Queen 18.2

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“They won’t take me back.”

“They will.”

“I saw it,” Dinah whispered.  “Before I ever met Coil.  The fear in their eyes.  When I said the numbers and I was right.  They’re scared of me.  They were relieved when I got taken.  They won’t want me now that I’m free.”

“They will want you.  Just wait,” I said.  “They’ll welcome you with open arms, and there won’t even be a hint of fear.”

“I look weird.  My hair’s all dry and dull, and I haven’t been eating that much.  I always felt sleepy, or edgy, and was never hungry, even when my stomach was growling.  And maybe I didn’t eat some because it was my only way of fighting back, the only time I could choose something, even if it was bad for me.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does!”  There was a note of desperation in her voice.  “They’ll see me and I’ll look different and they’ll think about all those moments when I left them feeling nervous and how there’s a bunch of stuff I haven’t even mentioned because it’s that bad.  I’m not even human anymore.”

“You’re definitely human, Dinah.”

“Then why do they call us parahumans?  Doesn’t the ‘para’ part mean half?  Paraplegic, only half your body works.  Parahuman, half human.”

“Not exactly.  It means beside, which is how it’s used with paraplegic, or paragraph.  It can also mean extra or beyond, like paranormal.  We’re next to human, or more than human, depending on how you look at it.  I think it’s pretty apt.  Powers, in a lot of ways, make the best and worst parts of our humanity stand out.  And that depends on the choices we make.  Your parents can’t judge you for stuff you didn’t choose.”

“How… how do you even know that?”

“Which?”

“The meaning of the words.”

“My mom taught English,” I said.  “So I was always sort of introduced to that stuff.  And after she passed away, I maybe started paying more attention to it because it’s the sort of thing she would have done.  A way of remembering her.”

“Are you an orphan?”

“My dad’s alive.  I don’t have as much contact with him as I should.”

“Why not?”

“It seems like every time I get closer to him, he gets hurt or put in danger.  Or I only get close because of the hurt.  I don’t know.”

“You should get back in touch with him.  Parents are important.”

“I know.”

“My parents won’t take me,” she said.  She made a croaking noise, and I touched the bucket she was holding to ensure it was in position, held her braid so it wouldn’t get in the way as she tried to empty her stomach of contents that were no longer there.

I sighed, waiting until the worst of it had abated.  When it looked like she might tip forward and fall with the puke bucket into the space between the back seat and the front seats, I caught her shoulders and leaned her back, carefully.

“How’s the pain?” I asked.

“It ends later.”

“I know it ends.  But how is it now?”

“Hurts all over.  Painkillers didn’t do anything.”

“Yeah,” I said.  They couldn’t give her anything narcotic, not with the way the doctor was suspecting that Coil had dosed Dinah with a mixture of opiates and tranquilizers to keep her artificially content and mellow.

“They’re not going to take me.”

It was becoming a refrain.

“They will,” I said.  “I know you can’t use your power right now, but they will.”

“And even if they do take me, it’ll be weird, because they can’t ignore my power now.  They pretended I didn’t have one.  Pretended I was an ordinary kid.  Pretended the headaches didn’t mean anything, like they pretended the heart disease wasn’t a thing.”

“Heart disease?  You?”

Dinah shook her head.  “Not me.”

She didn’t elaborate.  Related to her trigger event?

“Don’t worry,” I said.  I might have gone on to try to reassure her, but I wasn’t sure what to add.  I didn’t know her parents.

“They’ll turn me away.  I’ll have to come to stay with you.  Or Tattletale.  And then it’s like it was with Coil.  Not as bad.  No drugs, no being locked up.  But I’ll know I can never go home.”

She was shaking, I realized.  Trembling.

“Dinah, listen.  That’s the drugs talking, okay?  That’s all it is.  As relaxed as they made you before, they’re making you rattled now while you’re in withdrawal.”

She made an incoherent noise in response.

I leaned towards the front seat.  “Do you have a brush?”

The driver, supplied by the doctor’s office, responded with only one word, “Comb.”

“Comb will do.”

He opened the glove compartment and reached back to hand me a small comb, not even as long as my hand.

“Here,” I said, “Let’s get you more presentable, so there’s one less thing to worry about.”

I pulled off the elastic that held her messy braid together and began combing it straight.

There wasn’t much time left, and still so much I should be saying, doing or asking.

Do we come out of this okay?

We’ll come out of this okay.

Can we stay in touch?

I’m sorry I played any part in this happening to you.

Either I didn’t have the courage or I couldn’t find the right words.  Dinah wasn’t in much of a state to converse, either.

I settled for tidying her hair, braiding it from scratch, and putting the elastic band in place.  Maybe it wasn’t as nice as it would be without the braid, but this would be easier to manage while she was recovering.

Not even a minute later, I was holding that braid back while she hung her head over the bucket, the both of us waiting to see if she would start heaving up mere teaspoons of bile or if this latest spell of nausea would subside.  I was avoiding putting bugs on her skin, but I was aware of how she was drenched in sweat to the point that it was soaking through her clothes.  She was feverish, too.  My swarm could tell the difference in her temperature, even through her clothes and scalp.

The car pulled to a stop.

Dinah startled, as if shaken by the realization of what it meant.

“Can you go on your own?” I asked.  “Or maybe we could sit you down on the edge of the front lawn and beep to signal your parents?”

“Go,” she said.

“What?”

“Go.  I’ll stay in the car.  You see if…”

She paused.  I wasn’t sure if it was because of nausea or something else.

“If?”

“If they want me?”

I thought about arguing.  About assuring her that they would.  Then I reconsidered.  I got out of the car and crossed the front lawn to the front door of her house.

I hit the doorbell, but neither I nor my bugs could hear a sound.  No power, or it wasn’t hooked up.

I gripped the heavy iron knocker and rapped on the door.

Two stray fruit flies found the parents in a bedroom on the ground floor.  They stirred, one sitting up, but they didn’t approach.

I knocked again.

The dad got a cast iron pan for an improvised weapon.  It was almost comical, cartoonish.  Through my swarm, I could almost make out his words as he assured his wife,  “…don’t know…”

Whatever started or ended the sentence, I didn’t catch it.

I stepped back before he cracked the door open, pan held like a weapon out of sight.

He saw me and slammed the door shut in the next instant.

I pushed the door open before he could lock it, winced at the pain that caused with my fractured rib.

He moved as if to swing at me, then dropped his arm as he reconsidered in the face of the thick cloud of bugs that stirred around me.  I wasn’t sure how much he could see.  There weren’t any streetlights, or lights on inside, but I would be backlit by moonlight.

“I’m not here to cause trouble, Mr. Alcott,” I said.  “And I don’t mean to scare you.”

“What do you want?”

“I brought Dinah.”

He froze.

“If that’s alright,” I said.

Not turning away from me, he shouted, “Anna!”

His wife exited the bedroom to stand in the doorway, peering out into the hallway.  She reacted as she saw me.

“Extortion?” he asked.  “We don’t have anything.  You can take anything we have here, but it’s not much.”

“Not extortion.  The man who took her died.  I’m bringing her back.”

“Please,” the mom said.  “Where is she?”

“Before I go get her,” I said, “You should know.  There’s no sign he touched her.  He didn’t hurt her, not physically.  He did everything he could to take care of her, in a utilitarian sense, but she was still a prisoner.”

Without working eyes, I couldn’t see their expressions.  Horror?  Grim acceptance?

“She was drugged, often and heavily.  She’s in the middle of recovery, and it isn’t pretty.  No narcotics, no painkillers, and no tranquilizers, maybe for the rest of her life.”

The mom made a subvocal noise.

“She’s an addict?” the dad asked.

“Yes.  And she’s a touch malnourished, and above all she’s scared.  I wouldn’t have brought her yet, but I thought it was more important that I get her away from anyone who would do what Coil did, using her for her power.  I wanted to get her home.”

“She has abilities, then?” the dad asked.

Why else would Coil take her and keep her?

“An ability, to be specific,” I said.  “Does it really matter?”

The dad shook his head.

“I’ll go get her, then.”

I walked out to the car and opened the door next to Dinah.

“They don’t want me.  They won’t.”

“Come on,” I said.  I extended my hand.

“Maybe we should wait until I’m not sick anymore.  If they see me like this, they might have second thoughts.”

“They won’t.  And we agreed you should go home sooner than later.  Come on.”

She put her hand in mine, and I could feel it shaking in the half second before I got a firm grip.  I supported her as she got out of the car, then walked her back toward the house.

Mrs. Alcott made a noise somewhere between a moan and a cry as we approached the front door.  I moved my bugs out of the way and let go of Dinah the second her mother embraced her, right in the middle of the front lawn.  The father was only a step behind, dropping to his knees to wrap his arms around them.  A family reunited.

It was a rare thing, I was finding, that a family was both intact and functioning.  Too many of the people I’d interacted with so far were separated from the families they should have by death, by pain, misunderstandings or abuse.

I turned to leave.

“Thank you,” the dad called out.

I almost stopped.  Then I kept walking towards the car.

“Don’t thank me,” I said, without looking back.  I wasn’t sure if I was loud enough for him to catch it.

It didn’t feel good, but it didn’t feel bad, either.  I’d played a part in her being taken from her family.  Maybe a small part, but a part.  I’d done something to make up for that.  The real sacrifice, the real atonement, would be dealing with what came next.  Dealing with Noelle and the end of the world without using or abusing Dinah’s powers.

I wasn’t sure I felt good about that.  I’d gotten this far by making the most out of every resource I had available, and by being smart about things.  This was throwing away a resource, tying my own hands.  The decision felt dumb, even as I knew it was the right thing to do.

I climbed into the car.  Settling into the middle of the back seat, I swept my bugs over the area as a matter of habit.

Two folded pieces of paper were stuck in the flap behind the driver’s seat, where they hadn’t been before.  I picked them up, tried to view them with both my regular eyes and my bugs, then settled for tucking them into my belt.

Had to get someone to read them for me later.

“Where to?” the driver asked.

“Downtown.  I’ll tell you where to stop.”

■

The others were gathered outside Tattletale’s new headquarters.  The Undersiders were all there, Bastard and Bentley included.  Ballistic was present as well, though I hesitated to call him a member of the group.

There was also someone who I hadn’t expected.  Parian.  My recruit, after a fashion, the doll girl was dressed in a crisp new frock, accompanied by a giant stuffed penguin fashioned from cloth.

“You’re late,” Ballistic said.

“Had an errand to run.”

“Sent the girl home?” Tattletale asked.

“Yeah.”

“Good,” she said.  “Feel better?”

“Some,” I replied.  I turned to Parian.  “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Tattletale got in touch.  I… I apparently missed a lot.”

“You’re up for this?”

“No.  But I want to know what’s going on, in case it affects my territory.”

“She’s taking over my shelter and the surrounding area,” Tattletale said.

“Makes sense,” I said.

“Glad everything’s getting sorted out,” Grue said, “But we’ve got an hour and forty minutes until dawn, and we really need to deal with the present situation.”

Tattletale said, “Let’s talk as we walk, then.  We have one sighting of Noelle.  She left ten minutes ago, and I doubt we’ll run into her, but we could get info, something that’ll let us track her, or we’ll at least be in the right general area.  Sorry, Skitter.  We found Atlas, but he’s stashed halfway across the city.  So transportation might be a little awkward.”

I only nodded.

Parian took the penguin apart and created a longer, broader form: a dachshund, in black and white.

“This is so lame,” Imp said.  “How are you supposed to build a decent rep if you’re caught riding a wiener dog?”

“It’s the only thing long enough,” Parian said.

“Snake?”

“Too much wear.”

“If you don’t like it,” Grue said. “You can walk.  It’s functional.”

“You’ve fallen so far, man,” Regent murmured, wry,  “You used to care about these things.”

“Because they kept us alive, kept our enemies off our backs.  I don’t care too much about anyone dumb enough to ignore the fact that we own this city but care about how we travel.”

“I could ride Bentley,” Imp suggested.

Regent commented, “You’re calling him by his real name, now?  Didn’t you call him slobberjaws, just a little while ago?”

Rachel was looking at Imp.  Glaring?  “You’re not riding him.”

“You really care?” Imp asked.

“Not about the name,” Rachel said.  “About respect.”

Imp groaned audibly, and Regent laughed.

My bugs helped me catch the muttered exchange between the pair.

“Why?”  Imp asked, in her most wounded voice.

“Payback.” Regent replied.

Rachel was looking at me, the offer unspoken.

I accepted it, reaching up to take Rachel’s hand and using her help to climb onto Bentley’s back, settling in behind her.

We walked briskly alongside the cloth dachshund that bore the burden of the rest of the group; Grue, Tattletale, Regent, Parian and Ballistic.

“Everyone’s kosher with me taking the seat of power?”  Tattletale asked. “This isn’t me being manipulative like Coil, but I do consider us partners, I want us working side by side, even if our roles are different.”

“Partner?  You’re in charge, aren’t you?” Ballistic asked.

“I’m… headquarters.  Ops.  Management.  Skitter’s our real leader, our field commander.  If it comes down to it, she can call the shots.  I’ll back her up.”

“If she’s up for it,” Grue said.  “She’s blind, and neglected to mention it before the events earlier tonight.”

“It doesn’t matter that much.  I don’t need my eyes when I can use my power,” I said.

“I’ll have to take your word for it.”

“What are we up against?” I asked, aiming to change the subject.  “Ballistic, can you fill us in?”

“It’s why I’m here.  Consider Noelle a triple threat,” he said.  “She’s strong, she’s got nothing to hold her back, now, and she’s smart.”

“She was your team leader, right?” I asked.

“She was the leader before all of this started, yeah.  You have to understand, she’s a natural tactician, and tacticians come in two varieties.  There’s the strategists that think things through, innovate, and analyze.  Then there’s ones that go by instinct.  Noelle’s the latter.  Not to say she isn’t good if given a chance to plan, but she can get a sense of the current dynamic on an intuitive level, play things by ear while making spur of the moment calls.  Those calls turn out to be the right ones, not because she’s lucky, but because she grasps the situation so quickly that it looks like she didn’t give it any thought at all.”

“She’s quick witted, then,” I said.

“Not exactly what I meant.  Might be that I’m extrapolating too much from too small a sample of info.  Far as I know, she’s never been in a serious fight, but when you add that to the whole strong and desperate bits I just mentioned, it makes for a scary combo.”

“How’s that?” Grue asked.

“Right now, she’s scared, angry, desperate and frustrated, except all the dials are turned up to eleven,” Ballistic said.  “She can’t hold back her emotions like she used to.  She goes berserk at the drop of a hat, and this?  Losing what she sees as her last shot?  That’s more than a dropped hat.  If she were a person who relied on her brain in a crisis, she’d be at a disadvantage, because she’s not in any position to think straight.  The way she really operates, though?  She won’t be any less effective because of that fear and panic.  I don’t plan on getting in her way.  I’m sitting out on this fight, for the record.”

“You’re out?  You’re not working with us?” Grue asked.

“I’m holding territory, but I’m not a member of the team.”

“Same,” Parian said, “Sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” I said.  “But I think you’re underestimating how bad this situation could be.  I don’t think we can afford to have anyone sit out.”

“She’s scary,” Ballistic said.  “Let’s settle for that.  You don’t get within Behemoth’s range, you don’t aim for the long fight against Leviathan, and you don’t send everyone against the Simurgh at once, or you’re screwing yourself over.  Trust me when I say this is better all around if I skip this fight.  She knows me, and she’ll use me against you.”

“You talk about her being clever, but she didn’t seem that on the ball when we talked to her over the phone, back in your base,”  I said.  “You guys were lying to her about Tattletale, about Dinah, and other stuff.  If she’s that clever, why didn’t she pick up on it?”

Ballistic sighed.  “Honestly?  She put her trust in Krouse, in Trickster.  He betrayed that trust, and he did it pretty damn well.  I don’t fault him for it, exactly.  She couldn’t know the whole truth, or we’d be in exactly this situation, just at a worse time.”

“But you do fault him for something,” Tattletale said.

“He became team leader more because he’s fast at thinking on his feet than because he’s good at making the right call.  He took it on himself to make a whole lot of wrong calls.  I let a lot of that slide because he used to be a friend.  And maybe because they weren’t blatantly wrong.  Just a little wrong, a little disagreeable.  But at some point every call was a disagreeable call and every word out of his mouth became a white lie.  He started lying to us for what he saw as our own good.  Not Noelle with her delicate state, but us.”

“And you realized he was never going to change,” Tattletale said.  “His focus would always be on Noelle and himself, no matter what happened.”

“Yeah.  We shouldn’t discount Trickster, by the way.  Either as a threat or as a possible solution.”

“I hadn’t forgotten the possibility that he’d stick around and make life harder on us,” Grue said, “But solution?”

“Yeah.  Whatever else, I’d say Noelle still believes in him.  We can use that.  If we’re willing.”

“And that’s only if we can get him on board,” I said.

Ballistic nodded.

“What does she do?” Grue asked.

Ballistic sighed.  “Besides the ridiculous super strength, durability and the regeneration?”

“Besides that,” Grue said.

“To put it briefly, if it’s dead, she absorbs it and it becomes a part of her-“

“Powers included?” I asked.

“Don’t know.  Haven’t had cause to believe it.  In terms of raw material, raw mass?  Yeah.  She eats, she grows.  But here’s the thing.  If she absorbs something alive, she clones it.  More clones if she’s angrier, we think.  We don’t have a large sample size of incidents.”

“Clones?” I asked.  “Isn’t that an advantage for us?”

“No.  Because whatever they are, the extras come out wrong.  They come out ugly, their powers don’t always work exactly the same way, they’re screwed up in the head, but all that aside, they’re stronger, tougher, they have the memories of the parent.  Sometimes that means they’re just homicidal.  Other times, it means they’re just as sane as you are, but their priorities are reversed.  They want to end your existence, kill everything you want to protect, hurt everyone you care about, and dismantle your life.”

“Evil twins,” Regent said.  “She makes evil twins.”

Ballistic nodded.  “And that’s why I’m sitting this one out.  She’ll come after me if she sees me, especially if she heard the bit about my defection.  If she gets me, that’s even worse, because the clones she’ll get are capable of killing anyone and everyone here, easy.”

Bitch spoke for the first time.  “Animals too?”

“Animals too.  And microbes too, based on stuff she’s said before, though she might just treat them like she does dead material.  I don’t know.  For all we know, it ties into some other power.”

“Do the clones have an expiry date?”  I asked.

“Not as far as I know.  Any time we’ve had to deal with them, we were pretty ruthless in putting them down.  They sort of made a point of being too problematic to be left alone.”

“They’re still people,” Parian said.

“No,” Ballistic replied.  “They really aren’t. Trust me on that count.”

“I’ve got soldiers at key locations, keeping an eye out,” Tattletale said.  “Just a few guys, and I’m paying them an astronomical amount.  I won’t be able to keep it up for more than a few days.”

“Which is how you got this lead?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Okay,” I said, “Good.  But we’ll need a way to deal with her.  Ballistic, you said she regenerates?”

“Not that fast, but fast enough.  Her lower body is tougher, but her upper body isn’t exactly vulnerable.  I’ve seen her take bullets and barely even flinch, and that included one to the head.  They do damage, maybe, but it heals too quickly for it to matter.  And I think she’s gotten bigger and tougher since I saw her last.”

“When was that?”

“Maybe a week after we got to this city.  A while before Coil put in the first vault door, there was just a garage door.  I didn’t want to risk getting too close, not with the lethality of my power and the damage she could do.  Her appetite’s increased, so it might be a pretty dramatic difference in strength from the last time I saw her out and about.  You guys are going to have your hands full trying to kill her.”

“I don’t want to kill her,” I said.  “Not unless we absolutely have no other choice.”

Ballistic turned my way, and he had a funny tone in his voice as he asked, “How do you think you’re going to handle this?”

“Containment,” I said.  “If I get enough spiders together, I could try to surround her in web.”

“Not going to work,” Ballistic said.

“It almost worked against Crawler.”

“She’s stronger than Crawler.”

“Then we go to the heroes.  We get their assistance,” I said.  “Containment foam on top of my web.  Vista to slow Noelle down, Clockblocker to put her on pause.”

“Tattletale told you, didn’t she?  That we think she’s turning into an Endbringer.  Why is lethal force okay against Leviathan but not against Noelle?”

“She’s still a person, under it all,” I said.  “She deserves a chance.”

“You don’t seem to care at all about the subject of killing a friend, Ballistic,” Tattletale added.

“She’s not my friend.  She’s not the person I knew.  Maybe she has the same memories, fragments of the same personality, but that’s only surface stuff.  Because even the bits that look like Noelle aren’t really anything resembling the original.  She wouldn’t be able to heal bullet wounds like she did if they were.  Stands to reason the bits that think like her aren’t either.”

“Pretty cold,” Tattletale said.

“Fuck you,” Ballistic replied.  He slid off the stuffed animal’s back.  “I hope what I said was useful, and I wish you luck, but fuck you.  You don’t get it.”

Parian’s animal had stopped, but Ballistic was already striding away, in the general direction of his lair.

“Go on,” Tattletale urged Parian.  The stuffed dog started walking again.

“You told me I could protect people,” Parian said.  It took me a second to realize she was addressing me.  “How do I do that?”

“We could use your stuffed animals.  If she can’t absorb them, then they’re frontline combatants we can use.”

“I don’t want to fight.”

“I really don’t think we have a choice.  You fought Leviathan,” I said.

Parian shook her head, “I almost wish I didn’t.  I only did it because I promised myself when I was a kid, when I first learned about the Endbringers, that I would fight them if I ever got powers.  That’s why I did it, because I didn’t want to betray the kid version of myself.”

“Wouldn’t your child-self want you to do this?”  I asked.

“I don’t know.  But I didn’t make any promises to myself about this.”

Tattletale cut in.  “Heads up.  I don’t think we’re the only ones checking out the scene.”

“Who?” Parian asked.

“The Protectorate.  The Wards.  If you’re not up for a potential fight, this is the time to back off.”

“The Wards?” Parian asked.

Tattletale nodded.

“I’ll stay.  I won’t fight, but I’ll stay.  I made my decision and I’ll own up to it.”

It’s at least one more body on our side, giving them less reason to pick a fight.

“We do this peacefully,” I said.  “We need their help, so we avoid confrontation.”

“This isn’t going to work,” Regent said.  “Just saying.”

“We’ll try it anyways,” I replied.

I could sense the heroes well before we reached them, gathered by a ruined building.  I used my bugs to get their attention before we appeared around the corner.

“Undersiders,” Miss Militia spoke, rifle raised and pointed in our direction.  The other members of the local hero teams were at the ready just behind her.  I noted Flechette gesturing, Parian shaking her head.

“Miss Militia,” I responded, when I realized none of the others were responding.  Should have hashed this out with Tattletale.  She can do the negotiating with hostile parties better than I can.

“You do this?”  She jerked her head in the direction of the wreckage, not moving the rifle.  Her voice was hard.

“Indirectly,” I replied.  “But not really, no.  I don’t know what that is, exactly.”

“I find that hard to believe,” she responded.  “A hell of a lot of damage, reports of howling eerily similar to the reports we’ve had for Hellhound’s animals, and let’s not forget your penchant for kidnapping the good guys.  Shadow Stalker, Piggot, Calvert…”

Kidnapping heroes?

With my bugs, I did a head count.  Someone was missing.

How?  Dinah said Noelle wouldn’t do any major damage before dawn.

“Vista,” I finished Miss Militia’s thought.  “You’re talking about Vista.”

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Queen 18.1

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The empty vault loomed before us, dark and fetid.

“It’s that bad?” I asked.  “Do we need to contact the PRT and Protectorate?  Get the heroes on board?”

“No,” Dinah said, quiet.  “Not immediately.”

The others looked at her.  I couldn’t see her, but I had a pretty distinct mental picture.  A pre-adolescent girl, thin, with straight brown hair.  Cursory inspection with my swarm suggested her hair was tied into a braid, but many strands were coming loose.  Unless a lot had changed since I’d last seen her, Dinah would be pale.  My mental picture of her was of a girl that was almost ghostly.  It said something that she was still able to command our attention with a few quiet words.

“One point seven percent chance she does any serious damage before dawn.  We have time.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Useful to know,” Tattletale said, “But this is bad enough that we may have to go running to the heroes, eat crow and ask for their assistance, get it sooner than later.”

Regent had followed Grue, Dinah and I down the stairs.  He peered into the darkness, then said, “I don’t think we’ll have much pull with the white hats.  Among other things, we’ve conquered the city, gave their heroes a series of spankings, gave the world-reknowned tinker a very expensive spanking, kidnapped one of their Directors and if I just heard you right, you just offed the replacement director.”

He stepped back, moved his mask and whistled.  I had to step back to see Rachel on her way from the entrance, her dogs following behind.

I couldn’t help but cough at the rancid smell from the vault, which made me cough more.

“Hospital,” Grue said, for the umpteenth time.

“Soon,” I said.

“The heroes don’t know we offed Calvert,” Tattletale said.

“Yet,” Regent added.

“My question stands.  Do we need to contact them?” I said.

“Maybe.  I don’t know,” Tattletale shook her head a little.

“What do you know?” I asked.  “Because as far as the rest of us are aware, there’s a teenage girl that’s capable of tearing through two vault doors like they’re nothing, and she’s free, and she’s pissed at us.  Quite possibly at me, depending on how much she heard.”

“Coil sent the Travelers to me for help.  She’s had some physical changes,” Tattletale said.  She traced one of the creases in the crumpled vault door with her gloved fingers.  “They wanted to get a better idea of what was going on, so they could maybe change her back.”

“And when I asked about her before, you brushed me off.”

“Don’t like admitting I don’t know something,” she said.  “And I don’t know the full story.  They were working on the assumption that she’s turning into an Endbringer.”

That gave us all a moment’s pause.  Rachel had just descended from the walkway in time to catch the last part.  She grabbed Bastard’s chain to keep him from venturing into the vault, but her attention was on Tattletale.

“Seriously?” Regent asked.

“No.  Well, it’s what they were thinking.  It’s not what I think.”

“Elaborate,” Grue said.

“When I saw Leviathan, I got the distinct impression that the Endbringers aren’t human and never were.  Noelle?  She’s human.  So I’ve got two running theories.  Theory one is that she is turning into an Endbringer, with her body serving as the host to a growth that’s eventually going to shed off the Noelle bits and go full-monster.”

“And theory two?”  Grue asked.

“Someone’s doing their level best to make their own Endbringer.”

“Who?” I asked.

Tattletale shrugged, “No clue.  Could be any of the major players.  To figure out which one, I’m going to need time with the database on capes we downloaded from the PRT.  Even then, I’m not sure it covers the high-clearance stuff we need.”

“Off the top of your head?”  I asked.

“Who could it be?  The Protectorate might have been aiming to make an Endbringer with the idea that it could fight the other Endbringers, only for things to go sour.  There’s the group that made people like Gregor the Snail and Newter,” Tattletale looked at me, “You remember that paperwork we found when we infiltrated the Merchant’s party.”

“Cauldron.”

“Yes.  There’s also any number of megalomaniac tinkers out there who might have tried something. Bonesaw, Rattenfänger, Jamestowner, Blasto, Mosaic, Monstrum, some non-tinkers like Chrysalis and Nilbog, bunch of others.”

“Too many,” Grue said.

“But their powers don’t fit this scenario that well, so it would have to be some alliance between two of them, or one would need to get ahold of the tools and blueprints from one of the others and reverse engineer it, or one had a second trigger event and their powers expanded.”

“A lot of ‘ors’,” Grue said.

“Too many possibilities,” Tattletale said.  “We could be on the complete wrong tack, where I’m overthinking it, or I’m overlooking the most obvious possiblity, that she’s just unlucky.”

“What if we ask the kid?” Regent asked.  He turned his attention to Dinah.

“Only if she’s up to it,” I said.

“Head hurts, still fixing things, putting all the worlds in the right places,” Dinah said.  She was clutching my wrist as though I were a life preserver and she was going to drown if she let go, but she stared at the ground as she spoke.  “But I’ll help now.  I fear I won’t be useful for much longer.”

I fear?  Who talked like that?

“Why not?” Regent asked.

“I’ll get sick without the candy.  Soon.”

“Withdrawal,” Grue said.

Dinah nodded.

“Fuck,” I said.  “We need to get her to a hospital so they can see her through it.”

“I can see it,” she said, and her voice was smaller.  There wasn’t any inflection when she spoke; the only indication that she had any emotion at all was the changing volume of her voice, more volume as she got more confident, less as she drew into herself.  “I see myself getting sick, and it’s so clear a picture, so many pictures it’s almost as bad as being sick right here and right now.”

“There’s ways they can help you through it,” I said.  “I looked it up.  The hospital can put you under, so you’re not awake for the worst of it.”

She squeezed my wrist a little tighter.  “It’s okay.  I can see the chances and I know I’ll be okay.  So long as it’s just once.  Ask me questions.”

Tattletale glanced at me.

“Go ahead,” I told her.

“Chance she’s turning into an Endbringer?” Tattletale asked.

“Those aren’t the kind of odds I can give,” Dinah said  “It has to be something I can picture.  Scenes.”

“I thought so.  And that’d mean I can’t really use it to pin down who’s behind Noelle’s situation.”

Dinah shook her head.

“Chance of trouble in the next twenty four hours?” I asked.  “Violence, she attacks us, she attacks other people…”

“Ninety-nine point three four six three zero one percent,” Dinah said.

“What happens in that not-even-one-percent chance?” Regent asked.

“I can’t go looking.  I have to ask, and figure it out from there, which hurts if I do it too much, or someone else asks, which makes it hurt less, because I can focus on the numbers and just the numbers.”

“Okay,” Tattletale said, “Chance she runs? ”

“Twenty-three point three one one percent.”

“That doesn’t add up,” Regent said.  “Unless I’m way worse at math than I thought.”

“She does some damage and then flees,” Grue suggested.  Tattletale nodded confirmation.

“Chance someone stops her?” Tattletale asked.  “Defeats her, kills her?”

Dinah shook her head.

“You don’t know?”

“I can’t see it.”

“Okay,” Tattletale said.  “That means we probably can’t stop her with sheer firepower.”

“Didn’t see it.”

“Okay.  Thank you, by the way,” Tattletale said.  “Appreciate it.”

“You’re quite welcome,” Dinah said, dropping her eyes to the ground.

Quite welcome.  Dinah kept phrasing things in a funny manner.  An old fashioned or proper way.  It wasn’t quite like how Coil spoke, but there were similarities.  Was it a side effect of spending way too much time around Coil?

I didn’t like the idea of that.  That either Coil had molded her, or that she’d spent enough time in a pliable mental state that she’d adopted his speaking patterns.

“This situation is bad,” Tattletale said.  “We can’t take her on, but we don’t know enough about her to plan against her.  I was going to reposition everyone so our territories covered the entire city, under the assumption that the Travelers were leaving.  Now I’m suspicious they’ll be staying, which complicates matters, and I don’t want us spread too thin, either.”

“We could get hold of Ballistic,” Grue said.  “Get his version of events.”

“He went back to his territory.  I’ll make calls and see if we can bring him on board,” Tattletale said.  “I have two squads of soldiers that I’m keeping on retainer.  They’ll serve as my hands for right now, while I try and get myself sorted out here, establish this as my new headquarters.  If you guys want to go to the hospital, maybe see about getting Skitter and Dinah looked after, I’ll handle things on this end.  We regroup at least an hour before dawn and we plan with whatever new information we have.”

“No sleep tonight?” Regent asked.

“No sleep,” Grue confirmed.

I turned to Tattletale, “We don’t have access to all of Coil’s resources, now.  Or Calvert’s, for that matter.  Can you find us a doctor who we can trust?”

“Someone you can trust?  No.  But I can find someone not altogether untrustworthy.”

■

We were just finishing sorting out who was going where when Tattletale called us with a name and an address.

The group heading to the hospital consisted of Me, Grue, Rachel and Dinah.  I had the smoke inhalation and breathing problems, as well as the pain in my chest and my eyes to look after.  Grue and Rachel had been shot.  As for Dinah, we needed to make sure there weren’t any severe problems before we sent her home.  Regent headed back to his place with Imp for backup.

Dinah, Rachel and I settled in the back of one of Coil’s trucks with Bastard and Bentley.  Grue took the wheel.

I focused on canvassing the area with my swarm as Grue drove.  Dinah had assured us that things were safe for the rest of night, but I couldn’t ignore the existence of a dangerous pseudo-Endbringer with a very good reason to want to hurt me.

“You’re quiet,” Rachel said.

I turned my attention to her, then realized she was talking to Dinah.

“I considered saying something, but you would get upset,” Dinah said.  Again, the low volume.

“Huh,” Rachel said.  “Why?”

Dinah paused for long seconds.  I wondered if she was trying to work something out with her power.  “I was going to ask if I could pet your puppy, but it’s… not my place.  He’s not mine.”

“He’s not a dog.  He’s a wolf.  He doesn’t react like a dog will.  And I’m trying to train him before he’s old enough that he won’t listen, and I don’t need people mucking that up.”

“Okay,” Dinah said.  There was no fight there, no resistance, total compliance.

Rachel put one boot against the edge of the bench across from her, a foot to the right of Dinah.  As far as I knew, Rachel didn’t take her eyes off the girl.

“Rachel,” I said.  “Just curious, but you’re hoping to eventually adopt your dogs out, right?”

“To good owners.  So?”

“Just saying, but as much as the owners need to adapt to the dog and understand the dog, the opposite is true.”

I couldn’t read Rachel’s expression.

“The dog has to adapt to the owner?” She asked.

“Right.  And that means the dogs need a chance to get used to people.  Dogs and humans have a partnership, right?  So they need to meet halfway in that understanding.  Mutual understanding.”

“Okay.”

Enough time passed that I wasn’t sure if she’d picked up on my meaning.

“You want to pet Bentley?” Rachel offered.

“Very much,” Dinah replied.

“Bentley, go.  Up.”

Bentley hopped up between Dinah and I on the bench.

“Relax.”

The bulldog turned around once, then flopped down on the bench so his head was pressed against my hip.

“Give him a sniff of your hand before you touch him,” Rachel said.  “Bentley’s a good boy, but it’s a good habit to get into with dogs.  You don’t want to surprise him and get bitten.”

I kept still while Dinah took Rachel’s suggestion and extended a hand.  Without standing, he twisted himself around until his oversized head was in Dinah’s lap.

Months since she’s seen a dog, let alone touched one.  How would that affect her in the long run?  I hoped she wouldn’t be in therapy for the rest of her life.  I turned my attention to scanning the area, while Bentley reveled in the attention and affection.

It was another five minutes before Grue stopped the van and we had a chance to get out.

“Chance of trouble?” I asked.

“Fifteen point three three percent,” Dinah answered.

“Can you tell me who causes the trouble?”

“I only know we’ll be in there, so I have to look at each of us, one by one, and then I see the number.”

“Okay.”

“When there’s trouble,” she said, “It’s you.  Eighty percent of the time.”

“Me?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Okay,” I said.  “I’ll try to be good.”

With ‘Doctor Q’, the man Coil had always referred us to, it had been one man operating solo.  He’d known his stuff.  But he’d been Coil’s man, and we couldn’t trust him until things had time to settle down.

This doctor’s office had a staff, and they didn’t even react as we entered.

“What do you need?” a woman asked.  She had a musical voice that was almost irritatingly sweet.  Condescending, like a kindergarten teacher or a character in a show for very young kids.  Not to the point that I saw myself causing any trouble, but… yeah.

“Three of us took gunshots, but they didn’t penetrate.  Costumes stopped the hits, but I want to be sure there isn’t lasting damage,” Grue said.  “The little girl needs a full checkup and maybe a brief stay, while she suffers withdrawal from some unspecified drugs or drug cocktails.  And we’ve got one case of smoke inhalation coupled with severe chest pain.”

“Understood.  Your bill has been paid in advance.  My mother and I will be looking after you,” the young woman chirped.  “Please come this way.”

We followed.  The place was like any old doctor’s office, but I noted statues and innumerable picture frames, and the floor was tiled.  Going by my swarm sense alone, I got the impression the place was upscale.  And it was empty.

“You don’t seem bothered to have supervillains coming through.”

“We’ve dealt with supervillains before,” she said, and the way she said it suggested she didn’t plan on elaborating.  “You’ll need to remove your costumes and masks.  You can each have a separate room to disrobe, and we’ll be seeing each of you in turn.  Rest assured, your privacy and safety is our top concern.”

I could feel Dinah’s deathgrip on my arm.

I bent down and murmured, “Do you want a separate room?”   She shook her head.

I straightened and told the woman, “We’ll share a room.”

“Neither of you are bashful?”

“I’m blind,” I said, “And no, I guess I’m not bashful.”

“Blind?” Grue said, his head snapping around as he looked at me.  Rachel did as well.

“Tattletale didn’t mention it?”

“No.  And you didn’t either.”

“I’m functioning.  I probably won’t when I can’t use my power, but yeah.”

“Is everything all right?” the young woman asked.

“It’s fine,” Grue said, heading into one of the rooms.  He stopped in the doorway, turned to me, “We’ll talk after.”

I bobbed my head in a nod, then led Dinah into an empty room.  As far as I could tell, everything was as one might expect for a doctor’s office, down to the jar of tongue depressors and a bowl of lollipops.

“How’s your head?” I asked.  “Headaches?”

“Getting worse.  But I’ll get sick tonight, before the headache gets too bad, then it won’t really matter.”

“Oh.”

“Do you have more questions?”

“Some, but I don’t want to burden you, or make you feel like I’m using you.”

“Go ahead.”

“The end of the world.  Did Coil ask about it?  Did he get more details on what happens?”

“He would ask how the number changed, some mornings when he asked the usual questions, before Crawler came and I couldn’t use my power for a while.  He wanted to figure out what happened, but the only way to do that was to make guesses and see the numbers with my power.  Every day, he’d always asked the same sorts of questions about whether one thing was safe or whether another was safe and chance of success for this plan or that.  There weren’t many questions left for the day after he was done asking all those, so it was slow.”

I worked to take off my armor, unstrapping the armor to uncover the zipper.  It wasn’t easy, with the pain in my chest, and when it hit me, I’d have to suppress coughs to continue listening to Dinah.  “I guess he figured he’d be around long enough to figure it out.”

Dinah didn’t respond.

“What’s the chance the world ends, Dinah?  That these billions die because of something Jack Slash does?  Has the number changed?”

“It’s changed.  Ninety-seven point seven nine zero seven three percent.”

Ninety-seven point eight.  It’s higher.

“What did you and Coil figure out?  In terms of twenty questions?”

“People are spread out.  I know you’re there.  You’re different but you’re there.”

“And the others?”

“Sometimes there.”

“Can you give me more details?  How am I different?  Which of the others are there?”

“I don’t know.  There’s too many capes and too many capes with powers that make it fuzzy, because some powers make it harder and a bunch of those powers together make it impossible.   I don’t know what happens to start all of it and I don’t know much of what happens during, but billions are dead afterward.”

Damn.  “Okay.  You said we’re spread out?”

“Yes.  Five big groups, lots and lots of capes from all around the world, and armies.  Coil asked a lot about that.  He wanted to know about his chances for survival or the total number of casualties if he focused on one area over another.”

“He wasn’t interested in stopping it?”

“He asked about that at first.  But nothing changed the numbers enough.  He said it was better to accept that it’s going to happen and do what he could to minimize the damage.”

“Five major groups,” I said.  “You don’t know why?”

She shook her head.

“Do you know if it’s like, a natural disaster sort of mass-death, or death by violence, or…”

I trailed off.  Dinah was already shaking her head.

“Alright,” I said.  I finished pulling my costume off, grunting at the pain in my chest, then sat on the bed in my bike shorts and tank top.  Dinah sat beside me.

She looked up at me, and there was a hint of surprise in her voice.  “You’re burned.”

“Yeah.  Just a bit.  Is it bad?”

“Not bad.  But it looks painful.”

“My chest hurts more,” I said.  Then, as if I were reminded of it, I coughed, hoarse.

We sat.  I could sense the Doctor talking to Rachel, and ‘heard’ Rachel’s raised voice with the bugs I’d placed on her.  I didn’t envy the doctor for having to deal with her as a patient.

“Theoretically speaking,” I said, “Just in the interest of problem solving, or figuring out what’s going to work or not, would the chance of this happening change if I just drove around America and killed everyone in my power’s reach?”

“Not really,” Dinah said.

“Damn,” I replied.  If she’d said yes, I could have narrowed it down to maybe the eastern United States or the west, then cut it in half again with north versus south, or narrowed it down to certain states.  Home in on the person or people that the problem centered around, dealt with them one way or another

Except that wouldn’t work.

“Would you?”

“What?”

“Kill all those people, if you had to?”

“No,” I assured her.  “I’m not that kind of villain.”

“You killed Coil, didn’t you?  I saw.  Thirty-two percent chance it was you who did it.  Five percent chance you couldn’t and asked someone else to.  Sixty percent chance you were dead.”

“I killed him,” I admitted.  “But that was a special case.”

“Okay,” she said.

What I wouldn’t have given to be able to read her expression.

“Does that bother you?” I asked.

She shook her head, but she said, “It did at first, when I first saw that possibility.  But I had a lot of time to wait, and eventually the idea of being rescued mattered more than his life did.”

“That’s… pretty grim,” I said.  I didn’t get a chance to say more.  The female doctor was leaving Rachel’s room, and Rachel was storming out.

Both Dinah and I turned toward the door before the doctor had even touched the handle.

The woman entered and hesitated a fraction when she saw us staring.  Her voice was just as cheery as her daughter’s.  “Hello!  I’m Dr. Brimher.”

“Hello,” I said.  “Have trouble with my teammate?”

“She was uncooperative.  I suppose we’ll have to refund the amount that was already paid for her care.  I hope that’s alright.  Everything indicated she was fine, healthwise.”

“So long as she was fine.”

She perked up a little at that, “Well then!  Who’s first?”

“Her,” Dinah said, before I had a chance to speak.

The overall checkup went much as I’d expected.  I was diagnosed with a fractured rib, the smoke inhalation was apparently something that should have been treated earlier, but I wasn’t showing any lingering signs of mental or personality changes, and I wasn’t dizzy, so she let me off with instructions to breathe deep.  I got a cream for my burn and three bottles of eye drops for my eyes.

“Once every two hours,” she said.  “And as for you, little miss, you seem undernourished.”

“I haven’t had much of an appetite for a while.”

“Infection?”

“Involuntary incarceration,” I said.

“Ah.  Well,” the woman’s voice jumped up a notch on the cheeriness scale, “None of my business.”

“It wasn’t me,” I said.  “We weren’t keeping her prisoner.”

“Of course.  I wouldn’t act any differently if you had been.”

“Really?” I asked.

Dinah grabbed my hand.  I forced myself to shut up.

“Well.  What drugs were you taking, sweetie?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you describe what you felt when you took them?”

“Felt good.  Calm.  Relaxed.  Very sleepy, thinking through a thick soup.”

The woman was scribbling with a pen.  She shook it to banish the fly that I’d landed on the end.

“And now?  You’re a little flushed.”

Was Dinah showing symptoms that I couldn’t see?

“I’m hot, and my legs ache.  I’m sweating, but that might be because I’m hot.  That’s all for now.  Later, I’ll be throwing up, and crying.  I’ll be very tired but I won’t be able to sleep.”

“You’ve been through this before?”

“No.  Not much past this.  This will be the first time.  Hopefully the last.”

“I… see.  The time of your last dose?”

“I don’t know.  I couldn’t see a clock.  But things start getting bad in one and a half hours,” Dinah said.  “They get to the very worst in one day.”

“Can you put her in a coma?” I asked.  “I read about it.”

“No.  I wouldn’t feel confident in doing that without knowing the substances in her system.”

“Then do a blood screen first,” I said.  “If it’s a question of money-“

“No,” Dinah was the one who spoke.  “Has to be the hard way.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because there’s a seventy point one five nine percent chance that I relapse if I don’t.  The cravings get too bad and I can see more cravings in the future and it gets to be too much and I go looking for some eventually,” there was a hint of hysteria in her voice.

I sighed.  “Okay.  No induced coma.”

“One bad week,” Dinah said.  “Six days.”

“Okay then,” the doctor said.  Still chipper, strangely sounding pleased at this situation.  “I’ll go prepare a room so you have a place to rest.  I’ll grab some things to help quiet your tummy, too.”

A moment later, she was gone.

“I can stay with you,” I said.  “At least tonight.”

“You need to go and help the others with Noelle.”

“I will.  But first I’ll see you through tonight, okay?”

She nodded.

We sat in silence for a few long moments.  The doctor stopped in to say something to Grue, and there was something about her voice, the higher pitch…

“Hey, Dinah, since I can’t see, can you do me a favor and tell me if you see anything around here that says ‘Medhall’?”

“Medhall?  No.  I don’t think so.  Why?”

“These guys are too comfortable around supervillains, and this place is too expensive.  Medhall was the company that Kaiser ran, and he also ran the biggest gang of villains in town, before Leviathan came.  I’m just wondering if this was the place the white supremacists went to when they needed medical care.”

“Oh.  I don’t know.”

“If it is, I’ll have to have words with Tattletale.  And I guess I can see why you saw me possibly causing trouble.  If they said something to Grue, that’d probably do it.”

Dinah nodded.

I sighed.  “A week to recuperate?”

“Six days.  Eight percent chance I need another day to rest,” her voice seemed a touch tight, maybe a little anxious.  I wasn’t sure I could blame her.

“I’m not leaving you in their care, okay?  We’ll spend enough time here for me to get the details on what to do and what to look out for, and then we’ll find another place to rest up.”

“Okay,” she said, and her voice was far quieter than it had been since we’d rescued her.

It caught me off guard.  The quiet.  I’d pegged the changes in volume as being tied to her confidence, but the way she’d dropped her voice, it suggested she was anxious about something.  Something she apparently wasn’t sharing with me.

“Mind if I run a few more questions by you?”

“I should save my strength, so only a couple more?”  She was still quiet as she replied.

I wasn’t sure if Dinah was aware, but the bugs I’d placed on her shoulders sensed the movement, the way she drew her shoulders in.

She was afraid?  Was it the impending withdrawal?

“Okay,” I said.  “Chance we come out of this okay?”

“Sixty four point two percent chance.”

“And chance the rest of the city does?”

“…Not as high.  It depends how I ask the question, but if I do-“

“No.  I get it.  If you could ballpark it?”

“Eighteen point two two five eight percent.”

“Okay.  There’s going to be some catastrophic damage, then?”

“It’s very likely.”

I sighed.  I still had to figure out what we were doing about Noelle.  There were roughly eight hours before we had to address that issue.  Five or six hours before we really needed to act on the knowledge, calling in help, hiring assistance or notifying the heroes.  This was a threat just one step below an Endbringer.  Hopefully Ballistic would brief us on her powers, and Tattletale could get us on target as far as her location or weak points.

Tattletale might have been the ruler of Brockton Bay in a general sense, but I was still team leader of the Undersiders.  I was blind, we had a pseudo-Endbringer to tackle, and the lives of everyone in the city potentially hinged on it.

Just had to consider my options.

“Fifty eight point five,” Dinah said, and there was a hint of emotion in her voice.

“What?  What’s that number?”

“It’s my chance of getting home.”

“Why is it so low?”

She shrugged.

Did that mean she didn’t know, or she wasn’t willing to use her power to find out?

Then I sensed her lean slightly away from me, and I got an inkling why.

Me.

It was so seductive, when I thought about possible risk to my dad, to the people in my territory, to my teammates and friends, and even to me, to think about drawing on Dinah’s assistance.  With Dinah’s help, we could avoid the worst case scenarios.  And maybe in some not-quite conscious way, I was thinking about how to retain her help, one way or another.

If she was sick, after all, I could look after her while dealing with the situation.  Just a week of keeping Dinah close, drawing on her abilities to help everyone, and to ensure her safety.  With that in mind, and the way she’d clutched at me for security, I’d been assuming she’d stay with me for just a little while.

She knew that.  She saw the numbers changing.

And just with that, there was a breach in trust.  The savior wasn’t quite what she’d expected?  Dangerous, even?  It explained why she was anxious.

“Dinah, listen,” I said.  “I can guess what you’re thinking.  I don’t want to be that person.  I don’t want to trick myself into believing it’s right or better to keep you, that it serves the greater good or whatever.  Because that’s a slippery, fast road to doing what Coil was doing.”

She turned her head to look at me.

“We’ll get you home as soon as possible, okay?  Within twenty-four hours.  And if there’s more risk, if there’s more danger to me, or to you, or everyone?  I’ll shoulder that, okay?  I’ll make sure we come out of this okay.  You can go home.  You deserve to go home.”

A full minute passed before she responded with a murmured, “Thank you.”

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Monarch 16.13

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With Grue’s help, I seated myself on the intact edge of the destroyed swarmbox, scattering my insects to the walls and ceiling of the room.  Grue paced a little, while I eyed Imp and Bitch.  My female teammates didn’t look entirely convinced, and I couldn’t blame them.  They’d just seen someone who matched my description attacking them.  The nighttime darkness and the lack of city lights hadn’t helped, and the obscuring swarm of bugs had helped hide the details from the moment the impostor gave them reason to suspect her.

“What happened?” Grue asked me.

“We arrived at the place he was keeping Dinah, she grabbed my hand, we turned around, and the headlights flashed.  Then I was somewhere else.”

“He switched to his highbeams, momentarily.  Don’t know about the others, but my eyes had adjusted to the dark.  I couldn’t see anything, used my darkness to try to cover us in case he was pulling something, but nothing happened.  Turned around and you were fine.”

“Except it wasn’t me.”

Grue nodded slowly.  “Looked like you, sounded like you.”

“I don’t know how.  Genesis?”

“Didn’t strike me as much of an actor.”

“Then I don’t know,” I said, feeling lame.  I knew I didn’t sound convincing.

“What happened?  Was he only trying to separate you from us?”

“I’m ninety-five percent sure he tried to kill me.”

“What’s the other five percent?”  Grue asked.

“I’m not a hundred percent sure of anything.  But he didn’t have a bomb waiting to go off when I arrived, so that leaves me with some doubt.  He did shoot me, and set the building on fire around me.  And he had soldiers waiting to gun me down if I stepped outside.”

“Did he want you to come here, to frame you?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head.  “Doesn’t make sense.  Just as easy for ‘Skitter’ to disappear with Dinah, leaving you guys angry but still loyal.  I think the way he wanted it, I’d die of the gunshot or burn up in a housefire, and he could use the lack of living reporters in Brockton Bay alongside some bribe money for the Travelers to ensure you guys didn’t know what he’d pulled.  Maybe something comes out later about me betraying you, to put it in perspective and put any lingering doubts to rest.”

“He teleported you into a burning house, shot you, surrounded you with soldiers.  And you escaped,” Imp said.

“Barely.”  I touched the knot of metal where the bullet had settled in my armor.  “I guess it’s bulletproof after all.  I got away because of stuff he wasn’t aware of, mainly.  My costume, tactics I’ve been using in the field, the fact I had a gun.  Don’t know if Calvert knew about that.  Are you okay, Rachel?”

Rachel didn’t respond.  Her head was turned my way, and I could imagine her staring, trying to read me.  Her hand gripped the chain at Bastard’s neck.

“It wasn’t me,” I told her.

“It wasn’t her,” Grue confirmed.  “I saw with her power.  That box was controlling the bugs.”

Bitch nodded slowly.  I couldn’t see her expression to know whether she was glaring at me or narrowing her eyes behind her mask.

“If you have any doubts,” I said, “You can stay in a position to attack me if something happens.  One whistle or one hand signal away from commanding Bastard or Bentley to tear me apart.  I hope you won’t leap to any conclusions, but-”

“It’s fine.”

“Are you sure?  Because I don’t want there to be any hard feelings or… I don’t want there to be hard feelings.”  I’d almost said retaliation, but I’d decided I didn’t want to bring that up.

“It’s fine,” she said, and there was a touch of anger to the words.  “This shadow and dagger shit pisses me off.”

“Cloak and dagger,” Imp offered.

Bitch made a low, grunting noise in her throat that fell somewhere between a huff of anger, a belch and a grunt.  “The way you acted before, the way that person acted when she shot me and the way you’re acting now, none of it makes sense, and maybe that’s ’cause I’m stupid.  But I’m going to handle this my way.  Next time someone shoots at me, I kill them.  Or I have Bastard eat their hands and feet.”

“You shouldn’t maim people,” I said.

“Says the person who just emptied a gun clip at us,” Imp said.  When Grue and I turned her way, she raised her hands, “Kidding.  I’m just kidding.”

“…Want me to kill them instead?”  Bitch asked.

“No!  No.  Just… nevermind.  But hold back a bit for now.  And don’t call yourself stupid.  You think in a different way, that’s all.”

She offered a noncommittal grunt in response.

“We should talk rescue plans,” I said.  “Calvert invited Tattletale to join him, probably so she wouldn’t tip us off about the body double.  That means she’s probably caught.  Regent too, since we sent him to look after her.  This is the kind of situation we were hoping to avoid by playing along with his grand plan.”

“Having to tackle his full forces to save Tattletale, Regent and Dinah.”

“Right.  If we go charging into this, we or one of his hostages will get killed.”

“I could go in,” Imp said.  “Get them, walk them out.”

“No.  He knows us.  He’s anticipated something like this.  Probably has for the Travelers, too.  He’ll have planned around our powers, with counters in mind for each of us.  That means video cameras to keep an eye out for you.”

“Pain in the ass.”

“Indirect attack?”  Grue suggested.

“It won’t work if he’s holed up somewhere safe.  Not with the countermeasures he’ll have put in place.  If he’s in his underground base until this all blows over, then he’ll be impossible to access,” I said.  I had to stop to cough.

Nobody chimed in with an answer or idea while I recovered.

I went on.  “If he’s in the PRT offices, then we’ll probably have to get past the Travelers, his soldiers, his PRT officers, any countermeasures he’s put in place and any countermeasures the PRT put in place.  It’d be a question of staggering out his various lines of defense so the more questionable ones are out of sight of the good guys.”

“And he still has his hostages,” Grue said.

“Fuck it,” I groaned, then I coughed more.

“You need a hospital,” Grue told me.

I shook my head, then regretted it.  I felt dizzy.  Vaguely nauseous.  It was as though simply stopping and letting the adrenaline kick down a notch was letting symptoms emerge.  “Can’t.  Not now.”

“You’re nearly dead on your feet.”

“I’ll manage,” I said.  I turned my eyes to the place I’d been lying while Imp stood over me.  “What if I was dead?”

“Hm?”

“Calvert doesn’t have a way to know how this turned out.  Do you have phone service?”

Grue reached for his phone, but Imp had hers out first.  “Sure.”

“He cut my phone off.  I threw it away in case it could be used to track me, or in case it was how he was getting a hold on me with that teleportation device.  If he suspected you, wouldn’t he do the same, limit your options?”

“So you think he thinks maybe something happened.  Or he’s waiting to see if we bought his ruse.”

“He knows I was in the area.  I attacked his men trying to save you guys.  He had gunmen and explosives teams ready to wipe you off the map if you caught on to what that impostor was doing.  So what happens if you call him and tell him you killed me?”

“He asks us to meet him at one of those secure locations you mentioned, and we can’t refuse without revealing that we know what he tried to pull.  And destroying that box might have clued him in anyways.”

“Fuck,” I muttered.

“When the other Skitter disappeared with the girl, how did she do it?  Exactly.”

“Teleporting,” I said.  “Threw the first flashbang, teleported out, leaving rubble and another flashbang behind.”

“Mm,” he said, “Okay.”

“Why are you so curious about that?”

“Just thinking something through.  Give me a second to think.”  He pointed at me, “Make sure you’re taking deep breaths in the meantime.  Even if it hurts.”

I nodded and did as he asked.  For a little while, I ignored my bugs and focused on tallying the damage I’d sustained.  My breath wheezed and rattled, my chest hurt every time it or something attached to it moved, and my eyes stung when I opened them.  Not that there was any point.

Grue was pacing, breathing hard, while Imp and Bitch stood by.  It was a bit of a reversal of the norm.  I could sense Bitch scratching around Bastard’s ears, her fingernails digging in deep to get past the areas with armor and bony spikes.  Imp was on the other side of the room, leaning against one of the wooden pillars and watching her brother.

“I’m calling him,” Grue announced, still panting a bit.  Before any of us could protest, he said, “Quiet.”

I closed my mouth.

He put the phone on speaker.  I could hear it ring.

Funny how something so mundane as the ring of a phone could sound so ominous and eerie, given the context of a situation.

“Grue,” It was Calvert’s voice.  “What-”

When Grue spoke, his words were growls, barks.  “You better not have had anything to do with this, or I swear, this is over.  We’re done, gone.”

I could virtually hear Calvert switching mental gears to try to adapt to this.  “Slow down and then explain.  I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Skitter attacked us and then she used your technology to leave the scene.  I know you wanted to keep that girl, but going so far as to fucking turn on us-”

“Grue,” Calvert’s voice was hard, firm, “Slow down.  It doesn’t make sense that I’d arrange things that way.  Why go through the motions of giving my pet to Skitter, only to… you haven’t fully explained what happened.  You said she attacked you?  Are you sure?”

“Pretty fucking sure, Coil.  She shot Rachel and then turned on me.  Imp disarmed her.  Then she teleported away using the same device you described to us an hour ago.”

“I… I see.  Is Rachel all right?  And who else was with you, my driver?  You’re all unharmed?”

“Your driver went ahead.  No, we’re all fine, except for Skitter.”

“You said she teleported away.”

“She didn’t get more than two blocks away.  We chased her down and stopped her.”

My eyes widened a bit.  I could imagine Calvert’s next words before he spoke them, was already moving.

“Show me.  Send a picture through the phone.”

I shifted position so I lay in the depression that Bastard’s front paws had made in the swarm box.  It was a scene I had to stage in seconds, using dragonflies and wasps to carry hairs across my mask, moving my hand so my wrist bent at an awkward angle where the metal folded.  The final touch was bringing all the bugs from around the swarm box to carpet me and the floor.

Not a half second after I finished, I heard the digitized camera sound.

“I see.  That’s quite unfortunate.  Where’s Dinah?”

You know where Dinah is.

“I don’t know,” Grue said.  “I’m far more interested in hearing how Skitter managed to use your technology to do this.”

“You’re sure?”

“I saw it with my own two eyes,” Grue said.  “She threw a flashbang, but light and darkness don’t affect me the way they do others.  You know that much.”

Grue was lying, adding an element Calvert wasn’t aware of, to throw him off track.  Good.

“I didn’t, believe it or not,” Calvert said.  “And I don’t know how she would have gotten access to the controls.  One moment.  I’ll have to call you right back.”

My swarm felt Grue stiffen.  He raised his voice, “Don’t hang up on me!”

The speaker phone buzzed with the dial tone.

We stared at each other.  Or the others stared and I used my swarm sense to observe.  As a group, we were still and quiet for long seconds, the dial tone still blaring.

Grue hit the button.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Being aggressive, keeping him on his heels.  If he’s constantly defending himself, he won’t be able to turn things back on us.”

“Except he hung up.  He’s going to think through his options and give you an excuse when he’s ready.”

“I didn’t think he’d hang up.”

I frowned.  I was thinking back to the meeting I’d had with the school, when my dad had been with me and we’d accused the trio of bullying.  Both Emma’s dad and the school had played their little power games.

“It’s a tactic,” I said.  “He regains control of the situation by being the one who can call back, and it helps establish the idea of him being an authority figure.”

“Damn,” he said.  “Sorry.  It made sense in my head, but I didn’t think it through, I’m tired.  Didn’t sleep last night.  I figured it was better to call sooner than later.”

“It’s okay.  Maybe call him back?”

He didn’t get a chance.  The phone rang.

“This wasn’t the kind of response I wanted, Coil,” Grue growled into the phone, the second he’d answered.

I heard the beep as he switched it to speaker phone.  Calvert was already talking.  “- have sequestered Regent in my custody, out of concern that he controlled Victor to have the young man hack into my systems.”

“You and I both know that Victor didn’t have that kind of access, and we didn’t know about your teleportation technology until an hour ago.”

“I fear Skitter may have known, and I’m simply covering my bases.  Once we’ve verified what happened and that Regent wasn’t complicit, I’ll release him.  You can understand where I’m wanting to be careful, given this turn of events.”

“I don’t understand anything, Coil,” I heard a tremor of emotion in Grue’s voice.  “I liked Skitter, and she’s dead.  The use of the teleporter says you’re complicit.  I want to look you in the eye and believe you weren’t a part of this.”

“We’ll sort this matter out.  If you’ll come to my headquarters, we can discuss this.”

“No.  Not your headquarters.  Not with the possibility you pulled this shit on us.  We’ll meet somewhere else.  Somewhere open.”

There was a pause.  “As you wish.  Name a location.”

Grue, this time, was the one caught off guard.  Calvert’s response was fast, and Grue clearly didn’t have an area in mind.

A place where we’d be able to set up faster than Calvert, ideally open, not riddled with attack routes and vantage points for his soldiers…

I thought of a spot, and the air caught in my throat as I suppressed a small noise.  I almost coughed.  I drew the word in the air with my bugs.

“The market, north end,” Grue said, reading it.  “You know it?”

“I do.  It’s shut down at present.”

“Right.  You come with only one small squad of soldiers, bring Tattletale and Regent.”

“If-”  Calvert started.

Grue hung up on him.  He looked at me, “Authority, right?”

“Right,” I said.  But all I could hear was the emotion in his voice when he’d been talking about the idea that I’d been dead.  Pretending.  Grue wasn’t a guy who showed his emotions, he didn’t strike me as an actor.  Hearing that had affected me more than I thought it would.  I didn’t want to ask if it was because he really cared or if it was because he’d tapped into something else, some vulnerability that his recent trauma had left open to him.

I coughed lightly.  “The market’s a good spot.  His people were at the south end of town.  It’ll take him a bit to get there, so he won’t be able to stage any kind of ambush.”

“It works.  But if we’re meeting him, what are you doing?”

“Staying nearby,” I said.  “I’ll wait in the wings.  In the meantime, we should see if we can get our hands on something that we could have Bastard maul to the point that it looks like my mutilated remains.”

“There a butcher still in service anywhere?” Grue asked.

“We’ll figure something out,” I replied.

■

The market was almost empty, an expanse of asphalt devoid of cars, surrounded by tall grass.  There were still faint marks where the treads and scoops of bulldozers had pushed the dirt and debris to the far side of the lot.  Only a few stalls were standing, but the displays were empty.

I felt exposed, naked.  I was wearing only my old costume and the built-in makeshift skirt to cover me where the fire had eaten away at the leggings.  My utility compartment was the one that had been damaged during our altercation with the Nine, holding the bare essentials, while my new mask and the upper half of my remade costume were presently being worn by the fake we’d made.  The sacrifice of the costume hurt, and the process of putting the fake together hadn’t been pretty.

The head, upper body and arms were simply taken from a child’s mannequin we’d salvaged from the inside of a store display and stuffed into the top of my costume.  To get the meat for the torn midsection, I’d had to use my bugs to root out and kill a raccoon from the bins of a dumpster.  I’d cut it open and tied the entrails to the base of the mannequin’s torso with my spiders.  A wig that vaguely matched my own hair was simply bound to the head.  We soaked the body, the wig in particular, with the blood of the dead raccoon.

Bentley’s tail wagged as he carried the thing delicately in his heavy jaws, one arm and a bloody mess of hair dangling from the left side of his mouth, raccoon intestines hanging out the other.

I headed into the tall grass and hunkered down.  Volumes of insects and arachnids that I’d picked up during our trek to the market settled around me, hidden at the base of the grass.

Adrenaline kept me awake, despite the fatigue that I was experiencing.  It had been an intense few days, an intense few weeks, with minimal chance to rest.  My body was probably struggling to heal, and draining what little reserves I had remaining.  Still, I wasn’t about to doze off.

Calvert arrived after ten or fifteen minutes, pulling up with one armored van.  All in all, he had only four soldiers with him.  He walked within twenty feet of me as he crossed the tall grass.  I was aware of his footsteps crushing my bugs as he passed over the swarm.

Oblivious, he approached Grue, Imp, Bitch and the dogs.

“Ah.  You brought Skitter.  It seems there’s little doubt she’s dead.  A terrible shame.”

“No kidding,” Imp said.

“I’d suggest my man look over the body, verify that it was her, but I suppose there’s no point trying.”

“Bentley wouldn’t let you get that close to his treat,” Bitch said.

Bentley growled, as if he understood the words and wanted to make it absolutely clear.

“Don’t talk about her like that,” Grue said.  “Calling her a treat?”

“She betrayed us,” Imp said.  “Why do you care?”

“Enough,” Calvert said, his voice hard.  “Enough bickering.  My time is valuable, and I’m not willing to waste it on entertaining this ruse.”

I didn’t have many bugs deployed on my allies or on Calvert, but I could still feel the others tense in surprise.

“Yes, I know.  I commend you for trying, I might have believed you, but I do have other resources on hand.”

“Then-” Grue started.

“Ah, bup bup,” Calvert raised a hand, “I was talking.  As I was saying, I have other resources available.  I have a small cadre of supervillains, a small group of heroes, all the resources of the PRT and PRT computer systems, and all of their tools.”

He snapped his fingers, and soldiers began to teleport down to the edges of the market.  Most were positioned so that the Undersiders would have to run off the edge of the pavement, over the grass and into the water if they wanted to get away.  Surrounding a target while holding guns only promised to get people shot.  The effect, as it was, was good enough.

The Travelers teleported in behind Calvert, followed by Chariot, Circus, Über and Leet, and a few of his lieutenants.  People in suits.  One held a laptop while the other typed on it.

Every gun, tinker made or otherwise, was pointed at my teammates.

Another gun pressed against the back of my head.  Soldiers had teleported in behind me.

I felt despair sweep through me.  No.  Too many.  Didn’t think he could teleport this many in.

The gun barrel prodded me, and I stood.  I walked with the gun pressed between my shoulderblades, just above the spot where my utility compartment hung.

“Skitter.  How nice of you to join us.”

“Cut the fake civility,” I said.  “Where are our teammates?”

“Regent and Tattletale are safe and locked up, rest assured.  I must say, I’m quite disappointed.  I really had hoped this would work out, and the loss of the Undersiders sets me back by weeks or months in the grand scheme of my plan.  Imp, you can cease trying to run.  My men have cameras on you,” Calvert gestured toward the laptop.

Imp moved her mask to spit on the ground, just to my right.  It was a bit of a shock to find her standing there.

“Farewell, Under-“

“Wait.” I said.  Raising my voice made me cough.

“I don’t see any point to waiting.”

I hurried to recover and speak before he could give the order.  “Dead man’s switch.”

Calvert sighed.  “Ah.  You are irritating, you know?  On more than one occasion, I know, you’ve argued for the sake of the greater good.  I’ve viewed the recordings the PRT has of your appearances at major events and I’ve come to know you fairly well.  It’s rather hypocritical that you’re now working so hard to fight against the greater good.”

“Against your rule.”

“Essentially so.  If you simply would have died quietly, the Undersiders wouldn’t have been stirred to rebellion, I could have established a peace we haven’t seen since the day Scion arrived and everyone involved here could have walked away happier and healthier.  Your friends included.”

“Tattletale excepted,” I responded.

“Tattletale excepted, I admit.  Too dangerous to be left unchecked.  A shame.  Now, you were saying?”

“I arranged a dead man’s switch.  Kind of.  Unless one of my subordinates receives a message from me every twenty minutes, she’ll mass-send emails to everyone important and even a few unimportant people.”

“Detailing the true nature of Thomas Calvert, I suspect?”

“Yeah.”

“I hate to break it to you, dear Skitter, but this isn’t enough leverage for me to let you walk away.”

I turned my head in the direction of my teammates.  With my power, I noted their presence.  Grue, Imp, Bitch, her dog.

“None of us?” I asked.

“No.  I’m more confident in my ability to handle the chaos that any email creates than I am in my ability to get you and your teammates under my thumb again.”

“Okay,” I said.  I could feel sweat running cold down the back of my neck.  “Then I have a few questions, and a couple of requests.  Satisfy that, and I can disable the dead man’s switch.”

“The requests first, if you please.”

“Dinah goes free when you’re done.  You don’t keep her forever.”

“Agreed.”

“My dad, you don’t touch him.”

“I haven’t and I won’t have reason to.”

“And you take care of Rachel’s dogs.”

Calvert nodded, but I could sense his patience was running out.

“You do what you can to stop Jack from doing what he can to end the world.  If you have capes at your disposal, you give them some job related to that.  To stopping it.”

“Fine.  Is that it?”

“If none of us here get to live, at least promise Tattletale gets to.”

“Fine.  That can be arranged.”

“I’ll need to see her, to verify she’s okay.  I get that you can’t prove you haven’t gone after my dad in retaliation for earlier, but you can bring her here.”

Calvert nodded at Chariot, who pressed a button on his wrist.

Tattletale appeared in a flash of light, arms bound behind her, legs shackled.  She wore headgear that had her blindfolded and gagged.  I couldn’t quite tell, but it looked like the ears were plugged too.

“Satisfied?” Calvert asked.

“No.  It could be a body double, like you arranged for me.  I’d like to confirm with her.”

“No.  The restraints are in place for a reason.”

“Then it’s a body double,” I said.  “And I’ll let the timer run down on this damaging piece of email.”

“I’m willing to run that risk.”

“Use your power,” I told him.  “I’m going to say the words rose-L.  She’ll reply with something green, followed by the letter A.”

“I’m familiar with your codes.”

“Great.  And if she doesn’t, shoot us.  If there’s a problem, go with your other world.”

“You know how my power works?” Calvert sighed.  “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised in the end, with the name she chose.  No.”

“It’s all I’m asking for.  You can send your computer experts to the destination I name, they’ll check the computer memory to verify no messages were sent, check the phones of everyone on my call history that you don’t already know, and then you’ll know you’re in the clear.  That’s what I’m offering you in exchange for the assurance that at least Tattletale will get to live.  Peace of mind.”

“I could kill your liaison, you realize.  She’s a loose end.”

I thought of Charlotte, hoped I wouldn’t regret getting her involved.  “I hope you won’t.  All I’ve told her is that she should await my message and send the file I composed if she doesn’t hear from me regularly.  I hope you’ll let Tattletale and my civilian live, but if you won’t, if you break your word, I guess I’ll have to live with you looking a little worse in the eyes of the people who work for you.  Like the Travelers.”

“Don’t bring us into this, Skitter,” Trickster said.  “This is your mess.  Your consequences.”

“I didn’t do anything.  He was the one who turned on us first,” I protested.

I sensed Trickster turn Calvert’s way.

Calvert sighed audibly.  “As Skitter knows about my power and ever so kindly revealed the broad strokes of it to everyone in earshot, I suppose there’s no loss in explaining.  I tortured one member of the Undersiders for information, in another world, days ago.  They revealed that you were plotting to turn on me if I refused to release Dinah.  I cannot afford to release her, so my hand was forced.”

“So it’s our fault?” Imp asked.

“Ultimately, yes.”

“How did you make those body doubles?  Genesis?”

“The old-fashioned way.  The one that replaced you was a Sudanese child soldier.  I was preparing for the eventuality of your betrayal since the day after Leviathan attacked and your… wobbly allegiances became perfectly clear.  It’s amusing, but the files you stole from the PRT offices after rejoining the Undersiders supplied much of the video footage my hired experts used to coach her in the particulars of how you move and speak.  When you went to convince the Mayor of our way of thinking, Trickster carried the devices Leet designed to record the particular signals you use to command your bugs.”

“Which is how you built the swarm box.”

“The Famine Engine,” Leet said.

“Whatever.”

“Any further questions?”

“Why didn’t you drop me on top of a bomb?”

“An unfortunate side effect of Leet’s power.  Leet believes it was the proximity to the bomb or the particular signature of the vat of acid that made it so likely to occur, but with my power I observed that it wasn’t merely a chance that the teleportation would fail and your well-trained body double would be caught instead, but a surety.  No less than twelve tries with the variables changed slightly.  Leet’s power sabotages him, it seems.”

“Is that Leet’s passenger at work?”

“Passenger?  Ah, that’s what Bonesaw calls the agents.  Yes, I suppose that might be the case.  In any event, we nearly ran out of time before verifying that guns, fire and alcohol wouldn’t skew his power.  Whatever the cause of the errors was.”

“Okay.  So I don’t suppose you want to let me confirm it’s Tattletale and tell you who to contact to cancel the dead man’s switch?”

“No.”

“You’ve been careful every step of the way.  Thinking five steps ahead, amassing resources, amassing top-notch underlings, getting us working for you, getting the Travelers.  I’m surprised you’re willing to let things go ass-backwards when you’re so close to tying up the last loose end.”

“It’s precisely because I’m careful that I’m not willing to let Tattletale open her mouth and speak.”

“You’re still pretending it’s Tattletale,” I said.

“It is.  I had no reason to arrange a body double for her as I did for you.”

“You had every reason.  Like you said, you didn’t trust her, you couldn’t let her work unchecked, and it would have been too unusual if the two members of the Undersiders that posed the biggest threat to your goals happened to disappear at once.”

Calvert shook his head and touched fingers to his forehead, as if exasperated.  “Your underling and Tattletale can live.  That’s all I’m willing to offer.  You’ll have to take my word on both points”

“Your word is worth nothing,” Bitch spat the words.

Calvert reacted as if he’d been slapped.

“You promised me safety, security, so long as I joined this team.  I’ve never been less safe, less secure.  Everybody lies through their teeth.  Maybe there’s a couple of them I can stand anyways, but they’re still liars, they’ve made me a liar, and you’re the worst liar of them all.  It’s fitting you wear a snake on your costume.”

“Enough,” Calvert said, “Anything more and I’ll order my men to shoot you.”

“Shoot her and you’ll never get the info you need from me,” I said.

“You’re a cheat, Coil!” Bitch barked.

“I’ll have your dogs shot if you say another word,” Calvert said.

Bitch fell silent.

Silence reigned for long seconds.  I was aware of my bugs, knew that I couldn’t have them attack without us getting shot.  I knew my armor was bulletproof, Bitch’s armored jacket was the same way, but the thinner fabric, or a bullet through the lens or eyehole of a mask?  There were a lot of soldiers here.  Even if the suits could stop the bullets from penetrating, we could be pulverized anyways.

I heard a wave crash against the shore, not far away.  Long seconds passed.

“If it settles the matter, then fine,” Calvert said.  He signaled Chariot.

Another Tattletale appeared.  She dropped to her knees the second she materialized.  She wore a similar headset and bindings.

“Free her mouth and one ear.  Be ready to gag her again the second she speaks.”

One of his soldiers approached the kneeling Tattletale.  He undid the gag and freed her ear of the plug that was held in place with wire.

“Rose-L,” I called out.

“Stringbean-A,” she replied.  She grunted as the soldier forced the gag back into her mouth.

“She gets to live,” I told Calvert.  “If nothing else, you guys are going to need her help to figure out how Jack Slash ends the world in twenty-three months.”

“It’s amusing,” Calvert said, “That you keep asking me for things I was already prepared to do.  You wanted me to improve the city, to restore it to a working state.  Already planned.  And this?  Killing Tattletale was never in the cards.  I intend to keep her like I do my pet.  Her power will be invaluable.  Rest assured, I will offer every bit of assistance I can when the end of the world approaches.”

“I suppose it was too much to expect that you’d let her go,” I said.  My heart pounded in my chest.  I wasn’t exactly feeling top-notch, so simply standing was feeling like a bit of a challenge.  Fighting back, acting?  No.  No use.  “Her name is Charlotte.  She’s staying in the red brick house a block to the east of my dad’s place.  She has a laptop, but she doesn’t know what I put on it.”

“Very well.  Men?  Ready-“

“-You’re not going to check?”

“Aim…”

“Calvert!” I said, “Coil!”

“Fire.”

The sound of the gunshots was deafening, debilitating when I was already missing my sense of sight, my bugs not present enough to give me a sense of the surroundings.  I sensed Grue get hit, then Bentley… I took one in the stomach and folded over.

When the smoke cleared, for lack of a better term, we were still standing.  There was the sound of a few isolated scuffles in the ranks of the soldiers.  My bugs moved to the ends of gun barrels and to the soldiers themselves, noting their postures and positions.

Roughly half of the soldiers that surrounded us were holding the other half hostage.  A few had managed to get shots off, but a quick feel-around with my bugs verified that nobody had been hurt enough to be knocked to the ground.  Most of the bullets had gone over our heads.

“What is this?” Calvert asked.  “Travelers-“

“Don’t do a thing, Travelers,” Grue boomed out, in his eerie, hollow voice.  “Someone remove Tattletale’s bindings.”

One of the soldiers approached Tattletale and began undoing the restrictive binding.  She wobbled slightly as she stood, working her jaw in the absence of the gag.

“Glad to see the stringbean plan worked out in the end,” she said.  “Those of you I haven’t been in contact with, please hear me out.  I’m paying twice what Calvert is for a year’s salary, and I’m paying it all upfront.  Look to the other team captains if you don’t believe me.  Fish, Minor, Richards, Meck, I’ve talked to them, and they’ve agreed.”

There was a slight shift in the tension among the soldiers.  The ones at gunpoint began slowly lowering their weapons, and the ones holding them there similarly let it calm a notch.

“Lies,” Calvert said.  There was an uncharacteristic degree of emotion in his voice.  “I’ve tracked your funding.  I know exactly how much money you have.”

“Not exactly.  See, I revealed this to my team, just a little while ago, but I’ve sort of been skimming.”

“From me?”

“A bit.  Not as much as you’d think.  You keep good accounts.  But our targets?  For sure.  Like, we go rob the Brockton Bay central bank, and maybe I skip off for five minutes to go visit the CEO’s room, use his computer to get access to more funds, and shift them into a personal account.  Or I keep a few of the more valuable pieces of paperwork, or I pocket something expensive during a job.  Funny thing about a power like mine, it helps me figure out what I can get away with.”

“You haven’t taken enough to pay twice what I can.”

“You’d be surprised.  And some of your assets are in a position to be picked up by yours truly.  Safe deposit boxes and safes don’t mean much against me.  So that’s a bit more funding of yours that I can borrow to pay these guys.  A year up front, and I’m not asking them to do a single thing.  Most of them, anyways.  I’m just asking that they ship out of Brockton Bay or they stay on the down-low.”

“I’ll pay triple,” Calvert said.

“You can’t pay triple,” Tattletale said, stretching as the chains around her wrists and ankles were undone.  “You’ve dented your coffers too much with the city revitalization.  Didn’t help that you paid such an exorbitant sum to the Dragonslayers for the information they were offering.”

“That was your idea.”

“Yeah,” Tattletale said.  “You were desperate enough to deal with the Dragon threat before your big show at the debate that you didn’t make too big an issue of it.  Either way, you forgot the cardinal rule of employing mercenaries.  They follow the person with the money.”

“I didn’t forget,” Calvert said, “I had that in mind every step of the way.  I was exceedingly careful of how much funding I provided.”

“Okay,” Tattletale sounded almost chirpy.  “But you didn’t account for the possibility that I was picking up as much on my own as I was.”

Calvert made a noise that was a borderline snarl.

“Undersiders,” Trickster said.  “This goes no further.  Call it a stalemate, but we need his assistance.”

“Calvert’s lying, you know,” Tattletale said.  “He can maybe help you, but he can’t help Noelle.  None of the plans he’s been talking about will work, and he knows they won’t work.  He wants Noelle for entirely different reasons.  He thinks he can get her on a leash, so he’s got firepower even if he gets rid of the supervillains working under him.  A threat that only the great PRT leader Thomas Calvert can address.”

“I’d rather see the truth of that for myself.  You touch him and we kill you.”

“You guys aren’t wearing the same kind of durable costume we are,” Tattletale said.  “If you want to make a point of it, my soldiers can gun you down.”

“I can swap your group with mine the second the gunshots happen,” Trickster replied, unfazed.  “You don’t want to do that.”

I tried to speak, coughed once instead.  When I finally had my voice, I said, “Ballistic.  Sundancer.  Any other Traveler with doubts, I know you guys aren’t happy with the status quo.  If you want to stop running, stop moving constantly and move to Brockton Bay permanently, we’ll have you.  We need you, even.”

A long pause stretched out, then Ballistic stepped forward.

“Hey, man,” Trickster said.  “No.”

“I’m done.  This was a doomed quest from the start,” Ballistic said.  He stopped at Grue’s side, turned around to face his teammates.

“Sundancer?” I asked.  “You said before that you were lonely, that all of this was too intense for you.  Even the stuff I’ve done, it didn’t sit right with you.  I get that.  Don’t you want to stop?  To say goodbye to this life?”

Trickster looked at Sundancer, “Mars.”

She shook her head.  “No.  No, Skitter.  I’m staying.  Don’t have another choice.”

“Genesis?”

She was in the form of a girl, but wore a simple mask.  “Someone’s got to stay and be a real leader to this team.  No.  I’m standing by Trickster.”

“Teleport me to safety,” Calvert said.  “Escort me away, and everything I have is yours.”

“Everything you have is mine already,” Tattletale cut in.  “You’ve been dethroned, C-man.  I’m going to rule as the mastermind behind the scene in Brockton Bay, organize the territories, pay the bills.  My partners will see to the territories themselves.  I suppose I won’t be head of the PRT, but I’m suspicious we’ll be able to work out a truce of sorts with the good guys.  Hopefully we’ll get someone more sensible than Piggot and less shady than you.”

“Trickster,” Calvert said.  “I can put you in touch with the woman who can cure her.  Someone who knows as much or more about Parahumans than anyone on the planet.  It won’t be free, but I can subsidize the costs.  But I have to be alive to-“

Trickster collapsed to the ground.  Sundancer and Genesis turned, confused, and Ballistic caught Genesis with a spray of pellets.  She dissipated into gory wisps of whatever substance formed her body.

Sundancer was only just creating her sun when she collapsed as well.  I could see Imp bending over, prodding the bodies.  Über, Leet and Chariot backed away as guns turned to point at them.

“Anyone who shoots one of the Undersiders will receive one million dollars!”  Calvert shouted.

I waited for the inevitable bullet.  It didn’t come.

“Skitter and I had a little talk,” Tattletale said.  “Way back when the city had been freshly sieged by the Endbringer and rejoining the team wasn’t even a consideration.  I raised the idea of going after you, of taking you down.  We knew that if you were going to let down your guard, if you were going to slip up at all, it would be when you were closest to achieving your goals.”

Calvert only glared.

“If you made any one mistake, it was keeping me at your base towards the end of the fiasco with the Nine.  The problem with keeping your friends close and your enemies closer?  It puts your enemies in the midst of your friends, so they can discuss better means of payment with the right team captains.  Or they can maybe arrange to put something in Noelle’s vault during one of the feeding times, a few fire alarms with a low battery, tucked in where the door meets the wall.  Irritate her, so she’s awake that much more, and she then costs you sleep.”

“That metaphor fell apart,” Imp commented.

Tattletale shrugged.  “Not so much a metaphor, but I got off track.”

“Pettiness,” Calvert said.

“Strategic.  Lots of little things add up.  Seeding doubts.  Making you second guess plans.  Keep you up at night wondering, planning just a bit more, in both your realities.  You were too focused on the big picture, on the thing I could find out, keeping me off-balance, that you missed out on my ability to see the little things, to exploit them.  And it wore on you.  You didn’t realize how much, but it did, and maybe that’s why you were that much more susceptible to making the critical mistake here.”

“Damn you,” Calvert said.

“But you made the mistake we needed you to make, using your power here, while you were talking to us.  There’s no escape routes, now.  The only loyalty you have is bought with coin, and I have more cash than you do.”

“Then send me to the Birdcage and be done with it,” Calvert said.

“To jail?” Tattletale asked.  “No, no no no.  I know you have contingency plans.  Arrangements.  We send you to prison and someone breaks you out before you get there.”

I took a step forward, then made myself take another.

“It doesn’t have to be you,” Tattletale told me.

“No,” I told her.  “I think it does.”

Calvert turned my way, let his head sink back so it rested against the ground.  “So it comes down to this.”

I thought of the countless lives I’d put at risk, if not directly, then indirectly: the ABB blowing up parts of the city, the ensuing gang war, Purity leveling buildings because she blamed us for the loss of her daughter.

There was the fat superhero I’d left to die when the tidal wave was incoming.  I recalled leaving the dying Merchant to bleed out when I’d rescued Bryce from the merchant’s festival of blood.  There were the people in my territory, the old doctor who’d had her throat cut because I hadn’t realized Mannequin was close until it was too late.  The gas attack that killed nearly twenty people and the fires Burnscar had set in my territory, both because I’d provoked them and failed to consider how readily they’d go after the vulnerable point that was all the people I’d been trying to protect.

I remembered trying to kill Mannequin with grenades, going all-out in attempting to end a man’s life.  A madman, a monster, but it was what it was.

And, much more recently, there was the case of me bringing Triumph so close to death that he’d needed life support.

I’d come to terms with so much of that by telling myself it was leading to this.  I’d known deep down it would happen.  That my fight against Calvert would have to end here.

I walked forward until Calvert was beneath me.  I drew my gun, checked there was ammo in the clip.

“You’re not a killer,” Calvert said.

“No…” I replied.  I couldn’t see, so I screwed my eyes closed, felt the moisture of tears threatening to spill forth.  I took in a deep breath.

“…But I suppose, in a roundabout way, you made me into one,” I finished.  I aimed the gun and fired.

The gun dropped from my hand as the recoil jarred it.  It clattered to the pavement.  It was quiet enough that I could only hear the ocean water crashing against the shore, just off the beach.

As an afterthought, I kicked the gun a distance away from where Calvert lay.  Not that there was much point.  I tried to learn from my mistakes.

I felt Tattletale’s arm settle around my shoulders.  “We’re done.  This is over.”

“The Travelers will be pissed.  I can’t- we can’t kill them,” I said.

“We won’t.  They’ll move on.  They have no more reason to stay.”

Grue stepped around my left side, bent down, took Calvert’s cell phone from the man’s belt and then tossed it to Tattletale.  As Tattletale withdrew her arm from my shoulders, he stepped forward to give me a hug.  “Let’s go.”

I nodded into his shoulder.

We turned away.  With my swarm sense I was able to recognize Minor, Tattletale’s man, helmetless, opening the doors of one van for us.  I took a seat.

It wasn’t Tattletale or Grue that sat down beside me, but Rachel.  She took my hand in hers, held it fiercely.  I wasn’t sure what to make of it, so I simply accepted it.

■

We stopped at Coil’s underground base.  Tattletale’s underground base.  It was a relief to escape the silence of the van, surreal to be in the dim noise of downtown again.  Much of the area still lacked power, but there were the noises of the occasional car, of people clamoring on the bottom floor of an apartment building.  City noises.

“You okay?” Grue asked.

“More bothered by the fact that I’m not bothered,” I said.  I knew how little sense I was making, but I didn’t feel like elaborating.

“But you’re okay?”

I nodded, coughed fiercely for a few seconds.

“Our next stop after this is the hospital.”

“Okay,” I agreed.

As it had been at sunset, the base was empty.  The metal walkway sang with my footsteps as I walked to the far end of the complex.  I stopped at a door without a handle.

“Here,” Tattletale said.  She held Calvert’s cell phone.  Held it up and pressed a sequence of buttons.

The door clicked open.  I forced my fingers into the gap and hauled it open.  Heavy and metal.

There was one more door, one with a key lock.  Tattletale stepped over to the desk and got the key, opened it.

Dinah was inside with an unassuming man in a turtleneck sweater and corduroy pants.

“Go,” Tattletale told the man.  “Your boss is dead.  Just go.”

He fled.

“I’m going to get Regent,” she said.  “Think we’ll leave Shatterbird in her soundproof cage for now, just to be safe.”

I nodded absently.  I was holding on to Grue for support, watched as Dinah stood from the bed and slowly approached.

Her voice was barely above a whisper as she stared down at the ground between us, “I’ve been waiting for this for so very long.”

It didn’t sound like an accusation.  More the words of someone who had been forced to watch the clock for days, weeks, months.  Anticipating a possible moment that might never come.

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “I’m sorry it took so long.”

She shook her head, “I’m the one who’s sorry, you were trying hard and I set you up, so you’d go the way where your friends tried to kill you.  I shouldn’t have-“

“Hey, it’s okay.  It offered us the best chances in the end, right?”

She bobbed her head in a nod.

A second later, she was running to me, wrapping her arms around my midsection.  I winced in pain as her forehead banged against my chest.

“Medical care,” Grue said.

“For both of us,” I replied.  “Dinah and me.”

“Yeah.”

As a trio, we stepped out onto the walkway, where Tattletale and Regent should have been waiting.

But I could see Regent at the end of the walkway, and Tattletale wasn’t with him.  She was hurrying down the spiral stairs just to Regent’s left.

I leaned over the walkway, as much as I was able with the pain in my chest and Dinah clinging to my midsection.  My eyes went wide.  A moment later, I was hurrying after Tattletale, holding Dinah’s hand in one of my own and Grue’s elbow in the other.

We stopped when we reached Tattletale.  She stood facing the vault door.  The one that was used to seal Noelle within.

There were two vault doors, one set behind the other, and both were ruined, the one closest to us nearly folded in half, hanging by one hinge.

“A final act of spite,” Tattletale said.  She looked at the phone in her hand.  “He made sure she heard our conversation.”

“You didn’t notice?”

“He was using his ability to create alternate worlds to throw my power for a bit of a loop.  I was more focused on the possibility that he had a loyal soldier in the ranks or a sniper waiting in the distance, ready to take a shot at one of us.”

The odor that wafted from the open vault was like sweat and rotten meat.  It was dark.  Nothing about it gave the sense of a teenage girl’s living space.

“On a scale of one to ten,” I asked, “Just how bad is this?”

“Let me answer your question with another question,” Tattletale said.  “You think we could convince the PRT to turn on the air raid sirens?”

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Monarch 16.12

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Finding my teammates wasn’t hard; Calvert was telling me where they were.

He didn’t tell me directly.  No, this was more a casualty of being too careful, of putting too many secondary measures in place.  He’d stationed soldiers to serve as lookouts at a wide perimeter around the Undersiders.  I noticed one group, turned the truck to drive around them, and then noticed the second and third.  They were three blocks away from the Undersiders, effectively surrounding my team, staggering their movements so only half were changing position at a given time.

I wondered how much battlefield experience Calvert actually had, or if it had been too long ago to matter.  Had he forgotten what it was like to actually be in pursuit of a target in the midst of a sprawling urban environment?  He probably could have tripped me up a fair bit more by dropping the perimeter and leaving me to try to track down my teammates.

No less than three radios for one squad buzzed with the noise of voices.  The three soldiers picked up their radios and replied.  Ok, so he was checking in with each squad.  So maybe it was roughly as inconvenient as trying to find my teammates in the middle of nowhere.

Calvert had dropped me in Genesis’  territory.  It was about as far away as I could be from where I wanted to be, about ten minutes drive down Lord street and then a ways towards the water, if someone was driving quickly.  I wasn’t driving quickly; I spent far too long in the wrong gear, for one thing, I was clumsy with the car’s controls and I was forced to drive even slower because the roads were treacherous.  Damage to the road was hidden in the areas that were still flooded, where my bugs couldn’t necessarily see them.   Other roads were slick where there was just enough water to raise the oils up from the crevices of the road’s surface to the point that tires would slip on them.

On the plus side, driving while blind wasn’t as hard as I’d thought it would be.  I was relying on my swarm, of course, but even then I figured the lack of sight would be more of an impairment.

After noting where the squads were deployed and coming to the conclusion that Calvert was using his soldiers to track the movements of my team, I had to stop to contemplate the situation and finally got around to the coughing that had been looming for a few minutes.

If I charged in, Calvert’s men would collapse in on me.  Three or four soldiers per squad, and there had to be eight or more squads, unless Calvert wasn’t keeping troops moving in advance of the group.  That made for twenty-five to fifty soldiers.  That would be pretty much all of Calvert’s troops that hadn’t been at the house.  I didn’t fail to note how they were equipped, either.  I could sense the general shape of what would be sniper rifles and one piece of artillery that looked to be a mortar.

Made sense that he would have had the perimeter in place to ensure Dinah didn’t slip his grasp.  If she was gone, then he might have maintained their positions to keep me from reuniting with my team after I escaped from his deathtrap.

Thing was, I had another problem here.  Calvert had teleported me.  I wasn’t sure how he’d locked on to me, had ditched my phone as the most obvious measure, but I was worried that they could tag me with the thing and toss me into some backup trap reserved for one of my teammates.

All in all, I didn’t want to give the soldiers a chance to see me, radio in general coordinates and then toss me out to some remote area on the other end of the city.  Knowing that his power was least effective when he didn’t have a full grasp on what was happening moment to moment was another reason to keep out of sight.

I did want to go on the offensive.  I just wasn’t sure how.  If I attacked the individual squads, a check-in on Calvert’s part would reveal that someone was picking them off and they would all go on the offensive.  They might even shoot to eliminate my teammates.  Grue, Imp, Bitch and the dogs might have the suits or natural durability to keep them alive in the face of a hail of gunfire, but Dinah didn’t, and there was the possibility that the shots from the sniper rifles could penetrate the suits.

Or Calvert would order his squads to fire their mortars and wipe my teammates off the map.  If I assumed he had more than one mortar positioned around them, added his power into the equation to give him two sets of barrages with different target zones, I doubted they would emerge unscathed.

That left me to wonder why he hadn’t done something similar at the house.  No grenades, no mortar, no bomb laying in wait.

Failing that, what was the trick behind the teleportation?  Why hadn’t he just teleported me back after I slipped away?

Did he want to keep me alive?  Or had he actually expected me to escape?  Had he looked at all my past confrontations and gauged that I could probably make it, and it was no skin off his nose if I didn’t?

Hell, it was possible he’d used his power to help ensure I’d make it this far, to further some greater scheme.

Whether I wanted to deal with the soldiers, get the Undersiders out of the way of those mortars or avoid falling into some greater trap laid by Calvert, I needed more information.

The Undersiders were walking, judging solely by the speed the soldiers were adjusting their positions.  I wasn’t sure where Atlas was, but I’d driven past the site where we’d picked up Dinah and he hadn’t been there.  I could guess that Dinah wasn’t keen on riding the dogs, so that made sense.

I slipped bugs into position on the soldiers to track their movements, then moved in closer, pulling the car into park and climbing out.  Better to move on foot.  I’d picked up masses of bugs on my slow-ish drive through the city, and I guided them as close to the soldiers as I could get them without giving myself away.

The tint of my lenses didn’t help with the haze over my vision.  Still, opening my eyes, I could see it was evening, and the city wasn’t offering much in the way of ambient light, given the inconsistent availability of power.  I coupled the use of my bugs with my eyesight to try to spot the glare of flashlights or headlights, but peeks suggested that the soldiers were operating in darkness.  Night vision goggles, perhaps.

I waited until the squad nearest to me shifted to follow, noted how the squads to the north and the southeast of them were holding position, guns at the ready.  Calvert would have told them I’d escaped and that they should keep an eye out.  Their wariness made sense.

Still, I was able to advance closer, following the group that was moving to follow, getting closer while keeping buildings and other obstructions between us.  Not the easiest thing in the world when I had to use the presence of the bugs to estimate where their line of sight extended, but I managed to get within half a block of them, crouching behind a van.  Swarms waited just around the corners.

I wasn’t attacking, though.  No, my interest was on getting close enough that I could reach my teammates with my power.  Calvert had apparently stationed his men with my power’s range in mind, but he didn’t necessarily know that my power’s range extended in certain circumstances.  Getting just a little closer, I could sense them, walking down the middle of the road.  I drew my bugs around me, not in the shape of a person, but to mimic the curves and bumps of the truck I was kneeling beside, so my silhouette wouldn’t stand out so dramatically.

I could sense Bitch, still on Bentley’s back as he trailed behind the rest of the group.  Bastard was lying across her lap, apparently asleep.

I sensed Grue and Imp, walking just ahead of Bitch and Bentley.

And I sensed Dinah, walking hand in hand with a girl who shared my build, who had hair of the same length and a costume similar to my own.  I didn’t want to give anything away by swarming her with bugs to sense where our costumes differed, but it was pretty damn close.  She even had bugs on her costume.  Some were drawn there by pheromones, and some were pinned in place.  Her utility compartment differed from mine.  She had a knife, longer and narrower than mine, and two guns holstered within.  Some grenade canisters were tucked into the spaces by the shoulders where the short cape could cover them.

If Calvert’s preparation of the building prior to teleporting me in hadn’t made me think his betrayal was premeditated, this certainly cinched it.  Copying my costume, finding someone who fit my shape to the point that the others wouldn’t notice?  Someone apparently capable of using a gun?

Dinah was still with them.  They hadn’t dropped her off, even though Calvert could have arranged something like fake parents to accept Dinah.  Or maybe someone had raised that possibility and fake Skitter was taking Dinah back to ‘her’ territory to look after for a bit. The other Undersiders would leave, maybe, and Dinah would go straight back to Calvert’s possession.

I wished I had a better sense of Calvert’s overarching plan.  What would happen to the other Undersiders?  What would he do with fake Skitter?  He couldn’t hope to maintain the ruse for any meaningful length of time.

There had to be a reason he hadn’t just bombed them here and erased the last of his enemies in one fell swoop.  How much of the plan that he’d shared had been real?

This situation wasn’t so different from the one I’d just escaped.  There was the immediate threat, the mortars, and there was the one beyond that, with the soldiers ready to gun down my allies.  Bitch could have rescued Dinah, Imp and Grue from the mortars, given a chance to run, and Grue and Imp could deal with the guns, but the biggest issue, the biggest difference in where they were now compared to where I’d been, was that they weren’t aware of the threat.

If I could communicate with them, perhaps I could have coordinated them, managed something.  But it was evening and the black and brown bodies of my bugs wouldn’t be able to spell out anything obvious against a dark background.  My phone had been locked out and the presence of the false Skitter meant I couldn’t deliver a message unless it was very subtle.

Any mistake on my part threatened to provoke an ugly situation.  Calvert could order the mortar strike and teleport Dinah and false Skitter out.

No, I didn’t think there were many options when it came to communicating with Grue.  Imp?  Maybe that was a better option, given her ability to disappear, meet up with me and then rejoin the others.

Except I didn’t have an explicit strategy in mind, and I wasn’t willing to gamble that Calvert hadn’t accounted for Imp with some kind of surveillance with an electronic filter, like the screen of Dragon’s battlesuit.

Rachel?  No.  I was pretty sure she couldn’t read and write well enough to follow any directions, so I couldn’t even explain anything complex without saying it aloud, and doing that would be hard, speaking through my bugs without alerting the doppleganger in their ranks.

I could abandon them, try to find Tattletale or my dad, but Tattletale was going to be behind even more layers of security, if she was inside Coil’s underground base, and going to see my dad felt like a detour that wouldn’t do anything to address this situation.

That left me one potential ally.  I sent a ladybug to Dinah, settled it on her right hand, the one that the mock Skitter wasn’t holding.

She glanced at it, her head turning a fraction, then moved her hand to hide it from false Skitter.  I felt her clench her fist, the skin between the ladybug’s legs stretching so the legs were pulled slightly apart.

Dinah knew that Skitter wasn’t me.  There was no other reason to hide the ladybug.

We’d never spoken.  We’d never had a conversation, or even communicated through more than eye contact.  Dinah had been driving my actions for weeks, now, or maybe it would be fairer to say my goal of saving her had been driving my actions.  Now we were finally getting a chance to interact, and everything hinged on it.

The bug crawled to the center of her palm, and she closed her fingers gently around it.  Did Dinah have access to her power?  Could she signal me?  Dropping the bug?  Killing it?

I sensed the movement of the bug as she raised it to her chest, used her thumbnail to scratch at her collarbone.

Maybe I’d pinned too many hopes on the drug-addicted preteen.

Maybe I’d read the little signals wrong, and she didn’t realize that the Skitter next to her wasn’t me.

Or maybe that niggling doubt that had been in the back of my mind since I’d decided I had to help Dinah had been real.  It was all too possible she didn’t want to be rescued.  She was dependent on the drugs, she craved them, and staying with Calvert meant she got them.  In a way, I felt like that possibility was why I’d been pushing myself to save her as hard as I had, because I suspected that Dinah was trapped in more than one way.  She’d been kidnapped, kept captive physically, but she was also being kept captive in other ways.  I had to save her because she might not want to save herself.

Except if she didn’t want to save herself, then this situation would be that much more difficult to manage.

She dropped her hand to her side, let it swing a distance away, then brought it up to her chest again, scratched.

My doppleganger noticed, said something along the lines of ‘Don’t scratch’.  I caught only some sounds, was left to put the rest of it together through cadence and context.  And, I thought, maybe it was easier to understand because she sounded familiar.  She sounded much the same to the ambient bugs as I did.

It bordered on creepy.

The second thing I noticed was that what Dinah was doing was probably a signal.  Both times, she’d touched the bug to her chest, bringing it close to her heart.

Bringing the bug to her?

I didn’t like the idea of that.  If I was interpreting it the way I was supposed to, it seemed suicidal.  Did she want me to come to where she was?  If she was, was her power guiding that request, or was she still powerless and simply wanting to be rescued?

Breaking past enemy lines without getting seen, only to… what?  Make myself a mortar target alongside my teammates?  Where was the advantage?  What was the asset to putting myself in the thick of it?

Calvert had to anticipate that I’d try to rescue my teammates.  His soldiers wouldn’t be on guard against an outside threat like this if he didn’t.  What did he expect I would do?  I wouldn’t charge headlong into his soldiers.  I would see them.  I’d find some way around them, maybe turn some aspect of the situation to my advantage.

There were too many possibilities when it came to ways I might leverage things.  He couldn’t narrow down what I’d do because that was how I operated.  I was versatile.

Then what was the common element?  I was tired, I was hurting, fighting the urge to cough, lest I inform the soldiers I was here.  I couldn’t think of any solid way to tackle this situation, but in scenarios where I could, what might the common elements be?

I’d be using my power, for one thing.  Calvert couldn’t do anything about that unless he’d had Leet devise some kind of counter-weapon.  It was all too possible, but I didn’t have the time to consider all the possibilities there.

I didn’t have the time.

The other common element, the drawback to my power, to my mode of operation, was that I wasn’t dynamic.  I wasn’t a blitz hitter, in and out in a flash.  I could be aggressive, impulsive, improvising on the fly, but it took me time to get my soldiers in a row, to prepare my tools and drag things to where I needed to be.  Fighting Mannequin had been like that, those two long minutes of sustaining a beating while I got all the supplies and spiders to the site of our skirmish.  Even escaping the house, it hadn’t been quick.  I’d had to hunker down and amass enough decoys before dropping from the window.

Calvert had studied us.  He’d be aware of this.

Dinah and faux Skitter were walking.  Whatever excuse they’d given for not being able to ride Atlas, they’d opted to travel on foot instead of riding on Bentley or catching a ride in the truck Calvert’s man had driven.  Maybe that wasn’t because Dinah was scared of the dogs.  Maybe faux Skitter had suggested it, encouraged this for some greater plan.

They wanted to let me catch up.  They were betting I’d get here, then take time to deal with the squads so my teammates weren’t in danger.  By doing that… what?  How would he capitalize on it?

Identify the direction I was attacking from, then bring all the soldiers he’d had at the deathtrap house here to corner me?  Bring the Travelers?  Über?  Leet?

Dinah struck the side of her leg with the bug she held, hard.  Grue said something I didn’t catch.

The message was clear.  Now.  If Calvert was expecting me to delay, to take my time and be methodical about this, and Dinah was urging me to be aggressive, throw myself headlong into this situation, that had to point to something.  I’d decide what the hell I was supposed to do while I was en route.  I broke into a run.

I couldn’t move directly to their location.  I had to backtrack, find a route that didn’t put me in view of any of the watching squads.  The activity was making me cough, and I was forced to suppress it or limit it to muffled choking as I got closer to the soldiers.

Sweeping the whole of my range with my bugs, I found a route.  I had to backtrack a touch, move a bit closer to the water, but I found the construction site, and I found the ladder leading into a hole in the ground.  From there, it was a short climb to accessing the storm drains.

The acoustics of the storm drains made for a lot of noise, even if it wasn’t raining aboveground.  The water varied from knee-high to waist-high, depending on how much debris had filtered down, and it was moving with enough speed that it interfered with my ability to run.  My chest screamed at me in pain every time I was forced to stoop down to touch ground with my good hand for added support, and I didn’t dare cough for fear that the same acoustics that made the area echo with the flowing water would carry something to the ears of soldiers above.

The realization hit me when my swarm reached far enough to sense the second mortar and accompanying squad of soldiers.  There was an advantage to putting myself in the middle of the mortar’s target area.  I just had to get there.

I picked up my pace, hurrying in the direction of my teammates and Dinah, slipping on the slimy footing and loose grit, trying not to cough and failing.  It didn’t matter too much.  I was past the perimeter and closing in on my teammates, using my bugs to figure out which turns I needed to make and which paths were most open to travel.

In a matter of minutes, I was close enough that I had to find a way up.  My bugs identified a ladder, and I pushed my way up, using one shoulder and my legs to lift the drain cover from its housing.

I emerged just far enough away that I thought the sound of the cover wouldn’t be audible.  Bentley perked his ears up as I used my good hand to set the drain down, but didn’t do anything further.

My concern and my worry were driving my range outward.  I was sending any bug I didn’t need for sensing my surroundings to the periphery of my range, gathering them near the mortars.  Spiders threaded cords of silk together, and other bugs gathered en-masse.  Being here, at the bullseye, with my range extended like it was?  It meant I could strike at each of the four mortars simultaneously.

I hit each squad of soldiers in the same moment, a tide of bugs washing over them.  I tried to wind cords around the noses of the mortars, snag them on anyone who was moving, but they were too stable.

One soldier grabbed a bomb and moved to load it into the tube of the mortar.  In an instant, I had the full mass of that one swarm on him, slipping beneath the stylized, high quality armor and masks Coil outfitted his mercenaries with.  They bit, stung and attempted to wind cords around him, tying his hands, for lack of a better word.  He put the mortar down and backed off, and I eased up on him, settling for a more general form of attack.

Snipers couldn’t fire, mortars were out of commission, and the soldiers weren’t in a position to attack.

And faux Skitter raised her head a fraction, her back straightening.  If I could see, and if I were in a position to see her, I might have missed it, but I was aware with my bugs on her. She knew.  A headset beneath her mask?  A communications device in her ear, feeding her info?

I ran towards my team.  Bugs stirred around the others, as I attempted to rouse them and get their attention.

Fake Skitter wheeled around, reaching behind her back to draw her gun.  Her arm caught Dinah around the shoulders, hugging the girl to her side.

I missed the first part of what she said.  The meaning was clear.  “…got no more use for you.”

And she sounded like me as she said it.  I could sense the shock on the part of my teammates.

And I could sense the trap fall into place, as though a switch had been flicked.

The bugs I’d placed on my teammates to sense where they were went on the attack.  It wasn’t my command.

I tried to push the bugs to stop, but my power was drowned out.  It wasn’t that the commands they were receiving were more powerful than mine, more that they kept coming, a singular, crude set of commands extending across my entire range, maybe even further, every half second, overriding any ongoing instructions to my bugs.  Attack, move this way, attack, move this way.

Grue said something, and I couldn’t catch it.

“Betraying us!?” Bitch screamed the words.  Next to Bentley, she was suffering the worst of it as the bugs attacked.

“Sorry…” my doppleganger said.  I missed the tail end of what she said after that, but it ended with, “…the plan.”

Sorry, Bitch.  It was always the plan.

“No!”  I shouted, and the act of shouting made me cough until my knees buckled.  I could feel the bugs gathering on me, attacking mindlessly, collecting on my scalp.  Still coughing, I reversed the short cape that sat around my shoulders and pulled it over my head to serve as a hood.  It didn’t do anything to kill the bugs that were still alive and present, but it kept more from accumulating.

I was too far away for any of them to hear.  A block away.  Miles away, for all the good it did.

The other Skitter fired her gun at Bitch, one shot after another.  Grue blanketed the area in darkness, and the false Skitter dropped her weapon.  I could sense Bitch slumping on Bentley’s back, Bastard spilling from her lap to hit the ground and roll on impact.

Did he clone me?

No.  I could sense the movements of the bugs throughout my range, even if I couldn’t control them.  They were moving in a massive, slow spiral, drifting counterclockwise and attacking anyone they came in contact with, and the center of the effect, where they were settling and gathering in piles?  A box in the center of one building.

Had to get there, shut it down.

I struggled to my feet, half-running, half-staggering as bugs gathered in a heavy carpet on me.  I was lightheaded, exhausted, still coughing, and the first of the bugs were arriving from where they’d been attacking the soldiers.

I sensed Dinah in the midst of the swarm.  The pheromones that false Skitter wore were serving to override the pulses from the box, keeping bees and wasps from doing too much damage to the pair.  I wasn’t sure how they planned to deal with the more dangerous spiders, but the bugs that were moving across land were slowed by the constant vertical ascents and descents as they ran into buildings and other features of the landscape.

False Skitter hurled a canister into the midst of my teammates.

A flashbang.  I could see the flare of light, the concussive sound that scattered the bugs that had congregated on them.  Heading for the swarm box, I wasn’t close enough for it to really affect me.

The mortar crews were packing up their equipment and climbing into the trucks to beat a retreat from the scene.  This is Calvert’s doing.  He was convincing the others that ‘I’ was turning on them the second I had Dinah.  He’d probably rigged it so I would disappear afterward.  Skitter out of the picture, in a way that was totally believable given my prior actions.  The Undersiders would be mad, they’d be hurt, but they’d still be his.

Except I was here.  I could convince them it was a trick.  Either shut off the swarm box or take a left turn, show up where they were, and things would make sense in an instant, two Skitters, one a fake…

No, I had to shut off the box.  I could feel blood, where some bugs had found flesh on Rachel and the dogs.  If too many bee or wasp stings struck home, someone could be seriously hurt, needing epinephrine.

I could sense Dinah moving one hand, drawing it across her chest in deliberate gestures.  From shoulder to shoulder, down the side of her body from her armpit, turning to cross the base of her ribs…

Letters.  S.  O.  R.  R.

There was no time for the Y.  Both Dinah and the other Skitter disappeared, replaced by a collection of rubble and a single flashbang.  The others were still reeling from the first when the second flashbang detonated.

More boarded up windows and doors.  I fired my gun at the handle of the door and then kicked.  I did more damage to myself than the door, collapsing in another coughing fit.

The others recovered before I did.  I could sense Grue standing, shouting something.  I couldn’t understand him with the effect his power had on his voice.  Not the first time I’d run into that issue.  Rachel was up too, using Bentley to stand, one hand pressed to her side.  I sensed the hot knot of metal where it had impacted the reinforced jacket I’d given her.  Good.

“Find her!” she shouted.  “Find Skitter!  Hurt!  Kill!”

Bentley broke into a run, zig-zagging across the street they were standing on toward where false Skitter had been.

Did they make her smell like me?  They had to have, to keep the dogs from barking distress.  But how?  Had Calvert had his men raid my stuff?  Had he used my dirty laundry?

I felt violated, not just because of the potential trespass, but the extent to which they’d stolen my identity and abused it.

Bentley raised his head and then turned right in a loping run that would put him behind me in a matter of seconds.  Then he’d have my trail, he’d zone in on me… I could picture what happened next.  I wasn’t in a state to put up a fight.

I climbed to my feet, reloading my gun, then fired three more times at the door handle.  A gnat that was following the spiral summons of the swarm box made contact with a deadbolt on the far side of the door, and I shot at that too.  This time, when I kicked, it opened.  I collapsed to the ground, my cough so fierce and ragged that I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d been expelling flecks of blood into the inside of my mask.

Bentley spotted me and began charging.  I crawled inside, brought my legs up to my chest to get them out of the way of the door, and kicked it shut.

The mutant bulldog was too large for the door.  When he impacted it, it split across the midsection, the upper half coming free of the hinges, and the surrounding brickwork bulged inward, cracked mortar showering down around me.  The wooden framework around the door kept him from getting much further, wooden pillars of support that were a foot thick on each side.  It made sense that Calvert had picked a fortified structure to stick the  swarm box inside.  Small blessing that it afforded me some small advantage as well.

Bentley butted his head against the doorway again, getting no further than before, then backed away a few steps and howled.  Bitch and Grue were already en route, following the sound of gunshots.  I could hear Bitch howl a response to Bentley’s cry, an utterance of raw anger and promised violence.  Bastard was at Bitch’s side.  He was bigger, growing spikes of bone and an armor of calcified muscle.  He would fit through the door.

I crawled for the swarm box.  The bugs were thick, and though they couldn’t penetrate my costume, they were making their way into the folds at my neck, around my hood.  It was due to numbers rather than any design, but it was stifling.  I could barely breathe, and having to climb through a mass of bugs as big as a large tank, feeling them biting, stinging, feeling the venom the wasps and bees were injecting into me…

I raised myself up enough to get a grip on the tarp that covered the box, and then let myself collapse to the ground, coughing, maintaining my grip so I pulled the tarp off as I fell.  I was seeing bright spots in my vision, which shouldn’t have been the case, because I couldn’t see anything.

Getting onto my knees so I could find the wires of the swarm box was a gradual process, made heavier by the mass of bugs on and around me.  Every bug for what had to be at least a mile in every direction, gathering here.

I tore at one handful of wires.  Nothing.  It was just a matter of time.  I had a minute or two, judging by the speed Bitch and Grue were moving.

I reached to grab another and felt a hand on my wrist.  Imp hauled my hand back, pulling me off-balance, then kicked me square in the chest.  I doubted there was a place she could have hit me where it would have hurt more.

I lay on the floor, alternately writhing and spasming as pain lanced through me.

“Did the doggie get you?” Imp growled the question.  “Good.  Turn off your fucking power.”

I had only a helpless noise to offer in response.

“I warned you.  Warned you what you were in for if you let my brother down.  So do I use the knife, make it quick?” she drew a knife.  Then she drew her taser with her other hand, “Or do I stick you with this until you stop using your power?  Then we can find some place where you don’t have your bugs, and take the slow option.”

Grue and Bitch entered through the door, and I heard Grue mutter something.  Bitch gripped Bastard by the collar.

“Imp.  You found her,” he said.  He sounded strangely unaffected by recent events.  There was no emotion to his voice.

“We were just discussing options.”

“I heard.  Taser won’t do anything.  Worse than anything, she’ll use her power while she’s asleep,” Grue said.

I opened my mouth to speak, coughed instead.

“What about if she’s dead?” Bitch asked.  She didn’t sound disaffected.  She sounded pissed.  “I can do it, if you two can’t stomach it.”

The lack of a response from Grue was unnerving.  He kneeled beside me, putting one knee on my bad wrist.  I cried out in pain, coughed more.  He just stared.  Not that he could see much, with the way the bugs filled the room.

When he finally spoke, it was one word.  “Why?”

I struggled to gain my breath, to center my thoughts.  I felt dizzy.

What could I say?  Was there anything that would convince them?  If I said it wasn’t me, would they believe me?  If I turned their attention to the swarm box, would they think it was a bomb?

He waited patiently for me to recover enough to respond.

“Use…” I wheezed in a breath, “Dark.”

I closed my eyes as the darkness flowed over me.  I felt my power weaken, realized I’d unconsciously been pushing the bugs to hold back.  I felt their attack intensify.

Grue stood.  He opened his hand, fingers splayed, and his darkness dissipated.  He turned to Bitch, gestured to Bastard.

“Yeah?” she asked.

“Yeah.”  He pointed.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Bitch whistled, Bastard lunged, and the swarm box caved in beneath the wolf cub’s front paws.

The swarm went quiet.

Grue offered me a hand, I took it, and he hauled me to my feet.  I was unable to balance, dizzy, and leaned heavily into him.

“You’re not buying this, are you?” Imp asked.

“It wasn’t her.”

“She’s playing you.”

“It wasn’t her.”

Imp folded her arms.  Bitch didn’t move.

Grue murmured, “Explain what’s happened.  Then we need to take care of you.”

I shook my head.

“No?”

I coughed briefly.  “Tattletale.  Regent too.  They’re in trouble.  We left them with Calvert.  With Coil.”

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Monarch 16.10

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I pushed open the rusted metal door that marked the first real barrier to entry for Coil’s underground base.  It was unassuming, if secure, easy to ignore for anyone who happened to find their way underground.  It swung open without resistance; unlocked.

Every door was unlocked as I made my way through the series of checkpoints and gates.  There were no guards, and the cameras in the final room before I entered the base proper didn’t move to track my movements.

I pushed on the final door and let it swing open.  The base was empty.  Except empty wasn’t exactly the right word.  It had been cleared out.

The on-duty squads of soldiers were gone, as were the trucks, weapons, supplies and furniture.  The entire ground floor was desolate, with clean patches in the dust where furniture and crates had been.

In groups big enough for me to get full coverage of the area, my swarms took turns roving over my surroundings.  They couldn’t pass through closed doors, but they gave me a sense of my surroundings that my eyes couldn’t.  The results were almost the inverse of what I might expect from my eyesight.  There was no grasp of color, beyond what I could guess from the various clues I got from my other senses, but I had a keen sense of textures.  Where my eyes would have been capable of focusing on one thing at a time, my swarm-sense gave me the ability to pull together complete mental pictures from a thousand different points of focus.  I could ignore line of sight, sensing around objects, and even though my bugs’ senses translated poorly, the sum total of their awareness gave me a sense of the little things, in addition to the big picture.  I could sense where the air currents were traveling and the force with which they moved, the thickness of the dust in one area versus another, and where temperatures where higher, if even by a fraction.

None of this was new, exactly.  I’d always been aware of it to some small degree, but my core senses had always been there as regular, reliable fallback.  I’d never researched the subject, but reports seemed conflicting when it came to the topic of blindness making other senses sharper.  With only half of a day’s experience, I was beginning to think that maybe it didn’t improve my other senses, but seemed to free up the semi-conscious, semi-unconscious intake that my eyes typically used as my dominant sense.  The brainpower that was usually allocated to idle glances, comparing and contrasting, or just taking in ambient sights while my thoughts were preoccupied with other things?  It was freed up to be used for listening and my swarm-sense.

The Travelers were here, I noted.  I wasn’t startled to note their presence, but I was somewhat surprised.  They’d gathered in one room above the vault that Noelle was presumably being kept in.  They’d noticed the bugs and were venturing outside onto the walkway.  I met them halfway between their apartment and the entrance.

They were in civilian wear.  Trickster and Ballistic were in regular shirts, jeans and shoes, but Sundancer was wearing what I took to be pyjamas, her hair tied back in a bun.  Genesis was in her chair, a blanket on her lap, with Oliver standing just behind her.

“Skitter,” Trickster said, “You’re here alone?”

“My teammates are upstairs.  We wanted to have words with Coil, but he wasn’t free to talk until sundown, so we’ve been killing time and waiting around.  There’s still a bit of time, I sensed some movement down here, I needed to stretch my legs to keep my injuries from earlier today from stiffening up, so I decided to take a bit of a walk.”

“And they’re staying put?”  Ballistic asked.

“I can signal them in a heartbeat if I have to,” I responded.

“Just saying, but you know Coil’s dead, right?” Trickster asked.

“I saw it happen,” I answered him.  I chose my words carefully, “So I have a very good idea of how dead the man is.”

“Fair enough.”

“And you guys?” I asked.  “You’re keeping eyes on your teammate?  Noelle?”

“Noelle’s fine,” Trickster said, “You don’t need to concern yourself over her.”

There was just a touch of hostility here.  I turned my head to face the two girls, using my bugs to figure out the orientation so I could appear to be looking at Sundancer and Genesis.  The two of them were, I figured, the closest thing to allies that I had among the Travelers.  That wasn’t to say I was on good terms with them; Sundancer was especially wary of me and had been since I’d carved out Lung’s eyes, and Genesis had been a little weird in how she related to me when I’d delivered Trickster to her at the mayor’s house.  Part of that might have been a reflection or a response to my own paranoia, where I’d thought they were planning to kill me.  Either way, they hadn’t given me the impression of dislike or hostility to quite the same degree that I was seeing with Trickster and Ballistic right now.

This was where my current inability to see was hurting me.  I couldn’t read their expressions or body language, and even though my bugs were giving me a sense of how they were standing and where their head, arm and legs were positioned, I didn’t have that innate human ability to instantaneously assess and process those details.  Time and effort spent trying to figure it out was taken away from my ability to plan and follow the conversation.  It was sort of like talking to an answering machine; I was left trying to hold up my end of a conversation without the ability to assess what the person on the other end was making of it.  End result?  I was left there, silent, while none of the Travelers were volunteering anything.

“If you’re done checking up on us, or visiting, whatever you want to call it,” Trickster said, “You could go.  Your duty’s done, you’ve paid your respects to the other team while you’re in their territory.”

That’s something we’re supposed to do?

“I don’t want us to be enemies,” I said.

“We’re not,” Trickster replied, but his tone was far from friendly.  “We’re on the same side.”

“But?” I asked.  “It sounds like there’s more to that.”

“We’re not friends, Skitter.  Let’s not pretend like we are.  You’ve got your goals, we have ours.  You want to work together to tackle a situation like the Dragon thing?  Fine.  Great.  You want to backdoor Ballistic, going to the boss to recruit that cape he was trying to take down?  Hey, that’s fine too.”

Ballistic folded his arms.

Trickster went on, “Really.  We’re doing what we have to do in order to make this thing work.  I don’t love what you pulled, I’m not jumping for glee, but I get it.”

“So we’re business associates, but not friends.”

“Succinctly put.”

“There has to be more common ground there.  We can’t meet, share a box of donuts and talk about ways to mutually benefit our territories?”

“The fact that you have to ask that is a pretty good indication of how clueless you are about this. Let’s count the ways.  One, I don’t give a ratfuck about my territory or the people in it.  None of us do.”

I could feel Sundancer turning slightly away from him.  Was there disagreement there?

“Two,” he continued, “We don’t plan to be here much longer anyways.  Either Coil fulfills his end of the bargain and we’re out of this hellhole, or he doesn’t and we take a hike anyways.  Take our chances elsewhere.”

I could remember how Ballistic had talked about his frustration with the group, the idea that he might stick with this gig regardless of what Trickster and the others did.  If I brought it up, would it refocus the discussion to the point that Trickster wasn’t opposing me, in an abstract sense, or would it derail it with the ensuing drama?

I kept my mouth shut, and I was sort of glad that I couldn’t see, or I might have given in to my impulse to glance at Ballistic and give something away.

Maybe it wasn’t worth worrying about.  I was wearing my full costume, including the additional pieces I’d accumulated over time; I wore the tattered cape, the ragged semi-dress over my leggings, and a heavy carpet of bugs clung to the black fabric and armor panels.  My goggles would hide my eyes.  Nobody would see any tell, if I could see, and I doubted they’d notice I was essentially blind.

Trickster took my silence for an excuse to go on, “Three, again, there’s no common ground to be found, and I’m not interested in hunting for it.  There’s two things I want in this world, and being part of Coil’s thing was my way to get those things.  You were useful only as far as you helped make Coil’s thing work, and that’s over now.  To put it bluntly, you don’t have anything to offer me.”

“I get the picture,” I told him, cutting him off before he could continue.  “Okay.  Friendship’s off the table.  Even a friendly business relationship would be pushing it.”

He nodded once.

I sighed a little.  “Okay.  That said, as one local warlord to another, I’d like to extend an invitation.  We’re going to talk to Coil, and I’m saying you’re free to come.”

“Coil’s dead,” Ballistic made the words a drawl.

That was getting old fast.  “Do we really have to maintain this charade?”

“Coil went to a lot of effort in putting together his grand plan.  He died in a blaze of glory and violence, just like he wanted.  Do you really want to spoil that by going on about how he’s still alive?”

“Like you said,” I retorted, “We’re on the same side.  If you didn’t know, you’d be more upset than you are now.  Why pretend he’s dead when he’s alive?  Especially when it’s getting in the way of the larger conversation about the man and my invitation to come hear what he has to say?”

Trickster leaned against a wall and fumbled in one pocket for a cigarette.  “You mean outside of the possibility that you’re wired and my saying the wrong thing could out him?  Whatever.  I don’t have anything to say to him that I haven’t already said.  Maybe you aren’t getting the point.  We went out of our way to help you once, rescuing Grue, and it nearly got us carved up by Bonesaw.”

Your plan, I thought.

He went on, “I don’t care about the Undersiders.  I don’t care if you get a hundred trillion dollars and wind up kings of the planet, and I don’t care if Coil kills you.  We’ve wrapped up our business with Coil, and that’s as far as my interest goes.”

“Alright,” I said, raising my hands, “Point taken.  Listen, I get that maybe we haven’t gotten along so fantastically, but I really do wish you guys luck with your circumstances, whatever they are.  I hope you get what you’ve been looking for.”

“Sure,” Trickster said.  He turned to leave, making his way to the doorway that led to the pseudo-apartment they stayed in when they weren’t in their individual headquarters.  He beckoned for his teammates to follow, and they did.

Only Genesis lagged behind, her hands on the wheels of her chair.  After Trickster had rounded the corner, she said, “He’s tense.  Too much comes down to what happens in the next forty-eight hours.”

“Believe me,” I replied, “I get that.”

“Then good luck with your thing,” she said.  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I hope I never see you again.”

How the hell am I supposed to take that?

I didn’t respond as she wheeled herself to the corridor.

Okay, I thought, learned what I needed to.

Whatever the terms between Coil and the Travelers were, he hadn’t seen fit to invite them to the meeting place.  I’d had to think for some time before making the offer to join us for the meeting.  I knew that whatever Coil had planned, inviting the Travelers wouldn’t hurt.

If Coil fully expected to cooperate, to give us the answers we needed and hand Dinah over, then it didn’t matter if the Travelers were there.  If he was expecting conflict and he had planned to invite them, then we only gained the benefit of knowing in advance that they’d be there.  Finally, if he’d expected trouble but he hadn’t invited them, there was probably a reason, and that reason would be something we could exploit in a pinch.

They hadn’t accepted my invitation anyways, and I hadn’t sensed anything sinister when Trickster had rejected the offer.  He’d been too self-centered.

Funny, as I thought on it, how easily he seemed to slip between talking about ‘I’ as in himself to talking about ‘we’, the group.  It was as if he assumed everyone in the Travelers was on the same page as him, and my discussions with Sundancer and Ballistic had suggested anything but.  Even Cherish’s taunts had pointed to some strife within the ranks.

The second major piece of data that I’d gleaned from my detour was that Dinah wasn’t here.  There were a handful of locked doors my bugs hadn’t been able to slip past, but the room Dinah had been in when we’d first visited was empty.  I wasn’t a hundred percent sure that Dinah wasn’t still in Coil’s underground base, but I had a hard time believing that Coil would leave her there with no armed guards.  She was too valuable to risk losing her to one of his enemies or losing his bargaining chip he had in his dealings with me.

We’d agreed that if I could prove myself as a valuable asset, he’d accept my fealty in exchange for Dinah’s freedom.  I hadn’t earned him any money, not directly, but that had never really been his goal.  He had money, and he could get more by exercising his power in some high-risk, high-reward ventures.  I had gathered more followers under my wing than all of the others put together, with the possible exception of Tattletale.  I’d put life and limb at risk, partially for his benefit.  I’d proved myself as a leader, a soldier and a problem solver.  I’d put up with every challenge he’d set in my way: the false death threat he’d put on my head, convincing the mayor, dealing with Dragon and going up against the Nine.  Hell, I’d tended to my territory while my dad lay bleeding in the hospital.

I couldn’t say for sure whether Coil would actually follow through with his end of the deal.  In his shoes, ignoring what the right thing to do would be, if only because it was pretty fucking obvious he didn’t put much stock in right and wrong, I wasn’t sure I’d give Dinah up.  For a guy like Coil, who did things from behind the scenes, playing the long game and orchestrating events to get the best possible results, Dinah’s power was invaluable.

Trickster had used a chess metaphor, back when the thing with the Nine was just beginning.  Would I be considered a bishop?  Hell, even if I thought of myself as a queen, I wasn’t sure Coil would value having me on his side of the board over having Dinah.

Dinah let him rig the game.

I ventured outside and made my way to the flights of stairs for the building that was still in progress.  It had proceeded nicely in recent days, and the outside was partially complete.  The sun was setting, and my bugs could see and feel the warm light that streamed in through the openings in the outside, where tarps had come free.  The thick dust of concrete and shorn wood layered the area and formed clouds wherever the wind made its way inside.

I’d climbed the stairs to the meeting place only an hour ago, and I’d ventured all the way to the bottom to investigate Coil’s base.  That made this my third trip over the twenty flights of stairs, accessing the roof.  On my third trip, my aches and pains from being tossed around by Coil’s explosion were most definitely making themselves felt.

In a way, I didn’t mind.  I felt restless, and moving made me feel better.  Nervous wasn’t the right word.  Nervousness implied there was uncertainty, and I was pretty sure this wouldn’t go the way I hoped.  Trepidation wasn’t right either.  I might have settled on ‘a sense of encroaching doom’ but that felt over the top.

Then again, this was someone’s life on the line.  Maybe our lives too.  Was it possible to be over the top when the stakes were this high?

The others had arranged themselves around the roof.  Bitch was in a half-sitting, half-lying down position, leaning back against Bentley’s side, Bastard sleeping on her lap.  Tattletale and Regent were having a discussion at the top of the stairwell, while Grue and Imp were at the edge of the building.  Imp sat with her legs dangling off the side of the building, while Grue showed more caution, standing a distance behind her.

“You should be careful,” I spoke up.  “If you’re standing too close to the building’s edge, you’re making yourself a prime target for a sniper.”

“You said these suits were bulletproof,” Imp said.  I noticed how she didn’t move.

“I said they might be.  But judging by the fact that mine let some non-metal shotgun pellets through, I don’t think they’ll stop a bullet.  Either way, I’d really rather not start experimenting tonight.”

Imp pulled herself to her feet and retreated from the edge of the building.  I could feel Grue’s shoulders drop slightly as he relaxed.

Grue and Tattletale drifted my way, while Regent, Imp and Bitch each sort of moved to the periphery of our huddle.  It was Grue who asked, “You think he’s going to take shots at us?”

“I feel exposed,” I said.  “If he opens fire on us, are we really in a position to take cover?  Or if he bombs out the first floor of the building?  Or calls in the teams of heroes he’s in charge of?  Could we really get down?”

“I’m not getting that vibe,” Tattletale said.

“But he’s figured out how to trick your power,” I pointed out.

“Any solutions?” Grue asked.

“Yeah.  I’ve been working on one, but I’m not sure it’ll work.”

“Share?”

I extended one hand, and a wasp took flight, bearing a trio of spiders.  It was forced to turn and fly in circles to slow its forward movement to account for the speed at which the spiders were spooling out thread.  The ends of the thread were already wrapped around one of my fingers.

It took a minute before they reached the other formation that was doing the same thing.  I began reeling in the thread, until I’d raised a length of cord to the edge of the roof.

Bitch ventured over to see what was going on, and then spun around, “No.”

“My first night out in costume, I got stuck on top of a building.  I’m not going to make the same mistake twice.  We called Thomas Calvert, he agreed to meet us, but just in case he decides to level the building rather than have a conversation, I want us to have a way down.”

“A way down?” Grue asked.

“I’m pretty sure I got the lengths right.  I hope I got the lengths right, because I used up a lot of silk here.  Eight cords, we each hold one, or tie one around our waists, and then jump off the side of the building.  Swing out over the intersection.”

“Awesome,” Imp said.

“Pretty sure?” Grue asked.

“Pretty sure,” I admitted.  “I’ve tried to stagger it, so the silk stretches out over horizontal lines I set out between buildings, so we aren’t just dropping straight down to the street.  But it’s elastic, and I can’t account for how much stretch there’ll be in the material.  Or how much stretch won’t be there.”

“And if he’s got gunmen, too?  We’re left there dangling out over the middle of a street?”

“It’s one option,” I said.  “One.  We’ll have your darkness so they won’t necessarily have clear shots.”

“And you have your bugs,” Regent said.

“Our opponent here knows exactly what we can do.  He’s worked with us and observed us for weeks.  Excepting Imp and I, he’s worked with you guys for months.  Over a year.  So no, he’s not going to do something like underestimate the range of my bugs.  He’s going to have snipers that are just beyond my usual range and I won’t be able to fight back.”

“Your relay bugs?”  Regent suggested.

“Dying.  But yeah, I’ll bring them out.  I suppose a night like tonight warrants using up the last of their reserves.”

“And you can fly,” he said, pointing straight up, where Atlas was in the skyline, circling around a stationary Shatterbird.

“I can, but I’d almost rather use the cords and swing down to the street level.  If I’m flying and they get a lucky shot off, I’m pretty fucking screwed.  They hit me, Atlas won’t ease me to the ground.  They hit Atlas, nothing I can do to stop falling.  Besides, being on the ground means I have the utility Atlas brings to the table.  Being mounted on him means he and I are essentially one unit.”

“I think you’re overthinking this, dork,” Regent said.

“No,” Grue and I said together.  Grue didn’t say anything more, but I added, “We plan for every possibility and we’re wrong?  We don’t lose anything.  If we plan for a situation that does come up?  We’ll be glad we did it.”

“You’re going to drive yourself insane worrying about it,” he retorted.

“If she hasn’t already, I don’t think she will in the next ten minutes,” Tattletale said.  “You sense them on the ground, Skitter?”

I shook my head.  “My power’s radius is like a bubble, and the bottom end isn’t covering that much ground.  I should have been waiting at a spot lower in the building.”

“They’re on their way up.”

I could sense them as they reached the base of the building.  Thomas Calvert would be the man who led the way, and the men who followed him were outfitted in PRT gear.

It took time for them to ascend.  The building was only partially complete, with floors, some walls and the steel skeleton of beams with tarps stretching between them for the remainder, but no elevators.

Without discussing it, we arranged ourselves on the rooftop, preparing to meet them.  I was a little surprised that Grue and Tattletale positioned themselves so they were each just a little behind me, with Imp, Bitch and Regent behind them.  Bentley prowled at the perimeter of our group, three-quarters of the way to his typical ‘monstrous’ size and slowly growing.

Thomas Calvert was the first to cross the threshold.  Annoying that the first time I would ‘see’ Coil unmasked, I would be blind.  He waved one hand to brush away my bugs as they passed over him, but I managed to pick up the essential details.  Close cropped, coarse hair, trimmed eyebrows, thin lips and a cleft chin.  He wore the body portion of a PRT uniform with an insignia stitched onto his sleeve that I couldn’t make out with my swarmsense.

Most of the squads remained below, but he was joined by a handful of soldiers and three young men in plainclothes, one of whom looked like a bodybuilder.

“Yo, Frenchy,” Tattletale said.  “Sup?”

One of the uniforms nodded a slight response.  Was he backed up by a ‘PRT’ squad or two consisting of his hired mercenaries?

“Undersiders.  After your last interaction with Director Piggot, I assumed you would want to speak to me and try establishing ground rules?”

“We know it’s you, boss,” Regent said.

My bugs caught the slightest exhalation from Director Calvert’s nostrils, a minor expression of annoyance.  “The Travelers were a little more circumspect.”

“Circum-what?” Imp asked.  I couldn’t tell if she was genuinely wondering or if she was being intentionally obtuse.

“Tone it down, guys,” I said.  They’re the types to go after any weakness in authority figures.  They’ll nettle him until someone gets in trouble. “Director Calvert.  Would it be too much to ask for you to ask your squad to wait downstairs?”

There was an extended pause before he offered a slight nod to one side.  His squad turned to return downstairs, and I followed them as they took position by the base of the stairwell.

“I asked you to stay out of costume until further notice,” he spoke.

“With all due respect, Director,” I said.  Tattletale had coached me; I would stroke his ego by reinforcing his new position.  “I was injured as a bystander in Coil’s attack.  I wouldn’t have been hurt if I’d been costumed.  Until everything cools down, I think my team and I will play it safe.”

“I see.  I can respect that.  Nothing serious?”

“Serious?  Yes.  But it’s nothing life threatening and nothing that can’t be fixed.”

Thomas Calvert reached beneath the armored panel of his vest and withdrew a small remote.  He stared at it for several long seconds before putting it away.  That done, he clasped his hands behind his back.  It was a position that was very ‘Coil’.  It was obvious and direct enough that I suspected he was dropping his Director persona and admitting his true nature.  “My apologies.  I am not infallible.”

You let a dozen or more people die and left twice that many people injured in some way.  No, you’re not infallible.

I kept my mouth shut.

“I just checked for listening devices.  You aren’t recording this, which means I can answer any questions you have.”

“How much of that was planned?”  I asked.

“More than you might suspect.  Every person in that room who was not in the audience was accounted for.  Mr. Grove and Mrs. Padillo were selected and recruited well in advance.  Circus and Chariot were hired nearly a year and a half ago, their actions and development in the public eye carefully orchestrated.  Über and Leet were recent acquisitions.  I needed a heavy metal suit that could carry a package, and Trainwreck died at an inconvenient time.  Most reporters were selected and stationed well in advance, claiming the rear of the room where they would bear the brunt of the attack, so to speak.”

“They didn’t die?” I asked.

“As with Circus, Über and Leet,” Director Calvert nodded in the direction of the three individuals in civilian clothes.

“Wait, Circus is a guy?” Regent asked.

“Depends on your definition of guy,” Tattletale said.  “If you’re talking biological or what Circus identifies as.  Not that I have it pinned down; I can’t tell if you’re a guy posing as a girl when in costume or a girl who poses as a guy when in plainclothes.”

Circus spat, directing a loogie to shoot a horsefly out of the air.  “I’ll take that as a compliment, I guess.”

“The three of them and most of the reporters were removed from the premises in time,” Coil said.  “The reporters, as I said, were plants.  I needed news reporters in place who would be sure to catch the details I wanted them to catch.  Some editing of the footage just prior to it being sent to the news stations served to smooth rough edges and highlight key points.”

“Making Piggot look worse, for example,” Tattletale said.

“Among other things.  Appearances are one of the most important things, here.  With Chariot’s help, we created a rough emulation of Trickster’s power.  The reporters were swapped out, a sufficient amount of raw biological matter was swapped in.”

“Human matter?” I asked.

“That is what the paperwork will say, which is the most important aspect,” Director Calvert answered me.  “Rest assured, no serious harm was done.  Circus’ abilities allowed us to place the knives in nonlethal areas.  Better that Director Piggot looks as ineffectual as possible than simply perish.  The same applies to the mayor.  Thomas Grove and Mrs. Padillo will recover, but Thomas Grove will concede the election, supporting Mrs. Padillo, despite his strong showing.  It will help shake the notion that things were staged.”

“But they were.  Every part of it,” Tattletale said.

“Every part of it.”

“The bomb?” I asked.

“The sabotaged power supply was real, but Über’s metal suit housed a teleportation apparatus to detect when it was removed from the premises, so a replica could be brought into the lobby.  The initial detonation was little more than light and a shockwave primed to make the most of the Manton effect, leaving my agents with little more than bruises and scratches.  They were teleported out, as I already said, just before the final, true detonation.  We estimated how fast the evacuation would proceed and calculated a blast radius that would leave the building standing and the crowd largely untouched.”

I could remember Tattletale mentioning how there were less killed or injured than I might have thought.  Had she guessed this much?

“Every action I’ve carried out has been carefully weighed, with attention given to the aftermath.  Circus, Über and Leet will be leaving Brockton Bay with a sizable reward for their efforts.  I don’t expect they will need to return to a life of crime, but I believe they will use a different identity and modus operandi if they do?”

He’d made it a question, and Über answered, “Yes, sir.”  I could feel Leet and Circus nodding.

“Good,” Director Calvert spoke.  To us, he said, “It just isn’t worth killing good help.  Should my ultimate plans here fall through, it’s better to have individuals like them on reserve.”

“And us?” Grue asked.

“Your part in Brockton Bay isn’t entirely over, yet.  I established you here for a reason.  As Director, I will lead a slow but successful campaign against Brockton Bay’s villains.  The Travelers will be the first.  I expect a strike squad of my PRT agents will catch them off guard, but they will ultimately escape capture.”

“How unfortunate,” Tattletale said.

“Indeed,” Director Calvert replied.  “Doubly unfortunate if other villains should establish a presence in Brockton Bay’s south end, forming a loose alliance with the Undersiders, who maintain a firm hold on the flourishing North end.  Oh, rest assured, you Undersiders will lose your hold on this city over the course of months, but it won’t be quite as bad as it sounds.”

“We’ll avoid being captured, probably,” Tattletale said, “Or we’ll get captured and break out before there’s an issue.  And then we don’t come back to Brockton Bay.  We wind up establishing presences in nearby cities.  One or two Undersiders with a firm grip on a given city with other villains under us, establishing a new kind of villainy, and you, Director, as the valiant hero on the opposing side.  Your power grows in a way the public is very much aware of, and, well, we’re not losing quite so much as it seems, so your power grows in other ways too.”

Thomas Calvert spread his hands, “It seems you have a firm grasp on what’s going on.  I won’t waste our time reiterating.  Any questions?”

“Why become PRT director?” Grue asked.  “Why not mayor?”

“All eyes will be on the mayor after the recent fiasco.  Mr. Grove will serve as a red herring, drawing all suspicious eyes to him before he defers the election to Mrs. Padillo.  Besides, who would you rather rule?  A dozen capes or fifty thousand unpowered civilians?”

“I see,” Grue said.

“The fear this event creates among the public will make requisitioning additional capes and resources that much easier.  The remnants of Coil’s personal army will remain in the city, a sub-gang of highly trained individuals who will serve as an excuse for why the forces of the Undersiders do not grow beyond a certain point.”

“You said the Travelers will be the first to be ousted,” I said.  “Does that mean you’ve found a solution to their problem?”

“No.  But we have several last resort answers, and those will be exhausted soon.”

With my bugs, I noted Tattletale making a hand gesture.  Left index finger and middle finger pressed together, she tapped her thumb against the tips of the other two fingers.

“Any other questions?” he asked.

“Dinah,” I said.

“Mr. Grove’s concession to Mrs. Padillo will involve an offer.  He will push for his constituents to support Mrs. Padillo if she accepts his terms.  Among these will be a restoration project for the North end, employment stimulation for the laborers and a restoration of the ferry service.  In exchange for your continued cooperation, I can give you executive powers in naming the measures you’d like to see pass.  I am well aware of what I agreed to, but I would offer this as a compromise in exchange for a one year delay on that term of our contract.”

“No,” I told him.  “I’m sorry, but you’ve got to let her go.”

“Then I will.  I’m disappointed, but I won’t have it said that I’m not a man of my word.”

My heart was pounding.  Just like that?

Director Calvert clasped his hands in front of him, “How would you have us resolve this?  I can return her to her family, or pass her on to your custody.”

I didn’t think this far ahead.  “Her family, then.”

“Very well.  With your permission, we’ll release her to her parents, with some covert surveillance to ensure she does not reveal any details of my greater mission.”

“Okay.”

“My officer will take you to her.”

I hesitated.

“Your teammates can join you, if you don’t feel secure.”

Grue placed a hand on my shoulder.

“Thank you, Director,” I said.  “I don’t mean to impugn your sense of honor, but I didn’t expect this.”

“I have a healthy respect for paranoia, Skitter.  Go.  Tattletale, could I borrow a few minutes of your time?  The Travelers grow anxious, and you can offer some more answers about Noelle’s situation.”

Tattletale turned our way, “Your call, guys.”

“Take Regent and Shatterbird with you,” Grue said.

“You sure?”

“If he respects paranoia, he’ll respect the fact that I’m as worried for your well-being as I am for Skitter’s.”

“Aw,” Tattletale gave Grue a pat on the cheek, “You’re not a very good liar.  I appreciate the sentiment, though.”

I felt entirely out of my element.  For weeks, months, I’d been bracing myself to hear Coil say no.  To hear him say ‘I promised I’d consider it’ or ‘I promised to release her when my plan reached its conclusion, and that won’t happen for another year.’  I didn’t know what to do with my hands.  If I’d had pockets, I’d have jammed them in there, but I didn’t.  My belt didn’t really suit itself for me hooking my thumbs in there.  I didn’t even trust myself to speak, with the possibility that I could say something to ruin this.

No, it was better to be on my guard.  I swept the area for threats, with bugs on every set of gloved hands and every weapon.

But the PRT uniforms climbed into their vans and the doors slammed shut.

Director Calvert stayed at the gates that marked the construction site from the roads beyond, Tattletale and Regent beside him.

“In the truck,” the remaining PRT officer told us.

“If it’s alright,” I said, “We’ll ride.”

He looked to Coil, who nodded.

I climbed onto Atlas, and Grue settled behind Bitch on Bentley.

It was a fifteen minute flight, following the truck, and I was on edge for every second.

We stopped outside of a brick building, and the driver of the truck stepped out.  I swept the area with my bugs, then swept it again.  The interior featured modest living accommodations, a squad of armed soldiers, a man who wasn’t armed and a little girl.

I set Atlas down and waited outside, bugs poised to attack.  The door opened, and the soldiers stepped out, parting to let Dinah go free.

The little girl stepped out, hesitant, then stopped.  Nothing gave me any indication that she was unhealthy or hurt, but she wasn’t lively either.  She was dressed in a skirt, sweater and uggs, her hair thick with chemical smells that told me it had been recently washed.

“Want to go home?” I asked.  I reached out.

Her hand found mine, and I clutched it tight.

Couldn’t leave on Atlas.  I turned, and she stepped to follow.

Through my bugs, I could feel the thrum of the truck as it started up, I could feel the mild heat and see the flare of light as the highbeams shifted on.  If I could see, they would have been blinding.

I tried to squeeze Dinah’s hand, to reassure her, and found myself clenching an empty fist.

My bugs weren’t where they were supposed to be.  I was momentarily disoriented as I tried to map my surroundings.  When I felt hardwood beneath my feet, I scattered the bugs from beneath my costume.  Containment foam, all around me.  I’d been teleported.

And Calvert.  Calvert and a squad of his people.

“You bastard,” I said.

There was no response.  I could feel how his arm was outstretched, sense the general shape of the weapon in his hand.  The others had weapons too.  I could attack, but it would only make them open fire.

“No monologue?” I asked, “You’re not going to explain how you did it?  How you’re going to deal with my teammates or explain what happened to me?”

He answered with a pull of the trigger.

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Monarch 16.7

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Living in a city meant dealing with some recurring issues.  Crime, having to lock the doors, congestion on the roads, crowds getting in the way on footpaths; stuff we dealt with so often that we considered it routine.  We considered it background noise or we managed without even thinking about it.  Construction work was something we couldn’t dismiss so readily, something that always seemed to elicit groans and complaints.  Maybe because it was so blatant, so grating, and it changed in tone, location and degree often enough that we couldn’t adjust.

Not today.

No, I felt a level of satisfaction and security as the bulldozers and piledrivers went to work in my territory.  For every car on the road, there were ten trucks carrying debris out and five trucks bringing materials in.

A lot of that would be Coil’s doing, I knew.  There was construction and clearing going on throughout my territory and building inspectors were checking blocks, all despite the warnings that were going around regarding big, bad, unpredictable Skitter, and that would be because he greased palms or the construction companies at work were his.

Damn it, I felt restless.  I wanted to go to Coil’s territory and discuss Dinah, and I might have, if Trickster hadn’t been the first to speak up and declare he was going to confront Coil.  I suspected that Coil wouldn’t release Dinah this soon, and if he was under too much pressure to hear Trickster out, he certainly wouldn’t listen to me.  If he did have something to offer Trickster, he wouldn’t welcome my distraction.  I had to wait.  I hated it, but I recognized it as the sensible route.

Trickster’s focus was on Noelle, though, and nothing I’d seen indicated that Coil had made any advances on that front.  All I knew, really, was what Tattletale had told me and the little things that had come up in our brief discussion with the Travelers about our strategy.  She’d been a girl, maybe not in the best of health.

It was possible Trickster had been trying to save Noelle in the same way I was trying to save Dinah.  The circumstances were different, obviously: Coil was the best answer the Travelers had to Noelle’s situation, but he was the cause of Dinah’s.

Still, it made me think.

I was officially hands-off in my territory.  I wasn’t going to deviate from orders now and risk upsetting Coil.  That meant no costume, no showing my face, no intervention in the management of things.

Which turned my thoughts to Sierra.  As far as my ability to sense things with my swarm went, Sierra was easier to identify than many.  Her dreads gave her a distinct profile.

I couldn’t find her.

I could find Charlotte.  That wasn’t a problem; she was in the company of the kids, half a block away, giving each kid two six-packs of plastic water bottles to ferry out to the various work sites.

“You’ve been lying there since I woke up, eyes half-open, staring off into space.”

I blinked hard, then rubbed my eyes.  “Hey.”

“Hey.”

I looked at Brian.  He was pulling himself up to a sitting position, the covers over his lap.  I glanced over his upper body.  None of the battle wounds I’d seen him sustain in the past were there anymore.  The scars from the shallow cuts Cricket had carved into his chest were gone, as were the defensive wounds and old scars on his hands and arms.  He was in perfect shape, physically.  Physically.

But I’d sort of explored enough to discover that last night.  It hadn’t been a perfect night, not even excellent, but it had been nice.  Considering all of the other humiliating or awkward possibilities, I was happy to take nice.

Thinking about it made me self conscious.  I pulled the sheets up to my collarbone.  “You sleep any?”

“Some.  Woke up in the middle of the night, I made some noise.  I’m surprised I didn’t wake you.”

I frowned.  “You should have.”

He shook his head.  “You were exhausted.  Once I saw you there, it helped me to realize where I was, dismiss them for the dreams they were.  Took me a bit to relax, but it wasn’t bad.  Being here.”

Hated that, that he was struggling like that and I couldn’t help fix it.

“Do you need to talk to someone?  A psychiatrist?”

I could see him flinch at that, his entire upper body stiffening in some kind of knee jerk resistance.

I waited, not pushing.

He sighed, and I watched that battle-readiness slowly seep from him, the tension leaving him.  Up to a point.  “Don’t we all?”

“Probably.  But you’re the one I’m worried about.”

“I’ll figure this out myself.  Have to do this myself, or I feel like it won’t count, it won’t really be a fix.”

I didn’t like that response, but it was a hard one to argue with.

“I won’t pester you about it.  But can you at least tell me that if this goes on for any length of time, you’ll go get help?”

“It’ll get better.  Has to.  I feel like I’ve taken strides forward, forcing myself to let down my guard, to be here with you.”

I tensed, “Forcing yourself?”

“That’s not what I mean.  I mean, you know.  I… I can’t relax.  Can’t stay still, can’t stop watching over my shoulder or make my brain stop replaying scenes in my head.  Except I can, if I’m active, if I’m doing something like we were against those Dragon suits, or if I’m with you, and I’m lying here in your bed, trying not to wake you up.  Then I know I can’t get worked up, it gives me these boundaries I can force myself to work inside.”

My eyebrows drew together in concern.  “It sounds like it’s causing you more stress in the long run.”

“No,” he said.  He reached out and used both of his hands to seize mine.  He squeezed.  “Come on, no.  Is that really what you want to talk about right now?”

“I’d love to talk about other stuff,” I said.  I wasn’t sure I was telling the truth.  Things were more awkward in the light of day.  Only seconds ago, I had prodded a sore spot for him by raising the idea of psychiatric help.  Offended him.  If I didn’t clear my head and get centered, I wasn’t sure I trusted my ability to avoid another misstep.

“But?”

“But I made plans with my dad.  It’s…”  I paused, closing my eyes, “Nine-twenty-eight.  I figure I need to shower and get dressed, which might take an hour, eat, do a quick walk around my territory in civilian clothes, then head over.  I want to spend time with you, but after the intensity of the past little while, taking things slow this morning feels like a nice idea.”

“How do you know the time?”

“Bugs on clock hands,” I said, pointing toward my bathroom.

“Ah.  You want company?”

My eyes widened a little.  “In the bathroom?”

He grinned.  “For breakfast.  And the walk-around, if you want.  I could learn stuff.  We’re liable to lose track of time if we share a shower.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Please, we’ll have breakfast, walk.”

I climbed out of bed, tugging one of the sheets free of the bed so I had something to wrap around myself as I made my way to the bathroom.

With my bugs, I could sense Brian getting out of bed shortly after I’d abandoned the sheet, climbed into the shower and pulled the makeshift shower curtain into position.  He made his way downstairs and began putting breakfast together.  He set two plates down, and then said something to the empty room.

I still had the scene in mind a little while later, as I ventured downstairs.  I was dressed now, a tank top, jeans and sweatshirt around my waist, my hair towel dried but still damp.  “Were you talking to me?”

“I was saying it probably isn’t very hygienic to have houseflies landing on dinner plates.”

Ok, so he wasn’t going crazy.

“They landed on the edge, and they’re mine.  From the terrariums upstairs.  They’re in as sterile an environment as you’ll get.”

“Okay.  Just saying.”

“I can’t hear you through my bugs, by the way.  It’s not the first time you’ve done that.”

“Right.  Wasn’t sure, because Tattletale said you were working on it.”

I shook my head, “No progress.”

“And I’m getting used to talking to empty rooms.  Sometimes catch Aisha off guard.  Breakfast?  Sit down, I’ll put the kettle on.  Didn’t want to fill it while you were in the shower.”

“Thank you.”

Through some unspoken agreement, we didn’t talk about ‘work’.  We didn’t discuss Coil, Dinah, the Travelers, Dragon or the Nine.  Instead, our discussions turned to favorite movies and shows, my favorite books and memories from our childhoods.  Shows we’d watched and nearly forgotten, moments from school.

Emma came up a lot, as I thought back on it.  My parents too.  The three of them had been the focus of my world, with everything else taking a distant second place.  Emma had turned on me, my mom had left me, and my dad… I had to admit I’d left him.

I didn’t raise any of the heavier stuff, but I mentioned that Emma had turned out to be one of the bullies that plagued me throughout my stay in high school.

Brian, in turn, talked about his life growing up.  That did touch on the heavier stuff, and as much as I liked learning a bit more about the details of his life, I was glad when we detoured into a discussion of martial arts.  As he explained it, he was more interested in the broader strokes and philosophy of a given style than on the particulars.  Once he had a sense of how a given adherent of the style might approach a fight and enough basic techniques to see how they put it into practice, he tended to lose interest.

All around us, I could see people hard at work.  My people were deferring to any legitimate construction crew that set to work, shifting their focus to nearby areas.  I could see people moving supplies out of a nearby building so the crews could bulldoze it, others helping to unload a truck of building supplies.  When I got back to this and started to give orders, I’d have to find work for them that wouldn’t put them in the way.  I couldn’t quite track how many people were working for me in my territory, but it was far more than before.

I felt like I should be losing people each time I got pulled into a fight against a major threat.  I had, when Mannequin and Burnscar had attacked, but I’d walked away from the first Mannequin fight with something of a following, and I’d expected to see my people leaving in droves after Dragon made her move.  Except it wasn’t happening, and I wasn’t entirely sure why.

Our walk took us on a circuit, with us turning back to my lair, and I left to go back to my dad’s while Brian headed back to my place to use the shower.

I felt weird about that.  Parting ways so casually after spending the night together.  Oddly enough, I felt weird about letting him in my lair while I wasn’t there.  He’d be passing through my room, seeing my stuff.  I knew it was paradoxical to be bashful, covering myself with a sheet and feeling guarded about my privacy, all things considered, but that didn’t change the fact that I felt that way.  I wouldn’t refuse to let him use my bathroom because of it, but yeah.

In a way, we’d sort of done everything backward.  We’d started with the long-running partnership.  With the ‘family’, if I wanted to think about managing the others in that sense. In the course of that, we’d been through hell and back, we’d backed each other up, helped each other.  All hurdles one might face in a marriage.  Then there were the more recent cases of actually talking about the relationship happening, there was last night, then the more casual date and getting to know each other better this morning.  If it wasn’t a hundred percent backwards, it was at least pretty jumbled up.

Or maybe I was looking at it in an immature way, expecting some simplistic, formulaic, storybook notion of how a relationship was supposed to proceed.

I made my way to my dad’s, thinking about a thousand things at once, not wanting to think about anything in particular.

There were cars parked out front.  There was a strange car in the garage with the door open, two others in the driveway, my dad’s at the end.  With a few stray houseflies, I casually noted a dozen people inside the house.  My dad was there, too.

I immediately thought of Coil.  Had he divined what I had planned today?  Planned some counterattack?

I’d foregone my costume, so I wouldn’t feel compelled to use it in a pinch, and I’d removed my knife holster from the costume and had it clipped to the back of my waistband, so it was in the midst of the folds, blanketed by various wasps and spiders.  The setup might have been awkward for anyone else, but spending the past few weeks and months while using my bugs to help guide my hand left me fairly confident that I could slip my hand through the folds and draw it at a moment’s notice if I had to.

Then a man opened the door.  I let myself relax.

“No shit,” he said.  “Taylor?”

“Hi, Kurt,” I greeted my dad’s coworker and longtime friend.

“Been a long time.  Barely recognize you, kid.”

I shrugged.  “How’re you doing?”

He cracked a wide grin.  “Working.  Getting by.  Better than we were doing.  Now, you coming inside or are you going to stand in the driveway for the next five minutes?”

I followed him into the house.

My dad was in the living room, surrounded by familiar faces.  People I’d seen around when I’d gone to his workplace or when they’d dropped by the house.  I could only put a name to the people who my dad called friends: Kurt, Kurt’s wife Lacey, and Alexander.  Even Lacey was burlier than my dad, with a build like Rachel’s, muscle added onto that.  The other three were familiar, but I didn’t know them well.  My dad and myself excepted, every person in the house had spent their lives doing manual labor.  Just looking at him, he looked like the odd one out in every way, in clothes and body type and demeanor, but he was relaxed in a way I hadn’t seen in years, surrounded by friends with a beer in hand.

My dad saw me, mouthed the word ‘sorry’.

Kurt saw it.  “Don’t blame your old man.  Alexander brought a truckload of beer in from out of town, we got to drinking.  We thought we’d include Danny, drag him along, invited ourselves.  Didn’t know he had plans.”

“It’s fine,” I said.  Nobody that could be a threat, none of Coil’s people.  I let myself relax.  What had I been thinking?  That he’d strongarm my dad?

“Heya Taylor,” Lacey said.  “Haven’t seen you since the funeral.”

Nearly two years after the fact, it still hit me like a punch in the gut.

“Hell, Lacey,” Kurt said.  “Give the girl a second to get used to having people in her house before you drop that on her.”

I glanced at my dad, elbows on his knees, a 24 ounce beer clasped in both hands.  He’d lowered his head to stare at the can.  He didn’t look devastated, or even unhappy.  It hadn’t caught him off guard like it had hit me.  Knowing these guys, I could guess it came up with enough regularity that he was used to it.

“Ah, baby,” Lacey said.  She raised a beer in my direction.  “Just a little drunk.  Wanted to say, your mom was good peoples.  She hasn’t been forgotten.  Sorry if that came out a little direct.”

“S’okay,” I replied.  I shifted my feet restlessly.  I’d never felt more a stranger in my own house.  Didn’t know where to go, where I wouldn’t be drawing attention, have people asking me questions.  It was hard enough with my dad and I having this distance between us, but there were other people in the equation now.

Kurt spoke up, “We’re leaving in a few minutes.  It’s hard to get around, so they’re scheduling events together so we don’t need to make two trips.  The last debate is this afternoon, then mayoral vote right after.  You catch the debate the other night?”

I shook my head.  “Didn’t even know it happened.”

“Well, if that’s any indication, this one’s bound to be a pisser.  So we’re drinking to mellow out.  And I’d feel a hell of a lot better if your dad had more than the one beer, so he can relax some and hold back from choking one of the smarmy bastards.”

“Not about to do that,” my dad said.

“Wish you could.  But it wouldn’t be worth it in the end if you wound up in jail and left that daughter of yours alone.  It’s all good.  We’ll go in stinking of beer, offer some drunken commentary from the sidelines, punctuated by a few off-color words,” Kurt smiled.

“Please don’t,” my dad said.  He hadn’t raised his eyes from the beer in his hands, but he was smiling, too.

“You want to sit and let ’em say what sounds good for them?”  Kurt asked.

“I was thinking it’d be better to ask the hard questions, if we get a chance.  A big part of the crowd’s going to be people from the north end.  Good few of them are going to be from the Docks.  So why don’t we ask him what’s happening with the ferry?”

“He’s going to brush it off,” Lacey said, “Not in the budget, with everything that’s going on.”

“Then that’s a good time for some booing and drunken swearing,” my dad answered, smiling.

Kurt busted out a laugh.  “You want to start a riot, Danny?”

“No.  But might sway the undecideds to see just how unimpressed we are with the man.”

“Everyone’s unimpressed with Mayor Christner,” Alexander spoke up.  He was a younger guy, heavily tattooed, with thick eyebrows that gave him a perpetual glower.  Every time I saw him, he had his hair cut in a wild style.  Today he had the left one-third of his head shaved, showing off a fresh tattoo of an old-school pinup girl in a bikini with her elbow appearing to rest on his ear.

“Disaster does that.” I spoke up.  “We want someone to blame, and the guy in charge makes for an easy target.”

“He’s a deserving target,” Kurt said, seating himself on the arm of the chair Lacey was in.  She wrapped one arm around his waist.  He went on, “There was this thing in Washington.  Talking about whether they should throw walls up around the edge of the city, blockade the streets and shut off services, get everyone out of here.”

“He said no, right?”

“He said no.  Asshole.  Probably earns more money this way.  Take a few million for restoring and helping the city, help himself to a percentage.”

That surprised me.  “You’re not happy the city was saved from being condemned?  Did you want to be kicked out of the city?  To leave your home?”

“It’d suck, but the way they were talking about it in the paper, there’s a big fund that’s set aside for covering the damages those Endbringer motherfuckers cause.  Idea was that they’d dip into those funds, give everyone that they ousted a bit to cover the cost of their homes.”

“There’s no way that’s doable,” I said.  “What about everyone who left when they were told to evacuate?”

“Don’t know,” Kurt said.  “I’m just saying what the papers did.”

I felt an ugly feeling in my gut.  “And they’d give us what the houses used to be worth?”

“They’d give us what the houses might be worth now,” he said.

“So not much.”

“It’s more than they’ll be worth a few years down the line, after the rot sets in and any mold problems get worse.  Getting expensive to get supplies into the city, which means it’ll be costly to fix things up and renovate.  Not necessarily worth it.”

“I saw construction crews at work.”

Kurt downed a swig of his beer and cleared his throat, “Sure.  The companies that are buying up all the materials, purchasing land on the cheap, all in the hopes that this city gets its act together and the land turns out to be worth something.”

“It could.”

“Come on,” he made the words a groan, “We’re under the tyranny of supervillains.  Heroes don’t have what it takes.  Used to be they were outnumbered but they were trying, making a difference in little ways.  Now they’re outnumbered and losing.  What’s the point?”

“Just a hypothetical question,” I said, “But isn’t it better to be in a city that works, where villains rule the streets, instead of a failed city with the same villains in a less prominent position?”

Lacey groaned a little, “Sweetie, had a few too many to wrap my head around the question.”

“Might be time to stop then, Lacey,” my dad said.  Turning to me, he said, “I suppose you’re asking the classic question, Taylor.  Would you rather be a slave in heaven or a free man in hell?”

“Free man in hell,” Kurt responded.  “Fuck.  You think I’d be doing what I do, living here, if I was willing to make nice, suck up to the guys in charge and do what I was told?”

Some of the others were nodding, Lacey and Alexander included.

I looked at my dad.

“What’s your answer, Danny?”  Kurt asked.

“I’d rather not be a slave or in hell,” my dad responded.  “But sometimes I worry I’m both.  Maybe we don’t get the choice?”

“You’re the most depressing asshole of a friend I’ve got,” Kurt said, but he said it with a smile.

“Why are you asking, Taylor?”  Lacey asked.

I shrugged.  How much could I say without giving them cause for suspicion?  “Saw some of the stuff going on in the shelters.  Some sick people, unhappy people.  It was a long while before anything started getting better, and as I understand it, it was the villains who made the first move in getting things fixed up.”

“For their own benefit.  You can’t rule a hole in the ground,” Alexander said.

“Maybe,” I said.  “Or maybe bad people can do good for the sake of doing good, at least once in a while.  They’re taking charge, they’re keeping things more or less quiet and peaceful.  It’s better than what we had.”

“The problem with that,” my dad said, “Is that we’d be setting humanity back by about three thousand years if we let that happen.  It’d be falling back into an iron age mindset and leadership.  The people with the numbers and the weaponry lay claim to an area through sheer military strength.  They stay in charge as long as they can through family lines, merging families with whoever else has the military strength.  That lasts until the family in power peters out or someone smarter, stronger or better armed comes in to seize control.  Might not sound so bad, until you figure that sooner or later, the person who gets control is going to be someone like Kaiser.”

“Kaiser’s dead,” Kurt said.

“Yeah?” my dad raised an eyebrow.  “Okay, but I was speaking in general terms.  Could just as easily be Lung or Jack Slash, instead of the relatively benign villains that are in charge right now.  Again, I stress, it’s just a matter of time.”

Just a matter of time until we lose -I lose- and someone else claims Brockton bay for themselves, I thought.

“What would you rather have happen?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” he said.  “But I don’t think complacency’s the answer.”

“Last debate,” Kurt said, “People kept bringing up the capes, moderator kept shutting them down, telling them that they were supposed to be talking economy and education.  Today we’ll hear some talk on the crooks running the city.  Hear what the candidates have to say on the subject.”

“We should go soon,” Lacey said.  “If we want to get a seat instead of standing around at the sides.”

My dad looked up at me, “Can I get you any food, Taylor?  I promised you something.”

“I’m alright.  Had a late breakfast.  Maybe when we get back?”

“I’d offer you a drink,” Kurt said, chuckling, “But that’d be against the law.  How old are you, anyways?”

“Fifteen,” I said.

“Sixteen.”

I turned to look at my dad.

“It’s the nineteenth,” he said.  “Your birthday was a week ago.”

“Oh.”  I’d been a little distracted at the time.  A week ago, that would have been around the time we were wrapping up our confrontation with the Slaughterhouse Nine.  Lovely.

“That’s the saddest goddamn thing I ever heard,” Kurt said, getting off the chair’s armrest and helping Lacey to her feet.  “Girl missing her birthday like that.  I’m guessing you don’t have your license, then, huh?”

“No.”

“Damn.  Was hoping you’d be our designated driver so your dad could have another.”

“I’ve only had half a tallboy,” my dad said, shaking his can lightly to let us hear the contents sloshing against the sides.  “And we’ll be driving slow on these streets anyways.  Who’s driving the other car?”

Alexander raised his hand.  He only had a glass of water.

“Then we’re off.  Out of my house,” he said.  I could see him wincing in pain as he used the chair’s back to help himself to a standing position, but he recovered.  He started shooing the burly dockworkers out the door.  “Go.  Into the cars.”

We began to file out.  Kurt and Lacey climbed into the back seat of my dad’s car.  The others got into Alexander’s truck.

“Should you be drinking with the kidney damage?” I asked, as the doors shut.  “You had trouble standing.”

“I got cleared yesterday.  I’m back on a regular diet.  Any hurt is just the muscle and the stitches.  Thanks for worrying about me.”

“Of course I’m going to worry about you,” I said, frowning.

“You have changed,” my dad commented, resting his elbows on the roof of the car.

“Hm?”

“Wasn’t so long ago that you would have walked into that situation and clammed up.”

“Feels like that was a year ago.”

“Anyways, I’m sorry,” he said.  “I’d hoped this would be just you and me, having a chance to catch up.  They invited themselves.”

“It’s okay.  I’m glad that you’ve got friends like that.”

“They’re a bit overbearing,” my dad said.

“The window’s open a crack,” Kurt said, from inside the car.  “We can hear you.”

“They’re overbearing,” my dad repeated himself, raising his voice a notch.  At a normal volume, he finished by saying, “But they’re alright.”

Smiling a little, I climbed into the passenger seat.

“Hey, Taylor?” Lacey asked.  Her voice was overly gentle, and for a moment I thought she was going to mention my mom again.  I winced a little.

“What?”  I turned around in my seat, as much as I was able with my seatbelt on.

“Just wanted to say thanks.  For the warning.  You told your dad that Shatterbird was around, didn’t you?”

I nodded.

“He told us.  We were careful.  I don’t know if it saved our lives or not, but thanks for watching out for him, and helping us out as collater- collar-”

“You’re welcome,” I said, before she could fumble over her words any further.

I was glad he was in touch with them.  From what I’d seen, I’d been left with worries that my dad was all on his lonesome.  Introverted people like him, like us, were best paired with  the Kurts of the world.  Or the Lisas.  People that wouldn’t be ignored or shrugged off, people who pushed the boundaries, so to speak, and drew us out of our shells.

I enjoyed the drive as we made our way downtown, more than I thought I would.  My dad and Kurt knew each other well enough that their dialogue flowed easily, and the same went for Lacey and Kurt, what with the pair being married.  I had a feeling that, by the end, Kurt was feeling like he’d wound up on the short end of both exchanges.

The town hall had survived the waves.  The stone building had crenelations and an American flag over the door.  We joined the trail of people who were filing in, walking past stands with the posters and images of the candidates, booklets of brochures about the issues and stands with newspapers from neighboring cities.  My dad and Kurt grabbed a few papers each and put them into the plastic bags that had been made available to us.  It was a nice thought, putting those out.  There wasn’t any TV at present and we had to keep abreast of what was going on somehow.

The signs led us past the old historical courthouse and to the auditorium.  We’d expected the seats to be filled, leaving us only with standing room, but the opposite was true.  The back of the auditorium and the rear rows were filled with reporters and camera crews, and the rest of the crowd had filled in random spaces on the benches.  Five or six hundred people.  Somehow less than I’d thought.

It was an odd election, in a way.  The city had been without working computers for a week and a half, most had lost their cell phones, and were left without landlines.  An election without media for advertisement.  For many here, this would be the first and last time they heard a candidate’s stances on the issues before voting.  Was this how it had been in the past?  When poorer households hadn’t gotten newspapers and there hadn’t been televisions or radios?

I looked at the candidates.  A dark haired woman in a dark blue suit, a blond man, and the older incumbent, Mayor Christner.  How many others in this auditorium were aware?  Some time ago, Coil had told us that two of the candidates for office had been bought.  Mayor Christner… well, I could remember standing in his backyard, him pointing a gun at me, pleading for me to step in and save his son’s life.

Would the debate turn to the subject of him arguing against the condemnation of the city, and if it did, how would Christner justify the decision he’d made?

I was caught between an ugly feeling of guilt and genuine curiosity in how the event would play out.  Mostly guilt, but I couldn’t do anything about that.  I’d done what had to be done.

On the curiosity side of things, I wondered momentarily if either of Coil’s mayoral candidates had military backgrounds or if he’d hand-picked his politicians the same way he selected his elite soldiers.

That train of thought ground to a halt as something caught my attention.

It was habit, now, to have my bugs sweeping over my surroundings, giving me a perpetual sense of what was going on in the surrounding three or four city blocks.  When the vans found parking spots around the building, it didn’t even warrant a conscious thought.  When the soldiers began filing out of the vans, it startled me.  Men and women with machine guns and body armor.  Not PRT.

No.  Definitely not PRT.

The armored limousine pulled into the middle of the street, just outside the front doors.  By the time Coil climbed out of the vehicle, his soldiers were either just past the doors on either side of the building or standing at the ready to accompany him by the front.

Coil, here?  It didn’t make sense.  He wasn’t the type to show himself.  It didn’t fit how he operated.  Hell, if the mayor was here, his son would be too.  Triumph would be in the crowd.

I glanced at my dad, and he squeezed my hand, “Not too bored?”

I shook my head, trying to keep my expression placid as my mind raced.

Coil was making his play right here, right now.

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Monarch 16.6

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“We should throw a party,” Imp said.  “Celebrate.  Rub it in a little.”

“Rub it in?” Grue asked.

“Yeah.  Party in the streets, maybe some fireworks.  Show the heroes that we know we won and we’re doing fine.”

There were a few chuckles from the others.  Regent and the Travelers, primarily.

“In what way is that even close to being a sensible idea?”  Grue asked.

“I didn’t say it was sensible.  But it’s fun, and that’s why we got into this, right?”

“No.  No it isn’t.  It was maybe a side-bonus when I joined the group, if anything, but things have changed since then.  I warned you this would be hard work, that it wouldn’t be fun and games.  And throwing a party to celebrate a win is a monumentally bad idea when we don’t even want the heroes to know we consider this victory anything out of the ordinary.”

“It is out of the ordinary.  We’re not giving anything away if we’re celebrating scaring off Dragon.”

“I kind of have to agree,” Regent chimed in.  Grue turned his way, and I could imagine the death glare that was behind his mask.  Probably scarier than the mask itself.

“Maybe you’re right,” Grue said, “Maybe, I won’t say you’re absolutely right there-”

“Of course not,” Imp said, sighing.

“-But we definitely don’t need to rub it in the heroes’ noses.  Not if it means they have both an excuse and motivation to try this again, sooner.”

“If you’re afraid of that, we’ll never be able to celebrate a win.”

“I’m okay with that,” Grue said.

“Do we get to chime in?” Trickster asked.  “Because I’m siding with the Imp, here.  Morale could become pretty important if we’re going to be building up individual gangs and collections of henchmen.”

Grue sighed.  “Feeling outnumbered here.  Skitter?”

“What?”  I blinked.  “Sorry, not keeping track of the conversation.”

“She’s out of it.  Tattletale broke Skitter when she said we won,” Regent said.

“I’m… I’m alright.  Lost in thought”

Grue settled a hand on my shoulder.  I couldn’t read his expression with his mask in the way.

I sighed and confessed, “I’m… I guess I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Isn’t that what happens?  The second things start to go right, the next disaster strikes?  Empire Eighty-Eight, Leviathan, The Nine, Dragon…”

“That’s a pretty defeatist way of thinking,” Trickster commented.  “Didn’t Tattletale basically say that there’s nobody left to cause us any problems?”

“There’s always something,” I said.  “I’d rather anticipate it and be ready.”

“Look at it this way,” Genesis spoke.  She was in a human-ish form, not unlike her real self, though she was wheelchair-free.  “If it’s more dangerous than Leviathan, the Nine or the Dragon suits, there’s no way we can make some plan to deal with them until they make the first move.  If they’re less dangerous, we can deal.  Relax.  We’re in good shape.”

I shrugged.

“Sooo,” Imp drew out the word, “Party?”

“No,” Grue and I spoke at the same time.  Imp groaned.

“Coil told us to check on our territories.  We should do that,” I said.  “Take your costumes off, take it easy.  I’m going to see if the food and drink I’d arranged to go to people in my territory is still okay, and make sure that they get fed and don’t have cause to lynch me.  Then I’m probably going to sleep for twelve straight hours.”

“Wait, didn’t you just say no party?” Imp asked.

“It’s not a party.  It’s something I was doing before the Dragon suits came.”

“Do the heroes know that?”

“Dragon could confirm it,” I said.  “She disrupted the preparations.”

“Dunno, that sounds pretty flimsy,” Imp said, sounding way too pleased with herself, “Maybe you better cancel, just to be safe.”

“Imp,” Grue growled the word.

Imp laughed, “I’ll go patrol our territory.  I’ll be using my power, so no worries about being seen in costume.”

“Coil said we shouldn’t go out in costume at all,” I said.  “I thought that part of the message was pretty clear.”

“Fine,” Imp said.  “Whatever.  If I’m not supposed to do anything, I’m going back to our place, gonna to kick back and catch up on some shitty reality shows.”

“No TV,” Grue said.

“Nuh uh.  No way.  If you two want to play hardass mom and dad and be controlling assholes, okay.  But you can’t tell me I can’t watch T.V.”

“I mean you won’t get any channels.  There’s no cable, no digital connection and no satellite.  Only static.”

Imp groaned, an agonized sound one might expect from someone who had just been speared through the gut.

What did it say about me that my metaphors were tending towards that kind of violent imagery?

“Why don’t you come by?” Regent asked her, “Play video games?  I’ve got shows on DVD.  No shitty reality shows, but stuff.”

I looked Grue’s way to gauge his reaction to Imp and Regent hanging out, only for our eyes to meet, so to speak.  We were thinking the same thing.

“I don’t think-” Grue started to speak.

Imp wheeled on him, jabbing a finger in his direction, “Enough!  You don’t dictate how I live my life!”

“No fighting, please,” Sundancer said, from the sidelines, “We’ve been through too much already.”

Grue stepped forward, raising one hand, but Imp didn’t give him a chance to touch her, backing away, swinging one hand through the air, as if to swat his hand away if he tried.  “You’ve said enough!  You don’t want me to celebrate my first legit win where I was actually fucking useful?  Fine!  Don’t want me to go on patrol?  Fine!  I’ll accept that shit because I’ll take orders from the guy who actually pays me.  But if you’re going to whine because I want to play video games with a teammate, I’m not going to stand here and listen to it!  Deal!”

“If you’d just-” Grue started.  He stopped and sighed.

“What?” I asked.

“I was going to say something,” he said, turning around.  “But I can’t remember what.”

We experienced a moment where the conversation died, where nobody was sure what to say next, and nobody was able to tie things back to the prior conversation to resume an earlier topic.

“We did what we were supposed to do,” Trickster said, finally.  “Good work.  Skitter’s right.  Let’s go retreat, tend to any wounds, and we’ll take a breather.”

There were nods and murmurs of assent from everyone present, myself included.

More to his team than the rest of us, Trickster said, “I’m located closest to Coil, so I’m stopping by, going to check on Noelle, see if Tattletale needs help setting our captive Director free, and then I’ll talk to Coil about his progress with our issues.”

“Don’t get on his case,” Genesis said.  “Whatever his plan is, he’s under a lot of pressure right now.  I’d rather wait another few days and then talk about it with him than push it now and risk upsetting him.”

“The difference between us,” Trickster said, terse, “is I’m not willing to wait.”

With that said, he tipped his hat at me and walked away.  He wasn’t three paces out the door before he found something to swap with, leaving a mailbox at the mall’s edge.  The rest of the Travelers began to file off.

“I’ll be off too,” Regent said.  He offered me a sloppy mock-salute, “Good work, chief.”

I winced at that.  I hadn’t wanted to raise the subject of me taking over as leader for the previous confrontation.  I glanced at Grue and found him looking at me.

“Can we talk?” he asked.  Thanks, Regent.

“Yeah,” I said.

“We did make plans.”

“You’re dating?”  Bitch asked.

“I didn’t say that,” Grue said.

“But you’re dating.”

“Yeah,” he admitted.  Bitch looked at me to double check and I nodded.

“Hm.”  She somehow conveyed smugness with the monosyllablic response.

“You want to come?” I asked her.  “Hang out?”

“Nah.”

“You sure?” I asked.  “You’re welcome to spend some time with us, kick back, watch something, eat some good food?”

“Being around people’s too tiring.  Warm night like this, nice weather, figure I’ll go play with my dogs.  Make sure they aren’t too hurt, throw a few balls for ’em in the moonlight, eat when I want to eat, sleep when I feel like sleeping, not having to worry about getting in anyone’s way.”

“You wouldn’t be getting in the way,” I assured her.

“It’s all good.  I’m happiest doing this.”

“Well, stay in touch.  If you feel like some company, come by again?”

She shrugged and turned to leave, Bentley to her right and Bastard to her left.  With every step Bentley was taking, he was getting larger.  When she was nearly out of sight, Bentley was big enough for her to climb on top of.

Leaving Grue and me standing in the mall.

“I’d almost think you didn’t want to spend time alone with me,” he commented.

He was looking at me.  I felt scrutinized, like every movement and every part of me was suddenly under the spotlight, anything I did potentially being read as meaning something.

“No,” I said, very carefully.  Not exactly.  I just didn’t want to hurt him by taking away his role on the team, and I knew it would come up.  I tucked my hair behind the spot where the armor of my mask covered my ear.  “No.  Being alone together is good.”

“Your place?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

■

My people were active in my territory, but they were busier cleaning up the mess than they were actually getting stuff done.  It was irritating on a lot of levels.  We’d been accomplishing something, and Dragon had interrupted.  We’re in the world on the other side of the looking glass, I thought, where it’s the heroes who get in the way of progress and recovery.

I could understand why Dragon did it.  I wasn’t saying it was her fault, exactly.  Especially if it wasn’t actually her directing the suits.  But it was still irritating.

The silence between us was a tense one.  I wished Bitch had decided to come along.  Not because it would have generated conversation, but because it would have put off the subject of discussing team leadership, and the third wheel would have made for a reason for the quiet.  Was it bad of me to think about using her like that?  Or was it just accepting that she made an uncomfortable silence comfortable by her very nature?

I used my power to scout for any groups of people as we made our way to the beach.  We weren’t supposed to be out in costume, but we didn’t have any great options at this point.  I figured Coil would forgive us this much.  We entered the storm drain and made our way up to my lair.

Charlotte and Sierra looked surprised to see us as I opened the door.  Charlotte had three kids sitting on the couch with her, while Sierra reclined.  She rose to a sitting position.

“What happened?” Sierra asked.  She glanced nervously at Grue.

I saw Charlotte and the kids had plates on their laps.  The pork we’d been cooking earlier in the day.  I headed for the fridge and found a hunk of it wrapped in cling film.  “The PRT didn’t like the fact that we’d claimed control over Brockton Bay, so they sent in seven Dragon suits to root us out.”

“What do you want us to do?” She asked.

“Nothing.  It’s fine.  Stick to business as usual.  I’m glad you managed to get back to the food in time to make sure it finished cooking alright.  Any other problems?”

“We didn’t get a lot of work done,” Charlotte said.

“We weren’t going to anyways,” I said, “That’s fine.  I’m going to grab some food.  Grue, you want any?”

“Yeah.  Please.”

“Seven Dragon suits?” Sierra said.  “If they come back-“

“They’re dealt with,” Grue said.  Was the surprise on Sierra and Charlotte’s faces because of what Grue had said, or was it the way he’d said it with such confidence in his strange, echoey voice?

I set two servings worth of the pork onto one plate and put it in the microwave.  “They may come back, but that’ll be a little while coming.  What I’m worried about is my territory.  Were people upset?”

“Yeah,” Sierra said.  “A few people got shocked by those floating flying saucer things.”

“The drones,” I said.  My heart sank a little.  My promise to protect my people had been broken yet again.

“Yeah.  Drones.  People were pissed.  They were trying to get the drones, catch them in trash cans, but the wings got in the way, so they started using tarps.  They even got hold of a few before the drones started fighting back.”

Grue gave me a look that I couldn’t read.  Stupid masks.

“Anyone seriously hurt?”

Sierra shook her head.

“Ok, good.  Listen, I’m going to be working from the background these next few days.  I won’t be appearing anywhere in costume or overtly using my powers.  Are you okay with keeping things running smoothly?  I’ll be available by phone if you run into any problems.”

“I, um, I don’t know.”

I opened the microwave and withdrew the plate of smoking, herb-rubbed pork.  “What’s the problem?”

“I’m worried people are going to recognize me, and it’ll get around to the people I know.”

“I’m not asking you to do anything criminal.  I’m just looking for someone I can trust enough to put in a management role.  Make sure things are cleaned up and that nobody’s slacking off.  It’s nothing you wouldn’t be doing working for a cleanup crew somewhere else in the city.”

“Except I’m doing it for you.  I’m working for a criminal.  Even doing what I’m doing right now, it doesn’t sit right.  No offense.”

“Okay,” I said, pausing.  I was apparently taking too long to prepare the food, because Grue was edging in to take over the preparation, cutting the meat into two portions and arranging the plates.  How was I supposed to manage this?  “Listen, I’ll take five thousand dollars out of the safe upstairs, sometime late tonight or early tomorrow.”

“It’s not about the money, or the lack of money, or any of that-” she protested.

“I know.  I’m not trying to bribe you.  Not exactly.  I guess, um…” I trailed off.  I was tired, thinking at high intensity for too much of the day.  “Um, I’m trying to say I trust you, and I value the work you put in.  So take that money, then if you know of someone who could do what I’m asking, someone like Charlotte or someone else you think we could trust, give them as much as you think is appropriate.  If there’s any left over, maybe you and Charlotte split it.  Or split an amount between the people who fought the drones, and be sure to tell them that as much as I appreciate them standing up to Dragon, I don’t want them to do anything like that again.”

“You don’t?”

“The last thing I want is people who live in my territory to get hurt for my sake.  And I don’t want you to be inconvenienced either.  Think about what you’ll do with the money tonight.  But don’t overthink it.  It’s a gift, a thank you.”

“I can’t take your money,” Sierra said.

“Then don’t,” I told her, trying to look like I was more focused on the food than anything else.  It wouldn’t do for her to see how much this was gutting me, and I didn’t want her to get guilted into anything.  I grabbed a coke from the fridge.  I gestured with it to Grue, and he nodded.  I grabbed another for him.  I had to swallow and clear my throat before I said, “I hope you’ll stay.  I really do.  But if you’re not comfortable doing what you’re doing, that’s okay too.  You can take a secondary role, or you can leave.  I’ll be disappointed, but I won’t be angry.”

“Okay.”

I looked at Charlotte and the kids, the steaming plate in my hand, a coke in the other, my right foot resting on the bottom stair of the staircase.  I asked Charlotte, “Are you okay with the status quo?”

“Yeah.  But I’m just looking after the little ones, and making sure people get fed.  I’m out of sight, I don’t come off like a second in command or anything.  I- Sierra and I have talked about this, before, her being uncomfortable.  I’m okay because this works for right now, but I understand what she’s saying?”  Her voice quirked with uncertainty as she finished speaking, as if she were asking a question, or asking permission to have that opinion.

“I understand too,” I said, sighing.  “I’m sorry I haven’t been around enough for you to talk to me about this, Sierra.”

“You’ve had bigger things to worry about.”

“And I shouldn’t have forgotten about this stuff while I was doing it.  I’m sorry.  You do what you need to do, decide if there’s any compromises or options you want to ask for.  I think I’ll understand, whatever you do.”

She nodded.

Grue had walked ahead of me and stopped halfway up the stairs.  I followed him, leaving my nanny-cook and reluctant lieutenant behind.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

“You going to work that out?” Grue asked.  He paused on the second floor.  After a moment’s thought, I tilted my head up toward the next set of stairs.

“Don’t know.  Hope I can keep her.  Wouldn’t have made it this far without her to hold things together when I was away.  If there was something I could do for her, maybe I would.  I dunno.”

We stepped into my bedroom.  I was glad I’d left it more or less tidy, but I had to take a second to hastily make my bed and throw some stray clothes in the hamper.  I moved some folded clothes from a wooden chair and let Grue take the seat.  I grabbed a remote and turned on the TV, only to remember that there wouldn’t be anything to watch.  I left it on the display screen for the DVD player.

Edgy with nervous energy, I took a moment to remove my mask and find a pair of glasses from the bedside table before seating myself on the edge of my mattress, my soda at my feet.

Grue had pulled off his helmet in the meantime to start eating, and I saw his face for the first time since we’d left his apartment for Coil’s.  I could see the dark circles under his eyes, which suggested he probably hadn’t slept well last night.  He wasn’t better, but it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect him to be.

Brian swallowed, “I wish I could offer you advice, but Imp and I are at a point where it’d be nice if we had to worry about retaining… what did you call them, way back when?”

“Employees.”

“Right.  If we had to worry about keeping our employees, it’d be good, because it’d mean we actually had some.  I’m not sure how to get underway on that front.  We’re intimidating.”

“I’m intimidating,” I said, admittedly defensive.

“You are.  But I’d say you’re more intimidating as an idea than you are in person.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“No.  That’s not bad.  You’re more intimidating overall than I am, and yet you’re more approachable than I am.  I’m tall, I’ve got broad shoulders, I’ve got the mask, I’ve got the mass of darkness rolling off me.  People run when they see me coming for them.”

“My costume isn’t exactly lovey-dovey, either.  I’ve got the bugs crawling on me.  Sure, I’m smaller, narrower, but-“

“The idea of being attacked by you might be spooky, but even if you can hold your own most of the time, people don’t imagine getting in a hand to hand fight with you and feel scared.  It’s your power that’s scary.  Me?  I think people look at me and they can imagine me pounding them into a bloody pulp, or worse.  My power’s inconvenient, it’s spooky, but it’s not the scary thing.”

“You can’t really see your darkness, though.”

He shook his head, “I know where it is, but I don’t really see it.”

“I think you underestimate what it’s like.”

“Maybe.  But my point is that people are more likely to run than stick around and talk when I’m approaching.  You can take your bugs off the table, make it clear they aren’t a threat, and people feel less threatened, they’re willing to hear you out.”

“Maybe.  But if that’s the case, don’t give them a chance to run.”

“What?  Pop out from around a corner, scare the living daylights out of them, then offer them a job?”

“Sure.  Why the hell not?  Or have Imp break into apartments and leave a card.”

“I don’t think that would send the right message.  It’s vaguely threatening.”

“You’re vaguely threatening.  If your prospective hires can’t deal with that much, then they probably won’t handle the job all that well, either.  If you can’t find anyone, then maybe I send some of my people your way to help get you started, or you could shell out for some decent mercenaries.”

“Maybe.”

“There’s options.  Don’t stress about it.  Whatever else happens, we have a few days before we decide on the next leg of our plan.  Let’s relax.  Movie?”

“Sure.”

I stood from my bed and began going through the box of DVDs that Coil had supplied with the TV.  Most were still in the tight plastic wrap that they’d been bought in.  I looked through, then handed some to Brian before turning back to the bag to keep browsing.

What the hell were we supposed to watch?  I didn’t want anything that would ruin Brian’s mood or remind him what had happened, so horror was probably out, I was sick of the high intensity stuff, but I couldn’t stand romance or bad comedies.

“Going back to the earlier topic,” Brian said, “The subject of leadership, being in charge…”

I winced.

“You took over today.  Are you wanting that to be a permanent thing?”

I turned around.  “No.  Not permanent.  Just until-” I stopped short.  How to put it?

“Until?”

“When I was getting really obsessive about what I was doing, when I was losing sleep and making mistakes, I deferred control.”

“To Trickster,” Brian said.  I could see a shadow pass over his expression.

“Yeah.  And that’s a bad example because it didn’t work.  It’s just that we both know you’re not getting enough rest.  So maybe I can pick up the slack in the meantime.”

Brian sighed.  He didn’t look any happier.

“I don’t want to make you unhappy,” I said.  “I’m not wanting to oust you, or co-opt your role permanently or completely.  You were the leader, even if we didn’t really establish an official title over it.  But we can divide the duties for the time being.  Tattletale handles the information angle of things, I maybe keep Bitch reined in and handle the spur of the moment calls, while you handle Regent and Imp and all the rest.”

“Which is less than it sounds like, especially when you and Tattletale contribute on ‘the rest’ in little ways.”

“No-” I started, then I sighed.  “Maybe, yeah.  I don’t want to come off as manipulative or anything.  Like I said, I don’t want you to be unhappy, but at the same time I do want the whole team to get by in the meantime.”

“You don’t sound manipulative,” he said.  His fork hit the plate with a clatter.  “Jesus, this sucks.  I know you’re right.  I know this is for the good of the team, and if I could just get over this shit-“

“It’s not that easy.  Don’t do yourself a disservice and expect too much.”

“My whole life, I’ve been bigger than my peers, I’ve been stronger than most.  Spent my time around pretty powerful guys.  Boxers, martial artists, other criminals.  I didn’t have many friends, but they were the people who were around me, you know?  And they were the types to go after you if you show any weakness.”

“You get shot, nobody’s going to call you a wimp.  I don’t see why it’s different if the damage is mental or emotional instead of physical.”

“I know, but you’re not getting it.  I was the type to go after someone if they showed a vulnerability.  Wasn’t until I’d had my powers about a year, Aisha tells me I was being an asshole, just like one of her stepdads used to be.  So I tried to be better, but I always wanted to protect her, always wanted to help others.  Teach you and Alec to fight, step up and take charge when a situation demanded it.  Sometimes when a situation didn’t.”

“Yeah.”

“So it isn’t just about me trying to adjust.  Christ, it’s me having my world turned upside down.  It’s others protecting me, others helping me, others covering me in a fight, others taking charge.  Aisha’s the one fixing things for me.  And you-“

“Me?”

“This thing with Coil.  Don’t think I’m so obsessed with what’s going on with me that I don’t see it.  It’s like a burden’s fallen from your shoulders.  You’ve got concerns, but you’re more relaxed.  You’ve got hope that you didn’t have twelve hours ago, and it’s dramatic enough that your posture’s changing.  Even since we left the mall, it’s like you’re slowly convincing yourself that this is over, Coil’s going to follow through, we’ll move on to taking care of our territories and everything works out in the end.”

I folded my arms.  “I don’t think that.  Like I said, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“You say that, you tell yourself that, but I don’t know that you’re feeling it.  I’m worried you’re setting yourself up for a massive disappointment, and that you’ll be affected enough that you won’t be able to deal when it happens.  But I’m mostly worried that all that will happen and I won’t be in a position to help because I’m distracted by my own shit.”

“You don’t have to take up all the slack.  We have other teammates.”

“Lisa isn’t exactly a heavy hitter, and let’s not fool ourselves into believing that Alec, Rachel or Aisha are going to offer any meaningful emotional support.”

“We’ll manage,” I said.  “We’ve managed this far.”

“More or less.  Problem is, ‘managing’ is fine, up until we don’t manage, if that makes any sense.  Then it’s over.”

I sighed.  “How did Genesis put it?  There’s no use in getting worked up over it if we can’t plan around it or do anything to change it.  So we’ll each do our own imperfect jobs of taking care of each other and taking care of ourselves, and be as ready as we can for whatever comes up.”

He sighed.

“We’re not perfect.  We’re flawed people, and as much as I want to help you in every way I can, I know I can’t.  I don’t- I’m not good at this.  I don’t know how to act, or what to say.  But I like you.  I care about you.  I’m going to do my best, even if I know it’s not good enough.  And I won’t expect any more of you.”

He nodded, but he looked glum.

“No hard feelings?”

He shook his head.  He didn’t look happy.

“I won’t be leader forever.”

“I don’t know,” he said.  “Might be better that you keep the job, even if I do bounce back eventually.”

“Except I don’t want the job.”

“That might be why you should take it.  I don’t know.  Can we drop the subject?”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay.  Just… heavy topics, with lots of ramifications.  And it’s hard to shake the negative thoughts.  I’d rather talk along the lines of what you said before, about taking care of each other.”

“And taking care of ourselves,” I said.  “Getting enough sleep, eating right.”

“Okay,” he said.  There was a pause.  “I slept well the other night.”

“Then stay over.  There’s nothing pressing coming up, so we’ll watch movies until we fall asleep.”

He smiled a little, and for the first time in a long time there was a glimmer of that expression that had gotten my attention in the first place.

I put three DVDs into the drive so I could use the remote to play the next movie without having to get up, then pulled off the armor panels of my costume before settling into bed.  My back pressed against his chest, and I could feel his breath against my hair.

I felt so self conscious that I could barely keep track of what was going on.  I was thinking every unromantic thought there was: worrying if I had body odor from being in costume and running all day, wondering if I should get up to go to the bathroom now so I wouldn’t have to go as desperately as I had the other morning.

I felt his hand on the zipper at the back of my costume, lowering it an inch, then stopping.  A fingertip traced from the ‘v’ where the top of my costume parted, all the way up to the the nape of my neck, then back down.  I could feel his fingers on the zipper, felt every tiny hair on my body standing on end.

A million thoughts raced through my head at once.  All put together, they amounted to a mumbled, “Um.”

There was no response from behind me.  I could hear him breathing, I could feel the warmth of his breath, the slow rise and fall of his chest against my back.  He was waiting for me to make my decision, and the thing that loomed largest in my mind was the sensation of his fingers on the tiny tag of the zipper, strong, insistent, there.

Any confidence I’d picked up in the past weeks or months fled.  I felt as vulnerable as I had in early April, brought to tears in front of my worst enemies.  Except this… wasn’t wholly negative.  Not entirely: I still felt acutely aware of every vulnerability, I thought of every part of myself that I tried to ignore when I looked in the mirror in the same way I might see my life flash before my eyes before I died.

Again, thinking that way.  Why couldn’t I think in a more romantic way at a moment like this?  Was I broken in my own way?

“Let me get up and turn off the lights?” I asked.

His power blanketed the room.  I could feel the phantom touches of it on against the thin fabric of my costume and my bare face, leaving me blind and deaf as we were plunged into darkness.

As I was plunged into darkness; he could see just as well.  This totally wasn’t what I’d wanted.

“That’s not fair,” I murmured.

He placed one hand on the side of my head to get me to turn his way, then pressed his lips against mine.

I didn’t protest any further.

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Monarch 16.5

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If I was remembering right, the Slaughterhouse Nine had introduced themselves to their prospective members roughly two weeks ago.  I couldn’t be sure what had happened, but Piggot had alluded to the idea that Armsmaster had banded together with Dragon.

Two weeks, and they’d built this.

The other dragon suits had the general stylings of dragons, with claws, armor plating that resembled scales and heads or faces that resembled a reptile.  In the end, though, they were still machines, and the theme was just that.  A theme.

Rather than armor plates, the scales were fine, intricately detailed and arranged with a kind of natural sense to it, with denser scaling in the areas which saw the most movement, creasing and folding and heavier scales around the elbows, talons and face.  There were wings, batlike, with openings at the base of each ‘finger’ that the membrane stretched between.  The actual body was more like a lizard, but the angle of the forelimbs and shoulders resembled those of a human.  When Azazel moved, its scaled exterior rippled with the shifting movements of the mechanisms underneath.

My bugs found their way inside, and I discovered it was very different from the machine we’d just fought.  It wasn’t sturdily built, nor was it solid.  The wires and internal mechanisms weren’t heavy-duty, reinforced or covered in chain mesh.  They were so numerous and dense that I couldn’t hope to make any headway with every bug in the city committed to the task.

It was, just going by what I could tell from my swarm-sense, a machine as intricate and multilayered as a living, organic being.

But how?  It didn’t make sense in terms of the timeframe.  It would have taken time to make each individual, unique part with their condensed and intricate design, but he’d only had two weeks.

A thought dawned on me.  It was a half-formed thought up until the moment I devoted some attention to it.  Then it clicked.  Tinkers had a knack, a specialty, be it a particular field of work or something they could do with their designs that nobody else could, and I knew Dragon’s.  She could intuit and appropriate the designs of other tinkers.

It put everything in perspective.  The machines she was using, half of them drew on ideas I’d seen other tinkers put to work.  The drone model had used Kid Win’s antigravity generators and Armsmaster’s ambient taser, the wheel-dragon might have used the same theories as the electromagnetic harness Kid Win had been packing when we attacked the PRT headquarters.

It also served to explain how she could invest the time to make the suits.  If her power afforded her the brainpower and raw thinking power to understand and apply the work of other tinkers, then she could put all of her resources towards manufacturing.  Armsmaster made the base design, she appropriated it and then turned artificial intelligence or her own power to creating the necessary variations.

I could imagine how she had worked herself into the Protectorate and the Guild for just this reason.  It would get her the funding and raw materials she needed.  Being a member of the team would give her access to the work of the various tinker heroes, in the name of oversight and security.  Add the confiscated material from criminals like Bakuda, and she had unparalleled access to other tinkers’ work.

There were realizations that were kind of a ‘eureka’ moment, except not so much an inspiration borne of creativity or creation as being about finding that weak point, finding that way out of a corner.  This wasn’t one of those.  This was one of the realizations I wish I hadn’t had, because I could feel my own morale plummeting.  If I was even close to being right, then Dragon was the incarnation of why tinkers were so dangerous.

Which didn’t change the fact that we had to find a way to stop her or everything we’d worked for would be for nothing.

I used the relay bugs to extend my search out further, and ran into a snag.  My swarm died in droves, bugs being obliterated or having half their bodies sheared off as they approached too close to what the suit was building.

It slammed one claw down, and my bugs could sense a thin rod skimming along the surface of the ground, tracing bumps and depressions.   The telescoping rod extended several hundred feet, crossing from the corner of one building to the base of a wall on the other side of the street.  It stopped, and there was a pause as the suit moved on.  Then the rod bloomed.

There wasn’t a better way to put it.  It expanded, unfolded, the rod of metal peeling open like a stick of bamboo, leaves and shoots unfolding over miliseconds.  The final stage, what I might call the ‘flowering’ was familiar enough.  If I could see it, I’d describe it as a vague blur.  Armsmaster had used the effect for the weapon he’d used to hack away at Leviathan, and Mannequin had been in possession of a knife with the same effect.  Except these blurs were five or six feet around.

I watched as the suit scanned the area, its head sweeping right to left to survey the area before it planted two more.  One extended for what must have been a tenth of a mile before it met another wall and stopped.  Since I’d been watching, four streets had been rendered impassable.

What did the Undersiders and the Slaughterhouse Nine have in common?  Besides our general intimidating natures and disturbing powers, we were both elusive, favoring hit and run tactics with a degree of shock and awe to keep our enemies off-balance.

Dragon and Armsmaster had decided on this as their means of attack.  They would seal off our movements by erecting barriers that were the high-tech equivalent of barbed wire.  Barbed wire that would turn steel into vapor.

That wouldn’t stop Siberian though.  What technologies had I seen that they might use against her?  Or was it a technology I hadn’t seen before?  There were some ugly possibilities there.  Something long ranged that could take him out before he could get to cover?  A microscopic form of attack that could fill the air and debilitate him if he wasn’t in an airtight container?

“What’s wrong?” Bitch asked.

“Found it.  Trying to find the others but I’m running into a bit of a snag.  The suit’s setting up barriers.”

“The forcefield thing they sent against Sundancer?”  Regent asked.

I shook my head.  “I think it’s the Azazel suit the Director mentioned.  It’s using that blurry stuff that cuts through anything, I told you about it.”

“I don’t remember that,” Imp said.

“Just don’t touch it,” I told her.  “Not even in a joking way.  You’re likely to lose your finger or your hand before you realize something’s wrong.”

“Uh huh.”

“I thought these things were supposed to be packing nonlethal hardware,” Regent said.  “Blue fire and now this?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “The Director said these suits were supposed to go up against the Nine.  You want to be as lethal as you can get.  I- I’m pretty sure they’re holding back, though.  They could have hit us a few times and didn’t.  We might be able to use that, but that’s testing our luck.”

“What?  You’re thinking about a kamikaze attack?”  Regent asked.

“Probably not.  We don’t know everything that suit could be packing in terms of devices or hardware.  Especially with Armsmaster helping out.  It’s definitely going to have something they think can counteract Siberian, so let’s rule out a brute force attack.  The hedge maze it’s building would hold off Hookwolf or Bonesaw’s creations, and the sturdiness of the design would protect it against Jack.  In terms of other tactics the Slaughterhouse Nine might use… hostages.  I’d bet it’s packing containment foam.”

“So what do we do?”

“It’s still a machine, a well made machine, but it’s a machine.  We can break it, given an opportunity.  But our number one goal is going to be keeping it from catching us out of position and walling us in.”

“We could move up to the rooftops,” Regent said.

“I have a bit of a policy against doing that,” I replied.  “It leaves you with a shortage of escape routes.”

“Doesn’t sound like we’ll have many anyways.”

“No.  But we’ll worry about that when it comes up.  Worst case scenario, we climb for the rooftops when it happens.  The dogs are mobile, and I assume Shatterbird can lift one or two people at a time?”  I asked.  Regent nodded confirmation.  I continued, “For now, we’ll take the long way, keep our distance from it, see if we can’t find the others.”

I looked around, saw some nods.  I glanced at Bitch.  Would she see it as cowardly?

“Okay,” Bitch said.

“Good.  Let’s leave your people behind?  No use bringing them into a fight.”

She nodded.  I looked over my shoulder at the vet trainee and the guy, and they took that as their cue to climb down.

The remainder of us rode.  Me on Bentley, Bitch on the wolf cub’s back, Barker and Biter riding in tandem on one door just behind Regent and Imp on the other.

The machine was gradually taking over an area near Ballistic’s territory with the disintegration ‘hedges’.  Going counter-clockwise around Azazel would have meant running face first into the crater Leviathan had made.  Traveling the edge threatened to put us dangerously close to the suit, and with the water on one side we’d have denied ourselves one of the cardinal directions as far as escape routes went.  That meant we were left with only one viable route to travel if we wanted to head further into the downtown areas; turning left and giving the suit as wide a berth as possible.

I kept one metaphorical eye on the suit as we traveled, while sweeping out with my swarm to scan for the others.  Azazel was laying down more of the ‘hedges’, not connecting them but placing one and then winging past intersections and streets to place another two or three blocks away.  I couldn’t be sure what the point was.  Our teammates were nowhere nearby, as far as I could tell, and the openings were wide enough that the barriers wouldn’t really hamper us even if we were running straight through the area.  Maybe a bit if my power wasn’t informing me of where we needed to go, but even Bitch would be able to get by without too much trouble.

I couldn’t shake the notion that I was missing something.  Was there something about those rods that I wasn’t aware of?  None of the rods were any thicker around than my pinky fingers, so they didn’t leave room for any real traps to be hidden inside, Armsmaster’s special talent or no.

It had been too long since I rode one of the dogs.  They weren’t well suited for riding, and that was doubly the case with Bentley, with his broad shoulders and barrel-like chest.  It forced my legs apart, and that made for an uncomfortable ride when coupled with the bouncing motion as he ran and the lingering soreness of my shoulder from the battlefield surgery Brooks had provided.

I thought about calling for a break when I noticed movement.  Not Azazel.  It was coming from the other direction.  My heart sank.

The drone-dragon.

“Incoming!”  I called out, using my bad arm to point in the general direction of the approaching suit.  It was approaching at a right angle, accurately enough that I feared it had a way of tracking us.

This was one of those moments where I had to make a clutch decision as leader, but it seemed like a choice of a half-dozen equally awful options.  Splitting up, moving closer to Azazel, trying to confront the drone deployer, hiding and risking getting cornered?

Damn.

I wondered if I was maybe better at improvising than I was at spur-of-the-moment strategy.   There was a distinction there.

“This way!”  I shouted.

Running straight down the road left us dangerously exposed.  I led the group down a diagonal route, zig-zagging between alleyways and the main streets.  Away from the drone-deployer and slightly towards Azazel.

When Azazel shifted positions and took flight, heading straight for us, I was left to wonder if that had been their plan all along.

“We’re being herded!”  I called out.  “Reverse directions!”

I hauled hard on Bentley’s chain, getting him to turn, then goading him to start running the way we’d come.  Regent, Imp, Barker and Biter had a harder time.  The ‘sleds’ were too dependent on momentum, and they didn’t have built-in traction.  Bitch and I pulled ahead on our respective mounts while the others tried to get turned around and build up speed again.  We couldn’t afford to stop and wait for them.

The drone suit flanked us on our right, drones spilling out of its ports to trail behind it like my bugs trailed behind me.  Other drones were moving to cut us off in front.  Azazel was behind us and to our left.  The herding was still underway – the sole route left to us, if we didn’t want to run straight into a mess of drones or one of the suits, would be going left.

Left took us into the area Azazel had employed the rods and the ‘hedges’.  Fuck that.  I could see what Azazel wanted to do, now.  The moment we were in there, it would take flight, setting down rods to close the gaps and trapping us inside.

My swarm and my eyes scanned the area.  In a matter of seconds this decision would be made for us.

I saw what I was looking for.  A third option.  If I was eyeballing this wrong, or if Bentley didn’t have a hard enough head… well, one of us would get hurt.

“Go!” I urged the mutant bulldog on, steering him for the nearest building.  He pulled away, and I steered him back on course, ducking low so I was hugging his neck as I drove him forward into the already ruined display window of a minimall.  I could feel the top of the display window scraping against the armor on my back as we passed through.

We stampeded past a store that had already been looted, headed for the glass window that faced the mall interior.  If I could find a shortcut through here, exit on the far side of the drone-dragon, we would be able to make a break for it.  Shatterbird could drag the two sleds faster than the dogs could run.  She wasn’t that fast: I could remember how she’d fallen behind the rest of the Nine in the fight where we’d taken her captive.  Still, they could fend for themselves for just a little while, while Bitch and I got some breathing room to prepare a counterattack.

The drone-deployer could see what I was doing.  Drones were moving down to cut me off.  Cut us off, as Bitch had followed.  Bentley and I crashed through the store entryway and into the mall proper.  It wasn’t a big place, and the interior was riddled with tents where some people had holed up.  Store owners wanting to protect their goods?  The area was empty now.  Had Azazel evacuated it?

I could sense two drones orienting themselves to bar our way, and steered Bentley between them.  Twenty or twenty-five feet of distance would be enough, if there wasn’t anything to conduct the ambient electric charge.

There was.  Bentley and I were rocked as both drones fired off at once.  The dog took it harder than I did, and we sprawled.

Bitch slowed as she approached.  She started to head my way, maybe to rescue me, maybe to help Bentley, but I could sense a drone moving straight for me.

“Go!”  I shouted.

She turned and ran, the third drone turning to pursue her.  It was too slow.  She, at least, would get away.

I couldn’t say why the electricity had reached me.  I’d thought I’d figured out their basic range when I’d first fought them, but maybe the simultaneous effect had extended the charge between them?  Or there was something nearby that had helped carry the charge, something in the tents or the mall’s design?

Through the plexiglass that framed the mall entrance, I caught a glimpse of Azazel.  The scales that covered it were small and dark, glossy, and the spaces between them glowed like hot coals, red and orange.  Its head paused as it glanced through the window, and a red eye fixed on me.  It stamped one claw down on the ground, in a movement my swarm had felt too many times.

No.

The rod extended beneath me before I could climb to my feet.  In one second, smaller branches had extended under, over and around me.  One more second passed, and they bloomed into the blurry effect.  Bright red, orange and purple, as if to signify the danger it posed in the most basic, primal sense, like the yellow of hornets or the bright red of poisonous berries.

I froze, afraid to even breathe.  I was still in one piece.

Tentatively, I commanded some of the bugs out from beneath my costume.  The insulation had protected some, luck and sheer durability had saved a scant few others.  They died the second they moved more than an inch away from my body, vaporized.

My heart was pounding from the recent exertion, adrenaline still flowing through my veins.  As I realized the situation I was in, my body was shifting into fight or flight mode, but humans weren’t engineered to go into the same ‘deer in the headlights’ state like conventional prey animals.  And that was what I needed to do.  I needed to freeze, not to fight, struggle or run.

My lungs screamed for oxygen, and I let out a small breath.  It came out as a half-whimper.  I watched as one lock of hair shifted from where it was draped over my shoulderpad, slipped down to touch the blurry growth that surrounded me.  It turned to dust, and I held my breath yet again, afraid I’d inhale the vaporized hair and cough.

Azazel was taking the long way around the building, heading into the same storefront I’d ridden Bentley through.  It wasn’t huge, but it was big, and its progress was agonizingly slow.

I’d been on my hands and knees for ten seconds, maybe twenty, but already my body was feeling the strain, screaming at me to change position.  A crease on the inside of one of my kneepads was digging against the bone of my kneecap.  The branches that extended around me might hold me, but they might not, either.

And there was nobody even close by.  If this was the movies, it would have been an opportune time for Tattletale to make her move, but we’d already been that fortunate once, with Imp forcing Piggot to order a standby.  I couldn’t hope for a second lucky save.

Azazel was moving through the store now.  It was a minute away, as it carefully planted its feet to avoid crushing store merchandise.  I wanted to scream at it to move faster, that I was afraid my hand would lose traction on the dusty tile and slip into the disintegration effect.  I could lose a limb like that, or belly-flop onto the blur beneath me, bisecting myself.

Why hadn’t it cut me when it grew?  Because whatever guided the growth kept it from tearing up the surrounding material.  It was why the Halberd and dagger hadn’t been destroyed by the growth of the disintegration cloud around them, why the growing ‘hedges’ of the stuff hadn’t cut out sections of building.

I wasn’t in immediate danger, besides the obvious, so I decided to try something.

“I’m going to fall!” I screamed.

I could sense Azazel lunging forward, crushing a store display as it hurried to the opening, its mouth opening.  It directed a blast of superheated air at the ground, so it cut through the lowest portion of the disintegration hedge, clearing the area beneath and around me.  I winced at the heat of it, but took it for what it was.

“You may lie down but do not try to move from your current location, Skitter,” the machine spoke.  It was the same voice as the armbands and drones, but deeper.  “Do not stand or make dramatic movements or you may be harmed.”

The message delivered, Azazel began spraying Bentley down with containment foam.

I checked with my remaining bugs.  A bubble with a four-foot radius had been cleared around me, but the larger branches still existed and a rough dome loomed over me.  The area where the hot air had been vented in made for an area I might have been able to fit an arm or leg through if I felt brave, but I wouldn’t be able to crawl through, not with the branches being where they were.

“You assholes aren’t holding back,” I muttered.  When the suit didn’t respond, I glanced up.  It was standing stationary above me, apparently content to have me and me alone.

My allies were still making a run for it.  The drone ship pursued Shatterbird, Regent, Imp, Barker and Biter, and some stray drones were chasing Bitch but falling behind.  I positioned the relay bugs to keep in touch, but didn’t know what to communicate.  That I was captured, but they shouldn’t come back for me without a plan or reinforcements?  Bitch would let them know.

No, I was stuck here, in custody.

“So, she design you to talk?”  I asked.

Silence.

“This statement is false,” I told it.

“I’ll go with true.  There, that was easy,” Azazel replied.

Damn.  Wouldn’t be able to shut it down with paradox.  Dragon apparently had a sense of humor.  The reply sounded canned, a recitation.  Or she had a liking for popular culture I wasn’t aware of.

Think, Taylor, think!  What were my options?  I had bugs, but they wouldn’t be able to do anything.  I drew them closer, wary of the two drones that were picking themselves off the ground.  Bentley was down.  My weapons wouldn’t cut me free, and I was leery of trying to use my weapons on the larger branches, in case I brought something down on my head.

Armsmaster had called it nanotechnology.  It cut through anything, everything.  If some dropped free and fell to the ground, would it keep falling, cutting out a bottomless pit?

No, I needed to find and exploit weaknesses.  If my costumed career had taught me two things, it was that things could always get worse, and there was always a solution.  It was, in a way, why I wasn’t freaking out over the end of the world.  I’d already accepted that things could get bad, and I held out hope that we could find a way out.

I could find a way out here.

The suit had used a heat gun.  Was the nanotech vulnerable to heat?  To fire?  It would be ironic in a way.  The growth around me resembled fire with its hues and blurry, transparent nature.  Fire frozen in time.  The entire scene made for a strange picture.  Azazel and its ‘fire’ weren’t moving in the slightest, and the only things that were moving were the two drones that were rotating lazily around Azazel and the clouds of dust that had been stirred by the blast of hot air.

With my swarm, I felt around my utility compartment.  Yes, I had a box of matches.  I’d packed tissues in there to keep them from rattling around, like I did with my changepurse, so I’d have to use my hands to withdraw them, probably.  The suit wouldn’t let me once it saw what I was doing.  I wasn’t sure what the response would be, but it could range from blasting me with containment foam the second the fire ate at the nanotech to hitting me with that superheated air to blow me into the side of the dome, vaporizing me.

Had to deal with Azazel first.  I looked up at the reptilian face with glowing red eyes.  I could see the snakelike neck, the human-ish shoulders and arms.  It looked more like a demon than a dragon, from this perspective.

The only weapons I had were my bugs.  There weren’t enough in my range, even with the relay bugs, to do anything to the suit.  The model we’d just fought in Bitch’s territory had been able to bend steel, would have been able to tear my spider’s silk.  I couldn’t hope to tie Azazel up.  It was bigger and I was willing to bet it had more raw strength.  Maybe it was better to say that I was confident enough it had more raw strength that I wasn’t willing to take the risk.

No, my bugs wouldn’t serve.  I sent some cockroaches in to see if they could nibble through the insulation of some wires, but it felt futile.  Even in what stood to be the more vital areas, like the neck, I doubted my ability to do any real damage.

What other tools did I have?

My voice.

Dragon was smart.  Smart enough to write an A.I. that wouldn’t crumble to a simple issue with paradox.  But the A.I. wasn’t necessarily brilliant.  It had leaped to my defense when I’d said I was in danger.  Either it wasn’t smart enough to discern truth from a lie, or it wasn’t allowed to when a life was potentially in danger.

I’d wondered if the machines were obligated to preserve our lives.  Now I had a better sense of it.  Now how to use it?

Regent and Imp were still fleeing the area on one of Shatterbird’s sleds.  They had outpaced the drone ship, which was moving too slowly to pursue even Shatterbird.  It was better suited, it seemed, for seizing and protecting an area than for pursuit.  Good.

I drew out a message on Regent’s back.  ‘Hide’.  Imp was directly behind him, and bugs on a white shirt would be clear as day to her.  I hoped.  They were almost out of my range, relay bugs or no.

“You’re Azazel, correct?”

“Correct.”

“What’s the other ship called?”

“The Glaurung Zero is an old model, designed to deploy drones of varying loadouts.”

“Thank you for the information.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Don’t suppose you’ll tell me how to defeat you?”

“No.”

“Or your self destruct code?”

“No.”

“What if I told you that you were putting a human life in grave danger?”

“I have no reasonable cause to believe that.”

Damn.

But if it wasn’t designed to tell truth from a falsehood, maybe…

“Imp had a second trigger event.  She should be invisible to your sensors.”

“I have no reasonable cause to believe that.”

“Doesn’t matter.  Imp may be in this room.  If you move a foot, you could be stepping on her.”

“Imp could not be in this room.  As of two minutes ago she was recorded at a distance of .4 miles away from this location.  She could not return here in that span of time unobserved.”

The suits were communicating.  That was good to know, but it wasn’t exactly good.  It made this harder.

“She could if Trickster leapfrogged her here,” I said.  If Trickster was currently engaged in a fight with one of the other models, this could blow up in my face.

But the suit didn’t refute me.  It didn’t speak at all.

“I used my power to signal Imp and Trickster and ask them to help.  They’re nearby, and it’s very possible Imp is here.  She could be crawling on top of you, for all you know.  If you open your mouth, move your head or move a wing, you might be causing her to fall.  With your head being where it is, it’s not impossible she could fall and roll into this nanotech hedge you’ve made, right?”

I waited for a response, for the canned reply saying Azazel had no reasonable cause ot believe it.  Nothing.

Had it worked?

“Maybe I should be more specific,” I said.  “I told them to help in general.  They might not be helping me, so it’s very possible that any other suit might be in immediate proximity to Imp.  Be careful you don’t accidentally crush her.”

No reply.  Hopefully that would help the others somehow.  It wouldn’t stop any of the ones in the air like that Glaurung drone suit, but it could stall others.

“Now,” I said, picking my words carefully, my pulse pounding, “I’m going to light a match and try to burn this thing away.”

I drew the matchbook from behind my back, grabbed a match from the box.

Hesitated.

If the hedge burned quickly enough to matter, what would happen?  Azazel could easily spray me down in containment foam.

I began organizing my bugs, placing them on the ceiling, drawing out lines of silk cord.

The PRT could be entering my range any second, ready to take me into custody.  I needed to be fast, but I couldn’t rush this.  I was replicating the natural design of a spiderweb, three times over, but I was making each strand fifty or sixty times as thick, braiding other threads into cords and braiding cords into thicker strands.

It took a minute before I was satisfied.  I was aware of the drone that hovered some distance over my head.  I adopted a general runner’s pose, then lit the match.  With my bugs, I was able to sense the safe distance I could raise my hand, match held high.

It burned faster than I would have thought.  With a whoosh like I might expect from lighting a barbecue, it was gone.

A series of things happened in that instant.  I pulled free of the branches that hadn’t burned away, sprinting for the exit,  Azazel opened its mouth and began spewing containment foam, and the drone began speaking, “Attention Citizen…”

I maneuvered the spiderweb-nets into place in the stream.  Two were far enough away to catch only a little, but the burden was heavy, growing more awkward for my bugs as the expanding foam captured some and rendered them unable to fly.

I still managed to drag the foam-nets into place, covering one drone’s eye-lens and the other’s gravity panel.  They spiraled out of control, one striking a column, the other plummeting for the ground.

The other net was fixed just in front of Azazel’s mouth, strands already wound around the scales of its face.  It tore free on one side, but the foam expanded, forming a beard, then covering its mouth.

The makeshift barrier had kept the worst of the foam from reaching me.  I scrambled out of the way of the rest, narrowly avoiding getting the damned stuff on my costume.

Azazel’s chest opened, and a grappling hook speared out.  Still trying to recover from dodging the foam, I couldn’t dodge it.  It seized me, and I hurried to climb over the railing that surrounded the now-empty fountain to keep Azazel from drawing me up into its chest.  Or into the foam that wreathed its head.

I climbed under the railing, to see if I could wind it up any further, then jerked to a stop.  The hook was frozen in midair, still clutching the armor at my chest and shoulder.

Right.  So this was how they’d planned to counteract Siberian.

I couldn’t free myself, and I couldn’t fight back, so I waited.

Armsmaster had said this technology drained his batteries, but Azazel could have a major power source in its chest.

It took only a minute before the hook went limp.  I managed to pry myself free.

Other than opening its mouth to spray the foam and turning its head, Azazel hadn’t budged from its position.

With my swarm, I signaled Regent and Imp:  ‘Good job.  Come back fast.’

Without Bentley, I couldn’t cover enough ground.  Couldn’t run.  I found a hiding spot by the mall entrance instead.  From the spot, I used my swarm to covertly keep an eye on Azazel, praying that whatever Dragon was doing was consuming her attention.  Praying that she wasn’t about to override the simple head game I’d pulled on her hyperadvanced mecha-suit.

■

A very satisfying crunching noise rang through the minimall.  I stood there, watching in approval with my arms folded as Grue, Sundancer, Ballistic and Genesis approached.  I’d signaled Trickster to tell him to stay back.  No use giving the suit a way to rationalize its way out of my lie.

“Is that the Azazel?”  Grue asked.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“It’s not moving.”

“Because I told it that it might crush Imp if it did.”

“Ah,” Grue answered.  He didn’t ask for clarification.

“How’d it go?”  Regent asked.  Azazel had started venting the mist to clear away the containment foam, freeing its head and front claws where it had been covered in its own foam, but I’d already formed a mesh of spiderwebs to keep it from opening fire with any of its weapons.  The mist had also exposed enough of Bentley for us to save him.  Working together, we’d already cut the real Bentley free of the desiccated flesh of his larger self that contained him.  The bulldog and Bastard were happily sitting between Bitch and I.  Shatterbird was hammering at Azazel, smashing it repeatedly with a massive wrecking ball of condensed glass.

Sundancer spoke up, “We took down the hybrid model.  Giant gun, was sitting in the stratosphere, shooting down Genesis every time she sent a body out into the open.”

“Our group took down two,” Bitch said.

“Where are the others?  Shouldn’t more reinforcements be arriving?”  Grue asked.

I shrugged, “If they come, I’ll know, and we can react.  We’ve gotten this far.”

A minute passed, punctuated by the thud of the glass sphere against Azazel’s outer body. Only a little damage was done with each hit, but it was adding up.  That, and it felt good, in a way.

Sundancer created an orb of flame and drove it into Azazel.  I watched as the metal melted and the wiring burned in clouds of acrid black smoke.  In the span of a minute, the suit was slag.  I signaled Imp and Trickster to tell them it was okay to approach.

We watched the suit burn.  Trickster and Imp joined us from the outskirts of the mall.

“I feel bad about this,” I said.

“Why the fuck would you feel bad?” Bitch asked.

“They must have put millions into manufacturing this.  That was supposed to stop the Nine, and It was powerful enough that it might have, if it’d had Dragon’s brain backing it up.”

“They can build more,” Grue said.

“Scary thought,” Sundancer commented.

“We got lucky,” I said.  “What with Imp being able to force Piggot to shut them down, and the way I could exploit it’s A.I. to lock down its movements.  Maybe you can make a program versatile and leave yourself open to the program using loopholes to work around any safeties you put in place.  Or you can make it heavily restricted and leave it open to vulnerabilities like what I exploited there.  I guess we’re a ways off from an A.I. being smart enough to work around those limitations.”

“It’s a matter of time,” Regent said.

“You’re such a pessimist,” Imp retorted.

“And I’m so right.”

The suit continued to burn.  Containment foam billowed out of a container within Azazel’s body, putting out the worst of the flames and leaving us with an assurance that Azazel wouldn’t be lurching back to life the second we turned our backs.

“Let’s go,” Grue said.  “Four more suits to take down, and we don’t have long before it gets dark.”

I nodded.

We were half a block away from the minimall when a phone rang, startling the living daylights out of us.  It was my satellite phone.

Dragon?  

Tattletale: “Phones are back on.”

“Why?  Is she baiting us?  Trying to get us to reveal our positions?”

“She’s gone,” Tattletale replied.  “Suits leaving the city, satellite phones are working.  Few factors at play, there.  I got word back from the Dragonslayers.  Paid them a few million bucks to tell me how they keep getting the upper hand on Dragon, tell me how she’s relaying commands to her suits.  With that, I had some squads plant C-4 and knock down cell towers.  That slowed her down, cut her bandwidth, so to speak, and limited her ability to reprogram them on the fly.  I’m guessing you guys took out one or more suits?”

“Three,” Bitch said.

“Two or three,” I clarified.

“That cost the Protectorate a good chunk of cash, and it’s detracting from Dragon’s primary mission, which is the Nine.  My guess is she’s zeroing in on them.  Better to have a few suits closer to where she thinks they are than to leave them here in the city for you guys to keep breaking.  So she thinks, anyways, and the bigwigs that are footing the bill seem to agree.”

“I can live with that,” I said.

“I think we all can.  It doesn’t mean there won’t be more coming down the road.  But whatever else she does, she won’t be able to sell the local government on the idea that victory is a hundred percent assured, and she’ll have to justify the costs to the PRT.  That means we’re getting a reprieve.  When she does come back, it’ll only be because she’s certain she can win.”

I glanced around at the others.  “That’s good to know, kind of.”

“What’s important is it won’t be in the next little while.  If they intend to send someone like Eidolon or Alexandria here, even, it won’t be anytime soon.  So I can give you the official announcement.  We won.  Job complete.  The Pure have hauled ass out of town, Faultline’s apparently decided it’s safer to be out of the city, and you’ve humiliated the heroes enough that they can’t honestly contest your claim.  There’s nobody left.”

“The city is ours?” Grue asked.

“The city is ours.  And here’s the thing.  Order from the one in charge,” Lisa paused, and her meaning was clear.  An order from Coil.  “You’re done.  Good job.  Your final order for the time being is to take a few days off.  No costumed tomfoolery.  Go back to your territories, make sure things are okay, but no getting into fights.  If I see you out in costume, you’re fired.  Hell, I’ll shoot you.”

It sounded like a joke, the way Tattletale put it, but the deeper meaning was clear.  Coil was telling us to stand down.  No matter what.

“Just like that?” Grue asked.

“Yeah,” Tattletale said.

“I was going to go out,” I said, “Uncostumed, don’t worry, but um-“

Didn’t want to say where I was going on a line the heroes might be listening in on.

“I get it,” Tattletale said.  “I know where.  One sec.”

A pause.  No doubt while she checked with Coil.

“Okay.  Cool,” she said.

“I can go?  It won’t cause issues?”

“No issues.  So long as you-“

“I know,” I cut her off.  So long as I left the costume at home.

“We’ll talk later,” she said.  “Gonna go see if I can get more details on what happened.  Betting someone blew their top when they realized you guys demolished two of those suits.”

“Three,” Bitch said.

“Sure, three,” Tattletale clarified.  “Ta ta.”

She hung up.

Our group paused, each of us looking to the others, as if we couldn’t believe it, or we were measuring each other’s reactions.

We’d won.  We’d cost the PRT too much in resources, pride and money, and they’d apparently decided it wasn’t worth their time to uproot us.  I hated the bureaucracy, the fucked up mindset of the institutions, but it was clearly working in our favor here, at least.

Coil had his city.  There was nothing more I could do.  The only thing stopping Coil from following through on his end of the deal and releasing Dinah was, well, Coil.

I exhaled slowly, letting out a deep breath that I felt like I’d been holding in for a month.

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Monarch 16.4

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I was turning to leave when I was struck with a thought.  “Did Bitch move to her new territory yet?  I know we planned for her to relocate to the city outskirts.”

“Not yet,” Tattletale answered.  She was tying the gag back in place.  Piggot was screwing her eyes closed in disgust.

“So she’s somewhere near the Trainyard.”

“Yeah,” Tattletale replied.

“We’re going to need transportation if we’re going to get there without losing too much time.”

“Brooks can hotwire a car for you, show you how to start it up again when you’re ready to head back,” Tattletale suggested.

“No.  I’m not sure it’ll be able to navigate all the fenced off areas and debris that’ll be in the Trainyard.  Bitch hasn’t been clearing the mess, as far as I know, and it wasn’t easy to navigate to begin with.”

“If we use the car to get there…” Grue started.

I finished his sentence for him, “We run the risk that it’ll break down, run out of gas or get wrecked somewhere, stranding us and forcing us to hike across half the city to get to Ballistic’s territory.  Let’s minimize the opportunities for stuff to go wrong.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Tattletale said.

I glanced at Piggot.  “We’re capes, not beggars.  I was thinking about Sundancer and something like a hot air balloon, but I’m not sure how much forward acceleration you could pick up that way.  But something like that.  A lot of our powers operate off virtually limitless power sources.  I’ve used my power all day, every day and I haven’t been any worse for wear.  Can we use that for some extra mobility while we don’t have Bitch on the team?”

“You could try a James and the Giant Peach thing with us,” Imp said, “Only it’d be backwards: bugs on strings and the ‘bird along for the ride.”

I shook my head.  “My bugs would get tired.  That leaves Shatterbird.”

“I can only fly with one person, maybe two,” Regent and Shatterbird spoke in unison.

“What if you aren’t flying?”  I asked.

■

Maybe not my best idea in retrospect.

We were putting our lives in Shatterbird’s hands.  Or in Regent’s hands, depending on how I interpreted it.  Which wasn’t to say we weren’t getting where we needed to be in record time.

Shatterbird had pressed and embedded glass into the wood of a door we’d taken off the hinges, and Regent, Imp and I were standing on the surface while Shatterbird flew above us, using her power to pull on the glass.  With our weight resting more towards the back than the front, the door was angled upward, skimming on the surface of the road or through the shallow water of streets that were still flooded.

We had to be pushing forty or fifty miles an hour, and any time we were forced to make a turn, we inevitably went wide, sometimes bouncing off of a wall.  That was without getting into the cars and debris that still covered the roads or our total lack of solid hand-holds, seats, seatbelts or brakes.  I’d parceled out silk cord to grip, but they also served to emphasize how momentum swung us out to one side or another when we turned.  It was easy to underestimate how fast even a lower cruising speed was when safe inside the interior of a vehicle, removed from the road by two to four feet of solid material..

Either way, we headed into the thick of the Docks.  Our makeshift vehicle sped towards a chain link fence.

“Regent, fence,” I warned, leaning forward to speak into his ear and make sure he could hear me.

We continued forward without slowing.  Half a block away, seventy feet away…

“Fence!” I raised my voice.

Thirty feet away…

Shatterbird hit the fence with a wave of glass, knocking it down to a forty-five degree angle.  Our makeshift craft lifted up fractionally and we hit the makeshift ramp, remaining airborne for only a second or two before hitting the ground and continuing forward.

“You dick,” I swore.

Regent and Imp laughed and cackled.

What had I been thinking, inflicting this pair on myself?

We made our way into the Trainyard, and the ride became much bumpier as we navigated areas with overgrown grass, train tracks and piles of trash.  A crash and howl informed us of our destination before my bugs did.  I signaled Regent when we were close enough so he could bring the craft to a stop.

Bitch and the dogs were fighting, and there were signs the fighting had been going on for a while.

There were six dogs in the area, including Bastard, Bentley and Sirius, but only Bastard and Bentley were still fighting.  Bitch, Barker and Biter had stepped up to fight, as well, with Bitch’s civilian henchpersons were hiding nearby.  The vet-girl was taking care of a smaller dog.

Looking at the situation, I couldn’t figure out why they’d be having trouble with their opponent.  Dragon’s suit wasn’t that large, didn’t seem to have that much in the way of weapons or gear.  She stood maybe eight feet tall, eight feet wide, with each arm forming roughly a third of its mass, ending in disproportionately large, squat claws.

Barker screamed, then slammed his teeth together with a clack my bugs could hear.  His power turned the noise into a concussive force, erupting around the armored suit.  The suit reeled, staggering back from where it stood on top of a derelict train, nearly falling.  One of the dogs charged and tackled it, tearing into it with claws and teeth.

The suit hauled the dog off it, climbing to its feet in an instant.  It leaped forward to close the distance to its human opponents, and Biter stepped forward to meet it, his fist swelling to five times the normal size, along with the spikes and blades he’d worked into the fabric of his glove.  The suit went flying, gathering itself into a rough ball shape as it careened backwards into the side of a train.

Had we stepped in just as the fight was wrapping up?

The suit stood.  That didn’t surprise me.  It brought its claws to either side and clawed at the side of the train, crumpling metal in its massive claws.  My bugs gave me a sense of what was going on as the suit drew the metal into itself with crushing mechanisms and gears.  Its torso expanded slightly as it made room for the new material, armor plates reshaped by internal mechanisms and shifted into place to patch up the worst of the damage.

I arrived on the scene, Imp and Regent only a short distance behind me.  A glance showed me that Bitch, her underlings and her dogs were injured, beaten to the point that they were dirty, bruised and scraped.  Her eyes widened as I approached.

“It won’t,” she growled the words between pants for breath, “Fucking die!”

I wouldn’t have picked a brute-type machine to go up against Bitch, if I’d been in Dragon’s shoes, but she’d apparently decided this would be a good matchup.  Or was this Armsmaster’s idea?  I was put in mind of the fight at the fundraiser, him trying to not just defeat Bitch, but to beat her into submission.

Not that he was really fighting for a crowd, here.

Or was it something else?  The suit could absorb metal, what would give Bitch that much trouble?

“It’s drawing scrap metal into itself,” I said.  “Self repairing.”

“I know.”

“So stop it from getting the scrap metal.”

“You want to fucking try?”

This wasn’t good.  From the moment we arrived on the scene, this suit would probably be signalling others.  We couldn’t be sure that Piggot’s order to stand down would still be in effect for the other suits, so we had to anticipate reinforcements.  Except this suit seemed to be made to be durable, to stall and wear us down.  It wouldn’t be easy to take this down in the limited time we had.

Which was it?  The Melusine?  The whatchamacallit-Nidhug hybrid?  Or was it the Azazel, presumably designed to take on the Nine, with defeating the Undersiders as a secondary design goal?

“We’ll try together,” I said.  “Regent, we need Shatterbird in here.  Imp, you’re backing us up.  Drag the injured to safety.  Did you ever take that first aid class?”

“Grue told me to, but I haven’t gotten around to it.”

I swore under my breath.

“Not totally my fault.  Things have been kind of a mess since I joined the team.  Not like there’re classes or anything.”

“There probably are.”  I watched the suit step away from the train, adjusting its shape to sort out the additional material it had absorbed into its body.

“Not like it’s easy to find classes,” she clarified.

“Just take care of anyone that gets hurt.  I don’t know how much you can do here.  I think one of Bitch’s henchmen is over there,” I said, pointing.

“Okay,” Imp retreated.

“I’m telling you,” Bitch growled the words, “Can’t fight it.  It doesn’t die.”

“We’ll try.  There’s got to be a way.  Barker, Biter, you two okay?”

“Hurt,” Biter said.

Barker nodded, “Throat’s sore.  Keep knocking it down, it keeps getting back up.”

“One or two more tries,” I said.  “We hit it with everything we’ve got.  Bitch, which dogs are least hurt?”

“Bentley and Bastard.  Had a few more I was sending in, but they’re hard enough to order around when something isn’t hurting them.”

“We’ll need their help, then.”

“Bastard’s not trained enough.”

I glanced at the wolf cub.  He was five or six times his usual size.  He’d grown rapidly in the past few weeks, but it still meant he was small.  His mutation seemed different from the other dogs.  Was there a whole other department of changes with various subcategories of the wolf breed?

The suit raised one hand, and a chain fired out, a grappling hook on the end.  We threw ourselves out of the way before it could catch any of us.

“Keeps doing that,” Barker muttered.  His voice was gravelly.  “Trying to tire us out.  Wear us down.”

“Let’s avoid giving it another chance.  Longer range powers first, everyone else close in.”

I hadn’t even finished talking before Shatterbird was hurling the glass-coated door into the suit.  She followed up with a veritable tide of glass shards, pulling them from debris and the edges of the street.  The suit staggered back, putting it closer to the train she had just harvested scrap metal from.

“Keep it away from anything metal!”  I reminded them.

Easier said than done.  The area was a fenced in yard with railroad tracks, rusted train cars and trash that ranged from sign posts to disused trash cans.  There was metal to spare.

I was limited in my options.  Bugs wouldn’t hurt this thing’s metal body.  That left me the less stellar option of fighting it like I had Mannequin.

Barker shouted three times in short succession before bidding the resulting clouds of smoke to detonate violently.  The suit shielded itself with its arms, leaving it defenseless as Bentley flanked and charged it from one side.  It sprawled, landing face down, and reached over to grab two rails from the train track.  In one motion it rose to its feet and hauled two lengths track out of the ground.  Each of the rails bent and folded as they were absorbed into the suit, churned up by grinders and more complex devices.

Bentley charged again, but the suit swung both rails simultaneously to catch the dog in mid-air and hurl him to one side.  Bentley was on his feet in a second, getting his paws under him and lunging for the suit before it could turn to face him, savaging the suit’s metal exterior with claws and teeth.

My bugs began to encircle the suit.  The silk had enough areas to catch on, and my bugs were finding openings to crawl within, but I couldn’t find much in the way of stuff to interfere with or attack.  The suit’s interior was hot, more so as my bugs drew closer to the very center, to the point that my bugs died if they got too far inside.  Everything was solidly made; wires had chain mesh protecting the insulation, pistons and valves were sealed and reinforced, with more delicate technology presumably contained within cases and covers. There was nothing for my bugs to get into.

Using silk to bind the main body wouldn’t do anything.  Spider silk had strength on par with steel, but this was an armored suit capable of tearing railroad tracks from the ground and crushing them in one hand.  A material as strong as steel wouldn’t accomplish anything against a machine that could rend metal.

I’d have to play this smarter.  I used cords of silk to seal valves shut or bind them in an open position where I could, and focused the rest of my efforts on more strategic deployments, forming cords as big around as my arm.  The suit’s arms and legs would be free to move, but my goal was more along the lines of restricting its movements.

Biter used the metal ‘bear trap’ jaw-guard in combination with his ability to distort parts of his body to large sizes, clamping down on the suit’s hand.  He had to hurl himself back and out of the way to avoid the suit’s retaliatory attack.  As he climbed to his feet, he spat out two fingers and a section of the suit’s hand.  I hurried to send my swarm after the discarded parts, using silk and the cumulative strength of the swarm to haul the bits away.

Biter hit the suit twice with enlarged hands and then backed off as Bentley hurled himself into the fray, catching hold of the suit’s other arm and hauling on it with all the strength afforded by his muscular forelimbs, neck, jaw and shoulders.  He struggled, strained, to tear the arm from its housing.

The suit fought to keep its feet beneath it, leaning hard to one side to compensate for the two-ton bulldog’s weight hanging off its arm.  It used its free, damaged hand to grab the dog by the scruff of the neck and flung it hard to one side.

Shatterbird hurled a wave of glass-encrusted debris at the suit.  Not one second after the suit was bludgeoned by the trash cans, wooden planks and pallets, a second wave caught it from behind, striking its legs out from beneath it.

Lying on its back it reached for us and fired another grappling hook.  With the speed it was moving, it looked like it could have caved in someone’s ribs, but we each managed to get out of the way.  Some of the people in Bitch’s group were moving slower, their reflexes and mobility suffering due to their fatigue.

Okay, this wasn’t easy, but it didn’t seem as impossibly hard a fight as some of the other suits, either.  It was just a question of keeping up the onslaught, keeping the suit from gathering too much metal for self-repair and hoping that the suit didn’t get any reinforcements.  With luck, the other suits would be either on standby due to Piggot’s orders or they would be occupied with Trickster, Sundancer and Grue.  Not that it would be a good thing if they were fighting, but it would at least mean we got out of here okay.

The suit struggled to its feet, using its arms to shield itself from two more shouts from Barker and a barrage from Shatterbird, then stopped short as the cord of silk I’d bound around its neck pulled taut.  The other end was wound around one of the coupling rods that stretched between the wheels of one rusted train.  I’d worried the coupling rod would come loose, but the elasticity of the silk combined with the durability and sheer thickness of it meant it didn’t snap.  The suit was pulled off-balance, giving Biter and Bentley a chance to close in, hammer it into the ground and thrash it.

I glanced at Bitch, saw her mouth set in a grim line.

The suit fought its way free, and Bitch whistled for Bentley to back up.  I could see how it was mangled, metal torn and rent.  Yes, it had displayed some self-repair technology, but every part of it was a ruined mess.  I didn’t want to underestimate Dragon’s work, but-

Hot steam hissed out from the gaps in the suit, seconds before it turned itself inside out.  The parts on the exterior folded out and were absorbed into the suit’s interior, new components emerged from within and locked into place.  They still smoked from the heat of being forged and reforged in the heart of the machine.

The suit’s joints shifted position as it settled into a quadruped stance.

I recognized it, now.  It didn’t have missile launchers, and it was a fraction smaller than it had been, but it was the same suit Dragon had used when I’d first seen her.  The suit she’d used against Leviathan.  That suit had also peeled apart to reveal a lesser suit beneath.  Presumably it had possessed the same self repair capability and the ability to do what this suit had done, but hadn’t had the chance.  Except I wasn’t even sure how to define or process what I’d just seen.  It was such an overhaul that I was left grasping for a word to explain it.  Reincarnation?

It was easy enough to picture.  Any time the suit took enough damage, it reforged itself into a different shape with the reserve components deep inside its body, or it shed its outer layer, ensuring that it was always in pristine fighting condition.  Give it an opportunity and it harvested metal for raw materials, and it would keep going until its battery ran out.

With the kind of stuff a tinker like Dragon could make, cold fusion reactors and self-sustaining energy sources, that battery could have one hell of a long life.

Either way, it wasn’t a new model.  That meant it wasn’t the Azazel suit Piggot had told us about.

“You could have explained,” I said.

“I did,” Bitch answered, glowering at the smoking suit.  “I said it won’t fucking go down.”

“You could have explained why.”

“I don’t understand why!”

The reforging process had killed every bug I had on the thing, and it had burned through the silk cord I’d leashed it with.  I was left wondering what the black market price would be for something like Armsmaster’s EMP device.  Something that would serve as a get-out-of-a-fight-with-a-tinker-card.

Tinkers had so many options that they brought to the table, a crazy synergy with any teammates, and an ability to customize their approach to counter specific threats or individuals.  I, on the other hand, was pretty screwed if I went up against anyone with flame powers, cold powers, electricity powers, enough durability to shrug off my bugs or a way to clear out large numbers of bugs at once.  I’d managed thus far by thinking on my feet, but it sort of pissed me off that tinkers existed as the antithesis of that.

Yes, I was aware that tinkers had to put in hours upon hours of work, and that I only ever really experienced the end results of that investment.  I didn’t care.  Whether they had vat grown monsters, clockwork lairs, impenetrable suits of armor, jetpacks and exploding guitars or programs to tell them how to win a fight, tinkers were a fucking pain in the ass.

“New plan,” I announced.  “We hit it hard enough to slow it down and then we scram.”

“You want to run?” Bitch asked.

“We don’t have a choice.”

“We do,” she said, still glowering at the suit.  “We gotta kill this thing sometime anyways, so you come up with a plan like you usually do, we’ll make it happen, and I won’t have to give up territory to this armor asshole.”

I stared at her, trying and failing to process how she was looking at the situation.  Then it dawned on me.  This was why Dragon and Armsmaster had pit this suit against her.  It wasn’t that it countered her power, exactly.  It was that it was set up to work against her stubborn nature.  With the way her mind worked, she couldn’t back down from a fight she subconsciously felt like she was winning.  It didn’t matter that we were losing in the long run, she was focused on the fact that we could do damage, and walking away would be a forfeit.

Barker was screaming a long series of invectives at the suit, detonating them.  With four legs solidly on the ground, it wasn’t budging, and Barker’s shouts weren’t doing much to the armor.

“Look at it this way,” I said, trying to stay calm,  “We just defeated it.  Heck, every time you’ve forced it to change like that, that’s been a win for you.  How many times was that?”

“Four.”

“Four times, you’ve kicked its ass.  If you walk away, that’s five wins total and one loss, if you can even call that a loss.  But we can’t afford to stay much longer, or one of your dogs is bound to get hurt.”

As if to give evidence to my statement, Bentley howled as he grappled with the suit, trying to tear into its neck while the suit attempted to wrestle him down to the ground.  Biter leaped onto the machine’s back, his hands with the spiked knuckles worked into the gloves growing larger so he could tear the armor plates away.  Bentley joined in, setting his teeth at the lower part of the armored suit’s ‘spine’, for lack of a better word.

Her eyes narrowed.  “We run?”

“We have to stop it from following first.  One more time, guys!  Regent, stand ready!  We need as much glass as you can spare!”

The suit turned our way.  Three masters, standing in the back lines while we sent our bugs, dogs and lunatic supervillain thrall into the fray.

It began to glow, steaming, and Biter virtually yelped as he threw himself off of its back.  Bentley was slower to react, but he fell back, shaking his head violently as flesh sizzled around his muzzle.

We backed up a few paces as it advanced one step.  It whipped its head up until it almost pointed to the sky, then opened its mouth.  Blue flame streamed over our heads to pool behind us, cutting off our retreat.  We had to scramble for cover before any droplets or sparks landed on us.  I wasn’t sure if it was flame at a temperature I wasn’t used to seeing, if it was a liquid accellerant that just happened to be on fire or if it was plasma, but I didn’t want to touch it and find out the particulars.

All of us, dogs, Barker and Biter included, headed inside a building to seek further cover.  The structure rumbled as the suit climbed the side and settled on the roof.  The A.I.s liked high places, it seemed.

“Need to hit it hard,” I said, my voice pitched low so the suit wouldn’t overhear.  “One good hit.”

“We don’t have one good hitter,” Imp said.  I turned my head to see her crouching by the vet and one wounded dog.  “Maybe Shatterbird, but everyone else is about a lot of littler hits.”

“We need one good hit from someone who isn’t Shatterbird,” I clarified.

“Can’t,” Biter said.  “Limit to how big I can grow myself before I do permanent damage.”

“Define permanent damage.”

“Stretch marks, scarring, permanent aches and pains.  I have some in my midsection, all day, every day, it hurts.”

“Okay,” I said.  “Barker?”

“I can’t hurt the fucker.”

“You screamed something like three times, then detonated that smoke you make whenever you make noise.  Can you do it more?  More shouts, louder?”

“At my limit.  Probably not.”

“Bentley’s hurt,” I said, “What about Bastard?”

“He’ll probably listen to me, but he might attack anyone else.  He’s too dangerous when big.”

“And that suit’s dangerous too.  In case you haven’t noticed, it’s either trying to beat us to a pulp so it can drag us into custody or it’s going to burn us alive.  We have to use one of your dogs, and Bastard’s in the best shape.  We have to use him.”

Bitch frowned, “How?”

I told her.  “You’ve taught him to fetch?”

She nodded.

“Fetch something big, then,” I said.  “Wait until my signal, hit him as hard as you can. Everyone else, let’s run for it.”

I could see Bitch tense.  Her henchwoman, the vet, stood and nervously circled around the edge of the room to join us, giving Bitch a bit of space.

“You’re leaving me behind.”

“We’re counting on you,” I said.  “Wait for my signal, then come with Bastard.  More damage you can do, the better.”

All together, we bolted, Bentley following immediately behind us.  I could feel the Dragon suit reorienting to face us, felt it angle its head before it spewed another stream of liquid fire.

In a residential area?  This wasn’t an occupied area, but… well, the suit might know that.  It might be another reason it was deployed here.

“Hard right!”  I shouted.  We turned to head for a nearby alleyway before the liquid fire even touched ground.

The suit leaped, and I grabbed Imp’s wrist, hauling her out of the way.  It landed a short distance from us, then barreled through our group, sending Biter, Barker and the vet-in-training sprawling.

Controlled movements.  Everything it’s doing, it’s all calculated.  Even the more dangerous attacks were geared to hold back just enough to hurt, not to kill.  Even the hurt was fairly minimal.  If Biter had still been on the suit’s back when it turned red-hot, I was willing to bet it would have shaken him off to avoid giving him terminal burns.  There had to be something about that I could use.  Trouble was, I wasn’t sure when or where the suits drew the line.  I couldn’t trust that they’d follow the rules enough that I could offer my own life in the bargain, much less anyone else’s.

I signaled Bitch, and she was out of the building in a second.  Bastard was as large as I’d ever seen him, and there was something about his appearance… he looked less wrong than the others.  The spikes and ridges of bone that lined his body weren’t asymmetrical, and there seemed to be more art to the design.  Drool flew out of the corners of his mouth as he bounded forward, fangs clamped around a wooden post.

The suit was halfway through turning around to face them when Bastard drove the end of the post into its stomach.  It skidded, sparks flying as its claws dug into the pavement for traction.

“Pull it free!”  I shouted.  I didn’t wait for her to follow through before calling out the next order, “Regent, fill the hole!”

Bitch hauled on Bastard’s chain and he followed the direction, pulling back, the post still clamped in his mouth.  When it came loose, it revealed a rent in the armor’s side, far less empty space than I’d hoped, and a dislodged joint where the leg met the pelvis.

Shatterbird called forth a stream of glass, shoving it into the hole.  I didn’t need to give the next order.  I realized she was using her power more through my bugs than any other sign, the telltale high-pitched noise that was above my human limits.  A second later, the suit’s rear legs lost their traction on the ground.  Its lower body collapsed.

The suit began struggling for footing.  It was still operational.  I swore under my breath, still backing away.

Shatterbird moved one arm, and the suit slid a few feet in that direction.  She had a hold on the glass.  More forcefully, she pushed it into the nearest building, then dragged it across the alleyway to slam it into the opposite wall.

She repeated the process two more times before the suit tried a counterplan.  It began to reshape itself, glass shards pouring out of the openings as pieces slid in and out.  A third form, something airborne.

Shatterbird slammed it into a wall before it was done reshaping.  The fallen glass shards levitated into the air to find new nooks and crannies to slide into.

The suit was hot, naturally heating up as part of the reincarnation or reformation process.  I watched as glass melted, running into holes and slats in the armor.

Shatterbird pushed again.  The suit barely moved.  She wasn’t so adept at moving molten silicon.

We continued backing down the alley.  The suit raised its head, preparing to cut off our retreat with another pool of flame.

In her second jousting run, Bitch lanced the thing through the base of the neck.  Fire spilled down around it, setting the post aflame, and the attack was stalled.

She wheeled Bastard around and shouted, “That’s six fucking wins to one!  Go!”

We ran.  I maneuvered my swarm behind me to watch for its approach, felt it step forward and then collapse, its legs giving way.

Even the forelegs?  Okay, that was interesting.

The glass.  It had melted, and it was cooling in the lower recesses, farthest from the body’s core.

I could have told Bitch she’d beat the suit, that we might have defeated it a hundred percent, but I kept my mouth shut.  Didn’t need her acting on what might be a false assumption.  If it freed itself, found a way of reconfiguring where all of the glass-affected areas were contained, or if it simply abandoned its legs in favor of a smaller form… too many possibilities.  Better to leave it and cross our fingers.

Damn tinkers.  What the hell was Dragon’s specialty?  The ability to make stuff without half the time other tinkers would need?  So many different suits, so many different projects and tasks, and it rarely interconnected, if ever.

We ran two or three blocks before we had to stop.  Shatterbird sent glass shards into a nearby door, then tugged it free.  A sled for Regent and Imp.

With some coaxing, I got the vet-trainee to climb onto Bentley’s back.  The other henchman, the guy, climbed up behind me.  Barker approached Bastard, and received a mean growl in response.  We searched for an option for Barker and Biter before Regent and Shatterbird offered another door.

We made good time on our way to Ballistic’s lair.  We’d planned to arrive by dusk, but the sun wasn’t even setting.

The others weren’t there.  We double checked, then mobilized to find them, spreading out.  With reluctance, I drew my relay bugs from the interior of my shoulderpad.  I felt a twinge of disappointment as I handled them, gently passing them on to dragonflies that could carry them.  They were dying.

Panacea hadn’t given the relay bugs a digestive system, and in my haste to save Atlas from a slow death by starvation, I’d neglected to pay attention to them.  It wouldn’t have mattered anyways, probably, because Grue had only had so much time to work with.

The dragonflies sent my relay bugs out so I could keep in touch with the others as we searched for Grue, Trickster, Sundancer and Ballistic.  Bugs were tough, natural survivors.  I knew that cockroaches could survive lengthy periods of time without heads, that other bugs could be frozen solid and thawed and be little worse for wear.  They subsisted on relatively little food considering their body size, and the relay bugs had held on this long with an inability to eat at all.  Their physiology wasn’t quite the mess that Atlas’s was, and they retained some basic hibernation instincts, defaulting to a near-immobile state.  It was a struggle to even get them to extend my power’s range for me.

I found the next dragon suit before I found the others, and I immediately knew it for what it was.  It had to be Azazel.

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Monarch 16.3

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Well, we’d gone up against Dragon, the Wards and the Protectorate at the same time, and our pains had earned us our hostage.  I was worried the next part would be harder.

Trickster started fishing through the pockets of the Director’s suit-jacket.

“Looking for this?” Imp held up the Director’s phone.

“Yeah,” Trickster replied.  He took the phone.  “There’s a chance it’s not scrambled.”

“Bad idea,” I said.  “If-”

I stopped when Grue reached over and blanketed the Director’s head in darkness.

“Don’t need her listening in if we’re talking strategy,” Grue explained.  “Go on.”

“If Dragon’s listening in on the call, and it sounded like she was, we might accidentally divulge some crucial info.  Or we could be alerting those suits to our location.  Or the location of whoever you’re calling.”  I finished.

“Might be.” Trickster replied, “But it’s handy to be able to contact others, and that might be worth the chance that we’d have to run again.”

“Maybe.”

Trickster went on, “We could call Tattletale right now, hop in the truck Imp brought and have her meet us somewhere secluded, or we could split up, with one or more people going ahead to pass word on to her, then wait for her to meet us, wasting a hell of a lot of time in the process.  Keep in mind the suits are still disabled.”

“There’s still the Protectorate and the Wards,” Grue said.

“The only ones capable of moving that fast are Assault and maybe Chariot,” I said.

“We’re short enough on time, and we need to know what happened to our other teammates,” Trickster said.

“It’s not a good idea.”  Grue folded his arms.

“I’m making the call anyways.  We can’t afford to wait.”

Grue stood there, literally fuming as the darkness roiled around him.  After a few long seconds, his pose relaxed and he held his hand out, “Then let me talk to her.  We have a password system.  The rest of you, keep an eye on her, and don’t forget to watch out for incoming threats.”

“Good man.  The two of us will be over there,” Trickster said, pointing to one area where sand and debris had been bulldozed into a small hill.  “Need to talk with ‘Dancer for a second.  Shout if you need a hand.”

I nodded.  Grue, Trickster and Sundancer all stepped away, leaving Regent, Shatterbird, Imp and I to watch over our hostage.

A minute passed, and she shifted position, her head leaving Grue’s darkness.

“Back up,” Regent warned.

“I have bad knees,” the Director said.  “I will if you make me, but it’s painful.  I suppose that could be a way of easing into torture, if that’s your style.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Regent said, uncharacteristically cheery.

“No,” I told him.  To her, I said, “Sit however you want.  We’ll cover you again if we start talking work.”

She gave me a curt nod.

“Maybe we should get her to command the suits?”  Regent asked.

“Won’t work,” the Director replied.

“Why’s that?”  Regent asked.

“I can send them in, I can tell them where to go or when to stand by, but they do what they’re programmed to, and they’re programmed to avoid attacking civilians and local heroes.”

“That didn’t stop the foam-spraying-”  Regent started.

“The Cawthorne model,” the Director interrupted.

“Sure.  That didn’t stop the Cawthorne thing from shooting Trickster when he had Kid Win hostage.”

“I expect Dragon accounted for the fact that you might take hostages and use the nonlethality restrictions of the A.I. against it.  She would have given the machines tools or strategies to work around it.”

“And you’re just volunteering this information?” I asked.

“I said it earlier, I think, but you’re not a stupid girl, Skitter.  Reckless, shortsighted, capricious, violent, even vicious… but not stupid.  I’m hoping you have the sense to realize how dangerous your current position is.  There will be more mechanical suits coming.  There will be heroes coming to Brockton Bay to assist us.  You can’t afford to hold this city, and we can’t afford to let you.  Not in the grand scheme of things.”

“She likes to jabber,” Imp said.  “Should we gag her?  Or make her stick her head back in the dark?”

“Might be better,” Regent answered, looking down at the Director.

“Need a cloth.  I could pull off a sock, jam in her mouth, maybe we tie it in there with Skitter’s silk.  My feet are sweating like crazy in these boots, so it’d be really gross.”

“No,” I said.  “We’re not going to humiliate her.  We get the information we need from her, see if we can’t use her as a hostage to leverage for peace.  That’s all.”

The Director shook her head.

“What?”

“Extorting for peace when you started the war.”

“When are you saying we started the war?  When the ABB came after us and we fought back?  When we ambushed the fundraiser to embarrass you?  When we fought Leviathan and the Slaughterhouse Nine and then picked up the pieces ourselves, clearing our territories of the low-level threats while leaving the civilians more or less alone?”

“Except for Bitch.”

“We adjusted Bitch’s territory so she wouldn’t have as much cause to harass the locals, not so long ago.”

“I suppose that’s a consolation to the people she injured.”

“I’m not saying we’re perfect.  We aren’t.  But we’re doing something.”

“So are we.”

“You’re not doing enough.”

“And when you subtract the blood you’ve spilled and the pain you’ve caused, have you really done that much more, Skitter?  That’s oversimplifying, obviously.  Right and wrong aren’t a matter of adding the good deeds and subtracting the bad.”

“I’m bad at math anyways,” Regent said.

The Director ignored him, her eyes on me.  “I presume you’ve been paying for the supplies and materials you’ve been importing to your territory with your own money?  You’ve been paying your people, I know.”

“Yeah.”

“How much damage was done in the course of earning that money?  I see the repercussions you don’t.  Things pass my desk: hospital bills, property damage, psychiatrist’s notes.  People lose their jobs, lose precious belongings.  Parents are woken in the middle of the night because their children are seriously injured.   I see the details from detectives in narcotics who track the drug trade-”

“I-”

She interrupted me before I could protest.  “I know you don’t sell drugs, Skitter.  But you’re interacting with people who do.  If you buy a favor from someone who does, the Merchants, Coil, the Chosen, then you’re indirectly supporting that trade.  Just like you’re supporting any number of evils every time you help a fellow villain.  I’ve talked to homicide detectives who have dealt with the bodies in the wake of your shenanigans.”

“We don’t kill.”

“People die when you start feuds.  Bakuda was injured by you in one altercation, and she attacked the city over the course of several days.  Do you know how many people were harmed, then?  Because you set her off?  I could show you photos.  People with flesh melted off, frozen, burned, turned to glass.  When I don’t see these things in person, I see them on my desk, in high-definition glossy photos.  I could arrange for you to see the photos if you don’t believe me, or if you want to see the damage you’ve done for yourself.”

“No.  I don’t need to see them.”

She looked up at me, one eye half closed, both eyes bloodshot.  “Why is that, Skitter?  Are you afraid facing that reality would shatter this nice little delusion you’re living under?”

“I’m not to blame for whatever crimes Bakuda committed.”

“You played a role.”

“Anything she did is on her head, just like anything the Nine did is on them.”

“Where do you draw the line?  When do you start taking responsibility?  Or will you explain away every evil you’ve done and count only the actions you want?”

I could have protested, argued that I did take the blame for some things, I did blame myself for Dinah, for not seeing the bigger picture, for acting when I’d known Coil needed a distraction for something bigger.

“Hey,” Regent said.

I turned to face him.

“This is going nowhere.  Let’s wait until Tattletale can talk to her.”

“Right,” I said.  Not only had it been going nowhere, but she’d had had the upper hand, so to speak.  Not necessarily in the strength or validity of her arguments, but in the psychological and emotional sense.  I’d failed to budge her and she’d provoked a response from me.

The Director didn’t open her mouth again, apparently satisfied.

Grue returned with Trickster and Sundancer following behind him.  “Imp, where’s the truck you used to get here?”

“You passed it as you came here.”

“We’ll have to be careful,” Grue said,  “Anything from the Protectorate, her included, may be bugged.  No talking about anything sensitive on our way back, and we’ll ditch it asap.”

We nodded.  I had only the one good arm, my other shoulder still tender, so I walked around to the Director’s left side to grab her under the shoulder and help haul her to her feet.

I was surprised that she cooperated.  If she’d delayed us by forcing us to carry her, she might have bought time for reinforcements to arrive.  If we’d forced the issue with violence, it would have reinforced her argument.

In her shoes, I might have done it, just to apply that stress to my enemy.  It said something that she didn’t.  I just wasn’t sure what.

■

We emerged from the truck at the rear of a liquor store.  Tattletale stood in the open doorway of the loading area with Brooks and Minor beside her.

We hauled the Director out of the back of the truck.  Grue had covered her in darkness to keep her unawares, and she looked more than a little disoriented.  Her hair was in disarray and she couldn’t fix it with the cuffs on, and the effects of the capsaicin hadn’t entirely worn off; her eyes were puffy, her face red.

But when she looked at Tattletale, the smallest smile touched her lips.

“What’s this, Piggot?” Tattletale asked, hopping down from the ledge to the parking lot.  “Looking forward to a duel of wits?”

Director Piggot shook her head, still smiling.

“Staying mum?  Lips sealed, so you can’t betray vital information?”

“I trust you’ll get it anyways,” the Director replied.

“First things first,” Grue said, “Are we bugged?”

“The truck is.  But we’ll have my guy drive it a ways and then leave it somewhere.”  Tattletale jerked a thumb towards Minor, and he marched over to the truck, catching the keys as Grue tossed them.

“They’ll know the truck stopped here,” the Director said.

“I know.  We’re going to go for a walk,” Tattletale said.  “Up for that?”

“I don’t think I have a choice, do I?”

“Nope.”

We headed down a back alley.  I saw the Director struggling to keep her feet under her, her pumps sloshing in shallow water.  She stumbled once, and I put a hand out to steady her.  I was more likely to be crushed beneath her than to catch her if she fell, but at the same time, I wasn’t sure we could get her off the ground without uncuffing her if she did slip.

I didn’t like her.  Maybe that was an obvious conclusion for me to come to, but she reminded me of my high school principal in some ways: she was the authority figure, the person who embodied an institution I had no respect for.  On a more concrete level, she was indirectly or directly responsible for Armsmaster, for Sophia and the other bullies getting away with what they did.

Even on a basic, abstract level, she reminded me of Emma in how quickly and easily she’d gone for the throat in trying to cut me down and provoke a reaction from me.  Again, much like Emma, it was all the more nettling because she wasn’t entirely wrong.

“You have our teammates in custody?” Tattletale asked.

The Director didn’t respond.

“That’s a no.  Which means they’re either injured or dead and you aren’t aware, or they’re holed up and can’t leave their territory because of the suits that are sitting there.”

“Perhaps.”  Even with the unsteady footing, the Director was focusing more on Tattletale than where she was going, studying her.  But I knew that if I could see that much, Tattletale would as well.

“Is Dragon in town?”

“Last I saw,” the Director replied, hedging.

“She’s gone,” Tattletale said, for the benefit of the rest of us.  “Another task.  Wouldn’t be an Endbringer.  Not yet.  The Nine.”

“Yes.”

“Want to give up the information now, spare me the hassle of twenty questions?”

“My delaying you means the other models have a chance to find and arrest your teammates.  You’ll have to ask.”

“We have other tools at our disposal,” Tattletale glanced at Regent.

“And I know Regent takes anywhere from fifteen minutes to two and a half hours to take control.”

“After which point you wouldn’t ever be able to work in this town again.”

“Taking the same approach you did with Shadow Stalker?”  The Director asked.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah, like Shadow Stalker,” Tattletale replied.

“We have records from when Regent worked for Heartbreaker, under his previous name, Hijack.  Interviews with people Regent controlled.”

“Good for you,” Regent replied.

“I know his power gets weaker as you spread it thin, control slips.  You can’t afford to loosen your hold on Shatterbird, so no, I don’t think you’ll try to take control of me.”

“And you believe that,” Tattletale said.  “Enough that you’re confident.  You aren’t worried here, even when you’ve been taken hostage.”

“Which leaves you the options of playing twenty questions to get all the information you need, or you can try something more dire.  Torture?”

“That’s the second time she’s brought that up,” I said.

“Because she’s trying to get a sense of us,” Tattletale said.  “She wants to see our reactions and body language as the subject comes up.”

“Yes,” the Director said.  “Based on that much, I’m almost certain you wouldn’t torture me and you aren’t the type to kill unless absolutely backed against the wall.  Which means I can be home before midnight.”

“A little optimistic,” Trickster growled the words.

“I don’t think so,” Director Piggot replied, turning to level a glare at him.  She looked almost feral, even as her voice was controlled.  “See, I know you might try to kill me if these others weren’t around.  But the others won’t let you.  There’s Regent too: little to no compunctions, as we saw with Shadow Stalker.”

Her eye darted to Tattletale, then to Grue, and finally to me.

“Do they know the full story?” the Director asked.

“No,” Tattletale replied.  She sighed a little.

“Tell us what?” I asked.

“I’m interested, too,” Grue added.

The Director only smiled.

“Do you trust me?”  Lisa asked.

“Pretty much,” I replied.  “A little bit less right now than I did a minute ago.”

“Fair.  She’s trying to derail our interrogation.  She knows we won’t get violent with her to get the details we need, but I’ll be able to get the answers out of her with a bit of time to ask and apply my power.  Knowing this, she’s trying to fuck with us, set us against each other, and delay us.”

I nodded slowly, glancing between Tattletale and Director Piggot.

Tattletale shrugged, “If you trust me, can you agree to drop the subject?  I’ll explain before too long.”

“Knowing is half the battle,” the Director said.  “Only half.  Being aware of what I’m doing doesn’t stop me.  I’ve learned a lot since you took me hostage, and I already knew some things from research, observation, paperwork and background checks.  I have a read on your personalities and how you operate, and I know some background details.  How is your brother, Tattletale? Sarah?”

Sarah?

I glanced at Tattletale, saw a flicker of emotion cross her face before she smirked, wagged a finger at the Director and spoke with a touch too much cheer, “Low blow.”

“I’ve been looking forward to having a conversation with you for some time, playing it out in my head.  I paid out of my own pocket for information so I can beat you at your own game.  You would have done well to erase the trail leading back home, Sarah.  But then, that would have required thinking about it, maybe even going back.”

“You’re glad we took you hostage.”

Piggot smiled.  It wasn’t pretty.

“Ball’s still in our court,” Tattletale said.

“But you have a time limit.  Like I said, I expect to be home and in my bed before the night’s out.”

“You have a card up your sleeve, leverage.”

“In a way.  I’m dying.”

Our group had been walking across a street, and we all stopped to look at her.

“You need constant medical care?” Tattletale said.

“I have a setup at home.  Hemodialysis.  I hook myself up to it every night, flush my blood of excess water and pollutants over the course of eight hours while I’m sleeping.  If I don’t get the dialysis, I expect I’ll go downhill very quickly.  My body’s already in rough shape, and I’ve overworked myself these past few weeks.  I wouldn’t die that quickly, but you wouldn’t get any use out of me, either.  So we get to enjoy each other’s company for about five or six hours.  Then you decide whether you let me go home or whether you let me die.”

“And in the meantime, you intend to stall.”

“To the best of my ability,” the Director said.

“What suit did they send against Bitch?  Hellhound?”

“Did you know your parents are still looking for you?  They never stopped.”

Tattletale pursed her lips.  “A model Dragon’s used before?”

“You should have seen the looks on their faces when I told them you were alive and well,” Piggot said.  She measured the look on Tattletale’s face, smiled.  “Yes, I visited them in person.”

Tattletale’s eyes narrowed.  “I could turn the tables on you, pick you apart.”

“Please do.  Waste time.  You won’t accomplish much.  Look at me.  You know as well as I do that I wear my shame and disappointment on the outside, for the world to see.  I had the muscles of my legs torn apart years ago on the job, lost the ability to keep up exercise, coupled with hours behind a desk, hours of the dialysis and recovery from surgeries, no time to take care of myself with work.  I know I’m ugly, I know I’m fat.  There’s nothing you could say to me that I haven’t said to myself a hundred times over.”

“You sound almost proud,” Trickster said, a hint of disgust in his voice.

“I have no powers, Trickster.  I’m lowly, a mere mortal compared to you.  I admit it, I admit I’m weaker, slower, my options are pretty limited in a fight.  But I’m tenacious.  I’m shameless, if I have to be, because I refuse to lose to you.”  Her voice bordered on a growl as she uttered the word ‘refuse’.

This was the director of the PRT?  Hearing her speak, I’d almost thought she was like Coil, at first.  Cultured, proud, arrogant.  Now that she was showing her true colors, it was almost the opposite.  And strangely, it was equally problematic.

A fleck of spit flew from her lips as she continued her rant, “And I find it pretty fucking poetic that I have the upper hand because of the very things that you capes look down on us for.  I’m fat, frail, scarred, and I have old wounds that I’ll never recover from.  But because of that, because I could die in a matter of hours if you don’t let me seek treatment, you’re either going to have to compromise with your personal code or you’re going to have to let me walk away and find another way to beat Dragon.”

This isn’t working.

“Trickster, watch her,” I said.  “Sundancer, you and the medic watch Trickster and the Director.  Rest of you with me.  We’ll talk over there.”

We retreated from the woman.

Regent ran his fingers through his hair.  Tattletale had her arms folded as she leaned against a wall, staring at the ground.  She wasn’t smiling, and she wasn’t venturing to comment.

“What’re you thinking?” I asked.

“This isn’t working, obviously.”

“We could take her to her house, give her the treatment she needs,” Grue said.

“That’s what she wants.  There’s a trap there.  Either she’s got some measures in place at home, guns hidden where she can get at them or some kind of safe room, or the PRT is already there, waiting to ambush us.”

“I could control her,” Regent said.  “Send Shatterbird back, lock her up, get control.”

“Which would take time, again,” Tattletale said.  “The benefits would be negligible, and it would take longer than you think, because she’s trained in resisting mental and emotional attacks.”

“I wouldn’t have thought,” I commented.

Tattletale shook her head, “Let’s figure it’s half an hour for Shatterbird to get snug in her cage.  Two or three hours to get control of her… and for what?  They have an idea we captured her.  If they haven’t revoked her access and powers by now, they will have by the time Regent’s finished with her.  So how do we use her?”

“We’re running out of time,” Grue said.  “It’s maybe two or three in the afternoon.  That gives us maybe twenty hours to get this done by Coil’s schedule.  Brainstorm.  More ideas, come on.”

“We could abandon the job.  Say fuck you to Coil, let his grand plan fall apart,” Regent said.  “Get Bitch and leave town.”

“I don’t like that,” Grue said.  “On a lot of levels.”

“Sure, sure.  But it’s the most obvious choice.”

“Not an option as far as I’m concerned,” I replied.  “I won’t blame you guys if you want to do that, but I gotta do this, finish the job or fail trying.”

“Okay, I sort of expected you to say that.  Um, hear me out on this before jumping down my throat, but why don’t we torture her?  She’s been begging for it, practically.”

I stared at him.

“Torture doesn’t work,” Grue said.

“Without getting into too much detail, I’d say it does.  Sometimes,” Regent replied.

“Not with someone like her,” Tattletale said, sighing.  “Even if she didn’t have a background in that sort of thing, her personality… if anything I think she’d be glad we did it.  Not while we were doing it, but it’d validate her view of the world.”

“Which is?” Grue asked.

“That we’re monsters.  In her eyes, our trigger events highlight a moment at the worst point of our lives and our powers make it so we can never put that behind us.  Good guy or bad, she sees us as walking personifications of whatever issues drove us to get our powers in the first place, inflicting some shadow or abstract representation of those traumas on others with our powers.”

“How can someone educated and professional like her think that way?”  Grue asked.

“For one thing, she’s not all that wrong,” Tattletale replied, shrugging.

“Hm?”

“We are.  But even people without powers are walking issues.  That’s no big surprise.  Having powers just… makes it all more noticeable.  Piggot’s suffering from some tunnel vision, is all.  Happens with any bigot.  Anyways, my point was, if we torture her, we’re only reinforcing her worldview.  It would almost negate any psychological stress we put her under.  No, torture is out for a few reasons.”

“What if we give her treatment?”  I asked.  “Not at her house.  Off-site.”

“We’d be showing our hand, maybe cluing her in to our connection with Coil, and it would still take time we don’t have,” Grue answered.  “Nothing saying we’d get enough in the way of answers to be worth the time spent.”

“I don’t see what was wrong with my suggestion,” Imp said.

“Which was?”

Imp pulled off her boot and then peeled off a knee-high sock, wiggled her toes before jamming her bare foot back in the boot.  She stretched out the sock, “Gag the fatty.”

“I need her to answer if I’m going to get the detail we need in any reasonable length of time,” Tattletale said.

“She’s not answering anyways, right?  Get what you need from her body language.”

Tattletale frowned.  “Yeah.  You’re right.  But it’s going to take time.”

“And we’re operating in the dark until then,” Grue said.

“We did okay with the last fight,” Imp said.

“Barely,” I cut in, at the same moment Grue said, “We didn’t-“

“We walked away,” Imp clarified.

“Where are you on the other thing, what you were talking to Coil about?”  I asked Tattletale.

“Trying to get info.  It’s hard with the way communications are down.  We sent some soldiers out in trucks, each going down a different major road in the hopes of getting far enough away to get cell service.  Then they gotta get back here to bring me what they got.”

“Time’s our most valuable resource here,” Grue said.

I spoke up, “I don’t think we can afford to wait until we hear from your soldiers or the Director.”

“Heading out?”

I nodded, pointing towards the others.  We rejoined Trickster, Sundancer and Brooks.  Imp shoved her sock in the Director’s mouth and took the silk cord I offered, tying it in place.

“Careful,” I said.  “Trouble with this sort of gag is that if she pukes, she could choke on her own vomit.”

“How do you know these things?” Regent asked.

“I’ll be careful,” Tattletale assured me.

“Let’s plan, then.  Tattletale, any idea if the other suits would be active yet?  The ones we had Piggot shut down?”

“Not yet, but soon.”

“Then I’m thinking we should split up into two teams” I said.  “Strike while the other three suits are shut down and waiting for Dragon’s attention.  If we can rescue our teammates, we’ll be half-again as strong.”

“We don’t have the firepower to fight those things,” Trickster said.

“We have lots of firepower,” I replied.  “Problem is they have a lot more.  So pick your fights, strike at the right time and hit hard.  Play dirty, don’t give them a chance if you can help it.  Grue, you should go with Sundancer and Trickster, so we’ve got even numbers on both sides.”

“You sure?”

“Your power works well with Sundancer, keeps the enemy unaware until she can get that miniature sun close, and you can keep them off the machine’s radar, thermals or whatever.  Hopefully.”

“And you?”

“My bugs will give us early warning if a suit’s nearby, and they might alert me if there’s radar or anything subsonic.  If Regent and Imp come with me, we’ll have some firepower from Shatterbird.”

“Okay.”

“My team will go see if we can find Bitch, rescue her from whatever they sent after her.  You guys do what you can to rescue Ballistic, then hunker down.  If you succeed, stay put, wait for us.  If we don’t arrive before dark, assume we lost, mount a rescue.  If you aren’t there, we’ll assume the same.”

“Sounds good,” Grue said.

“Either way, we’ll figure out where we’re going from there.”

The Director raised her head, staring up at the sky.

“You have something you want to say?”  Tattletale asked.

The Director shrugged.

Tattletale removed the gag.  “What?”

“I’m looking forward to this.”

“Which part?”  Tattletale asked.  “The interrogation?  The rescue mission?”

“The fight.  Seven suits in this city right now.  The Melusine-six, Cawthorne M.K. Three, the Glaurung Zero, the Ladon-two, the Astaroth-Nidhug, the Pythios-two.  That’s six ships right there, that Dragon explained were old models.  Previous versions of her suits that were cannibalized for parts, abandoned after taking severe damage and recently repaired or simply outdated.”

“And the seventh?”

“The Azazel.  Note that there’s no version number.  It’s a fresh design, crafted to go up against the Nine and put up a serious fight.  The first truly original suit she’s made in four years, and I assure you that Dragon has advanced her skills in that timeframe.  If that isn’t enough of a pedigree, the Azazel was created by Dragon working in tandem with her new partner, a fellow tinker.”

Armsmaster.

She saw the reaction from us, smiled a little.

“Yes.  A new partner.  It was his suggestion that we park the suits here when they aren’t needed.  And even though I know he’s a new cape, nobody you’d know, certainly nobody who’d have a grudge,” she smirked a little, “I think it’s a safe bet to say he had you in mind when he was building it.”

Tattletale jammed the sock into Piggot’s mouth and turned to us.  “Which ones did you fight?”

“Foam sprayer, drone deployer, forcefield generator and a wheel-dragon with electricity and some electromagnet,” I said.

“Cawthorne, Glaurung, Ladon, Pythios, I’d guess, with only the names and what little I’ve seen of Dragon to go by.  That leaves the Astaroth-Nidhug, Melusine and the Azazel.  One went after Ballistic, another after Genesis, and a third went after Bitch.”

“Meaning that with the way we’re splitting up and taking on whatever machines attacked our missing teammates, each of our groups has a one-in-three chance of going up against this Azazel,” I concluded.

“Better cross your fingers,” Tattletale suggested.

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