

“I know,” Rey admitted. “But I wouldn’t be a self-respecting tinker if I didn’t at least pretend to protect my work.”

“True.”

Bonesaw turned her attention to the homunculus. She poked it in the stomach and it growled at her in response.

If he let the Morrígan out now… Bonesaw was staring at the homunculus, and Damsel was focused on the TV…

But it would die if he let it go now. It was too young. Every two or three seconds it sat in the high-nutrient solution would be a week of growth. He’d need it at least at four or five years of age before it was capable of moving and acting, and he’d still be depending on it having powers rather than a defunct corona pollentia.

He’d never experienced a stronger emotion than he did when he saw another set of feet appear at the top of the stairs. They made their way down, and each step brought more of the figure into view. If it was another member of the Slaughterhouse Nine, he’d die. If it was one of Accord’s ambassadors…

He’d probably still die. But there’d be a chance.

It was neither.

The man reached the bottom of the stairs, turned his head to survey the scene. He wore a visor that combined the movable visor of a knight’s helm with a high-tech equivalent, and the points where they met his helmet were shaped like a lizard’s frill or a dragon’s wing. He held out a rod in one hand, and it unfolded into a spear of ridiculous length.

The lizard theme… if the machines Rey had seen fighting the Slaughterhouse Nine were Dragon’s, was this one of her assistants? Someone working under her?

Or her?

Damsel wheeled around, extended one hand, but the man in armor was quick to step around a pillar for cover. Damsel’s power ripped into the pillar, warping and tearing space in a chaotic storm.

The man in armor ducked and rolled to reach the next piece of cover, one of the stainless steel desks. He arrested his momentum with one outstretched arm, then kicked the desk with both feet. It slammed into Damsel.

He hopped onto his feet in a single movement, slashing with the spear’s point. The tip struck Damsel across the eyes, blinding her. He reversed the spear and swung it, and the spear-butt caught her in the side of the head. She was knocked down onto all fours before she could direct her power at him again.

The man dug the spear’s point into the ground to help propel himself towards her. His leg flared with a gray blur as he reached her, and be brought it down onto her back from above.

It sheared through her as though she weren’t even there, cutting her in half. He kicked out to obliterate her head and one of her shoulders in a single movement, disabled the gray blur, and set his foot down with a thud that rang through the underground laboratory.

Bonesaw didn’t seem disturbed by the loss of her teammate. “Don’t think I don’t recognize you. You were Mannequin’s pick. Armsman? Armsmaster?”

The man in armor pointed his spear at her. “Defiant now.”

“You know I loaded myself with a mess of epidemics, Defiant,” Bonesaw said. “You kill me like that and I’ll explode into a cloud of a bajillion plagues. It can’t be easy.”

“It is,” Defiant’s voice was distorted by his helmet, vaguely computerized. There was a processor at work somewhere there, Rey observed.

“What, you’ll unleash a thousand plagues on this world to finish me off? Me? A little girl?” Bonesaw smiled wide.

“Yes.”

“You’ll get sick.”

“Biohazard safe,” Defiant said. His spear shaft tapped against his armor.

“He’ll die in a hundred horrible ways,” Bonesaw said, pointing at Rey.

“Villain. Acceptable loss.”

“And the people in this neighborhood?”

“I scanned the area. There is zero air flow in or out of this lab. It’s quarantine-safe.”

“So you’ve got all this figured out, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

Bonesaw glanced over her shoulder at Rey, “You-”

Defiant moved so fast that Rey couldn’t follow the movement. The spear impaled the girl in the chest. The heart.

“Ugh, fuck me,” Bonesaw grunted.

Defiant swung the spear to one side and slammed her into the wall, knocking chemicals and vials off of every shelf unit she hit on the way.

“Why-” Bonesaw started.

Defiant raised the spear and her sentence was interrupted as her head cracked against the ceiling. He drove the spear toward the ground with just as much force.

“Why…” Bonesaw spat blood onto the ground. Being impaled in the heart hadn’t put her down. “Ow. Bit my tongue. Why don’t you come closer, big man? Too scared to come here and finish me off?”

Defiant didn’t respond. Instead, he struck her against the wall again, then shoved the spear point into a set of stainless steel shelves. Pieces of the empty glass beakers rained onto the ground beneath her dangling feet.

“Coward!” she taunted him.

Rey glanced nervously toward the door. Would it be better to run or to stay?

The girl reached forward, clutching the shaft of the spear. She began pulling herself forward, hauling the spear’s shaft through the hole in her chest as she closed the distance inches at a time.

She smiled as she did it.

Blades sprung from the length of the shaft, and began spinning like propellers One caught her from behind, and she slid forward, only to find herself sandwiched between two such sets.

“That’s Mannequin’s trick! That’s so cute, that you’re copying-”

Defiant moved the spear, and Bonesaw was thrown back, her hair and back caught against the blades. She used her hands to pull herself forward so she was clear, maintaining a grip even as he swept the spear to one side again, keeping herself fixed at the same point on the pole’s length.

“Hey, plant geek!” Bonesaw had to raise her voice to be heard, “He kills me, you die! Think about that!”

Rey glanced at Defiant. There wasn’t an opening or anything that suggested at the man inside. Only armor, implacable, unrelenting, driven.

Then he looked at the girl, half-hidden behind the blur of the spinning blades.

“Okay,” Rey said.

He wanted to live. Wanted nothing more than to go on to do his research, maybe one day find greatness, find a woman who could appreciate him. Have kids.

But he wanted her to live even less than he wanted any of that. Because he could well and truly believe that she would do more harm in her life than any good he could do in his.

“Okay,” he repeated. I can live with that.

There was a crunching sound, and Defiant snapped his head over to look at Bonesaw.

She spat, and smoke billowed where the spit came in contact with the blades.

One flew off and sailed across the room to strike a cage with animals inside. The mechanism that was keeping the blades in motion ceased.

With nothing impeding her line of sight to Defiant, Bonesaw crunched again. Smoke billowed from her mouth as acid ate away at her flesh, she leaned back as if she were preparing to spit a loogie-

And Defiant disabled the propeller behind her, swinging the weapon and flinging her free of the end.

She touched ground and spat out a mouthful of acid onto the floor. It smoked on contact with the concrete.

“No,” Defiant said. He took two steps forward and swiped with the spear, cutting her in half.

Almost in half. Something like chainmail was wrapped around her spine, but the spear had cut through the matching mesh that had protected her abdominal organs.

Defiant turned to catch a mechanical spider that was making its way down the stairs. He impaled it and dashed it to pieces. Another thrust killed one that was hiding inside an air vent.

Bonesaw crawled forward, dragging her spine and ruined midsection apart from her legs. There wasn’t as much blood as there should have been. “Not… done.”

She clawed into her apron for vials, threw them across the room. Defiant backed away as they exploded into clouds of white. As they spread, Defiant was reduced to a mere silhouette.

You’re in an augmented biohazard suit, Rey thought. He eyed Bonesaw as she clawed her way in his general direction. Come through!

But Defiant had other ideas. Maybe he had a degree of familiarity with the white powder, knew what it was and that it had to be avoided.

Maybe there was something else at play. Another member of the Slaughterhouse Nine in the area?

Bonesaw was getting closer. Rey backed away.

She looked up at him. Dark circles were already spreading around her eyes, her face paling. She looked gaunt. And she held a vial. She tried to claw the cork off and failed.

If he stepped closer, she’d do something to him, but if he didn’t try to stop her-

On the second try, the cork came free. She pushed it in Rey’s direction, and he was quick to kick it into the cloud of white to his right.

But the fluid that had trailed out as it rolled was smoking, just under his feet. He had nowhere to go.

He lunged, leaping onto one of the shelving units to keep from passing anywhere near Bonesaw.

Something snagged on his foot. He toppled to the ground.

Looking back, he could see her spine was prehensile, and that it had caught his foot, winding around the bridge of it. The sheath is hiding more machinery.

The white smoke was congealing into strands of gunk that cut off the end of the room closest to the stairwell. Defiant was caught in the midst of it, and was slowly tearing himself free.

No. No.

Rey tried to kick her off, but that only served to let her get a grip on his other foot. She began clawing her way up his legs.

He reached for the keyboard, pulled it down from the shelf it sat on. It dangled above his head, and he pressed it against the wall, tapped the keys to open the tube that held the Morrígan.

He hadn’t drained the water, and the fluid began to flow onto the ground as the glass sank into the floor.

Bonesaw had climbed up to his chest, and it was only his struggles that kept her from reaching any higher. He clawed at her hands, and she wasn’t that strong, but she was tenacious, and she used her prehensile spine to secure any progress she made.

Three limbs against his two. He tried to stand, failed. Too much weight in the wrong places, and he couldn’t use his hands.

The water finished pouring out, and the Morrígan took its first steps. Five or six years old in apparent age, a vague replica of the Simurgh. It would have some blend of her powers and Myrddin’s.

Too busy looking at his creation, he was caught off guard as Bonesaw got hold of his throat with one hand. She hauled herself up until her entire upper body was resting on his chest. The sheath that had been around her spine pressed up against his face as the bone and attached machinery passed into his open mouth and down his throat. His throat was scraped raw by the edges of it.

He choked, fought for breath, found none.

The Morrígan flopped to the ground. Dead. Dumb. Not viable.

Just as the crystalline feather and Leviathan’s blood had been, it wasn’t capable of sustaining life. A failed experiment.

Needles punched their way out of Bonesaw’s spine, found his own. In one instant, he lost all sensation below his neck.

In the next, she was making him move, pulling him to his feet. His head craned toward the ceiling, mouth forced open, blood trickling onto his face as the full weight of her upper body came to rest on his head.

“Just got a fresh pair of hands, and this happens,” she muttered. “Do you know how long it’s going to take to find and transplant a good pair of legs?”

She bid his hands to move as though they were her own. At her will, he typed on the computer. At her bidding, he turned his body to give her a better look at Defiant’s progress, threw another vial at the man.

Back to the computer.

“Samples. Evidence,” Bonesaw murmured. He could feel the vibrations of her voice against his face. The air that was flowing from a tube by her spine and into his lungs was stagnant and foul, but she bid him to breathe and he breathed.

“Crawler,” she said. There was a whir. She used his hand to shatter the glass case that held the samples, and he groaned in pain as the shards cut it. She made him grab the sample from the robotic claw’s grip. “Mannequin.”

She gathered the samples in her own hands while she used his hands to type and select the options.

“Burnscar, Shatterbird… surprising how much DNA we’ve left on crime scenes. Winter… Chuckles…”

Defiant roared. He growled words, as if speaking to himself.

“Nice Guy, Murder Rat, Hatchet Face. We’ve gone through a lot of members,” she said, while depositing each sample in a plastic case. “Screamer, Harbinger, King.”

Rey choked, tried to choke. He could control his head, his mouth. If he passed out, would his body fail? Would she fail?

“Pity I can’t use this lab,” Bonesaw said. “Make the cloning process that much easier. But I’ve seen your work. I think I can replicate it. Helps if I have this…”

She had him tap a key, and he could hear the water flowing as another of the glass cases started to move. The Regrowth tube. The seeds.

“Didn’t think we’d get this lucky,” she said. “Jack said that since the world isn’t ending like it was supposed to, he wants to hurry it along. We did our research, and decided to track down some decent tinkers, and you were closest. Only problem with entering any metropolis like this is security cameras… Oooh! Gray Boy! He was one of Jack’s first teammates! You wouldn’t believe the stories Jack tells about him.”

Another sample was collected and deposited in the box.

She stopped, and turned toward the Morrígan. He could feel his blood run cold.

“Nah,” Bonesaw said. “Even I’m not that crazy.”

She had him tap keys on the keyboard, and a laser fired from the top of the case that had held the Morrígan. He couldn’t see, but he could smell the burning flesh.

The box of samples tucked under one arm, she walked Rey to the door that led out of the back of the basement. The one Rey had been ordered to use when coming and going, out of Accord’s sight.

He couldn’t lose hope. Defiant would have come on an armored suit. If that suit was positioned to survey the area, if Defiant had contacted Dragon, ordered an airstrike or even just reinforcements-

No. There was a ladder on the other side of the doorway, leading down into a pitch darkness.

She turned in Defiant’s direction, and Rey caught a glimpse of the hero. He was still caught, and though the blur around his leg was cutting him free, goop was streaming down from the ceiling to connect to his upper body, and he couldn’t destroy that with a ready kick.

She had Rey grip the rungs of the ladder, and they slid down into the pitch black.

■

“I failed,” Defiant said.

“You hurt her. If anyone failed, it was me,” Dragon replied. “I couldn’t break away from the fight.”

Mist emanated from her robotic body, dissolving the strings of slime that had congealed around him. Her hand settled on the side of his face.

“Did we gain anything?”

“I’ll show you in a minute. Are you okay?”

“Need more tech. Nanomolecular thorns for my arms. It would have made the difference.”

“We can figure something out. But are you okay?”

“I suppose so. Where do we stand?”

“Two suits destroyed. And we don’t yet know what Bonesaw took with her. Jack escaped with some of his team. But we killed four of them, all together.”

“Four,” he said. “We should mobilize now. There’s a limit to how fast and how far they can move, especially with the wounded. Bonesaw went into the subway system, and it will take time for her to get free, but if she gets in contact with their new teleporter-“

“We’ll mobilize as soon as I’ve freed you, Colin. If I don’t use this body, you’ll be left behind, and neither of us want that.”

“Better that you give chase.”

“We’re doing okay. We’re closing the gap. They showed up on camera, and we were ready to move on them within minutes. We’ll do it again.”

Colin nodded, but he didn’t respond.

She settled her arms around his shoulders, letting the spray do its work. The metal of her forehead touched his mask. “Take it for what it is. A little lost, a lot gained.”

It took thirty more seconds for the foam to dissolve. She broke the hug and he tore himself free of the scraps. They were out of the basement and walking through the ruined interior of Accord’s household in moments.

They stepped outside into the evening air. Colin let the vents in his costume open so the cool air could flow through. Dragon luxuriated in the feel of the air against her exterior body.

Her hand caught his as they walked to where the Uther and her own suit were waiting.

Colin stopped in his tracks. Dragon’s suit was posed with its head pointing toward the sky. The suit’s metal jaws were clamped around a body.

Manton.

“The Siberian is dead?”

“Gone would be a more appropriate word,” she said. “Manton is dead.”

Colin nodded and exhaled slowly. “Good work.”

“The job’s not over yet.”

The Uther’s cabin doors opened to invite him in.

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