Worm

11.01

I stared down at the metal walkway as I caught my breath. I had one gash at the side of my head, and another trickle ran from beneath the armor of my shoulder, down my arm and to my fingertip, where it dripped almost in sync with the head wound. It should have hurt, but it didn’t. Maybe it would when the shock wore off. If so, I didn’t look forward to it.

Trickster, Ballistic and Circus lay in front of me. Another cape had fallen over the railing and lay on the concrete floor below, unmoving. They were all either unconscious or hurting badly enough that I didn’t need to worry about them.

I swallowed hard. My heart had climbed up so far into my throat that I almost couldn’t breathe, and my heartbeat felt oddly distant and faint for how terrified I was.

Coil’s base was deserted. I knew his men were out on patrols, that the only people in here were a handful of the capes that were working for him. He’d left it almost undefended.

If I was going to act, I’d have to do it now.

My costume’s feet lacked hard soles, so I should have been nearly silent, but the interior of Coil’s base was deathly silent and my feet were slamming down on the metal walkway as I ran. The noise of singing metal filled the dark space, echoing, seemingly louder with each step I took.

The thrum of the metal rang through the air even after I came to a stop. I’d reached my target; a reinforced door, identical to so many others in the complex. With the labyrinthine mess of metal walkways and the dozens of doors, I might have missed it. The only thing telling me I was in the right place was the smudge of ash left behind from when the soldier had put out his cigarette on the wall.

I opened the door, and it was far too loud, creaking, then banging into the wall with a crash despite my last-second attempts to stop its momentum.

The room looked like a prison cell. It had concrete walls and floor, a cot and a metal sink and toilet. Coil and Dinah were both there. I couldn’t say whose presence left me more devastated.

I could say Coil’s presence was the worst thing, because it meant my info was bad. His power meant I was probably fucked on a lot of levels, that the odds were suddenly astronomically against me. I was caught. My gut told me that I wouldn’t make it out of the compound in one piece, now. He was washing his hands in the sink, he turned to look at me, apparently unconcerned by my presence.

But no. As I stared at Dinah and registered what I was seeing, I realized the image would be burned into my mind’s eye forever. She lay on the cot on her side, her eyes open, staring at me, through me. A bloody froth was drying at one side of her mouth and at the edges of one nostril. I didn’t consider myself a religious person, but I prayed for her to blink, to breathe, to give me some relief from that cold horror that was gripping me.

I was too late.

My vision practically turned red as I charged Coil, drawing my knife as I ran. I felt him use his power, and suddenly there were two of him, two of me, two cells with two dead girls named Dinah Alcott.

In one of those rooms, I stabbed Coil in the chest. There was no satisfaction in doing it, no relief. I’d lost, I’d failed in every way that counted. The fact that I’d put him down barely mattered.

In the other room, he stepped back out of reach of my first lunge, raised one hand and blew a handful of pale dust into my face. While I was blindly slashing in his direction, he grabbed the wrist of my knife hand and held it firm in his bony hand.

That room where I’d succeeded in stabbing him faded away. The only me that existed, now, was coughing violently. My knees buckled as I coughed hard enough to bring up my lungs, unable to get the powder out of my nose and mouth. I pulled at my hand, trying to free it from his grip. Futile.

“Stop,” he ordered me, and my struggles stilled, though I was still finishing my coughing fit.

“Diluted scopolamine,” he spoke, his voice calm, sonorous. He let go of my wrist, and pushed at the knife in my hand. I let it drop. “Also known as Devil’s Breath. The vodou sorcerers, the Bokor, were said to use this along with the venoms of the puffer fish and other poisons. With these substances, they could create the ‘zombies’ they were so famous for. These zombies of theirs were not raised from the dead, but were men and women who were forced to till fields and perform crude labor for the Bokor. The uneducated thought it magic, but it was simple chemistry.”

I waited patiently for him to continue. The notion of fighting or responding didn’t even occur to me.

“It strips imbibers of volition and renders them eminently suggestible. As you can see, I attempted to use it on my pet, and the results were… tragic. The price of hubris, I suppose.”

He sighed.

“Take off your mask,” he instructed me.

I did. My hair fell across my face as I let my mask fall to the ground. My cheeks were wet with tears. Was that from before, from when I’d first seen Dinah? Or was I able to cry about my present circumstance, even if I was helpless to do anything about it?

He touched my cheek, brushed a tear away with his thumb. He stroked my hair, and the gesture felt strangely familiar. The way his hand settled on the back of my neck and gripped me there didn’t. It felt… possessive.

“Pet,” he intoned, and fresh terror shook me to my core.

“You couldn’t have succeeded. This was terribly unwise.”

“Okay,” I murmured.

No, no, no, NO.

I didn’t deserve this.

My eyes fell on Dinah. She still stared at me, eyes wide and unblinking, and I couldn’t help but see the look as accusing.

I did deserve this. It was thanks to me that she’d been kidnapped. Thanks to me that she’d been made into Coil’s slave. Karma, perhaps, that I’d take her place.

The strength went out of me. My head hung, and I stared at my feet.

Tears streamed down my face. I didn’t wipe them away. I wasn’t sure I could.

“Look at me, pet,” Coil instructed, and I did. I was glad to, like a compliant, eager to please child. A part of me wanted more orders. In that drug induced haze, I wanted to lose myself in obeying, wanted to serve. That way, at the very least, I wasn’t to blame for my own actions or the tragic consequences that followed from them.

Coil removed his mask, and I stared.

I recognized him. He was someone I knew all too well.

They were both tall, thin. How hadn’t I seen it? Coil’s costume could must have been designed to highlight his skeletal structure, make him look thinner and more bony. All it had taken, beyond that, would be an affected change to his voice and different mannerisms. I’d been unable to see it.

So dumb, so stupid.

I could understand it, too. He’d been struggling to fix things, watching people failing to find work, knowing it was the city government that was to blame. I could remember him telling me how he’d make the city work again, how he had all the answers. I knew how hungry he was to do it.

He’d gotten powers. He’d started to put plans into motion so he could do just that.

“Welcome home, pet,” he spoke, and he didn’t speak in Coil’s voice. The voice I heard was my father’s.

I woke up, and for a long moment I stared up at the ceiling of my room and reassured myself that it was all a fabrication of my own scumbag mind. It had been a nightmare or a terror dream; I wasn’t positive on the differences between the two. It was my brain drawing together all my guilt about what we’d done to Shadow Stalker, the role I’d played in Dinah being kidnapped and leaving my dad; knitting it all into some convincing, disturbing scenario. Not the worst I’d had, but there was at least some repetition and familiarity with the usual ones.

Fuck.

It had felt way too real, and it had sucked. My shirt stuck to me with the damp of my sweat, the room was warm, but I still shivered.

My alarm clock sat on the ground by my inflatable mattress. I picked it up and turned it around so the I could see the green numbers of the digital display. Five forty in the morning.

Time to wake up, I supposed. There was no way I was going to be able to fall asleep again in the next few hours. It wasn’t just the idea of having another nightmare. The dream had left me with a feeling of an impending deadline.

How long could Dinah be expected to hold on? I doubted Coil was taking bad care of her, so she wouldn’t die of malnutrition or overdose on whatever drugs Coil was giving her. Still, there was a limit to what the human mind could handle. How long until Coil pushed her abilities too far? If she was getting headaches from the use of her power, there was a chance she could suffer more severe issues if pushed to use it more often. Pain generally signified something was wrong.

I was also worried I wouldn’t earn Coil’s trust and respect. Until this was resolved, I wouldn’t be able to rest, take it easy, or have a day to myself. Not in good conscience. Depending on what happened, it might be a long, long time before I could relax again.

What worried me more than anything was the idea that I might save Dinah, only to find that Coil had broken her spirit or her will to the point that she couldn’t go back to her old life. I worried that, like in my nightmare, I would be too late.

With this in mind, I sat up and tossed the sheet aside. I reached for my glasses, by the alarm clock, then stopped.

Instead of putting on my glasses, I stood and made my way to the bathroom adjacent to my room. Alongside fresh supplies of toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, tweezers, shampoo, conditioner and all that, I had a small box with packages of disposable contact lenses, daily use.

I hated contacts so, so much. I’d tried them in middle school, at Emma’s recommendation, and they had never felt comfortable. That, and I had never figured out how to put them in properly. It seemed like ninety-nine out of a hundred times, they flipped inside out to cling to my fingertip instead of sticking to my eye.

True to form, it took me four minutes to get the contacts in, and I found myself blinking every two seconds after I did have them in.

At least I could see.

I walked through my new base of operations wearing an oversized t-shirt and a pair of underwear. Not exactly fitting attire for a supervillain.

My new abode was three stories tall, which made it taller than Grue or Bitch’s places, which were the only ones I’d seen thus far, but it was narrow. A cafe had stood here, before, but it had been flattened by one of the first waves to hit the city. Coil owned at least one of the companies that was managing the restoration and reconstruction efforts, and over the past two and a half weeks, as his crews had started clearing and rebuilding on the Boardwalk, he’d had them set up some buildings, all squashed together. When the Boardwalk was fixed up, these same buildings would be at the westmost edge of the same block that had the stores, restaurants and coffee shops. If the Boardwalk ever got going again, they would be prime real estate.

Ostensibly to protect these new buildings until people started buying up the properties, each had been set up with heavy metal shutters to seal the windows and wall off the front. It made the building dark, with only faint streams of light filtering in through the slats at the top of each shutter.

The topmost floor was mine and mine alone. Taylor’s. It was living space, with a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. The bedroom was spacious enough to serve as a living room as well as a sleeping area. The first things I’d done after Coil’s men had unloaded the furniture and supplies was to hook up an internet connection and computer and get my television mounted on a wall and connected to a satellite.

The second floor, as I liked to think of it, was Skitter’s. It was for my costumed self. It still needed more than a few things to complete it. I flipped a switch in the stairwell, and tinted flourescent lights lit up on the undersides of the shelves that ran along two adjacent walls, floor to ceiling. Each shelf was lined with terrariums and backed by strategically positioned mirrors so that the light filtered through the front of the terrariums and into the room. Only a few were occupied, but they each had the same general contents – a layer of dirt and pieces of irregularly shaped wood.

I hit the second switch, and chambers in the lid of each occupied case opened to release their inhabitants. As they crawled through the case, the spiders were lit up by the lighting so that their shadows and the strange shapes of the wood were cast against the panes of hard plastic, distorted and larger than life. I’d seen a picture on the web of the same thing, done on a far smaller scale. I had hopes that the effect would be suitably impressive and intimidating once all of the terrariums were full.

It would be doubly impressive once Coil’s special effects technician stopped by and outfitted a case with a series of switches that a large bug could move – a beetle or something. If I could direct the beetle to release the bugs, turn the lights on or off or even open the lids of the terrariums, all while appearing to sit motionless in my chair, it would be that much more effective for any audience I happened to have in the room.

Terrariums aside, the room was sparse. Six empty pedestals sat just beneath the shuttered window, each standing just a little beneath knee height.

After touring the place yesterday morning and spending some time browsing the web to see what was available, I’d gotten in contact with Coil and named every possible thing I could think of that I could use for the space. The current contents of the rooms on this floor and upstairs had been delivered last night. The stuff I was waiting on was harder to come by, and it would be unreasonable to expect it to be available and in place within this short span of time.

I did have a chair, here, way too large for me. It was positioned in one corner, so that it was framed by the two walls of terrariums. It was black leather, and broad enough that I could comfortably sit cross-legged on it. I’d loved the idea since I’d seen one like it in Brian’s apartment. It was the one concession I was making in regards to atmosphere and appearances. A series of smaller seats were positioned so they faced the larger chair and the terrariums.

A large abstract painting hung above the stairs on the right side of the room. I’d seen a similar one online and had liked it, so I had found the artist’s gallery and stumbled onto this. It was the first thing I had asked Coil for, and he’d delivered a large framed print far faster than I might have expected. I liked how it tied into the room and echoed the shapes cast against the front panes of the terrariums. The black lines were painted on the background of reds and yellows in a way that seemed spidery.

I stared at the painting for a minute, seriously worried that I would see the abstract image from a different angle and realize I’d had Coil get me a eight-foot by five-foot painting of a hairy wang or a headless chicken or something.

Making my way down the stairs, I found the ground floor surprisingly cool. The weather was warming up, and with the shutters closed, I’d found my room warm, sticky in the humid air. I’d foregone pajama bottoms, had slept with just a single sheet, and had slept with my feet uncovered. Goosebumps prickled my bare legs as I stepped on the cool hardwood floor.

The ground floor here wasn’t much different from the one at Grue’s place. There was an area with bunk beds, albeit fewer than Grue’d had, a bathroom, a small kitchen and an open area that didn’t yet serve a purpose, stacked with boxes.

All this was mine. My lair. It felt so empty.

I knew that would change as it filled with furniture and necessities. The place was already something of a luxury. More than half of Brockton Bay was currently lacking plumbing or electricity, with more than a few unfortunate individuals having neither. In the process of setting up these buildings, Coil had ensured I was provided with both. Trucks would be coming and going through this area as clearing and construction continued, and Coil had informed me that these trucks would be discreetly resupplying me with water, ensuring my water heater had propane, emptying the aboveground septic tank and refueling the generator.

As the city was rebuilt and standard utilities were put back in order, these special measures would be set aside, I’d get hooked up to those, and my lair would be lost in the surge of urban growth. Ideal world.

It was nice to be able to enjoy those luxuries, but the Dinah situation took all of the joy out of it. I had hot showers and the ability to wash my dishes because Coil had provided them.

I grabbed a cell phone from the kitchen counter and dialed Coil. I didn’t give a fuck about the fact that it was 5:45 in the morning.

It bothered me, calling him, relying on him. It made me feel complicit. Inconveniencing him, even a little, felt good.

“Yes?” His question was curt.

“It’s Skitter.”

“What is it, Skitter?”

“I need a loan of some guys.”

“How many?”

I looked around the living room, “Eight? A truck would be a good idea, if you can get one here.”

“I can. These men you require, are you needing gunmen or-”

“Just regular guys, anyone up for some exercise.”

“I assume there’s no rush?” He was being more curt than usual. Maybe I’d woken him up. I didn’t really care. He could deal, if I was working on something that helped him.

“No rush.”

“Then I’ll have them there in an hour.”

“An hour, then.”

He hung up.

It was a lot of time to kill. Free time sucked when you didn’t want to be alone with your thoughts.

I wanted to run, but it was awkward. The fenced off areas, construction zones and flooded streets of the Boardwalk didn’t really make a sprint around the neighborhood that doable. Besides, it was dangerous enough I might stand out.

In the end, I went against my better judgement and decided to go for a run. I dressed in a pair of shorts and a tank top, donned my running shoes and ensured I had both my pepper spray and my knife. I unstrapped the knife’s sheath from the back of my costume, then threaded a belt through it so I could strap it around my waist. I put the sheath itself under my waistband and the handle of the knife under my top.

I stood in front of the full length mirror in my bedroom to check how visible the weapon was.

It wasn’t exactly hidden, but it wasn’t conspicuous either. I adjusted it slightly, then called a small collection of bugs to me. It was a little creepy, having them crawl on my skin, beneath my clothes into my hair, but that stopped when they reached their destinations – above my socks, in my hair and between my bra and my top. I was cool with it so long as they weren’t directly on my skin.

Did I look different? My skin had a light tan, now. I’d spent more time outdoors in the past few weeks. In the week and a half I’d spent in the shelter, I hadn’t exactly had books or TV, so I’d walked during the day, making my way across the city to check on the loft and to see the state of my dad’s house. I’d walked at night, too, when I’d been unable to sleep, but people hardly tanned doing that.

I couldn’t pin down exactly how or why, but the definition in my face and body had changed. It was possible I’d had a growth spurt. Some of it was perhaps the tan giving more accent to the features of my body or face. Maybe it was that I’d been eating a pretty lean diet when I was staying at the shelter, coupled with the fact that I’d been so active over the past two months. I hadn’t spent six hours every day sitting around in school, I’d been in fights, I’d been running, and I’d ridden the dogs. I had some muscle definition in my arms, now, and I thought maybe I was standing straighter. Or maybe it was all those minor things helped by the simple fact that I was dressing differently, that my hair hadn’t been cut in a while, and that I wasn’t wearing my glasses.

To say I barely recognized myself was.. how could I put it? It was true, but I could also remember myself months ago, when I’d look at my reflection and I would be so focused on the flaws and the things I didn’t like about myself that I never felt familiar with the person I was seeing in the mirror. It was as though it was always a stranger I was looking at, and I would be left vaguely surprised at the combination of features across from me.

This was not recognizing myself in a very different way. There were still things I didn’t like, like my wide mouth, my small chest and the lack of curves or any real femininity. My scars stood out with my slight tan, a teardrop shaped mark on my forearm where Bitch’s dog had bitten me, a wavy mark on my cheek where Sophia had dug her fingernails in,and a line by my earlobe where she’d tried to tear my ear off. But my physical flaws no longer consumed my attention when I looked at myself. I felt comfortable with my body, like I’d somehow earned it, the way it was, and it was mine now. I wasn’t sure if that made any sense, even to myself.

If there was anything about myself that I didn’t like, it was primarily psychological. Guilt was a big one. The idea that my dad might dislike me if he got to know me, now? That was another. That my mom, were she alive and showing up at the door, might be disappointed in me? Sobering.

As he’d done with his own underground base, Coil had set my lair up with a discreet entrance and exit. Leaving through the front door would be conspicuous, if I started working with anyone beyond my teammates. Skinny teenage girl with black curly hair entering and leaving the same building that the skinny teenage villain with black curly hair was operating out of? No.

I made my way to the building’s cellar, opened a hatch and entered the adjacent storm drain. The same builders that had put the building together had blocked off the drain so the water flow wouldn’t make it impassable, and I was left with a clear route down to the section of beach where the storm drains emptied.

I wasn’t sure if Coil had plans to keep the city’s workers from trying to unblock the drain, but I supposed that was the sort of thing we could rely on him to handle. In the meantime, a third of the storm drains were too clogged with rubble and detritus to drain, and another third didn’t connect to anything anymore. Add the fact that most of the storm drains were a little out of the way of regular foot traffic, and it wasn’t too conspicuous.

I started running the moment I reached the beach, glad for the chance to resume my routine.

It was a strange environment, eerie. The wooden pathway, the literal boardwalk that had run in front of the stores, was now a skeletal ruin that loomed above the piles of trash that the bulldozers had all pushed to one side, twice as tall as I was. The beach had been cleared, which was a feat unto itself. The work of the bulldozers and the crews with rakes had revealed the packed, dirt-like layer from beneath the loose sand. Opposite the trash piles, by the water, there were mounds of irregularly shaped pieces of concrete, set to break up the waves and prevent the highest tides from dragging the trash, debris and machinery into the ocean. Two mounds looming on either side, with a space cleared in the middle for the trucks and any foot traffic.

A scene up ahead caught my attention. Two pieces of machinery lay in a heap just below the lip of the boardwalk above. A bulldozer and an eighteen wheeler with a crane-mounted claw attached had both been driven or pushed over the edge of the boardwalk and onto the beach. The cab of the truck with the claw had been partially crushed by the bulldozer. Though it was barely past six in the morning, a group of laborers were already there, some on the ledge above, others down on the beach, all gathered around the trucks.

Spray paint had been used to draw the same crude symbol on both the side of the eighteen wheeler and the concrete wall separating the beach from the Boardwalk above. A capital ‘M’, with two taller lines drawn vertically through it much the same as you’d do with a dollar sign. The Merchants.

It fit their modus operandi. They had been bums, drunks and addicts, looked down on others, before Leviathan came. In the wake of what Leviathan had done to the city, leaving everything in shambles, with social services gone or in chaos and even basic utilities in short supply, everyone else had been brought down to their level. The Merchants were even, I suspected, thriving. With strength in numbers and virtually nothing holding them back, they had become like pack animals. They roamed the city in bands of three to twenty, robbing, raping, pillaging and stealing. They were settling in some of the better areas, the neighborhoods that still had power or water, and forcing the existing residents out.

Or, worse, I could imagine that some were moving in and keeping the residents around for their own amusement. It was not a pleasant thought. The kind of people who had gravitated towards the Merchants tended to have a lot of resentment. Specifically, they had resentment towards people who had what they didn’t. If they happened upon a family with Kate the soccer mom, Tommy, the kid with more video games than teeth, and Joe the blue-collar worker with a steady job? If they weren’t letting them go? I was guessing that hypothetical family would be in for a hell of a rough time.

It might have sounded silly, that line of speculation, but I’d spent time in the shelters. I’d heard about how vicious and depraved the Merchants were getting.

Anyways, this? This whole situation? They liked it. They wanted to keep things this way, and that meant they were going to stop anyone else from fixing it. They would intercept supplies, attack rescue workers and they would push construction vehicles into a heap on the beach.

I’d have to deal with these guys. It wasn’t just intercepting any groups that made their way into my territory. That was easy, all things considered. No, I also had to deal with the small army that would come marching through here wanting retaliation over my having kicked the asses of any groups that had made their way into my territory.

I could call on the others, if such a situation arose, and I expected them to call on me if the same thing happened. But people would take time to get here, and the Merchants, the Chosen or whoever else was making trouble could keep making trouble until the reinforcements arrived. It was tricky, and I didn’t know for sure how I’d handle things if-

“Taylor.”

My reaction wasn’t much different than if someone had stabbed me in the stomach with an icicle. I’d thought of that mental image in particular because of the cold, horrible feeling in my midsection; fear, guilt. My thoughts immediately went back to my nightmare from earlier. I turned to look.

“It’s you,” my dad spoke, “Wow.”

He stood on the ledge above me. He was more tanned than I was. He wore a short-sleeved button-up shirt and khakis and held a clipboard. It set him apart from the other laborers, and the man who stood just behind him, wearing a gray t-shirt and jeans. I knew in an instant, my dad was in charge around here.

Looking at him, I couldn’t imagine how I might have thought he was Coil. Even in a dream.

“Just out for my regular run.”

Surprise etched his face, “You’re running during this…?!”

He made a visible effort to close his mouth. It made me feel uneasy. What thought process or concern was keeping my dad from opening his mouth about my running? He’d been worried about it when the streets were relatively safe. Was he that spooked at the idea of scaring me off again?

He looked at the man who was standing near him, murmured something. The man walked over to join the others in observing the damage around the damaged vehicles.

We were left more or less alone.

“You got my messages?” I asked.

“I’ve listened to that answering machine so many times-” he stopped. He was a good distance away, but I could see the lines in his forehead, “I miss you.”

“I miss you too.”

“I… I don’t know how to ask. I’m afraid to ask you to come home, because I’m not sure I can stand to hear you tell me you won’t.”

He paused, for a long moment. Waiting for me to jump at the opportunity. I stayed silent and hated myself for it.

“Well,” he said, so quiet I could barely hear him, “You can always come home. Any time, any reason.”

“Okay,” I told him.

“What are you doing with yourself these days?”

I struggled to find an answer, and was saved by the bell. One of the men by the wreck shouted, “Danny!” and my dad turned.

My dad ran his fingers through his hair, “I need to go handle this. Can I… How do I contact you?”

“I’ll leave you a message on your answering machine,” I said, “With my cell phone number, and my email in case I’m in an area where cell service is down.”

“Email?” he asked. “Where are you that you have access to a computer?”

A few blocks from here.

“Just outside the city limits,” I lied, “Not far from the Market.”

“So you’re out of the way of any trouble,” My dad noted, with a touch of relief. There was a noise as someone began prying one of the truck doors open, and my dad turned his head, frowning. “But what are you doing here this morning?”

“I was going to stop by the house, see if it was in okay shape,” I lied again. Was this the extent of my interactions with my dad? Always lies? “Keeping up with my running.”

“I see. Look, I have to go, but I do want to talk again, soon. Lunch, maybe?”

“Maybe,” I offered. He offered me a sad smile, then turned to go.

I moved my hand to adjust my glasses, and wound up waving at my face. I was wearing my lenses.

“Dad!” I called out. He stopped. “Um. I’d heard the Slaughterhouse Nine were around. Be careful, warn others.” I pointed at my face.

His eyes widened. I could see the thought process, the realization. He took off his glasses and hung them from his shirt’s front pocket. I wasn’t positive that was much better.

“Thank you,” he said, squinting slightly at me. He raised a hand in an awkward half-wave, and I returned it with one of my own. As if by mutual agreement, we turned to leave at the same time, both of us going in separate directions. He hurried to where he was needed, and I turned to run back to my place. My lair. I hadn’t run nearly as far as I’d wanted, but I wasn’t up to continuing.

I checked the kitchen clock as I entered from the cellar. I had thirty minutes. I took the time to shower and don my costume – my sleeve was still crusty and stained yellow-white where it had come in contact with the foam, but at least it wasn’t sticky anymore.

My mask wasn’t wearable with the contacts. I’d taken lenses out of an old pair of glasses and set them into the construction of my mask. I debated it for a few moments, then I decided to use the remaining time to fix it. With my knife’s point, I set about undoing that particular piece of work, prying the lenses out.

I finished with enough time left over to grab and eat a breakfast bar. Coil’s people were punctual, rapping on the metal shutter at six forty-five.

Alright. This was it. I pulled on my mask.

Time to claim my territory.

11.02

Water sprayed in the truck’s wake as we cut a path through the flooded streets.

It was a military vehicle. I wasn’t one to know much about cars, and I knew even less about stuff like military vehicles, so I couldn’t put a name to the truck that was carting me and eight of Coil’s workers through the Docks. It was like a sturdy pickup truck, but the rear section was wider and it was hidden beneath a green tarp that had been stretched over a framework of metal bars. The tires were massive, with deep treads allowing the truck to navigate all but the most cracked sections of road where Leviathan had brought the underground pipes and drains through the surface.

The interior was loaded with the supply crates that I’d had Coil’s guys load into the vehicle. Each set was strapped together and tied down to the floor and sides of the truck with belts. There wasn’t much room for the seven of us in the back, and we’d been forced to sit on the crates with little legroom.

A part of me wanted to converse with Coil’s men and get to know them. Another part of me, a larger part, told me that I shouldn’t. I had to convey power and confidence. I wasn’t sure I could do that while making small talk. With much the same reasoning, I’d chosen not to help with the loading of the truck.

The men Coil had sent me were dressed up in the same outfits worn by the cleanup crews I’d seen around the city, picking up debris, trash and dead things. They wore heavy plastic one-piece bodysuits, made of a material I compared to those heavy-duty industrial rubber gloves that my dad kept under the sink, each in blue and yellow. The suits were loose-fitting, and only the upper halves of their faces were visible behind the clear plastic goggles they wore. Their mouths were hidden by the filters intended to prevent mold, dust and airborne pathogens from getting into the worker’s lungs.

The masks also, I noted, did a good job at hiding the identities of the six men and two women. If it weren’t for that, I’d think Coil was trying to be funny, giving the hazmat crew to the bug girl.

Whatever image I conveyed, whether it was in the role of a leader or as a potentially dangerous villain, it had given me elbow room. Coil’s employees had chosen to sit, cramped together, closer to the rear of the truck. I sat atop a crate with my back to the truck’s cab, watching the road behind us.

In a way, it was good that I wasn’t engaging in conversation. It let me focus on what I needed to – my bugs.

Generally speaking, there were two routes I tended to go. The first put me in one spot, drawing my bugs from the area. A three block radius made for a good number of bugs. The second situation came about when I’d taken the time to gather a few select bugs from here or there, while covering a whole lot more area. I’d done it before the bank robbery, to get a prime selection of bugs. I’d also done it before we attacked the ABB the first time, with the other groups. Never enough to draw attention.

This was different. This time, I wanted attention. This time, the city was a breeding ground for the bugs. Warm, moist, and filled with food. This time, I was gathering everything I could and I was covering a lot of ground.

We’d been driving for fifteen minutes around the perimeter of what I hoped would be my territory, gradually closing in towards the center. I found the bugs closest to the edges and sent them toward the middle. Of the ones that could fly, I had them gather overhead. It was more bugs than I’d ever controlled at once. My power seemed to crackle in my head as I drew in and interpreted all of the data.

I was almost convinced I would finally see the upper limit of my power. That I’d reach for more bugs and realize I couldn’t control any more. It didn’t happen.

The clouds of bugs that were gathering in the center of my territory were starting to cast a visible shadow on the area.

They weren’t the only bugs I controlled. I had others on separate tasks. With a number, I created barriers, heavy clouds in alleyways and across streets. My motives here were purely selfish – I laid these barriers between the southmost end of the old Boardwalk and the Docks because I didn’t want my dad entering the area. My gut told me that if he got a good look at me in costume, he’d know who I was.

Besides, it didn’t factor into my plan.

I had other bugs sweep through the inside of the buildings in my range. I made contact with people, stirring some from their sleep. As I sat on the crate in the back of the truck, nearly motionless, I was making a tally. How many people were here, and where were they?

When I had a sense of things, I began organizing my bugs into formations. I started in the areas with lots of people clustered together: a warehouse with no less than eighteen people; a tenement crammed with what I assumed were families, with lots of small children; and an overly warm building with a large group of half-dressed people drenched in sweat.

As I got those groups out of the way, I turned to targeting smaller groups, probably collections of families or friends. Where people were too deep in their sleep, I had the bugs nip at them to wake them.

They would wake up and see what I’d done. On their walls and floors, much as I’d done at the fundraiser, I had my bugs organized into arrows, pointing the way out the doors, down to the streets, and towards the truck’s destination. I drew out the letters to the word ‘supplies’ and left them in the brightest lit, warmest spots in the rooms where people were. Accounting for the illiterate, I put the bugs down in the shapes of basic food – a drumstick, a cut of cheese, a can.

I knew I wasn’t the best artist. I worried I was confusing matters with the pictures. I could only cross my fingers.

Today wasn’t one of the days my power was working double time, with double the range. I’d wanted to make sure to reach as many as I could, so I’d started drawing the arrows and words with the bugs early. The unfortunate downside of that was that it meant we were left with barely any time to set up after we arrived at our destination. I’d knocked on the window to get the driver to stop at an intersection where the road was torn up and traffic was difficult for conventional vehicles.

I stayed in the truck as Coil’s men unloaded it. I sensed some of the people venturing out of their residences, and I was careful to leave them unmolested by the bugs, using only what I had to in order to track them. Watching from windows and entryways, encouraged by those who left, others ventured to follow.

The area in which I’d ordered the truck to stop was open. I hoped would encourage the growing crowd to approach. The truck was parked in the middle of the road, and the boxes were unloaded onto the ground just below the rear of the truck. I wasn’t sure I liked that they were getting wet, but I knew they were at least partially waterproof. I should have thought to ask Coil for some kind of platform or pallet to set them down on.

It wasn’t two minutes before the first people started to arrive. The first few were kids, no older than ten, gathered in a loose pack, maintaining a wary distance. The next two groups were families, parents with their kids in tow. I noted that the group of men who stepped out of an alley were armed, with knives and clubbing weapons hidden under their clothes and in their jackets. One of them swatted one of the flies I was using to feel him out. Were they members of the Merchants, or just a band of grown men that had taken to carrying weapons to protect themselves?

I’d known this move of mine would attract people of all types. If they were Merchants, I was okay with that, I’d accounted for it. Above all, I knew that this offering of supplies would attract the people who were hungry enough to venture out into the outdoors with the oppressive cloud of bugs looming above them. I would also attract the people who would want to confront me, Merchants included.

As people arrived and some ventured closer to the pile of boxes, one of Coil’s workers cast a wary glance over his shoulder, in my general direction. I should have told Coil’s men not to look my way or show any uncertainty. It would hurt the effect I had hoped to generate. To dissuade people from taking the supplies, I set a cloud of bugs around the piles of boxes, enough to be obvious without obscuring what was there. One of the guys with weapons approached anyways, and I had the swarm move towards him, condensing into a dark shape, buzzing loudly. He backed off.

In this manner, weighing enticement against implicit threat, I managed to keep the crowd in place as it grew to dozens, then a hundred people, with more still approaching, pushing the number closer to two hundred. Barely a fifth of all the people I’d tried to get in touch with. I was okay with that. It was enough to spread the word.

I was taking a risk, here. Gambling. It was like betting someone a million dollars that you’d hit a bullseye, when you’d barely played darts before. It wasn’t that I was confident this would succeed. It was that I really needed that million dollars.

In short, I needed to get underway with Coil’s agenda, and I needed to do it fast.

More people were still making their way towards us, joining the crowd. The bystanders would be getting more confident with numbers at their back, and they would be getting increasingly worried that if the crowd grew too large, maybe they wouldn’t get any supplies for themselves. If I put it off any longer, they could mob us, and I didn’t want that.

No, my gut told me this had reached the point where I had to act. From my seat in the truck, I drew my bugs together into a humanoid shape, and had the figure approach from the rear of the crowd, walking towards me. I waited, my attention focused on my swarm’s senses.

There was a gasp, then a general murmur. A woman shrieked. I felt the crowd part, heard the shouts. They’d noticed the figure I’d created with the swarm.

Most eyes would be on it, now. I scattered its shape and had the swarm leap or shoot towards the rear of the truck in a loose blob, arcing slowly through the air to land at the rear of the truck, on top of the crates.

The moment I knew the crowd would be unable to see, I stepped out of my hiding spot and into the midst of the swarm. I scattered the bugs explosively, sending every one of the bugs flying or crawling directly away from me, revealing myself. The people closest to the pile of crates I was standing on backed away.

To the crowd, it would look like I’d just transported myself to the back of the truck and materialized from the swarm. I hoped. It was a cheap ploy, obvious to anyone who thought about it. I was banking on the fact that the swarm I had blocking out most of the sun and the whole dramatic lead-up would help sell the illusion.

I kept the bugs swirling around me, tightly packed together so they would be moving in tendrils and loops. Like Grue habitually did with his power, I was aiming to use my own abilities to make myself look bigger, more impressive. It was like a dog raising its hackles or a cat arching its back.

“Some of you know of me!” I called out, and the noises of the swarm accented the words, gave an eerie, strangely loud echo to my voice. “My name is Skitter!”

I looked over the crowd. So many kids. So many who looked sick, pale with red cheeks. Some people were dressed too heavily for this warm weather. Everyone was dirty and damp, their hair greasy and clothes wrinkled.

My eyes fell on a figure in the back of the crowd, who stood out because she wasn’t unwashed or wrinkled. Her white and gray costume had patterns on it in light blue that weren’t too different from a circuit board. She leaned against a power pole, her arms folded, content to watch. The people nearest her were watching her as much as they watched me.

I’d known I’d attract attention from the heroes. Still, it was intimidating, a reminder of how fragile this whole thing was.

I swallowed. I had to be confident. I lowered my volume a step, relying on my swarm to convey my words for me. It wasn’t perfect, there were parts of speech they weren’t good at making, but it worked well enough that I kept at it. “I am laying claim to this area! From this moment, I rule this territory!”

People could have booed or jeered. I’d been almost convinced they would. Instead, I heard a murmur running through the crowd. Battery hadn’t budged, but I saw her pressing her fingers to her ear, and her lips were moving. She didn’t turn her head away from me, and I could imagine her staring at me.

“I am not the ABB, I am not the Merchants, the Empire or the Chosen! I am acting in your interests!”

Our group had discussed this, after talking to Coil the other night, and we’d hammered out more details yesterday, passing on the details to the Travelers. Our methods would vary wildly, but we were all making our bids for territory this morning. I decided not to mention that. Let the others arrive at that conclusion themselves.

“I demand no money from you, I do not intend to interfere in your lives unless you interfere in mine! I do not want to take or destroy what you have!”

I pointed at the crates that were beneath my feet. I lowered my voice. “These supplies are yours, a gift from me to you. And there will be more, delivered regularly for as long as I am here. My abilities will mean there will be no buzzing or biting flies harassing you, no cockroaches crawling over you as you sleep. I am offering you protection, security, and reprieve, for as long as you are my subjects! All I require is that you obey my rules, so hear me!”

“No gangs will operate here. Merchants? Chosen? I know some of you are in this crowd. Consider this my declaration of war. I will not permit you to sell drugs, to hurt my people or steal from them, or to seek shelter in my territory!”

I raised my hand, and the swarm gathered coalesced into a tight mass above me, a vaguely spherical shape, six feet in diameter.

“My bugs can devour a cow to the bone in one and a half minutes.” I had no idea if that was true. It sounded good. “I have a million eyes to watch you with. Go elsewhere.“

“To everyone else! If you assist any of these groups, give them food, shelter, or business? If you sell drugs, steal or prey on people in this area, you lose my goodwill. You will receive no more supplies, and you will earn my attention, with eyes on you for every waking hour. That’s strike one. If I catch you doing it again? I treat you as one of the enemy.”

I let my words hang in the air for effect, and to give my audience time to consider what I was saying. I glanced at Battery. She wasn’t moving to stop me… interesting.

“Each box contains enough basic food rations for four people. They also have first aid supplies and water filters. These supplies will keep you going until we can start fixing things and making more basic conveniences available.”

“If you want more? Work for me. This work does not have to be criminal, for I need people to pass on messages, to act as spokespersons for these neighborhoods, and to clean up or rebuild. For anyone who does assist me, them and their families will have access to some of those foods you miss, to showers and electricity, and generous payment. You and your loved ones will be dry, clean, and you will have fresh clothes.”

I looked over the crowd. I could see people getting restless. At least they weren’t lynching me.

“Thank you for listening. These supplies are yours to take. One to each family or group, up to two if your family is large enough.”

My monologue finished, I waited. Nobody ventured forward. Had I done too effective a job at intimidating them?

I was just starting to wonder what I’d do if nobody moved, when the first man stepped forward, followed immediately by his wife and a pair of kids. The wife had a very red nose and circles under her eyes that made me think she had a bad cold. The parents didn’t make eye contact with me as they accepted the box that one of Coil’s workers lifted down to hand to them. The children hid behind their mother. There was no gratitude, nor any thanks given, as the father turned to carry the box of food and necessities back to wherever he was taking shelter.

Seeing the first family leaving with their supplies, others grew brave enough to venture forward. In moments, there was a crush of bodies. I stepped onto the back of the truck as the boxes disappeared from beneath me, and I watched the crowd for any violence or fighting. One altercation began as two men both grabbed the same box. Before their violent tugging match got them or someone else hurt, I sent a buzzing flurry of bugs in between them. They dropped the box and backed off, staring at me. When I didn’t move to stop them or do anything further, they each returned to the pile to scrounge up different boxes, leaving the other on its side in the water.

There wasn’t enough in the way of supplies. I could see the atmosphere shift slightly as people realized it. There were too many people present versus the amount of boxes Coil had provided me, even with one box serving a whole family.

I knew Coil had more – his underground base had stored ridiculous amounts, so he had access to a supplier, or he was the supplier. I began formulating a plan, figuring out how I’d get boxes to those who were walking away from here empty-handed.

I was interrupted from my thoughts. A man shouted, and I saw the crowd backing away.

It was one of the men who’d had a weapon. He’d drawn and swung a crude knife to ward people off and grinned maniacally at the reaction he was getting. The scruff of beard on his chin was white, but it seemed rather premature given his apparent age. He was shirtless, with a long sleeve shirt tied around his waist, and scratches crisscrossing his upper body. His buddies stood back, smirking and grinning.

It was a bad judgement call to pull this right in front of me, but I supposed people were at a point where they weren’t at their most rational. That, or he was high on something. I could see him as a member of the Merchants, either way.

“Big man,” I called out, “You feel proud with that knife of yours?”

He turned towards me, “Fuck you! I’m not scared of bugs.”

I stepped down from the back of the truck. People backed away, but the man held his ground. As I got closer, I saw how his eyes were too wide, and he chewed his lip like it was trying to get away from him.

“You a member of the Merchants?” I asked.

“Fuck you!” he snarled.

I wasn’t going to be able to have a conversation with this guy.

“Fine. Don’t care. You’re threatening my people? You’d better be ready to take me on.”

“Not scared of you!”

I shrugged, “Prove it. Use that rusty thing on me. Stab me.”

He looked around at the crowd, hesitated.

“What?” I asked him. “I thought you weren’t scared.”

“I’m not!”

“Then stab me!” I raised my voice, shouted at him. “Or are you just a bully, getting weak in the knees when you’re facing someone that stands up to you!?”

He made a motion as if he was going to lunge for me, then stopped.

“Pathetic,” I snarled. Not for the crowd. I said it for him and him alone.

He lunged, holding the knife with both hands to drive it into my stomach, just beside where I had the armor. I resisted the urge to bend over, but I did have to step back for balance, and I had to put my hands on his shoulders to steady myself. I clutched his shoulders, digging my nails in for grip. I could feel pain radiate from my stomach and into my lower abdomen and chest. That was despite the fact that the fabric of my costume had kept it from piercing my flesh.

I forced myself to stand straighter, still holding his shoulders. He stabbed again, but it was ineffectual. Knocking one of my hands from his shoulder, he used the space that gave him to slash at my throat. The first hit had hurt because of the force of the charge behind it, I could almost ignore these follow-up strikes. He stepped back and looked at his knife, confused. I hadn’t gone down.

I extended my arm and let the bugs flow from beneath my costume in one swift movement, like water poured from a cup, covering him. The crowd backed away as the man began screaming incoherently. He threw himself backward into the inch-deep water and rolled around like he was trying to put out a fire. Maybe he was – the bugs I’d set on him were laced with capsaicin.

As his thrashing continued, I waited patiently, watching. As he used one hand to prop himself up in a crawl, I stepped forward onto his knife hand. My heel settled on his knuckles, and after I’d readjusted my footing, I ground it down, letting most of my body weight rest on that heel.

The volume of his screams increased. As I lifted my foot, he moved his hand, rolling onto his back to clutch at it, dropping the knife in the process.

I bent down to pick up the blade, and when I stood up again, Battery was ten feet in front of me, one pace closer to me than any of the rest of the crowd that ringed me and the Merchant.

“I can’t let you use that,” she gestured towards the knife. There was a faint glow from her costume. I gathered she was charging up her power.

“Wasn’t planning on it,” I lied, swarm buzzing in sync with my words. I’d considered stabbing the guy in the hand or somewhere where it wouldn’t be terminal, but hadn’t been certain on the route I would go. I reversed the knife and gently lobbed it towards her.

She spent the accumulated charge of her power and caught the knife out of the air by the handle. “How does this tie into the stunt you helped pull at the HQ?”

“The Wards’ building? The intel we got from there was valuable, and that kind of money buys a lot of things.” I looked at the remaining pile of supplies. The majority of the crowd had stopped collecting their boxes to watch the fight with the Merchant and my exchange with Battery.

As if noting what I was looking at, she glanced at the crowd encircling around us. “I don’t agree with this.”

“But you’re not going to stop me, and you’re not going to try and arrest me, despite what happened the other night,” I answered her, “Because I’m the lesser of a whole lot of evils that are in the city right now.”

“Mm. For now.”

“For now. Until then, I’ve got supplies from an outside agent, I’m not stealing them from the same sources you guys use, and I’m getting them out to these people at my own expense. I’m policing this area until the police can get back to doing it themselves, and I’m dealing with people who need to be dealt with. You’re not about to get in my way, are you?”

Battery surveyed the crowd again. “What’s your agenda?”

“Do I have to have one?”

“Yes. Your kind always has an agenda.”

“Maybe I’m unique.”

“No, knowing what you tried to pull with pretending to be a villain? Or pretending to be a hero that’s pretending to be a villain? You’re more likely to have some scheme at play than anyone else.”

I sighed. “Don’t know what to tell you. No agenda.”

She frowned, “When we first set post-Endbringer measures in place, your team was listed as low priority, and we were instructed to ignore you. Too costly in time and resources. I suspect someone intended to change that after your little stunt the other night, but the memo hasn’t gone out yet. You hear me?”

I tilted my head in a small nod.

“So I’m going by the book, and I’m walking away. But I’ll be keeping an eye on you, on this, and the moment you go too far, we’re coming after you, no holds barred.”

“I wouldn’t expect any less,” I answered her.

With that, she disappeared in a blur, the water parting in her wake.

With her gone, the rest of the crowd swooped down on the remaining supplies. People maintained a respectful distance, but oddly enough, they weren’t acting as scared of me as they’d been before I attacked the Merchant and before I’d talked to Battery.

Had her leaving me alone given me a measure of legitimacy? More importantly, had it been intended to give me legitimacy as ruler of the area? She hadn’t needed to step in right then. Probably. I had to admit I wasn’t sure if I would’ve gone through with stabbing the guy.

“Listen up!” I shouted. I used my swarm to give me more volume, and to stand out against the noise of the crowd. People went silent, and every set of eyes turned towards me. I stepped up onto the truck, hiding myself briefly in the swarm as I hopped up.

I addressed them, “Not everyone will get a box today. That is not an excuse to take what others have already claimed. As I said, I will not tolerate stealing or theft among you. If you try it, I’ll treat you the same as I treated him.”

As I pointed, the crowd parted slightly to reveal the Merchant who was still crawling away, simultaneously struggling to douse himself in the one or two inches water on the street and to crawl with three limbs – he was favoring the hand I’d stepped on. His buddies were gone. They’d left him.

“If you do not get a box, stay. I want the head of each family or group to raise their hands. This will help me ensure you get something before the day is over.”

It took a minute before the last of the boxes were claimed. There were some resentful looks as the last of the people left. I had thirty or so remaining people, and after some brief discussion, seven of them raised their hands.

I concentrated on the swarm, and found a collection of ladybugs. I piloted a group into each set of raised hands, and watched as people lowered their hands to look.

“Each of you now has three ladybugs in your hands. Keep them, and I will use them to find you later today to drop something off for you, with a small gift to each group of you for being patient.”

Slowly, they began to peel away from the group and leave. I began letting the swarm disperse, but I used the fact that I had the bugs all together to direct a mass towards my lair. The cream of the crop – the good ones.

As Coil’s men got back in the truck, my swarm-sense told me that one person had stayed behind. I turned to get a better look at her.

She was twenty or so, and her red hair had been set into long dreadlocks that she must have been growing for years. I wasn’t sure on the effect – white people didn’t grow good dreadlocks. She wore rain boots, a calf-length skirt, and had a colorful bandanna around her forehead. She was pale, and she fidgeted nervously, not making eye contact. High or afraid?

Then she saw I was looking and she met my eyes.

“Yes?” I asked her. “You’ve got the ladybugs. I will get you a box.”

“No. It’s not that.” She looked at her hand where the ladybugs were.

“Then what is it?

“You said we were your people, that you were protecting us. Does that mean you’re going against the other groups?”

“Yes.”

“My kid brother. I- he needs help. My parents are sick and they’re in the hospital and I can’t tell them because I told them I’d take care of him, um, and I asked the cops but they’re so busy and there’s no way they can help, and I was going to ask that hero, Battery, but then she disappeared so fast-” The words spilled out of her mouth, less and less intelligible as she kept talking. She only stopped when her voice cracked.

Breathing hard, out of breathlessness or emotion, she stared at the ground, clenching her fists. I could feel one of the ladybugs get crushed in her grip, fading out of existence as far as my power was concerned.

“Stop,” I told her, without using my swarm to change my voice. “Breathe. What happened?”

She looked up at me, then she swallowed hard.

“The Merchants took him. My kid brother. I want you to get him back. Please.”

11.03

I sat cross-legged in my chair on the second floor of my lair. A mug of tea was warm in my hands, and the room was dark. Only a faint light filtered in through the slats at the top of the metal shutter that covered the window. My mask rested on one knee.

My attention swept over my territory, with an emphasis on the centermost area near where I’d held my speech. The reach of my power wasn’t quite good enough to extend to the outer edges of my territory, which left me anxious. I was craving one of those moments when my power would go into overdrive and increase its range. Minutes passed as I followed my ‘subjects’ and did what I could to get to know them. My bugs remained on the backs of people’s elbows, at the small of their back, and I’d maybe put a small fly in their hair if it was long enough that they wouldn’t feel it. Not enough to bother anyone, or that anyone would necessarily notice, but enough for me to track their movements.

Two groups arrived within a minute of one another, each at different points of my territory. Thirty-two people in all, with eight in the first group and twenty-four in the other. Both groups reacted, jumping and backing away as my swarm swept over them. I could feel the vibration in the air as one in the second group laughed. The others joined him. I’d held off on attacking, just using the bugs to get a headcount and a sense of who was there. There were men and women, young and old. Each of them had weapons of some sort, and fifteen in total had guns.

The Merchants were responding to my bid for control. Good.

I sipped my tea and found it was lukewarm. I took big gulps in the hopes of finishing it before it got cold.

One of the Merchants in the first group shouted something, loud enough for it to carry down the street, and fired a gunshot. Impulsively, I tried to tune into my bug’s hearing and interpret what he was saying, but the strangeness of the noise stopped me. It didn’t translate from a bug’s ‘ears’ to mine.

The first group started running down the length of the street. They scattered, with smaller groups of two people each heading to different buildings. Finding the windows boarded up and the doors locked or barricaded, they started tearing at the plywood and planks. Some struck at the doors with their improvised weapons.

There were people inside two of those buildings. Not many, but still. Those were my people.

Using my swarm on them would have been easy, but this wasn’t just a question of taking the Merchants down. I needed to do it so effectively and undeniably that they would hesitate to come back. If I did it well enough, ideally, word of mouth would help keep others from trying anything similar.

Why did that line of thinking sound so familiar?

It dawned on me: Bakuda. She’d said something similar when she’d been doing her monologue and pretending to be the new leader of the ABB.

Well, that was disquieting.

Still, my reasons were different. I wanted to protect my people. Bakuda hadn’t been motivated by an interest in anyone but herself.

I dismissed that line of thinking and gathered the swarm into a vaguely humanoid shape with a head, arms, and a torso. I tried to balance it on two columns like legs, but I erred in favor of dissolving that into one column for the lower body over risking having it fall over. A good thing the ground was mostly dry, there, or I would have required far more bugs to maintain the shape with the lowermost critters constantly drowning or being pushed away by the motion of the water.

I piloted the swarm-figure slowly towards the first group. Someone noticed and turned away from the door he was trying to smash down with his makeshift club. He shouted and laughed, drawing the attention of others.

Running forward, he swung the club at the swarm like he was trying to hit a home run. The head was scattered, dashed to pieces, and he laughed again.

Until the rest of the swarm dogpiled him. Then he started screaming.

Roughly half of his ‘friends’ laughed at him. Lots of laughter. Were they all on something? The remaining four people hurried to his side and tried to claw the masses of bugs away from him. As they got bitten and stung in retaliation, they backed away, brushing the bugs off of their arms and legs, leaving him to his fate.

The bugs I had in the area coalesced into another vaguely humanoid shape. Then another. In moments, I had a half-dozen figures in a loose ring around the group. I moved them forward, and my enemies backed away from them. I used this to herd the Merchants until they stood back to back in a tight circle, surrounded. They had their weapons raised, but they had to know how ineffectual the baseball bats and guns would be.

Then I waited, keeping the swarm-figures remaining as motionless as possible. If it weren’t for the man still thrashing on the ground, screaming, it would have been eerily still and quiet.

The second group was oblivious to the events a few blocks away as they roamed through my territory. A woman in the group was singing, loud enough that her voice would be carrying to nearby residents. She was letting them know that trouble was near. I noted that she was holding a plastic tank of gasoline, if the topographic map I was getting from my swarm-sense was right, and the box in her other hand could easily have been matches. That wasn’t good.

Still, her group had yet to do anything. I kept an eye on them and waited.

Someone in the first group made a run for it, rushing for the space between two of the swarm-figures that surrounded his group. He didn’t make it. The swarms both intercepted him, and he went down, howling in pain.

Unease gave way to panic as the group realized they were trapped. A woman shoved a man into the nearest swarm, trying to use him to clear the way, but she only got two more steps before the wasps, black flies, mosquitoes and hornets caught up to her. She violently swung her arms around herself in a futile attempt to fight off the bugs, and succeeded only in throwing herself off-balance and falling to the ground. The spiders, ants, centipedes, millipedes, beetles and all of the other crawling parts of the swarm rolled over her, burying her beneath their mass before she could stand.

The remaining four Merchants in the first group exchanged muttered words, some kind of plan. Then three of them broke for it, each headed in a different direction. I wasn’t sure what outcome they expected. A mass of bugs caught each of them, and they all went down, limbs flailing, screaming.

That left only one. He dropped into a crouch, his hands on his head, and looked frantically around for some kind of escape route.

So I gave him one.

The swarm-figures parted enough that he had a chance to retreat. It took him ten seconds to notice it, and another few seconds to build up the courage to make a run for it.

He bolted. Seeing the general mass of insects down the road, he decided to turn into a series of alleyways. I let him run for a minute.

He was halfway down an alley when I drew the ambient bugs from the vicinity into a loose humanoid shape, not as dense as the others. Still, seeing it stopped him in his tracks.

He turned to retreat the way he’d come, only to find another swarm coalescing into a second figure at the other end of the alley. His head whipped around as he realized he had no escape routes left, and then he screamed, a primal, despairing sound.

The swarm figures moved towards him at a glacial pace, with more bugs joining them every second, to give them more mass and more raw attacking power. His composure cracked before they even reached him, and he charged headlong into the swarm that had been at the far end of the alley. Bugs tore into him, pinching and stabbing him, and he made it nearly to the edge of my power’s range before his legs buckled. He landed on top of a pile of the trash that the nearby building’s residents had been stacking in the alleyway, and the swarm started mauling him.

Group one down.

I finished my tea, then made a face. The teabag had leaked grit, and some had settled into the bottom of my cup. Bitter.

I put the empty cup down at the base of my chair, and then I turned my attention to the second group.

I didn’t even need to think about it.

“I’ll do it,” I told the redheaded girl with the dreadlocks.

She looked surprised. Odd. She’d asked me, but she hadn’t expected me to help? Or had she expected me to demand something from her in exchange?

Should I have demanded something in exchange?

“Stay here. I’ll be right back,” I said.

I turned and walked to the front of the truck, knocked, and the driver popped the door open for me.

I spoke in a low voice, “We’re done here. Tell Coil I need more supplies. Seven cases at a minimum, by the end of the day. And tell him I think you guys did a good job, so if he’s up to giving you any kind of bonus, it would be a good time.”

He gave me a tight nod, then closed the door. The truck drove off, leaving me with the girl. I approached her, and I could see the effect I was having on her. She was unwilling to meet my eyes, and her fidgeting stilled as I turned my full attention to her.

“Your name?”

“Sierra,” she answered me.

“Let’s walk, Sierra,” I said. “I need details if I’m going to help. The more you can tell me, the better.”

She joined me as I headed towards the sidewalk, and after taking a moment to compose her thoughts, she started telling me what had happened. “Three weeks ago, everything was so normal. I was finishing up at college. Bryce, my brother, went to Arcadia High. My uncle was staying with us because he was down on his luck, as my dad put it. I’m almost positive it had something to do with his drinking.”

I nodded.

“Then Leviathan came. The sirens woke us up early in the morning, we hurried to the shelter, and by the time it was midday, we were standing in front of what used to be our house. Flattened, everything we ever owned was gone.”

“I’m sorry.”

From the look on her face, it seemed like I’d surprised her again. What kind of image did she have of me?

“Thank you. We- we stayed in a family friend’s basement, and they had another family there as well, on the upper floors, so it was crowded. But it was better than the shelters, or so we thought. My dad, my uncle and I worked with one of the cleanup crews. Trying to get things normal again. Until word got out that one of the crews had been attacked, the women assaulted. Um. So they told me I couldn’t work with them. I worked for one of the shelters instead. Handing out sheets, making beds, keeping track of names and passing on requests for stuff like insulin or other meds that people needed. Long hours, thankless…”

She put a hand to her face, “I’m rambling.”

“It’s fine. Better that you give me too much information than not enough. Keep going.”

“My uncle got sick fast. He had a cold just days after Leviathan came, and it got complicated after, became pneumonia. The hospital sent him out of town for medical care, and we got word he’d died just two days after that. Respiratory distress or something. Drowning in his own lungs. Less than a week from the time he got the cold to the time he died.”

She stopped talking, and I didn’t push her, giving her time to compose herself. Had she been close to her uncle?

“By the time we heard the news, Mom and Dad were sick too, and Bryce was showing symptoms. It wasn’t a cold. It was more like the flu, but with what happened to my uncle, we didn’t want to take any chances. None of them could keep anything down, sinus problems, pounding headaches, tired… we went to the doctors and they said it could be toxic mold exposure. The moisture, always being cold and damp, and not having enough to eat, being in that basement, with the foundation possibly cracked or the mold disturbed by the vibrations and damage in the attack… Um.”

I wondered if this was pertinent to what happened to her brother, or if she was just really wanted someone to talk to. I didn’t want rush her, but I did try to get her on track, “So your parents and brother got sick.”

“And I was left alone. I guess I was saved by the long hours at the shelter, I wasn’t spending half as much time in the house where they got exposed to the mold. I had to find a new place to stay. A guy from the shelter heard my story, offered to give me a room in the church. Near here. I was grateful, I took it. My brother got out of the hospital, and he came to stay with me. He got the cot, I got the floor. A day and a half later, they came.”

“The Merchants?”

She nodded. “They attacked the church. Nine or ten of them. We outnumbered them, but they had weapons, and they caught us by surprise. One of them threw a molotov cocktail through a window. There were other families there, families with kids, so I grabbed a fire extinguisher and tried to stop it from spreading. Spraying around- I couldn’t put it out, didn’t want to try in case I just spread it around, so I just contained it, for all the good it did.”

She shook her head, “They came through the doors and began attacking people, one of them grabbed my brother, I- I panicked. I used the extinguisher to spray towards them and tried to pull him away. I couldn’t, and others were approaching, so I left him and I escaped through the broken window where the bottle had been thrown inside. When I got back an hour later, there were fire trucks and police and ambulances there. My brother was the only one missing. The others were there, but badly hurt. Burned or cut up, beaten. Derrick, the man who’d invited me to stay there-”

She broke off, and she stopped walking, turning away so her head was facing away from me.

I waited patiently. When she’d turned back so I could see her face and started walking again, I gently asked, “Dead?”

She shook her head. Quietly, she said, “They cut him up with a broken bottle. The doctor said they bent him over and shoved it between- he’ll have a tube running out of his stomach and into a bag for the rest of his life. And he might never walk again. You understand?”

“I think so.” Not that I wanted to.

“Not about what they did, I mean, do you understand what I’m saying about these assholes, these… I don’t even have words to describe them… to say how much I hate them. God!”

“Keep going,” I urged her.

“I don’t know you. I barely know about you. I heard something about you in some bank robbery around the time I had exams-”

“That was me.”

“I don’t know how you operate. I don’t know your methods, outside of what I just saw back there. But I want you to know that I’ve always considered myself a pacifist. I’ve never been in a fight, I’ve always tried to stand up for people and give them the benefit of a doubt, to be fair and never do anything to hurt another person, even with words.”

“Okay.” How long had it been since she slept? I was having trouble following her train of thought.

“So I think it should mean something extra, something special, when I’m telling you to hurt them. Fuck them up. Hurt them as much as you think they deserve, then double that. Triple it, just- just make them-”

She stopped yet again, choking on her words.

I had a hard enough time keeping afloat in a conversation when I was Taylor. How was I supposed to do it as Skitter? What was appropriate, what was expected? I hadn’t figured any of this out, yet.

I put a hand on her shoulder, and she flinched. I left the hand there, and I measured out my words. “Trust me when I say I have that handled.”

She looked at me, and I gave her a small nod.

“God,” she muttered.

“Tell me more about them, and tell me anything about your brother that might help me identify him.”

She startled, as if shaken from a daydream. She reached into her pocket and handed me a folded picture. It was hard to pin down the kid’s age. He was skinny in a way that suggested someone who was going through a major growth spurt but hadn’t yet filled out. He had large, blue eyes and a snub nose. There wasn’t a hair on his face, and his black hair was spiked so the top stuck up in every direction. Like so many guys, he didn’t seem to know how to style his hair. He ignored the sides and back in favor of overdoing the parts he could see when he looked in the mirror.

The boy could have been a tall eleven year old and he could have been a young-looking sixteen.

“Bryce?” I asked her.

She nodded. “Bryce Kiley.”

“Is there any chance he escaped?”

“No. I’ve checked all the usual places. His friends, our old house, what’s left of it. I stopped by the hospital where Mom and Dad are, and the nurses say they haven’t seen him.”

“How long ago did he disappear?”

“Two days ago.”

I nodded. I vaguely recalled that the forty-eight hour mark was when police considered a missing person as good as gone. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t try. It also meant I could feel less guilty about handling things here, with my territory, before starting my search.

“Did you get a look at the people who took him?”

“Some. The one nearest me, he was fat, white, and he had one of those bushy wild man beards. You know the kind I mean? It sticks out everywhere, no grooming-”

“I know what you mean.”

“And his hair was really long and greasy, so it stuck to his scalp.”

“Okay.”

“Then there was one woman. Maybe middle-aged, bleached blond hair. Trailer trash. And she was with this tall black guy with a scar on his lips. He was the one who was grabbing Bryce. He had a bottle in one hand he was drinking from and a length of pipe in the other, so I think he was the one who used the bottle on Derrick…”

“Were they wearing anything?”

“I don’t think anything major. Um, most of the guys were shirtless, and the ones who were wearing clothes were wearing t-shirts, some with no sleeves or with the sleeves torn off. Oh. And a lot of them had these bands around their wrists. Plastic, colored, sometimes one or two, but the black guy had a lot. I remember seeing the ones on the black guy’s wrist, and thinking it didn’t seem like something he would wear on his own.”

“Ok, that last bit is especially good.” Were they a way of marking status? More bands for higher status, with different colors meaning different things? “Anything else?”

“I can’t think of anything major right this second.”

“Okay.” I thought. But she might come up with something more? “Where are you staying?”

She hesitated to answer, but she finally relented and admitted, “Nowhere. I was out all last night, looking. I was going to go back to the place we’d stayed at first, our family friend, but…”

“The mold problem, and you said it was crowded. That won’t do. You’ll come with me.”

Concern flickered across her face. “I don’t know-”

“It’s better if you’re close, so you can answer any questions I have and so I can keep you informed.”

She frowned, and I could practically see her working to think of a way to get out of my offer without offending. I knew if she didn’t come with me, she’d probably wind up searching for a mediocre to unsatisfactory place.

“This isn’t really negotiable,” I told her, just to forestall any excuses.

For her part, she didn’t argue.

We made our way to the beach, and after I’d checked both ways, I led her into the storm drain. It took some urging to get her to enter the darkness, and I had to grip her hand to lead her into the oppressive black. I unlocked the barred door that led into the cellar and locked it behind us.

When I flipped the switches to light up the ground floor, her eyes went wide. “You have power. Erm, electricity.”

“And running water. Stay here a moment.” I took the stairs two at a time to get to the second floor. Nothing too sensitive there, but I did walk up to the stairs leading to the third floor and slid a panel across the stairwell. With my keys, I locked it in place. I didn’t feel it was that obvious to anyone glancing around the room. It looked like a section of wall until you saw the keyhole. I verified the bugs were all locked up tight in their individual compartments in the lids of each terrarium, then headed back to Sierra.

“I’m making tea,” I spoke, as I came down the stairs. “You want some? Are you hungry?”

“I’m not a tea drinker, and I haven’t had it in years, but that suddenly sounds like the best thing in the world.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have a kitchen table or chairs or even a living room for us to have the tea. There’re beds in the other room, if you want something to sit on, and you can make yourself comfortable there.”

“This is strangely domestic for a villain.” I turned to look at her and she hurried to add, “I mean-”

“It’s fine. I’m not offended, I am a villain. But I’m also a person under this mask. Someone who prefers tea to coffee, who enjoys reading, who…” I floundered. “…likes sweet and savory foods but dislikes anything spicy or sour. Point being, I’m someone who wants to make sure you get taken care of. Especially if you’re among the people I’m protecting in the territory I’m claiming. Go. Find a bed.”

Obediently, she went to do just that.

I put the kettle on, then got the sugar. What did I have that would go well with tea?

I got out a box of graham cookies with chocolate on one side. I poured out the tea into mugs and put a teabag in each. I poured milk into a small measuring cup so Sierra could have milk with her tea if she wanted, and similarly doled out sugar into a small bowl and placed a spoon inside it. Then I tore open the box of cookies and sorted them onto a plate.

I put everything onto a tray and went to find the room where Sierra would be seated.

She was lying on the bunk bed, already fast asleep.

Quietly, I set the serving tray down on one of the luggage trunks at one corner of the room, collected my own tea and went upstairs to the second floor.

It took me three tries.

On the third attempt, the beetle, supported by others and a crack in the pavement, successfully struck the match against the side of the box as the other bugs adjusted its position. A small flame flared at the end.

Other bugs leveraged matches out of the box the woman had dropped, gripping the matches in their mandibles, sometimes two or three bugs to one match. Like a relay, they touched one match to another, passing on the flame from the beetle’s match to each of the others. It wasn’t long before there were more than thirty beetles each with a lit match in its mandibles. Some died from the heat their own matches generated, but most were able to stand it. I could imagine the visual of it; kind of like a small sea of tiny flames like lighters at a concert. Or maybe it was closer to a lynch mob, a crowd holding torches, radiating with an imminent threat of violence.

It was a shame it was closer to noon than midnight. I imagined the effect would have been even more exaggerated in the darkness.

The woman stepped away, pulling off one of her wet shoes. She threw it at the bugs, and it rolled over a few. A heartbeat later, it burst violently into flame. It didn’t make a difference. The swarm that was armed with matches was already too spread out for one shoe and one small fire to slow them down at all.

The woman’s attempts to remove her other shoe made her fall over, and she suppressed a grunt of pain as she landed. She successfully kicked off her other shoe, and then began simultaneously fumbling with her belt while trying to crab-walk backwards away from the advancing sea of tiny flames.

I could picture it. It would be intimidating: A sea of bugs acting with a backing of human intelligence, each with their tiny torches.

Doubly intimidating if a swarm of bugs had made you drop and spill a can of gasoline onto your shoes and the cuffs of your pant legs.

She successfully undid her belt, then began trying to remove the tight-fitting jeans she wore. The woman got as far as getting her jeans around her ankles before she got stuck. Some beetles and roaches took to the air, carrying matches to the ground behind her, cutting off her retreat. She screamed at the others in her group, but nobody leaped to her assistance.

A beetle fluttered forward and touched a match to her jeans. In an instant, the bundle of cloth at her feet was on fire.

She tried to pat it out, but her efforts to remove her shoes had gotten trace amounts of gasoline on her hands. Her right hand ignited, the insects on it dying, and she threw herself to one side to thrust it into a hole in the road where water had collected, her feet still kicking as she tried to remove her jeans. Gasoline transferred to the water’s surface and flickered with the faintest of flames.

One of her friends finally stepped forward to help her, grabbing her under the armpits and dragging her ten feet down the road to a spot where more water had collected. Together, they worked to put out the flames, dousing her bundled jeans into the water. I could maybe have stopped him, driven him away, but my interest was more on spooking them than causing grievous physical harm. I wouldn’t lose much sleep over burning her with the things she’d intended to use on others, but I wouldn’t stop her from putting herself out.

Apparently seeing the woman get set on fire by the swarm had done its job in unnerving my enemies. The group scattered, and I let them run. One by one, I took them down by creating the human shaped swarms and then attacking them. Some fought, others ran, but each of the Merchants succumbed eventually, choking on the bugs or losing all self-control in the face of the pain the attacking swarm inflicted.

The human shapes were less efficient than a regular swarm, but I imagined the psychological effect was that much greater. A swarm of bugs was something you could encounter any day. An uncannily human figure that you couldn’t hurt with any conventional weapon, who threatened incredible pain if it got close enough? It was something my enemies would remember, and it was something they could tell others about.

I gathered the swarm into a figure that stood next to the woman with the burned feet and her friend. I drew more and more bugs into the swarm, bloating it and drawing it up to the point where I couldn’t make it any larger, without the bottom half giving way. I gauged it to be somewhere close to twelve feet in height.

Then I let it fall on top of them. That polished off group two.

I stood from the armchair, stretched, and pulled on my mask. I bent down to pick up my mug, then headed downstairs to check on Sierra. She was still sleeping, but I’d known that. I’d felt secure about removing my mask only because I had bugs on the girl, to keep track of her. I’d know the second she stirred.

I went into the kitchen before sending a text to Coil:

No use having the woman die from any complications from her injuries. Besides, maybe he could get her to offer up information in exchange for her freedom.

I dialed Lisa next.

“Hey, Boardwalk empress,” she answered me.

“Tattletale. How’s it coming?”

“It’s not. I’m gathering intel on the enemies in my territory. A few have migrated my way in response to what the rest of you are doing, regrouping. I’m trying to see if there’s any useful tidbits of info I can pick up, and if there’s maybe a way to fuck with all these guys at around the same time, so they know there’s nowhere left to go. In the meantime, I’m helping Grue out, figuring out where he’s got Merchants hiding in his area.”

“He’s doing okay?”

“No problems, last I heard. You? I saw that cloud of bugs earlier.”

“Made a big play. Everyone here should know this is my territory, now. Merchants tested the waters, I dealt with it. Remains to be seen if this works out in the long run.”

“Hmmm,” she replied, “I’m getting the impression you’re a little further along than the rest of us.”

“If that’s the case, then that’s great. I want to be in Coil’s good books.”

“I want you to be too. You know I’m here to help if you need it.”

“Yeah. That’s why I’m calling, actually. I need to find someone.”

“Do tell.”

I gave her the rundown on everything Sierra had told me. She stopped me when I got to the bit about the armbands.

“Those aren’t for rank,” she informed me. “But you’re not wrong in saying they’re like status. They’re more like… boy scout badges.”

“Boy scout badges?”

“From what I can gather, you get one for attending one of the Merchants’ ‘events’. Colors are supposed to represent what the each one was about. It translates to a kind of respect, showing you’re loyal, whatever.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“And neither am I, to be honest,” she replied. “And that bothers me. So in the interests of getting intel and maybe getting a lead on this missing boy of yours, do you think you could get away from your territory, tonight, to join me in figuring this out?”

“I don’t want to leave just yet.”

“Merchants are throwing a big bash tonight, so I doubt they’ll be attacking your territory. In fact, I’m wondering if they were attacking your territory to get cash or stuff to barter at the event as much as they were responding to your claim.”

“Maybe.”

“And Chosen aren’t a threat right now? They haven’t said or done anything yet?”

“Not yet, no. Haven’t run into any.”

“Grue and Imp are probably going to want to wind down and go on the defensive later today. You can have one of them babysit your territory if you’re worried. You have no good reason to refuse. Come on, let’s go see what a Merchant’s party is all about.”

11.04

Coil had put Bitch’s hideout in an area nobody wanted to be, masked with the appearance of a building nobody sane would want to enter. Grue’s place and my own lair were camouflaged in outward appearance and set in more discreet locations. Tattletale’s place, by contrast, was in plain sight, and it was also one of the highest traffic areas I’d come across in the past few days.

The city block that hosted Tattletale’s hideout was a short distance from Lord street, and it sported only two intact buildings. The first building was a gas station that was currently hosting more than a dozen wrecked or flooded cars that had been dragged off the road. The rest of the area had lots where buildings had once stood, each bulldozed clear of the rubble that had been left in the wave’s wake and surrounded with sandbags to keep the water from pouring in.

The second building was a sort I’d seen often enough as of late. I’d stayed in similar places for nearly two weeks before rejoining the Undersiders. The structure stood in the center of the area, surrounded by tents and communal areas that were sheltered by tarps set over metal frameworks – a dining hall, a medical bay, portable washrooms. Each of these outdoor stations had dozens of people gathered around them. It was a shelter.

She’d told me not to dress up, so I hadn’t. She’d also told me not to wash my hair today, but it was too late for that. I’d donned a brown spaghetti-strap top, rain boots and a pair of lightweight black pants that were a little worn from the past few weeks, but had the benefit of drying quickly. My knife was tucked inside the waistband of my pants, at my back. Not obvious, not entirely hidden either.

Way things were these days, cops were letting things slide as far as concealed and openly displayed weaponry went. People needed protection, and so long as the armed didn’t break the rules about using the weapons on people who didn’t attack them first, most people wouldn’t give them much trouble. Some shelters wouldn’t let you in with a weapon, of course, but some did, and others disallowed firearms but let other weapons slide.

I made my way inside, joining the rest of the crowd. Cots filled the majority of the building’s interior, and both possessions and people made navigating between the beds difficult at best. Signs were spread out over the walls, some professionally made, others written in plain print with permanent marker:

I found a big, burly guy that wore an orange vest and name tag and approached him. He was talking to someone else, so I waited.

When he turned to me, he frowned, “You wanting to stay here?”

“No, but-”

“Opened our doors yesterday, and we’re already nearly full. Any more space is reserved for priority people. If you want a place, you can try the other shelters down-”

“No. I have a place. I’m just looking for Lisa.”

“Works-here-Lisa or Staying-here-Lisa?” he asked.

“Both?” I guessed.

“Front desk. If she’s not there, wait. She’ll probably be in the back getting something for someone.”

I headed to the front desk where a crowd of people had gathered. The desk itself was a simple construction of unpainted, unvarnished wood. The people were wet, dirty and didn’t look to be in the best of health.

Lisa was at the end of the front desk furthest from the front doors, wearing the same orange vest and name tag the other staffer had been. Her hair was in a french braid, with a few strands hanging free. She was talking to a woman who might have been fifty or sixty. A large black and white map of the city had been stapled to the wall behind the counter where Lisa was working. Colored pins marked various spots on the map, and areas had been outlined and shaded in with markers and highlighters. Words were written in the boundaries of these sections. Many areas were marked with yellow highlighter, with the words ‘Merchant Territory: Very Dangerous!’, blue marker, with the words ‘Chosen Occupied: Avoid!’, or variations of such.

The Boardwalk and surrounding area? Green marker, ‘Skitter: Low threat, free supplies?’

I looked and noted that Tattletale’s area was partially blocked in by black marker. According to the map it was contested by an overlapping of Grue’s territory and the Merchants. Red pins marked some of the areas.

I supposed that made sense. If she left her own territory empty, it would be conspicuous, and it would be strange to mark it as Tattletale’s when she hadn’t done anything noteworthy to claim the space.

“Where did you say your house was?” Lisa asked the older woman.

“Dewitt and Pagne.”

Lisa turned and found the area on the map. She held the marker so it hovered over the spot. “And they’d moved in? You’re sure?”

“They’ve been there for four days, as far as I can tell. I’m afraid to get too close, but there’s always people there.”

Lisa colored in a small section of the map with yellow highlighter, extending the size of a nearby block of the Merchant’s territory. “I know it’s small consolation, but at least now others will know to steer clear.”

“Okay,” the woman answered with a note of sadness in her voice. “That’s all I wanted.”

“Things will get better,” Lisa promised, smiling gently.

The woman smiled back in return, glancing at the open area of cots and displaced people. With a light laugh, she said, “I suppose they have to, don’t they?”

“That’s the spirit.” Lisa grinned.

She was still smiling when she turned my way. “Lost and found? Want to check how your neighborhood’s doing? If you’re looking for someone, you can leave a photo. Every night, I’ll be taking digital photos and sending them to the other shelters.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “I’m here because a friend invited me to a party.”

She winked, then shouted, “Dimitri! Take over for me!”

A man from the crowd behind me shouted his response. Lisa waved me behind the counter and led me through a door.

“Surprised you aren’t running this place,” I told her.

“Too obvious,” she answered with a smile. She threw one arm around my shoulders. “And this lets me be right at the center of things. Information from the people who are out there every day, watching.”

“Good setup.”

“And it gets better, because I have this.” She opened another door.

The room was small and it was hot with the running computers that were crammed into it. Six people were seated at different points in the room, each with their own computer. Two more computers sat unoccupied. The walls were scattered with photos, maps, printouts and post-its. Black tape joined these elements together in a bizarre configuration that looked like part tree and part maze. All of our enemies were up on the wall: The Merchants, Fenrir’s Chosen, the Pure, the Protectorate, New Wave and the Wards. There were pages relating to something Lisa was calling Case 53. Dragon was up there, as was Scion. The Slaughterhouse Nine were on a bulletin board, but Hatchet Face’s picture was crossed out in red marker.

“Impressive.”

“I’d like to think so. With word-of-mouth and gossip from the crowd out there and the web info and the concrete data in here, I’m pretty in touch with all that crap. Except it’s tiring. I’m feeling the beginning of one of those headaches I get when I use my power too much. So you and I are going out for some fresh air.”

“Knowing where we’re going, I doubt the air’s that fresh.”

“It’s a saying, kiddo,” she smiled.

“I know. I’m just a little worried about there being trouble. I…” I lowered my voice, all too aware that Lisa’s computer guys could see me unmasked. I didn’t want them to connect the dots. “…just feel uncomfortable without my stuff.”

“This is strict recon.”

“And the people we’re doing recon on are dangerous.”

“True. But we’ll have escorts,” she led me into another room: hers. A quick glance around showed that a section at the back was curtained off, while the front had a desk with a computer, a bank of phones and two television screens.

“Escorts?” I asked, as the door closed behind us.

“Like dates for a really fucked up prom.” She worked her cell phone out of the pocket of her jeans and dialed. She held one finger up for me, telling me to wait and be silent.

It took a moment before she spoke, “Minor? I want you, Senegal, Jaw and Brooks in my office. Civvies.”

As she put the phone away, she shrugged at me. “I know you’d rather Brian come with, but he’s got his own thing going on, you know?”

“Oh, no. I’m ok that he isn’t coming,” I told her. “Things are bad between us.”

“I totally didn’t know you’d confessed to him, you know? I saw the awkwardness between you two, and the distance, but I assumed it was because you’d used him as a shoulder to cry on. My power filled in those blanks all wrong.”

“Yup. Confessed. Not sure what sucked more. Him saying he thought of me in the same terms as he thought of Aisha, that he considered me a friend, knowing I’d fucked said friendship up, or him implying he’d only been nice to me because he pitied me.”

She frowned, “I’m going to kick his ass, for being that-”

“No!”

Lisa frowned at me.

I went on, “Don’t interfere, don’t make things worse than they already are. He’s mad at me, he’s hurt by what I did, and, um,” I bit the corner of my lip between my teeth, tried to think of how to gracefully state what I wanted to say, “We’re already separated. You get what I mean? We’re each in our own territory, doing our own things. If something happened to push us further apart, I dunno if I’d even ever get his friendship back.”

“Oh, Taylor, no-” Lisa started. Before she could launch into any reassurances, there was a knock on the door.

“Come in!” Lisa called out, then she told me, quickly, “We’ll get into this later.”

Seeing the first three men come into the room, I was left with the distinct impression that Lisa had picked out the biggest, meanest looking men in her retinue. Then I saw the fourth guy. Where the first three were in the neighborhood of six feet in height, physically powerful, the fourth was an inch or so shorter than I was, though he was still in good shape. Better shape than me, for sure, but not someone imposing, like the rest.

Of the four, I noted the guy who was wearing the most wrinkled clothes, with the thick beard and the broad gut. He wasn’t imposing because he’d packed on muscle like the others, but because he was big, looking like a grizzly bear that was dressed up like a person. What caught my eye, though, was the ironic fact that this same guy was having the hardest time at shrugging off that stiff-backed, square-shouldered military bearing that had been hammered into him at some point during his onetime career.

These guys were soldiers. Coil’s, and now Tattletale’s.

Lisa pointed at one of the taller men, a blond guy with a long face. Not long in terms of being sad, but in terms of how genetics had put it together. “Minor. Team captain.”

The next guy, darker haired, with unshaved scruff on his cheeks and chin, she identified as Senegal.

She smiled as she turned to the burly, overweight man. “Jaw. I’m still waiting to hear where he got the nickname.”

“No comment,” Jaw rumbled.

That left only the smaller guy. “Brooks,” she told me, “Our field medic, though I’m hoping we won’t be needing his services there, and ex-airforce. Handy with radios and computers. Also pretty good with a gun.”

Jaw nodded assent to that.

“These four will be our lookouts, bodyguards and helping hands on our little errand. We can pose as couples.” She grinned at that.

Brooks spoke, and his voice had a hard sing-song accent I had a hard time placing, “Couples? Four guys and only two girls?”

“Minor escorts me. Senegal escorts my friend. And…” she took Jaw’s hand and placed it on Brooks’s shoulder. “You have your date.”

Jaw laughed, and Brooks turned red, anger etching his face.

“The fuck?” Brooks growled.

“Watch it,” Minor spoke. He didn’t raise his voice or add any inflection, but I could see Brooks react as if he’d been slapped.

“I could have brought Pritt,” Lisa admitted, “But I’m more comfortable with there being more guys in our group. Chances are good we’ll get in a minor scuffle somewhere along the way, and way the Merchants operate, they’re going to respect guys more. Ready to head out?” She looked at her cell phone’s display. “Party starts soon, and we’ve got to walk.”

Lisa removed the orange vest and name tag and then walked around to her desk to retrieve a series of colorful elastic bands. She snapped one around her left wrist, then handed two to Minor. She wore one yellow. He wore one yellow and one black.

That done, she led the way out of the shelter, giving a sloppy salute to her ‘boss’ at the front desk. Together, we walked as a crowd. We were a block away from the shelter when Senegal put one hand on my shoulder and pulled me closer.

Uncomfortable, I looked up at him to see his expression, and I didn’t like what I saw. It reminded me of a look I’d seen on Bitch’s face from time to time. That look where I could see that animal that had been at the core of any of us since before we walked upright. Just like Bitch, the animal at Senegal’s core was vicious. The difference was that he was much better at pretending to be normal, and his animal wasn’t angry. It was hungry.

He wore a polite smile and wasn’t doing anything more offensive than holding me, but something in his demeanor told me that Senegal wasn’t bothered in the slightest to be a thirty-ish guy with a teenage girl in one arm. Just the opposite.

“Hands off,” I told him. I didn’t want to remove his arm because I knew that if I failed, if he resisted me, it would only reinforce his position over me.

He didn’t budge. “Your friend there is the one calling the shots, and she said we’re a couple. Until I hear different-”

“Knock it off, Senegal,” Lisa ordered him.

The soldier backed off, raising his hands in an ‘I’m innocent’ gesture. That fake smile was still plastered on his face. Would I even know it was fake, if I hadn’t spent the time around Bitch? Or would I just think he was a slightly awkward guy with poor sense of boundaries?

Coil’s guys were supposedly all ex-military. My gut was telling me that Senegal hadn’t finished his tour or whatever the terminology was. I couldn’t picture it any other way, having seen what I had. He’d been relieved of duty.

“The rest of you walk ahead,” Lisa instructed, “I want a few words in private with her.”

“Who is she, anyways?” Brooks challenged her. “Far as I can tell, she is dead weight.”

“I’m saying there’s a reason she’s here,” Lisa spoke, her voice firm. “That’s good enough for you.”

“But-”

“Brooks,” Minor cut him off. “Come.”

Lisa and I let the others walk a bit ahead.

“Doesn’t look like things are perfect here,” I muttered.

“I might have made a move for my territory sooner, if I wasn’t trying to wrangle this.”

“Why’d you stick me with Senegal?”

She frowned. The others had gotten far enough ahead of us that she felt ok to start walking. I joined her.

Lisa explained, “Logistics. I needed Minor around so I could have words with him about our long-term plans, and because I want to build a rapport.”

I nodded. I wasn’t going to argue that point.

“The problems are Senegal and Brooks. They’ve become friends, and Brooks is the kind of guy that’s influenced easily by his peers. He’s good, he’s useful, but he wants to be in Senegal’s camp, and he’s not smooth enough to pull off what Senegal does, even if he’s smart enough to see what Senegal’s all about, so all you get is a dick who could be dangerous if things go the wrong way. I wanted to keep them separated, so I couldn’t pair them together, and things would be worse if I stuck you with Brooks, on a lot of levels.”

“Okay. But you have other guys, right?”

“Pritt and Dimitri. Dimitri’s second in charge of the group, and he’s the only one other than Minor who I trust to run the shelter and everything that goes on in the background. Our stuff. Pritt’s good, she’s capable, but she’s a hardass in a way you see with some women in a job dominated by men. CEOs, high-end lawyers, police officers…”

“And soldiers. Right.”

“Right. Compensating for something. She’d do more harm than good if I left her behind without someone else to supervise, and I already said why I didn’t want her along in our group. So long as our guys outnumber the girls, we’ll look less like potential victims.”

“Okay.”

“Put up with Senegal. Hell, if you’re uncomfortable around him, use it. Not everyone that’s at the Merchant’s party will be a willing participant. We’ll fit in more if you act skeeved out by him.”

I crossed my arms over my chest and brushed at my shoulders, as if it could shake the feeling of Senegal’s arm resting on me. “I don’t like showing weakness to a person like that.” To a bully.

“Play along, and I’ll make sure you never see him again after tonight. We just need him for this one errand. He’s got that look that can scare people, without being too obvious about it. Between him and Jaw, we actually kind of look like Merchants.”

“Okay,” I spoke, jamming my hands into my pockets.

“Tell me about your territory grab?”

I did, going into detail about the play I’d made, dealing with the Merchant who had tried to cut me, encountering Battery, then returning to my lair to fend off my enemies from a safe vantage point.

“…Problem is my range only extends eight hundred feet or so around me. My territory’s larger than that, which means I can only cover part of my territory at a time. It bugs me, because I know I can reach further, I’ve had times where I could.”

“Right. I remember you asking about that, but I was distracted.”

“Any ideas?”

“One theory, and there’s a good bit and a bad bit to it.”

“Yeah?”

“Just going by how my own power fluctuates, hearing what you’re saying about yours? You got a range boost that day of the hearing, right? When you went to your school to talk about the bullies, and everything fell apart?”

“Right,” I said. “And the day Leviathan came. It wasn’t just range. The bugs were responding just a bit faster. Maybe a tenth of a second faster, but yeah.”

“Ok. Here’s my theory then. I think your power’s strongest when you’re closest to the situation where you had your trigger event.”

“What?”

“Honestly, I’m highly suspicious that it’s true for any cape out there. Whenever you’re in the same kind of mindset or same sort of physical situation you were in when you got your powers, your powers get stronger. The bad news is that you probably can’t leverage that to your advantage. Your powers would operate off of hopelessness and frustration, because that’s what drove you to get your powers in the first place.”

Fuck. It fit, more or less.

“The really scary part is that it might be doing us a disservice, because it works like a Pavlovian trigger. Like how the dog who hears the bell ringing every time he gets food starts to drool when he hears the bell, this might be subtly urging us back into ugly, violent or dangerous situations with the benefits of having our powers temporarily boosted.”

I wasn’t sure I liked the implications of that. “Then what’s the good news?”

“It’s kind of like a defense mechanism. The worse a situation gets, the stronger you’ll get. It’s probably happened before, to small degrees, but you haven’t noticed it.”

“You said you saw evidence of it in your own powers? Can I ask?”

Lisa looked back over her shoulder, as if checking nobody was following us. She sighed.

“I don’t want to press,” I hurried to tell her.

“Another time?” she asked. “I don’t want to get into a bad headspace just before we do this thing, tonight.”

“That’s fine,” I answered her. “Really, you don’t have to say.”

“I said no more secrets, didn’t I? Just give me time to figure out how to explain.”

“Of course.”

She gave me a one-armed hug.

I realized where we were going well before we got there. Even hearing the music and knowing who the Merchants were, I was still shocked to see it.

Weymouth shopping center, the mall I’d gone to all my life, was now a rallying point for Merchants. Hundreds of them, it looked like, all gathered together for one grand, debauched festival.

Half of the Merchants I could see wore a fresh band around their wrists, or hanging from their clothing, like badges of honor.

Lisa had noticed it too. “Yellow bands were for a test of courage, black for near death experience. The red ones they’re handing out at the door?”

“Blood?” I guessed.

“Bloodshed, yeah. Something ugly’s going to happen tonight.”

11.05

Leviathan’s attack and the waves had done a huge amount of damage to the shopping center, and it seemed like the Merchants had interrupted the efforts to shore it up and rebuild. Construction equipment had been left behind and bore the decorations of the same hooligans that had hotwired and taken them for their own use. The bulldozer closest to me had been spray painted in hues of purple, blue and red, and it had bras, children’s toys and defaced flags strung around it, among other things. Clothes racks from one of the clothing stores in the mall had been tied crudely to the scoop and the jutting parts had been clubbed into rough points, as if they thought they could use the vehicle to run into people and impale them.

Trash cans had been dragged into place around the mall, and burned with an acrid smell of melted plastic and rancid meat. Countless Merchants had gathered, some perching on piles of trash or rubble as lookouts, and it seemed like everyone was striving to be heard over the music that blared from the countless speakers that were set up in and around the mall. Not every set of speakers was playing the same music, or even the same kinds of music. The blend of a half-dozen techno, dance and rap tracks devolved into a single grating, uneven noise.

Senegal put his hand on my shoulder again, and I didn’t stop him. As a group, we approached the side of the building where two larger guys were standing guard. They noted the elastic bands that Lisa and Minor wore, handed each a red elastic, and then waved them through.

“They’re with us,” Lisa spoke, gesturing towards the rest of us. The guy gave Senegal and I the go ahead to pass, and I took the offered rubber band and pulled it around my wrist. The second we were clear, I brushed Senegal’s hand from my shoulder. He smirked at me in response.

“No faggots,” the other man spoke.

We looked back and I saw Jaw and Brooks with a small crowd around them.

Jaw looked at Lisa, and she gave a discreet hand signal, making a fist and tapping her leg twice.

A moment later, Jaw was stepping in close and slamming the heel of his hand into the doorman’s nose. He fell roughly on a pile of rubble, and his ‘friend’ who’d been guarding the door with him stepped forward. Jaw caught the man’s hand and pulled him in close, smashing his skull into the man’s nose. As the man fell, blood gushing from his nose, Jaw straightened, cracking his knuckles.

“Anyone else want to complain?” Jaw asked.

Nobody did. I was surprised at how quickly people backed off and went back to whatever they’d been doing before.

Jaw collected two red elastics, put a hand on the small of Brooks’ back and nudged him inside.

The interior was so crowded we could barely navigate, and it was rank with the sweet and sour smells of sweat and garbage that had just started to reek. Body lice had found hosts with a full fifth of the people here, and more were spreading to new hosts in the shoulder to shoulder press of the crowd. The tide of bodies around us might have crushed us if our bodyguards weren’t clearing the way. Senegal and Minor simply pushed through the crowd with enough force that some fell over, while Jaw and Brooks followed our group. Nobody complained too loudly, and from the way others took it in stride, it seemed this was the norm. Here, I was coming to understand, might made right.

Judging by the packs of people, ‘might’ wasn’t necessarily physical strength. Those who had the force of numbers at their backs or the better weapons could do what they wanted. If they didn’t have numbers, sheer physical strength or weaponry that put them one step above the other guys? They became victims instead.

“Want to buy a lady? Or maybe a sir?” one of the vendors leered at Minor. A group of men and women were gathered in a ‘stall’ behind him, watched by another Merchant. Were they whores or slaves? I wasn’t sure I wanted to think too long about it.

“No,” Minor answered. “Have a girl.”

“Get a second! Or do you want something else? Got bullets, got some treats. Booze? Bad? K? Decadence? Madman? Nose powder?”

“Not interested,” Minor answered.

“Not. Interested.” The Merchant rubbed his chin, looking skeptical, “Right.”

“Wait,” Lisa grinned. “Decadence sounds good. How much?”

“Twenty per.”

“Bullshit,” she replied. “Not even if it was pure, which it probably isn’t. Eight bucks.”

“Ah, we have an expert here, do we? Can’t blame me for trying. You have to understand, it’s hard to get product with things the way they are. Ten.”

“Eight.”

He looked around, stared at her for a few seconds, then conceded, “Eight.”

“For me and two of my buddies here. That’s twenty-four bucks?”

The man nodded eagerly, “Twenty-four.”

She forked over a ten and a twenty and collected her change and three pills. She turned to me, “Open up. It’s ecstasy.”

“I dunno,” I answered her, feeling legitimately nervous. I didn’t want to refuse her outright and blow our cover, but I definitely didn’t want to get high. I was uncomfortable enough with the idea to begin with, but doing it here, in this kind of chaos?

“Trust me,” she told me.

Obediently, I opened my mouth. She pressed one small pill down on my tongue. I closed my mouth. She turned to Brooks and gave him one as well.

As our bodyguards led us through the crowd, she leaned over until our heads were touching, “Sugar pills. A little sleight of hand on my part. Just for appearances. Don’t stress.”

“Could’ve fucking told me,” I hissed. I wasn’t sure if she could hear me over the pounding music, but if anyone could fill in the blanks in what I’d said, it would be her.

More people were pushing product and stolen goods at the edges of the mall, some pimped others or prostituted themselves, while yet others were scrounging through the stores and then offering their finds for cash or barter. The roof at the center of the mall had collapsed and what remained was shored up, but there was a gaping hole that was open to the darkening sky. Beneath that hole, the party was already underway. People were dancing, fighting, clustering in groups or chanting. Sometimes two or three at a time.

As we found some breathing room, Lisa gathered the group together. I withdrew the picture, “We’re looking for this guy.”

Nobody disagreed or debated the point, not even Brooks. Senegal had dropped the smirk and was all business as he remained at my right shoulder, tall enough to see over the top of the gathered people. On the far end of our group, Minor did much the same thing. That left Lisa and I between them. Brooks and Jaw left to go looking on their own.

In front of us, someone got tackled to the ground. His attacker began pounding at his face, while the people around them cheered. We detoured around that group, which brought us face to face with an exhibition.

The scene was set at the front of a woman’s clothing shop, and the window had been shattered. Where the mannequins stood in the display window, there were three women and a girl. The women were trying on their clothes, openly undressing and then dressing in whatever the throng of people around them threw their way. Their eyes had the glazed over looks of people who were on something, and their skin shone with a faint sheen of sweat. They smiled as they posed provocatively and hugged the mannequins, showing off the clothes.

As if the clothes were what the crowd was there to see, and not the skin that was revealed while the women changed.

The teenage girl at the far right of the stand was another story. She was dark-haired and the makeup she wore looked like it had been applied by someone who hadn’t used makeup before. She clutched the collar of her sweatshirt in both hands and stepped back as the crowd surged forward, reaching for her. Being barefoot, she couldn’t step down from the display platform without stepping onto broken glass, and any attempt at running would only lead her into the reaching mass of Merchants. If she’d taken the same drugs as the other women, fear had already sobered her up. She looked entirely alert and she looked terrified. No red band on her wrist. She wasn’t here by choice.

Someone climbed up onto the platform, grabbing at one of the women. He wasn’t up there for two seconds before the crowd dragged him down and threw him to the ground. The people around him stomped and kicked him for his temerity.

That was social cooperation on a really twisted level. From my interpretation, they weren’t doing it for the women, but for themselves. They all wanted the women, but if someone stepped up to take one for himself, they’d collectively beat him, for trying to take what they’d silently agreed to share by way of watching.

That meant the teenage girl’s situation was especially grim. She couldn’t run, and if she didn’t give the crowd a show, they’d lose patience with her and treat her just as they had the other guy, or worse. If she did give them a show? With the way emotions were running high, I expected things would turn ugly right around the moment the crowd started to get bored. Exhibitionism would only buy her time.

“Let’s go.” Lisa pulled on my arm.

“We should help her.”

Lisa glanced at the girl, “There’s at least a hundred people here that need help. We can’t save them all.”

“We should help her,” I growled the words, “I won’t fucking sleep tonight if I walk away from this.”

“You’ve got a little superhero showing through, there,” she whispered right into my ear.

“I am going to help her, with or without you,” I hissed, “Even if that means using my powers and throwing subtlety to the winds.”

“Okay, okay. Probably don’t have to go that far. Hold on.”

Lisa pulled on Minor’s arm, and he bent down so she could speak in his ear.

Minor straightened, and with one fist clenched, he made his way through the crowd, pushing people to either side, and then stepped onto the stage.

The insults hurled his way were impossible to make out over the noise of the music and the larger crowd. He ignored them as he stepped behind the girl, caught her around the waist, and then threw her over one shoulder. She screamed.

“I’m buying this one!” he hollered, “Whoever brought her, here’s your fucking money!”

He revealed what was in his clenched fist – money and pills. The sugar pills Lisa had brought? He cast them into the crowd, and in that instant, the exhibition was over. The crowd tore into one another, fighting over what had fallen onto their heads and shoulders, or drifted past them onto the ground. The other women backed into the clothing store.

As Minor plowed his way through the crowd, Lisa lunged forward. She caught the wrist of an older man, and I saw that she’d just stopped him from turning a knife on Minor.

I moved to back her up, kicking the guy in the side of the knee. He dropped the knife and it skittered along the floor to the boundary of the crowd. I fell on top of it, covering it with my body to prevent anyone else from taking it, then grabbed it for myself at the first opportunity. Senegal helped clear the crowd out of the way so Minor had an exit route, and I stood, pointing the knife at anyone who looked like they might make a move for us. The size and muscle of our bodyguards posed too much risk for the Merchants here, with the potential rewards of getting the girl from them being far too scarce compared to the immediate rewards that were in arm’s reach. The crowd let them be and continued to scrabble for the bills and pills.

We legged it in making distance from there, and the girl screamed and kicked the entire way. People around us laughed and hooted. I couldn’t make out everything that was said, but there were lewd comments and dirty remarks cast our way.

I was swiftly losing faith in humanity. Not that I had much to spare.

How many people had joined the Merchants after everything went to hell? One in two hundred of the people who’d declined to evacuate the city? One in a hundred? One in fifty? How many of these people had been ordinary citizens until civilization broke down? Had I passed any of these people on the street while going about my day?

We headed into a hallway that branched off into a side entrance and bathrooms, but the rubble blocking the door and the lack of water in the bathrooms left little purpose for the area beyond being a quieter spot, away from the party. Lisa signaled, and Senegal moved to stand guard at the entrance.

The hallway now held only Minor, Lisa, me and the rescued girl, along with two small groups of younger people. There was a couple making out at the far end of the hallway, getting hot and heavy, oblivious to their audience. Nearer to us, in the alcove that led to the out-of-order bathrooms, there was a trio of teenagers that were so plastered with drink that they couldn’t sit upright. Empty bottles were scattered around them. It was as much privacy as we’d get.

Minor put the girl down, and she immediately shrank back, getting her feet under her as if ready to bolt.

“You’re safe,” Lisa assured her. “We’re not doing anything to you.”

The girl wiped at her eye with the back of one hand, smearing thick eyeshadow and eyeliner across her temple. “But-”

“She’s right,” Minor spoke, standing, “You’re as safe as you’re gonna get for the next little while.”

“Oh god,” the girl sobbed. She moved forward, ready to give Minor a hug, but he stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. He didn’t speak, but only turned to Lisa.

“Don’t thank him. Thank her.” Lisa looked my way. “We wouldn’t have gone out of our way to help if she hadn’t been stubborn.”

Before I had a chance to respond, the girl threw her arms around me, hugging me tight.

Lisa motioned to Minor, and he headed off to join Senegal in guard duty, leaving the rest of us alone. Better, probably, if the girl’s state left her uncomfortable or spooked around guys.

“Thank you,” the girl sobbed into my shoulder.

I hugged her back, reflexively, a little shaken. Why had it taken this long for someone to say that simple thing to me? I’d wanted to be a hero, once upon a time.

“I didn’t do anything,” I managed to get the words out.

“Thank you,” she repeated.

I stood, letting the girl rest her hands on my shoulders to get to a standing position herself. I glanced at Senegal and Minor. No problems there.

“Oh my god.” I wasn’t sure who it was.

It was the girl we’d rescued, staring at me.

“What?”

“You go- you went to Winslow High.”

“No,” I stepped back, pulling my shoulders out from beneath her hands.

“Yes. You’re the locker girl. I almost didn’t recognize you without the glasses, but everyone at school knows who you are. You’re with the Merchants now?”

“You’re thinking of the wrong person,” I said, with a note of irritation in my voice.

“No, I’m almost positive. You were that girl that got shoved in that rank locker with all that stuff they carted away in biohazard bags. The girl who went so mental they had to have a group of cops and paramedics haul you away for the first month of the semester.”

“Enough!” I shouted, suprised at my own temper. The group of teenagers who were having drinks by the bathroom turned to look at us.

Seeing my burst of anger, the girl did a complete one-eighty, from awe and surprise to desperate apologies. That didn’t necessarily improve things. “Oh god, I’m sorry. You know, I didn’t think about how it would bother you, saying that. I really did want to help, you know, to do something back then, but-”

“But you didn’t,” I growled at her. “Just like everyone else, you left me in that locker. You didn’t go get help. You didn’t report the people who did it, not even anonymously. You felt bad? You wanted to help? Is that supposed to mean something to me? Is it supposed to be some consolation? You were too lazy or cowardly to step up and do anything about it, but hey, at least your heart was in the right fucking place, huh?”

“No, that’s not…” there were tears in her eyes, and she was having trouble stringing words together. I should have felt bad, for going off on someone who was probably in a pretty delicate emotional state, but I wasn’t feeling particularly gentle.

“You obviously heard the story about me being hospitalized, you probably helped spread it.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. She startled as Brooks passed Minor and Senegal and approached us with a brisk stride. It threw her off her stride, and she stumbled over her words as she tried to pull her excuse together. “Um. It, um. It was Emma Barnes, she-”

Brooks had reached Lisa’s side and informed her, “Found him.”

“Emma Barnes what?” I asked the girl, trying to bring her focus back to the conversation we’d been having.

She looked from Brooks to me, and I could see how lost she was.

“Nevermind,” I cut her off before she started stumbling over her words again.

“What’s going on?” the girl asked.

“We came here for an errand,” Lisa answered her, “Up to ‘locker girl’ here to decide if you can tag along.”

“You can’t- you can’t leave me here,” the girl said, eyes widening. She looked to me, pleading.

I sighed. “She can come.”

“More dead weight,” Brooks frowned.

I raised an eyebrow. “For someone with the primary job of giving people medical care, you’re pretty dead-set against helping others.”

“I have a low tolerance for people who get themselves into an ugly situation and then expect others to bail them out.”

“That’s fine,” Lisa said. “Just so long as you do your job.”

“I always do,” Brooks retorted.

“What’s going on?” the girl said, for the second time, “Who are you?”

“Just shut up and keep up,” I said. We joined Senegal and Minor at the entrance to the hallway, then followed Brooks’s lead as he strode across the mall. We got bogged down once more in the press of people dancing, jumping and grinding in the center of the mall. We would have lost sight of Brooks, but he hopped up onto the side of the water fountain by the collapsed stairwell to get high enough for us to see him. Minor and Senegal cleared the way for the rest of us.

“I’ll do the talking?” Lisa offered.

“Sure,” I said. It made sense. If we did rescue Bryce, I didn’t want either him or his sister making a connection between Skitter and the girl in his rescuer’s group.

As we reached the side of one grouping of stalls, I spotted Jaw standing in front of Bryce. He had one steel-toed boot planted on the same wooden bench that Bryce was seated on, his broad gut almost in the boy’s face. Beside Bryce was a teenaged girl with bleached blond hair, who was almost lying across the bench in her attempt to keep back from Jaw. There was nobody near enough to Bryce to be his kidnapper, nobody with a weapon, no handcuffs or chains.

Shit. I didn’t like what that suggested.

“This your boy?” Jaw asked, as he noticed us.

“Yeah,” Lisa said, without even glancing at me. “What happened, Brycie? You join the Merchants and neglect to tell your sister, go to stay with her, and then give all the info on where she’s staying to your new friends? You that big a scumbag?”

Bryce scowled. I could see him trying to look confident in front of his girlfriend. “Not what happened.”

“Then tell me a story, kid. Keep in mind, what you say plays a big role in what happens in the next few minutes.”

“There’s no story to tell,” Bryce glared at her. “Our house falls down, my family moves in with my dad’s friend. Everyone else goes to work, I’m left with two of the lamest fucking families ever. I was doing more chores in a matter of days than I’ve done in the rest of my life combined.”

“Poor baby,” Jaw rumbled. Bryce looked up at the man and then looked away, angry.

“Got sick, then when I get better my sister drags me to this church, same fucking thing. Lame people, lame place, and I just know I’ll be doing more fucking chores to ‘earn my keep’. Fuck that. Some people came to trash the church, and I figured, hey, there’s a way out. Have some fun.” He cast a quick glance at the bleached blond girl next to him.

Fuck.

“Got a reality check for you,” Lisa told him, stepping closer, “Those people who ‘trashed’ the church? They hurt your sister.”

“What? No-”

“She’s in ICU, bro,” Lisa lied.

I didn’t get a chance to see where she was going from there, because Lisa was interrupted by a booming voice that rang through the entire mall. “Hey Sisterfuckers!”

The music had died all at once, and a slow roar spread through the entire mall, rising to a climax. Cheering.

All heads were turning to look the same direction. I followed their line of sight.

A crude platform had been pulled together at one side of the mall, where the rubble was piled highest. The leading figures of the Merchants stood at the front, just behind a railing of metal bars that had been haphazardly welded together.

Skidmark held the microphone and wore his traditional costume, dark blue and skintight, with the lower half of his face and the area around his eyes exposed. As costumes went, it was pretty lame, even with the cape that he’d added since the last time I’d seen him. Especially with the cape. There were people who could pull off that sort of thing, like Alexandria. Skidmark wasn’t one of them.

His girlfriend was at his side, her shoulder touching his. Squealer was streaked with oil stains, with some even in her hair. She wore a white top and jean shorts that were each so skimpy that she was more indecent than she’d be if she had been naked. She had a remote control in one hand, and her makeup was practically caked on. Not so dissimilar from the girl we’d just rescued, in that respect.

Beside Skidmark, opposite Squealer, was Mush. He bore a resemblance to a particular pink skinned, scrawny goblin of a creature from those fantasy movies. His hair was so thin he might as well be hairless, his large eyes were heavy-lidded with dark circles beneath them, and his skinny limbs were contrasted by a bulging pot-belly. All of the worst features of an old man and a malnourished child thrown together. Except he was real; just an ugly, ill person.

Behind them stood their subordinates. I recognized Trainwreck, but there were five more I couldn’t place. Five who, for all I knew, were new to the cape scene.

Trainwreck’s presence was interesting. Was he still with Coil? On our side?

“That’s more capes than they had a month ago,” I spoke, leaning close to Lisa and pitching my voice low.

“They’ve been recruiting,” Lisa muttered.

When Skidmark spoke, his voice carried through every speaker and set of headphones in the building. “You quim-jockeys up for tonight’s main event!? They don’t get any better than this!”

The cheering swelled again, that ear-splitting sound you got when hundreds of people all tried to shout louder than the rest.

Skidmark raised his hands, and then swept them in a downward motion. Twin shimmers not dissimilar to the heated air you saw above a hot road blasted towards the crowd. Where the shimmers touched the ground, they changed the color of the flooring, creating bands of glowing ground six or seven feet wide. After swirling for a moment, the colors settled into a gradient, stretching from violet on one side of the line to a pale blue on the other side.

The people who found themselves in the middle of the effect were dragged towards the blue side, as if they were standing on a steep slope. The crowd roared, and began pushing people towards the effect. Anyone who touched the purple side was caught with a greater force, dragged through to the blue side and cast towards the bulk of the crowd, sliding on the ground with enough force to stagger anyone they ran into. The blue side seemed weaker, with anyone stepping on it finding strong resistance, as if they were trying to move against a strong headwind on oil-slick ground. Only a handful of people made it out without being pushed back by the effects of Skidmark’s power or by the crowd that ringed the area.

Skidmark repeated the process to draw what I realized was a crude square in the middle of the mall, the ‘blue’ sides facing inward. As he layered his power over the same area, the colors of the effect became darker, the ground below less visible and the effects on the people were all the more violent. The blue sides had become dark blue, and instead of simply pushing against those who touched them, they threw people back towards the center of the ring.

“You piss-licking losers know what the red armband means!” Skidmark crowed, “Bloodshed! Violence! We’ve got ourselves a free for all brawl!”

The noise the crowd made reached a peak it hadn’t even approached before.

“Last five standing in the ring get a prize!” a mean smile spread across his face. Even from where I stood on the other side of the mall, I could see how bad his teeth were. “No rules! I don’t give a shitstained fuck if you jump in at the last second or if you use a weapon! Anything goes!”

People howled, hooted and jeered, but I could see some of the faces of the people trapped in the ‘ring’. Most of them weren’t cheering.

“Fuck me,” Lisa whispered, “He’s trying to get people to have trigger events. That’s how he’s recruiting parahumans.”

“Our contestants don’t seem to be too excited!” Skidmark shouted. “Need an incentive? Let me tell you cockgarglers what you stand to win!”

He snapped his fingers, and one of his powered subordinates, a woman with long hair covering her face, hurried forward. She held a metal box.

Skidmark placed the case on the railing and popped it open. He placed what looked like a metal canister on the railing, then withdrew the next. By the time he was done, five metal cylinders were spaced out in front of him.

He picked up the center canister and began unscrewing it. “Before, we gave our winners the pick of the pick, the best stuff our boys and girls have been able to grab from the rich assholes with their fancy-as-fuck houses and jobs!”

Every eye in the place was on him.

“But tonight is fucking special, because we won the lottery when we found this shit!”

He withdrew a stoppered glass vial from the canister and gripped it in his right hand. With his other hand, he held the stainless steel canister. He thrust both hands over his head, each object clenched tight.

“Superpowers in a can!”

11.06

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

“Don’t think he’s lying.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m open to ideas,” she said.

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

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

“Charlotte.”

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

“Thank you,” I said.

“So it’s up to her, what we do here”

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay,” Lisa confirmed. “That works.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Huge creatures filled my perception.

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

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

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

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

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

Destination. Agreement. Trajectory. Agreement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh my god,” she murmured. “You’re…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Stop!” Skidmark hollered into his microphone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Come on, now. Let’s hurry it up.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Doug. Doug can have it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11.07

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

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

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

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

“I’m going after the kid,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A maze. She was living up to her name.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fine, whatever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I pointed at the nearest section of wall.

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

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

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

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

Bad news? He was injured.

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

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

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

I watched Thomas struggle towards the door.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let’s go,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Taylor!” Lisa shouted.

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

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

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

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

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

“Not seeing it,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But we’d made it.

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

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

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

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

“You probably could,” I said.

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

“What’s on the other pages?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Which is?”

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

“So you followed us.”

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

Lisa gestured, and the bodyguards lowered their weapons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newter frowned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11.08

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reluctantly, she did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You saved my life,” she said.

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

I could see her shrink into herself.

“-I’m sorry.” I finished, lamely.

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

“I’m a villain,” I agreed.

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

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

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

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

She looked up at me.

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

“Leave? The city?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m not saying anything. Really.”

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

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

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

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

“Okay. So that leaves option two.”

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

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

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

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

“Then what are you doing?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“His hand,” she said.

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

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

“I’m sorry,” Lisa said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sierra,” I called out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Guys, stop,” I ordered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Merchants may be done for.”

“Because of you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her forehead creased in a frown.

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

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

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

“But he’s going to run anyways.”

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

“So what do we do?”

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

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

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

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

“Which is?”

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

“Okay. And we do this by?”

“With your okay, I’d recruit him.”

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

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

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

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

“It can be temporary,” Lisa assured her.

“He doesn’t get hurt.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh. Two territories.”

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

“You’re trying to fix things?”

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

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

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

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

“That’s not-”

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

“Definitely,” I interjected.

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

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

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

“You can,” I replied.

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

“I believe you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Because really, you can leave the city.”

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

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

I shook her hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Already recruiting?” he whistled, low.

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

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

“Sorry.”

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

“I’ll explain later?”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to. Just… later.”

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

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

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

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

“It’s not that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I nodded, “You too.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

11.a

A howl tore through the air. It wasn’t the howl one would expect from a dog. It was ragged, with a guttural undertone that hinted at the size of the one doing the howling.

Before the howl had even finished, more took up the cry in answer. A second howl, then a third. More joining in, all at once. Seven or eight.

Bentley raised his head and joined them, his tail wagging on his undersized hindquarters, almost prancing on the spot in his excitement. Water splashed around paws as wide around as bike tires as he landed, spraying Bitch.

His enthusiasm was infectious. She bared her teeth in a wide grin, then whooped, adding her voice to the cacophony. She hopped up his side, gripping ridges of hard muscle and bony growths so she could throw one leg over his other shoulder. A spike of bone scratched her upper thigh, beneath her skirt, but she didn’t care. It was nothing.

“Go, Bentley!” She urged him. He surged forward like an arrow loosed from a bow.

She could feel the heat of his body underneath her, the rippling movements of his muscles as he ran. She could smell him, like dog breath and the coppery tang of blood, that faint sweet smell of meat on the verge of going bad. She could smell herself, her body odor. She hadn’t washed in two days, but she liked her own smell. She liked that her belongings and her place all smelled like her.

It wasn’t that she wouldn’t take care of herself. She would, just like she took care of her dogs. Just as she groomed each of them twice a week or more, she would tend to herself. But what did some scruff on her legs matter when she was treading down flooded streets or caked in mud up to her knees half the time anyways? What did some body odor mean, if she didn’t even like the people who were around to be offended by it?

Barker, Biter and the others would be at the locations she had assigned them. She had given them the most menial of tasks. Grooming the dogs, feeding the dogs, picking up shit, checking the dogs for sores, cuts, ear infections and ticks like she’d showed them. She had a good number of dogs in her care, now. Most had been taken from kennels that hadn’t been in a state to help the animals since Leviathan attacked. She was eagerly anticipating the moment someone complained.

Barker or Biter would be the ones to whine about the task first. They had powers. They had expected to be in charge, to be her lieutenants. The looks on their faces when she’d given them their tasks had made her day. Nothing like putting someone in their place.

If they didn’t complain by the time they were through checking and taking care of all of her dogs, maybe they would start when the next batch arrived from the shelters, and they were told they had to do all of those dogs on top of starting afresh with all the ones they had done before.

The moment someone did complain? Or if they let one tick, one rash or one ear infection slip? She could make an example of them. Humiliate them, scare them, insult them. If she did it well enough, they’d leave.

If she did it really well, they would all leave.

Then she could be alone for a while, alone with her dogs. Nobody would be able to nag her about the fact that she hadn’t given the henchman thing a try. Fuck it. She already had all of the assistance she needed. The best, most loyal kind.

Lucy appeared from a nearby street, making her excitement known with a noise that was half bark and half something else. She ran alongside Bentley.

“Good girl!” Bitch laughed, “Come on!”

Lucy responded by huffing out a noise that might have been a bark. Her footfalls splashed out of sync with Bentley’s, and they were soon joined by others. Ink, Magic, Roxy, Buddy, Bruno and Socks. None of the others were as large as Lucy and Bentley. This would be their first run. A taste of her power. She would give them a little more each time, keep an eye out for the ones who listened, give more training to the ones who needed to be kept in line by the bigger and more obedient dogs.

But this was her territory. Her space. Finally a place where she could do what she wanted. Here, she was free, and that meant she could be dirty. She could go where she wanted, hurt anyone who got in her face. She could roam free with her dogs and try her power on them without worrying about people getting hurt.

Which wasn’t to say that people wouldn’t get hurt, of course. Just that it was her territory, and she was allowed to make the call. Anyone who hadn’t gotten the message already deserved what they got.

Bentley and the rest of her pack drew towards the source of the howling. Sirius stood outside an apartment block, filling the evening with that mournful, haunting sound that carried through the air.

She hopped down from Bentley’s back, and used the back of her hand to wipe away some of the sweat, mucus and blood that had transferred from his back to her inner thigh. ”Sirius! Good boy!”

He wagged his tail, and the tip of it made trails in the water.

“Sirius, guard!” she pointed toward the front door of the building. ”Bentley! Guard!” She pointed at the little emergency exit at the side. The two dogs moved to their respective positions.

“Sit!” Her dogs all sat. She noted Magic was a little slower than the rest to obey. Would Magic have listened if the other dogs hadn’t been here? If she hadn’t been following along with the others? Bitch made a mental note.

“Stay…” she ordered, drawing out the word. She could see the group of dogs freeze.

She had a routine with her dogs. The first priority was making sure they were healthy. That meant grooming and possibly shaving them, getting their records and shots updated if they hadn’t come from the shelter, cleaning their ears, and ensuring they were kept away from the other dogs so she could check the color and consistency of their shit and track any changes. Shit revealed a lot about the dog it came from, from the obvious of diet to general health to mood. An unhappy dog had unhealthy shit.

The second step was training, and every dog got some dedicated attention. ’Sit’ was the first command they learned, followed closely by ‘stay’, ‘off’, ‘fetch’ and ‘come’. Depending on the dog, it could take a couple of days before they had it down solid. These commands were absolutes. If a dog didn’t listen to each of those, it wasn’t allowed to go out, and it didn’t get any use of her power.

Once a dog had those commands down, it opened the door to other orders. A dog that would stay put while she demonstrated with another would be that much more inclined to follow suit.

If only humans were as reliable, as easy to train.

“Dogs, attack.” The word was quiet, but every dog present was waiting for it. Bentley and Sirius stayed at their positions, but the rest of the dogs surged into the building, the larger ones leaping through the boarded up windows, the smaller ones surging in the front door. Growls and barks that were twisted by the unnatural shapes of their throats overlapped into a single noise.

She waited outside the building, one hand on Bentley’s neck. He wanted to go, she knew it from the tension, but he was obedient. Good. This was a test for him.

Another howl sounded, far away, startling her. If her dogs were here with her… oh. Only one dog would be elsewhere. She listened as the howl came again. Yes. Angelica’s howl reflected her size and the degree to which Bitch had used her power on her. More than Bentley, Sirius and Lucy.

She whistled for them to come back, long and loud, and her dogs came tearing back through the building. She checked, and she couldn’t make out any blood that didn’t belong to the dogs. Good. Better to terrorize and inflict light wounds than to maim or murder. If the people in that building stayed in her territory, she would be surprised.

She climbed onto Bentley’s back, then whistled twice. Come.

A jerk of the chain collar around Bentley’s neck and a kick to his sides spurred him into action. The others followed, some yipping or barking with excitement.

Did other people experience anything close to this? Did Taylor, Brian, Lisa or Alec? She felt like she was one with Bentley as she caught quick breaths between his jarring footfalls. Water splashed onto her skin and his. Her legs pressed against his body, and she could feel the expansion and contraction as he huffed out breaths. She trusted him, and he trusted her absolutely in return. It varied from one dog to the next, but the same was true with the others that were following in Bentley’s wake. They believed in her, and if they didn’t love her yet, she knew it would come in time, with her patience and continued care of them. What did Lisa have that compared to that rush, this security? What did the others have?

Why, Bitch wondered, are they happier than me?

Unbidden, the answers came to mind.

She remembered living with her mother. She couldn’t even remember the woman’s face, but that was little surprise. Mom had worked anywhere from three jobs to none, but she spent little time in the apartment. When she was home, she was either drinking in her room or partying with friends. Little Rachel’s questions or attempts to get attention were met with anger, rejection. She would be pushed away or locked in her room. Better to stay quiet, watch for an opportunity. If her mother passed out drunk, bills could be taken from her wallet, secreted away for later purchases of bread, peanut butter and jam, milk and cereal or orange juice at the corner store. If there was a party, and if she was successful in keeping from getting underfoot, she could often snatch a bag of chips, a box of ribs or chicken wings, to eat under her bed or on the roof.

So she got by. Until the day her mother didn’t come home. The food in the cupboards had disappeared, even the cans of pineapple, pears and nuts in foul-tasting syrup that had been left behind by the apartment’s previous residents. Desperate, terrified to leave the apartment in case the fifteen minutes she spent looking for food were the same fifteen minutes her mother stopped by, she’d turned to trying to cook the rice, standing on a chair to reach the sink and stove-top. After pouring the rice into the water that had been sitting on the hot stove, she’d accidentally brought her arm down on the arm of the pot, and tipped it all over herself. In retrospect, it was a blessing that she hadn’t known that the water should be boiling. Still, it was hot enough to turn her skin pink and leave her screaming enough to drive the neighbors to call nine-one-one.

Then the foster homes. Home one, where the parents were kind, but lacked the patience to deal with a little girl who child protective services had labeled a borderline feral child. Her foster-sister there had been a mongoloid that stole things, breaking or ruining what she couldn’t take for herself. Rachel had responded the only option she could think of, attacking the girl who was three years older and fifty pounds heavier, leaving the girl bloody and sobbing.

They found a new home for her rather quickly, after that.

Home two, where the parents were not kind, and she had four foster siblings rather than the one. Three years there, a long series of lessons on what she’d done to the idiot sister from the first home, taught with the roles reversed. An education in violence of every kind.

Unable to keep the feelings bottled up within her, she screamed until she couldn’t breathe any longer. Then she took a deep breath and screamed again. Even though she screamed until it hurt, it was tiny and insignificant compared to everything she wanted to convey.

Home three had been the breaking point. Two foster siblings, a single foster-mother. She’d overheard her caseworker saying that the new foster-mother would be a disciplinarian, the only person that might be able to turn Rachel into a civilized human being. Bitch’s opinion, years later, was that this had been a retaliation, a punishment inflicted on her by the caseworker for the countless trips to school or the home to deal with Rachel.

She hadn’t believed that her foster mother could be more of a disciplinarian than her second set of foster parents. Realizing the nature of her situation had been unpleasant. The foster-mother brooked no nonsense, and had a keen eye for every failing and mistake on her children’s part, quick to punish, quick to correct. If one of her children spoke with their mouths full, she would snatch that child’s plate away and dispose of the contents into the trash can. Never the carrot, always sticks. Rachel was made to attend school, then after-school make up classes, with piano every other day, as if she couldn’t be bad if she didn’t have the time.

But Rachel hadn’t been equipped for these things, would never be equipped for school or manners or piano. She fought back, challenged her foster-mother’s authority at every turn, and when she was punished for this, she fought back twice as hard.

She might have gone insane if it wasn’t for Rollo. She’d stumbled onto the mangy, hostile puppy in an alley between her after-school classes and home. After earning his trust with scraps of her lunch over the course of days and weeks, she brought him home and chained him up at the very back of the expansive backyard, out of sight of the house.

She had stayed quiet when her foster-mother complained about the neighbor dog’s barking, feeling a confused mixture of smugness and terror every time it came up. Her lunch money went towards buying the dog scraps of food, guessing at what he needed, and this sacrifice of her lunches coupled with the frequent lack of dinner left her getting headaches and her stomach growling constantly during school. She would wake up at four in the morning to visit him and play with him, and the lack of sleep left her so tired she would drift asleep in the middle of class.

But a dog couldn’t be chained to a tree, not for twenty-two hours out of every day. She’d seen him grow increasingly agitated and unhappy, to the point that she couldn’t play with him without him hurting her. So she’d untied him to take him for a walk. He’d slipped free and headed for the house. Her blood running cold, she’d chased after him.

When she caught up to him, she found him in the pool; she couldn’t swim, and he couldn’t climb out. She’d pleaded with Rollo to come out of the pool, tried to run around the pool’s edge to get to him so she could pull him free, but he’d been scared, and swam away from her.

Then the plastic cover of the pool began to slide closed. When Rachel had looked to the house, she’d seen her foster-mother standing on the other side of the sliding glass door that opened into the backyard, her finger on the switch. Slowly, gradually, despite her screams and banging on the locked door, the cover had slid over Rollo’s head, trapping him. For nearly a minute, there was the bulge beneath the cover of Rollo’s head as he swam in tight circles, his sounds of distress muffled.

Her foster-mother’s punishments always matched the crimes. There could be no doubt Rachel knew the dog from her pleading and shouts, and having a dog was against the rules. Or maybe it wasn’t even that. Maybe it was the fact that she was making a disturbance at five in the morning, or the realization that the barking that had plagued her foster mother for so long was Rachel’s fault. Whatever the reason, the dog was to be disposed of, much in the same way as a plate of dinner was thrown out for holding a fork the wrong way or sitting at the table with her legs too far apart.

She’d woken to her power in that moment of panic. Fed by her power, Rollo had grown enough to tear through the cover. He’d then torn through her foster mother. The shrill screaming of her foster siblings indoors had drawn his attention, and he went after them too, pouncing on them like any excitable dog might do with a mouse or rabbit. He’d torn through door frames and walls, and an entire section of the house and collapsed in on her foster family. In one fell swoop, she lost the closest things she had to a home and family. It hadn’t been perfect, it had been nightmarish at times, but she’d had so little for so long, she found herself clinging to the scraps she did have. She ran, then, and she kept running for a long time after that.

Her breath hitched as she drew in a breath. She shook her head violently, to shake away the tears. She had stopped screaming, but her dogs were making up for it as their voices had joined hers and continued long after she’d stopped, almost drowning out Angelica’s howls.

So many bad memories. Memories she wished she could purge from herself, scour from her brain with fire and bleach and steel bristled brushes.

She was unhappy because humans were pack animals, she decided. Taylor and Lisa and Brian could smile and laugh because they had their pack, they had their family members and they had each other. Alec was more of a loner, but he could still joke and laugh with Brian. They had their pack, their dynamic. She wasn’t really a part of it.

Bitch knew that she wasn’t a lone wolf by choice the way that Alec was. There was a void there, some part of her that craved that human connection because she was a human and that’s what humans needed. The way things had played out, things she had no control over, she’d never had a chance to figure out how to deal with people, how to invite them in to fill that void. Friendships and family, conversations and jokes, being close to others and knowing when to speak up and when to stay quiet? They were treacherous things, littered with complicated nuances, bad associations and worse memories. Even if she somehow got something right, she always managed to fuck it up sooner than later. Easier to leave it alone, easier to stay back and not try. And if they got in her face, if they challenged her and didn’t let her keep them at arm’s length? It was easier to fall back on what worked and what she knew than it was to try to guess how to respond. Violence. Threats. It earned her respect, if nothing else.

Then Taylor had made overtures at friendship. Taylor had invited herself into that place, that void, and had stayed when Bitch fucked up. The scrawny kid had stood her ground instead of running when Bitch called her out on something. And maybe, just a little, in some small way, Bitch had gotten a glimpse at what she’d been missing out on.

Only to find out it was a ploy. An act, so that Taylor could get the group’s confidence.

And now the others had forgiven her? So easily? She could see them fawning over the little traitor. And there was nothing she could do about it. They liked Taylor more. They would keep Taylor on the team and make Bitch leave if it came down to it. She knew it in her gut.

So she’d done something stupid. She’d tried to get rid of her teammate, and she’d done it in a way that haunted her. More than anything, more than all of the people she’d hurt, the people she’d accidentally killed, or the days she’d scrounged in the trash for food when she’d been homeless, wandering the cities on her own, she hated herself for what she’d done to Taylor. She had acted like the people who haunted her memories, using what should have been a position of trust to try to hurt someone.

And she didn’t know what to do about it.

A gunshot startled her from her thoughts.

“Go!” she shouted. ”Go!”

More cracks of gunfire echoed through the night as her pack arrived on the scene. Angelica was there, her form hulking and rippling with muscle to the point that she couldn’t move as fast as she otherwise might. That was fine. Angelica couldn’t move as fast these days, anyways. Not since Fog had hurt her. She was more comfortable like this; she was big, strong and able to move without pain.

Angelica flinched and backed away as the shots came, striking her flesh.

There was another shot, and Bitch saw a flash from the window, a glimpse of a face. Her face twisted with rage. ”Attack!” her voice was shrill. She leapt off Bentley’s back so he could go too. ”Fetch them! Fetch! Go, go!’

As they’d done at the previous location, her dogs tore through the building. This time, though, they came back with people in their jaws. Arms, legs and torsos in fanged grips. Men, women and children. Some screamed where the dogs didn’t know their own strength and bit too hard.

She found the man she’d seen in the window and stalked over to him.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” the man repeated the word.

“You insulting me? You trying to act big?’

“What?” The man’s eyes widened. Was he staring at her, challenging her? Was it a fear response? Was he rallying to fight, trying to get a wider sense of his surroundings? She could only guess.

“No,” he said, his eyes moving around, as if searching for help.

Defiance? Sarcasm? A lie?

“I don’t think you realize how badly you fucked yourself. You. Shot. My. Dog.” She looked at Angelica. Her baby wasn’t acting too hurt, but he’d shot her. He could have killed her, if the bullet landed in just the right place.

She kicked him in the face, and his head rocked back. Blood fountained from his nose.

“I didn’t know,” he managed, huffing out air, blood spraying at his words, where it had run down to his lips. ”Didn’t know she was yours. She was scary, I- I reacted.”

Was he lying? She couldn’t tell. She’d grown up with so many good liars, it felt like everything that sounded honest was a lie. If he was lying, and it was obvious, she’d look weak if she fell for it. Others might not get the message about this being her territory, about her dogs being off-limits. If he wasn’t lying… well, he’d still shot Angelica.

“Nobody hurts my dogs.”

“Please. I have a wife, kids.”

As if family somehow made you better than someone else? The idea nettled Bitch. Life experience had taught her that it was all too often the opposite. People were assholes, people were monsters. The exceptions were all too rare. Far too many of those same people started a family just because they thought it was what they should do, and then they were assholes and monsters to a captive audience.

She kicked him again, in the stomach. He screamed as the kick made his arm, still in Ink’s jaws, wrench the wrong way.

“Angelica,” she ordered. She kicked him in the stomach again. ”Paw!”

Angelica stepped forward and placed one paw the breadth of a truck tire down on the man’s pelvis. He howled in agony, his words rapid, desperate and breathless, “Heavy oh god please stop please let me go make it move itscrushingme!”

She looked at him with distaste. It bothered her that the only time she could be absolutely sure what someone meant, what someone wanted, was in circumstances like this.

“Angelica,” she ordered, ducking beneath Angelica’s outstretched limb, kicking him in the kneecap, “Take it.”

Angelica bent and gripped the man’s legs in her teeth, twisting his body further. His body was pressed to the ground by her paw, his arm and legs pulled up and away from it.

She stepped close to Angelica, burying her face in the slick muscle and hard tissues that layered the dog, wrapping her arms as far as they would go around Angelica’s shoulders and neck. Just as her dogs came to trust her as she cared for them, fed them, and nurtured them, she grew closer to them as they shared experiences with her, as they learned and accepted their training. Angelica was one of the dogs she was closest to. The only dog she was this close to. Brutus and Judas had passed, the only dogs she had been with for years.

Her heart broke a little every time she thought about it.

And this man? This family man? He’d thought he could take Angelica away from her?

Without looking at him, her head still pressed to Angelica’s neck, she gave the order, “Hurt him.”

She felt the vibration rattle through Angelica’s head and neck as bone snapped and crunched between her teeth. The man shrieked, there was no better word for it, and others in the vicinity echoed his shrieks with their own.

She gave the hand signal and an order, “Drop him. Dogs, drop them!”

Angelica let the man drop. His shins were cracked, the ends of his legs bent at odd angles. One by one, the other captives were dropped to the ground. Each of the man’s noises of pain was a little smaller and quicker than the last.

“Why can’t you fuckers get it through your skulls?” she called out. ”This is my territory!”

“We didn’t know,” someone said. A woman who was clutching a bloody arm to her chest. Her daughter beside her.

“You fucking challenging me on this?”

“No! No. We- we just… how were we supposed to know?”

“Are you retarded or something? It’s obvious,” Bitch couldn’t believe the woman’s stupidity.

“How were we supposed to know!?” the woman raised her voice, sounding plaintive.

“The howling. If you can hear the howling, you’re too fucking close. Leave.”

“You could probably hear that halfway across the city!”

“No fucking shit,” Bitch retorted. The woman was challenging her authority. She had to respond to it, or the woman would keep talking, Bitch would say or do something that made her look stupid, and others would stand up to her. Best to stop that sooner than later. ”Socks! Come!”

The woman shrank back, clutching her daughter, as Socks advanced to Bitch’s side.

“Stop,” a voice ordered.

Bitch turned and saw two capes. From New Wave, weren’t they? Brandish and Glory Girl.

Brandish spoke, “Glory Girl, call your sister. At least one of those people needs medical attention, fas-”

She stopped as Bitch whistled as hard as she could. Barking and snarling, her massed dogs charged the heroes.

After being ambushed and taken captive by the ABB, she’d learned her lesson. Hit first, assess the situation later. Besides, what was she going to do? Talk to them?

Brandish flicked her hands out, and beams of light drew into vague sword shapes. As the dogs stampeded towards her she flicked them out to double the length. They drew closer, almost reaching her, and she reconsidered, banishing the weapons to condense herself into a beachball-sized ball of orange-yellow light. The dogs hit her, there was a spray of sparks, and the ball was sent careening down the street and through the wall of a building.

Glory Girl was flying over the stampeding dogs, a cell phone pressed to her ear, in Bitch’s general direction. Ink and Bruno leaped to the side of a building and then leaped from that point toward Glory Girl. She struck Socks across the head, sending him flying to the ground, and Bruno slammed into her, knocking the phone from her grip. She brought her knee up into the dog’s side and pushed herself away before he could drive her down into the ground.

The heroine went for Bitch, who had only Angelica at her side. Angelica positioned herself between enemy and master, and Glory Girl hit the dog broadside. Angelica barely reacted, turning instead to snap at Glory Girl. Her teeth rebounded off the heroine’s outstretched arm, and Glory Girl darted backward, to hover in the air. Catching her breath? Watching the situation?

That wasn’t how you were supposed to fight. Bitch whistled hard, then shouted, “Magic, Lucy, Roxy! Come!”

As the three dogs barreled toward her, she used her power. She felt it extend outward like a vibration from deep inside her. She felt that power shudder and reverberate, as if to let her know it was making contact with them. She could see the effect. Could see them grow larger, see bone and muscle swell and shift.

“Attack!”

In moments, Glory Girl was contending with four dogs. Angelica advanced implacably, Bitch following at a walking pace. The other three were attacking from every direction, cutting off escape routes, leaping onto the side of the building, leaping down, running behind her, or flanking her from the sides.

“Mom!” Glory Girl shouted, a note of panic in her voice.

“Run!” Brandish called out her response. She was facing much the same situation, unable to attack with the relentless pressure the dogs were putting on her. Instead, she changed herself into that ball form where she couldn’t be touched or hurt, flying away with every hit she took, or controlling the direction so she could make her way for an escape route. She managed to find enough pause to lash out at one dog and shout, “Get the wounded!”

Glory Girl caught Roxy around the snout as the dog lunged for her, and threw her down at Lucy. She used the momentary reprieve this granted her to fly straight for the man who’d shot at Angelica, who lay in a heap on the ground.

She stopped mid-flight.

A woman stood over the man’s mangled body, her long hair blowing slightly in the wind. Which seemed wrong. With the light rain, her hair should have been wetter.

Glory Girl looked over her shoulder to see the dogs, looked back to the injured man and the woman, and then flew straight up, disappearing into the gloom of the night sky. She’d left him behind.

The barking and snarling ceased as the fight drew to a close. Each of the dogs returned, and Bitch noted a few injuries. A shattered plate of bone here, a gouge where Brandish’s blades had made contact there. Surface damage. It was only the damage that penetrated deep, past the layers her power applied, which risked hurting the dogs or doing permanent damage. Nothing so serious. Bitch breathed a sigh of relief.

She stalked forward, her dogs joining her to form a loose circle around the woman. The crazy bitch was naked from head to toe, and her skin and hair were painted in alternating stripes of white and black, like a zebra… no. Paint would have washed off, and dye wouldn’t be so crisp around the edges. It was a natural coloring.

When the woman looked up at Bitch, her eyes were yellow and bright, reflecting the ambient light like the eyes of a dog or cat might. She smiled, and there wasn’t a trace of tension in her body, as though she’d just woken up in a safe place.

“Who the fuck are you?”

The woman didn’t reply. She crouched down beside the man, then shifted her position so she was sitting sideways, her legs stretched out beside her. Her fingertips traced the man’s injuries, almost lovingly.

“Answer me,” Bitch ordered.

The woman reached over and pressed her index and middle fingers to the man’s eyes. Pressing down, she penetrated the orbs, sliding her fingers down until they were two knuckles deep.

“Hey! Fuck off!”

The woman removed the fingers. Vitreous fluids and blood flowed from the open wounds in the man’s eye sockets.

The woman turned towards her. She didn’t meet Bitch’s eyes, instead looking down at Bitch’s feet. It struck Bitch that the woman was making herself small, was being inoffensive. It made her feel better, strangely.

Slightly calmer, her words measured, she called out, “I’m going to ask you again. Who the fuck are you?”

“Siberian,” the woman spoke, her voice barely above a whisper. Barely audible.

“What the hell are you doing here? This is my territory.”

“I’ll leave soon. I just wanted to talk.” Again, the whisper.

Talking, always talking. ”Not interested. Go.”

Siberian looked down at the man, who was still writhing and twitching, making small noises of pain.

“Go!” She shouted. The woman didn’t budge. Bitch glanced at her dogs to see who was the biggest, the least injured. Lucy. ”Lucy! Attack!”

Lucy pounced on Siberian. Bitch saw Siberian stretch out her arm, saw Lucy’s jaws clamp down on the limb.

There was no reaction. Lucy tugged, the full force of her body behind the movement, and the woman didn’t move a hair.

With great care, Siberian stood. She looked at Lucy, her bright eyes roving over the dog’s face and the length of the dog’s body.

“Beautiful,” she whispered. She pressed her lips against Lucy’s nose in a kiss, as if uncaring that the dog had seized her arm between jaws that could crush a motorcycle. Lucy snorted in response.

Then she looked at Bitch. This time, she made eye contact, and despite her whisper, there was no-nonsense in her tone. ”Your dog lets go of me now, or she gets hurt.”

The confidence in the tone, the authority, the fact that the woman’s eyes didn’t waver in the slightest, they made it abundantly clear to Bitch that the woman was telling the truth. She was certain enough about it that it was worth weakening her position here. ”Lucy, off. Come.”

Lucy let go and backed off, moving to Bitch’s side.

“They’re beautiful,” Siberian whispered, looking at the dogs.

Bitch nodded mutely in response.

Siberian approached her, walking with a great deal of care. There was grace in her movement, and she walked on her tiptoes, each foot carefully placed a measured distance in front of the other. Her eyes shone through the curtain of her white and black hair.

Bitch felt a moment’s trepidation.

“What…” She regretted opening her mouth the instant she did, but it was already too late. ”do you want?”

“You.”

“I don’t understand,” she tried to inject more confidence into her answer.

“They told me I should pick someone. Someone they can test. I read about you, I heard about you. I want you on our team.”

“Team?” She hated the short answers that were coming out of her mouth, the way that they were uncertain and they put her on weaker footing.

The woman’s response carried over the flooded street, through the growls that slowly ratcheted up from the dogs as the stranger approached their owner, ”The Nine. We have only eight, not enough. So some of us are picking people. Then we test them. I picked you, and I like what I’ve seen. I’ve been watching you for weeks, now.” She smiled again.

Has to be a lie, Bitch thought. Her dogs would have noticed someone following her, wouldn’t they?

The woman was only a few paces away. The question was, should Bitch retreat and put herself in an even weaker position, or did she stand her ground?

She stood her ground. The woman stepped closer, within arm’s reach, then another two paces, until her chest pressed against Bitch’s body. She met the woman’s gaze, unflinching, until Siberian wrapped her arms around her, holding her close, resting her chin on Bitch’s shoulder.

“Aren’t you tired of pretending?”, the woman whispered in her ear.

“What?” Bitch tried to pull away, so she could ask the woman the question to her face, but the limbs were unmoving, more resisting than steel bars would have been.

“Acting like one of them. Playing and losing their games, decorating yourself in their clothing and their symbols, following their rules?”

“I-” Bitch paused, “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The pause was telling. She knew it was telling. The woman understood her, she knew.

The woman understood her. The thought clicked. The way the woman moved, her body language, everything, she was making sense to Bitch in a way that so few people did.

The idea left Bitch shaken. How? Why? Was it some power? From the start, she’d known what the woman wanted to express as easily as she did with her dogs.

“You’re an animal, Bitch.” The woman gave special treatment to that last word. Bitch stiffened. The woman pulled away, one hand remaining to caress the side of Bitch’s face. Her eyes were lowered again, Bitch noted. She was smiling lightly, her lips pressed together, teeth hidden. Playful, gentle. Bitch let herself relax. It hadn’t been meant as an insult. The body contact was intrusive, but she could grit her teeth and bear it, at least until she figured out who this person was and how she could fight back.

“We’re all animals,” Siberian murmured. She walked over to Bentley, and Bitch hurried to give the dog the hand gesture for ‘stay’, then ‘off’ before the woman moved to touch him. ”Some more than others. You and I, more than others.”

“Philosophy shit?”

Siberian smiled, her hands tracing Bentley’s snout, the exposed muscles and horns. ”Philosophy shit. Yes. Touché. An idea given meaning because people think it should have meaning. But it’s just words, isn’t it?”

“Sure.”

“Join me. Stop pretending to be like them. You know you’re bad at it.”

“I’m fine where I am.”

“Mmm,” the woman smiled, her eyes lowered. She clasped her hands together and pressed them to her chin, squishing her breasts up against her chest. She turned, taking in the neighborhood, assessing Bitch’s territory. ”Maybe for now. You have freedom to run, to do as you like. It’s nice. But you’re going to chafe at it sooner or later. You’re going to realize that you’re still in a cage they made. You’re still following their rules, in the end.”

Bitch looked around the empty, flooded streets as Siberian was doing. She didn’t answer.

“Maybe you can be happy like this. A dog, collar around your neck, a fenced in territory. You’ll never really understand what they’re all talking about. The best you can hope for is a pat on the head when you’re good, when you do as you should, maybe some companionship whenever you’re a good girl. But maybe that’s what you want.“

“As opposed to what?”

“Being wild. Being free. Truly free. It’s exhilarating,” Siberian breathed.

Bitch frowned. Words that sounded nice, but that was all they were. Just words.

“I’m going to give you two presents, Bitch,” Siberian whispered. ”One will be waiting for you when you go back to your… what do you call it?”

Bitch didn’t answer.

“Let’s call it your den. I like that.”

Siberian closed the distance to Bitch with a surprising speed, her steps less controlled, carrying her long distances forward as she zig-zagged over the flooded street. Before Bitch could react, or before the dogs could step in, she was next to Bitch, stopping. Siberian put a hand on her collarbone. Bitch was lifted into the air and pushed down into the water, soaked, landing hard enough that the air was forced out of her lungs.

As she struggled to breathe, Siberian whispered, “The second gift is special, a treasure for a kindred spirit.”

Bitch coughed, struggled, but she couldn’t move the hand.

“As of this moment, you’re the only one to hear me speak and live afterwards.”

She kissed Bitch on the forehead, like a mother would with a child. Bitch tried to twist away, and only succeeded in getting water in her eyes and nose. She sputtered as she struggled to draw air into her empty lungs.

When she could see again, Siberian was gone. Her dogs were looking up at a nearby rooftop.

Shaken, she gestured for Bentley to come to her, and climbed up onto his shoulders.

Coughing, snorting water from her nostrils, she gave the order, “Home.”

Her thoughts were chaotic as she rode Bentley down the streets, a dull roar of too many things all at once, all too important to be ignored. At the same time, she didn’t want to think about them, didn’t want to put those pieces together, because she wasn’t sure she liked where they would lead.

The gift Siberian left her. Some of her henchmen were at her den. More important, some of her dogs were there. Every minute the trip took left her more worried.

She hopped off Bentley as they arrived at the building, shoving the doors open.

Blood. Trails leading to Barker and Biter, who were on the ground floor, unconscious, still breathing. One of the girls, the one with veterinary training that Coil had sent to her, was sitting in one corner, nursing an arm that dangled at the wrong angle from the elbow, sobbing.

This was recent. Siberian had done this in the time it took Bitch to get here.

More blood, one of the boys, a dog groomer with years of experience, lying beside the kitchen counter, his shirt wadded up and pressed to his face. Around the shirt, she could see the four parallel tracks where Siberian’s fingernails had left gouges running across his face.

None of the dogs were hurt. She had to double-check them to see. Most were cowering in the corners. Some had retreated up the stairs.

The blood had a pattern to it, as though Siberian had painted a picture with the spray. A line drawing from each of the injured to the center of the room, where a box sat, faintly dusted with flecks of blood.

She was nervous as she opened it, but she couldn’t not.

A furry bundle tried to escape, and she stopped it. It bit for her fingers. She pulled her hand back, gripped it by the throat and forced it down to the ground, making her dominance clear.

A husky puppy? No. The physical makeup was wrong. The smaller ears, longer limbs, and markings around the jowls and muzzle.

A wolf pup. Where had Siberian found this?

There was a card in the bottom of the box, stained with urine. Bitch picked it up with the very tip of her finger and thumb. She’d never properly learned how to read, so she had to work out the individual sounds, moving her lips to try to piece it together.

“Ah… air yoh… you. Air you a…” That letter, she didn’t recognize it. After it was… “oll… wolf.”

She gave up. She could guess, anyways.

Are you a wolf, or are you a dog?

The rule was to call Coil at a time like this. To let him know what had happened. She found her phone in one of her jacket pockets and she fumbled with the keypad to find him in her contacts. Her finger hovered over the button.

What was she holding on to? Who was she protecting? Her friends? Were they really her friends? It wasn’t that she wanted to betray them, she wasn’t about to repeat that mistake, but…

She couldn’t articulate the thought, but it was Taylor’s face that flashed into her mind’s eye when she put the phone away.

Maybe she would see what this test was about. She wasn’t about to back down. But in the end, she‘d make the call about where she went and what she did.

“You,” she told the man with the gouges in his face, “Go to a doctor. Take anyone here that needs it. But I don’t want you telling Coil, I don’t want you using his doctors. Got it?’

The man looked up at her, staring for long seconds. Finally, he nodded. She didn’t know if he would, or if he’d be able to hide it, but if he did inform Coil, it would at least be an excuse to get rid of him and the others.

She looked down at the wolf pup, who was still struggling to bite at her fingers. She let it go, waited until it tried to attack her again, and pushed it down onto its side once more.

“Little bastard,” she smiled.

Almost without thinking about it, she used her power. Just the smallest amount. She felt almost none of the vibrations or shudder she experienced as a visceral feedback on her power with the other dogs. It was only when she saw his skin splitting that she realized it was actually working. Faster, quicker, with so little of the temporary exhaustion she so often experienced on her end.

Was it easier with him? What did that mean?

11.b

Theo clutched the remote control in both hands. For five minutes, he hadn’t taken his eyes off the TV set.

For those same five minutes, the TV set had been off.

“Who’s a pretty baby? Who’s a pretty little girl? You are! Yes you are!”

Aster squawked in one of the little cries that foretold an incoming tantrum. Theo clutched the remote control tighter. He felt a throbbing pain where the corners of the remote bit into the heels of his hands.

“Oh, don’t cry, don’t cry!”

Theo’s throat was dry, every thud of his heartbeat seemed to make his hands shake and his vision waver. He’d never been more intimately familiar with the television itself. The shape and color of the TV set, the proportion of the screen to the outer frame, the little border of silver around the very edges, and the ‘Starry’ brand name logo at the very bottom. He suspected it would be ingrained in his memory for the rest of his life.

Which might just be a very short span of time.

“Nope. Don’t see the appeal. Hey, boy.”

Theo’s heart leaped in his chest. He tore his eyes from the television and looked up at the man who was cradling Aster.

“The baby needs to be changed.”

Theo nodded and stood. He was reaching for Aster when the man threw the baby at him. He had to scramble to catch her, almost let her slip through his arms, and only just barely caught her by pressing her against his stomach and pelvis. She started screaming.

“Don’t drop her, now, or I’ll be very annoyed.”

Theo nodded, raising his voice to be heard over Aster’s shrieks, “Yes sir.”

“Must you keep calling me that? Do I really look like a sir?”

Theo looked at the thirty-something man. He wore a dress shirt that was open to show his muscled chest and stomach, and had the sleeves rolled up to expose his forearms. His tight jeans were low slung, his limbs long, and his hair was longer and greasy.

The man’s beard had been trimmed, but scruff was growing in around the edges, obscuring the intricate pattern that had been trimmed into the inside border of the facial hair. A knife danced around his fingers constantly, making Theo flinch every time the blade turned to point toward him and Aster.

Jack Slash.

“My father told me I should address my betters as sir, sir.”

Jack laughed with the slightest touch of derision. ”Well, your daddy taught you well, didn’t he?”

True enough. Theo wondered if this measure of respect played any part in why Jack had let him live this long. ”Yes, sir. I’m going to go change the baby.”

“Yes. Do.”

Theo’s hands shook as he adjusted his grip on Aster, hauling her up until her head was at his shoulder, even though that meant she was screaming in his ear. He carried her to the changing table and set her down.

Kayden had reclaimed her old apartment after the catastrophe, found many of her possessions still there. The man never let the front door out of his sight as he walked around the living room, and was soon behind Theo. With the open window, Theo could hope the man was upwind of the aromatic diaper. How long before the squealing of the baby, an offensive smell or something else set the psychopath off?

“How long until your mother gets back?”

That was something else. That was the third time Jack had asked the question. Was his captor’s patience running out?

“She’s not my mother,” Theo changed the topic. He dropped Aster’s dirty diaper into the bin.

Jack walked up to Theo, until he was just behind the boy, his shadow cast long by the setting sun, stretching over Theo and the changing table. Theo could feel the tension ratcheting up. ”I’m going to get upset if you lie to me.”

Theo didn’t take his eyes off the baby, forced his fingers to keep working on the diaper. ”Kayden is Aster’s mother, sir, my dad’s ex-wife. She’s been taking care of me since my father died.”

“Of course, of course, now I understand. I believe you,” Jack said, before chuckling. He turned and walked away, leaving Theo breathing out a shuddering sigh of relief. When Jack spoke again, there was no humor in his tone. ”Do you love her? The mother of that baby?”

“Yes, sir.” But I don’t like her.

“Good, good. Does she love you?”

“No sir. But she likes me.”

“Ohhhh?” Jack drew out the sound, and it was vaguely mocking. ”Do tell.”

“I- I take care of Aster for her. I do my chores, I don’t talk back. I don’t make life harder for her,” Theo began. He swallowed, “But my dad treated her badly, and I think she sees him when she looks at me, and she’ll never let herself love me because of that.” She has to look past the doughy face to see Dad in me, past the baby fat I never seemed to lose, but I have his genes, I look like him, beneath it all.

“Do you have some of your father in you?”

Did he? ”I’d like to think not, sir.”

“I’m remembering now. Kaiser. His name in costume was Kaiser. I met him once, don’t you know?”

“I didn’t know.”

“Years ago. Allfather still ruled Empire Eighty-Eight then. They held a big meeting between all of the factions. We stopped by. Great fun. I don’t think they accomplished a thing that day. We provoked a bidding war instead. Group called the Teeth wound up hiring us to kill some members of the Protectorate team. We did it, and then we wiped out the Teeth before leaving the city.”

The Slaughterhouse Nine must have been new, then. People today would know better. Hopefully.

Jack chuckled lightly, “I digress. I do remember your father. He was older than you are now when I saw him. He talked in a way that made me think he was an athlete.”

“He was, sir,” Theo confirmed. And he was disappointed I never followed in his footsteps.

“There were more teams in this city, then, more villains. Not many heroes. Lots of scary motherfuckers around, and yet I could probably count on one hand the people who made eye contact with me. Even then, when my reputation was a fraction of what it is today. Your father was one of those people. Ballsy fucker.”

“Maybe he thought you’d respect him for it, sir? He was always good at reading people.” And making them do what he wanted. Even me.

“Is that so? I’d like to think I’m much the same. A people reader. But my interest is in the design of people. What makes them tick? What holds them together? All too often, it’s one little thing. In architecture they call it a keystone. The one stone that keeps the entire arch from collapsing. The weak point. And I’m very, very good at finding those weak points. Can you guess what I’m talking about here? Why I’m in this apartment?”

“Aster, sir?”

“And you say you’re nothing like your father. You’re sharp, little boy.” Theo couldn’t see Jack move, but again, the man’s shadow fell over him. He felt himself shrink down, as if the shadow weighed on him.

“Thank you, sir,” he managed.

“Yes. See, my compatriots are all busy with a task, tonight, you understand. I bet on the wrong horse. Come.”

Jack’s hand fell on Theo’s shoulder, and he flinched. Still, he scooped Aster up and followed as Jack led him to the front of the apartment. There was a trail of blood leading from the front door to the nearby bathroom. Jack gave Theo a push on the shoulder, but remained outside the bathroom, where he could watch the front door. Theo entered.

There was a man in the bathtub. He’d seen Jack drag the man inside, had heard the taps running. What he hadn’t expected was for the man to be alive.

The bathwater was crimson, and the man lay in a sea of things that had been taken from the freezer and dropped within. He was Japanese, Theo noted, his hair cut short, his body bearing the lean muscle of someone who’d honed their body into a weapon, and he was unconscious, though breathing.

“Oni Lee,” Jack spoke from outside the bathroom. ”Our habit is to nominate a certain individual. Then the others test them in their own ways. If that individual passes the test, they are recruited to the Slaughterhouse Nine.”

Theo didn’t know how to respond, so he kept his mouth shut. He rocked Aster in his arms, using one hand to shield her eyes from the scene. Not that he thought she could make it out or understand what she was looking at, but it made him feel better.

“I had a little conversation with Oni Lee. Found him living above a grocer’s, with the help of one of my teammates. Someone shot out his kneecap, it seems, and he’s been restless ever since. A few kills here and there, but perhaps a little harder when you can’t walk. Need the right time, the right place. I kind of respected that, and the fact that he was another fan of knives was a point in my book.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But we didn’t even make it to the test. I told him we had tinkers that could fix him up. He was interested. Then I told him he’d have to prove himself, he asked me how. Now, it isn’t always done, that a member of the Nine tests their own candidates, but I decided to anyways. Something off about him, wanted to make sure he didn’t embarass me. Told him to come up with something, and he couldn’t. Do you know what tabula rasa is, boy?”

“No, sir.”

“Blank slate. A piece of paper with nothing on it. A formatted computer. A tombstone without the name on it. Seems that fellow can copy his body just fine when he teleports, but something in his mind gets left behind. Once I realized it, picked up on the fact that he was little more than a robot wanting his orders, I informed him I had decided we had no need for his services, we fought, and… here we are.”

“I see.” And Jack was in one piece, while Oni Lee was bleeding out into the bathtub.

“So. Come on out of the bathroom, now.” Jack ushered Theo out of the bathroom with the dying man. “There we go. Back to the subject of Purity and the baby… Aster?”

“Yes, Aster, sir.”

“We’re going to play a little game. See, the moment Purity steps in that front door, I give her just a moment to take in the scene… and then snicker-snack, you and the baby die.”

Theo felt his blood run cold. Tears appeared in the corners of his eyes. I’m going to die.

“I’ll get to savor the expression on her face as she watches her keystone crumble. I’ll get to see how she responds as that element in her life that supports everything else bleeds out on this nice white carpet. Maybe say something to just twist the knife.” Jack mimed a lunging stab and then slow turn of his blade.

Straightening, Jack looked Theo over, “A pity she doesn’t love you, but if she likes you, at least, then it’ll have to do.”

Why did I tell him that?

“She’ll kill you, sir.” Theo said. Then he added a hurried, “No offense.”

Jack waved him off. ”She’ll try. So many have, and they’ve all failed so far. But it’s good that it’s a little dangerous, a little risky. It’s no fun if I know how it’s going to play out. Some unpredictability, it gives spice to life. Maybe I’ll kill her right after I see the look on her face. Maybe I’ll escape and leave her to wallow in her misery.”

Escape? From a fifteen story apartment building, against a supervillain who can fly and level city blocks?

Then again, Jack had done worse things than murder the child of a cape like Purity, and he was still here.

“Sometimes,” Jack started, pausing as if he was constructing the thought as he spoke it, “I like to imagine the impact I’ve made on the world. What possible realities am I pruning, what events am I setting in motion, each time I take a life? If the flap of a butterfly’s wing can alter the course of a hurricane, what am I doing when I take a human life? The life of a person who interacts with dozens of people every day, who would have a career, romance, children?”

Tears ran down Theo’s face. He clutched Aster tight.

“Can you tell me who you are, Kaiser’s boy? What am I doing to reality when I open you up from cock to chin and let your entrails spill onto the floor?”

“I-I don’t know,” Theo said, his voice quiet.

“Don’t shut down on me, now. Here, I’ll make you a deal. If you give me a good answer, I’ll make it quick. Thrust my knife right through the center of your brain. It’ll be like flicking a light switch. You just stop, and there’ll be no pain. It’ll be as dignified as death can be.”

“I-” Theo shook his head.

“I’ll even let you relieve yourself in the bathroom beforehand so you don’t shit yourself so badly when you drop dead. You’d have to be quick, unless you want to be on the toilet when she comes in, but it’s a chance few get.”

“I wanted to be a superhero,” Theo blurted.

Jack laughed abruptly enough that Aster was spooked and started screaming louder. His laughs continued for several long seconds.

Theo went on, as if Jack were still listening, “I’m probably going to get powers, because I’m Kaiser’s son. But I don’t want to be a member of Purity’s group, I don’t want to cleanse the world or try to fix things by killing or through hate. Sir.”

“And you’d fight people like me, I suppose?”

Theo nodded.

Jack was still grinning. ”What would you do to people like me, then? Let’s say you got powers. Would you right wrongs, lecture schoolchildren on doing what’s right, and see bad guys like me carted off to the Birdcage?”

Somehow, knowing the inevitability of his own death gave him a measure of courage he had never had before. Even so, it took all of the willpower he had. Theo met Jack’s eyes for the first time. The man’s eyes were a very pale blue, and there were lines at the corners.

Theo swallowed the lump in his throat. ”People like you? I’d kill. Sir.”

Jack broke into a second spell of hysterical laughter, and it was all Theo could do to keep Aster from squirming out of his grasp in her distress.

“Can’t-” Jack had to break off to let another small laugh pass, “Can’t say I can imagine that, boy. You, as one of the vigilantes?”

Neither can I, Theo thought, but he remained silent.

“But you’ve piqued my interest, and if there’s any reason I do what I do, it’s because I find it interesting.”

Theo could see the cell phone on the coffee table in the living room light up and shift position as it vibrated. It happened behind Jack, and the man didn’t appear to see or hear it. The only person who called Theo’s phone was Kayden, and she’d been out getting groceries. It was routine for her to call for him to open the lobby door, then come down to help bringing them up from the lobby…

She was coming up. He was almost positive. Could he distract Jack and give Kayden the opportunity to put the man down?

“I’ve changed my mind,” Jack said.

Theo stared, trying to fathom what the man was saying.

“Don’t let it be said that I can’t delay my gratification. Listen carefully now, I’m making you a deal.”

Theo nodded, mute.

“I want to see this. This picture you paint. So I’m going to give you a chance to make this happen.”

Theo nodded slowly, but his thoughts were on Kayden’s approach. How long until Kayden opened the door? Would Jack attack her? Attack Aster? Despite what he was saying now? Or would Kayden attack him and provoke something?

“How old are you? Fourteen? Fifteen?”

“Fifteen, sir,” Theo said. Hurry up, finish before she comes.

“Two years then. Two years to get your powers, to train, to do whatever it takes to become the motherfucking badass you describe. That should be long enough without risking that one of us gets offed by bad luck or picking the wrong fight. At that two-year mark? You hunt me down, you kill, disable or sneak past my Nine, whoever they are two years from now, you look me in the eyes, and then you try to kill me. If you fail? If you cannot find me? If you chicken out? Hmmm… what’s a good consequence?”

In his hurry to resolve this before the door opened, Theo made the first suggestion that came to mind, “You kill me.”

“That goes without saying. No. It should be meaningful. What’s your name, boy?”

“Theo.”

“Fifteen year old Theo. How many people’s lives will you touch in these coming two years, because I’ve spared your life? Two hundred? Five hundred? A thousand? How far will the flaps of your butterfly wings extend?”

Theo glanced at the phone. It glowed and moved again. Was Kayden in the lobby?

Jack went on. ”If you fail in this, I’ll kill nine hundred and ninety-nine people in your name. I’ll even break my usual rules to get the body count that high, so it’s something special, beyond my usual habits. Maybe a bomb, maybe poison. I’ll come up with something. I can target the people you love, those you’re closest to, people you’ve affected. Aster there can be the nine hundred and ninety ninth, and you’ll be the thousandth. Perfect. Canceling out the impact you’ve made in the world, it’s poetic.”

Theo swallowed. A thousand people? Could he say no? Could he refuse the offer? Or would Jack carry what he threatened regardless?

“Well,” Jack spoke, smiling. ”I’ll be off.”

He stepped into the bathroom, turning away from the door for the second time in his entire ‘visit’. When he emerged from the bathroom, he held the naked form of Oni Lee over one shoulder, a knife in his free hand.

“A treat for a teammate, this is,” Jack winked. ”Doesn’t need to be alive. Just fresh. Would you get the door, Theo?”

Theo hurried forward to open the door, shifting Aster in his arms to open it.

Kayden stood on the other side, groceries in hand.

Stern, she said, “Theo! I called you twice. Can you go down to the lobby and get the last two bags of groc-”

She fell silent as the door opened wider, revealing Jack. In a moment, the bags in her arms were tumbling to the ground, and her hair, eyes, and hands were glowing with blinding light.

“Kayden,” Theo had to control his voice to keep it from shaking, “Let him go.”

“I had a wonderful conversation with young Theo here,” Jack spoke. He rested his hand on top of Theo’s head. Theo could feel the hard handle of the knife tap against his scalp. ”Very interesting.”

“What are you-” Kayden started, her voice rising with anger, but Theo lunged forward, gripping her shirt and shaking his head. She looked down, confused.

Jack waggled a finger at her, “Don’t bother, Purity. See, I’ve been studying you. I go into every possible fight armed with knowledge. You have a weakness. A flaw in that power of yours.”

Theo could see Kayden tense, but she obliged when he pushed her away from the door and towards the end of the hallway furthest from the stairwell, stepping back.

“While reading up on you, I tried to put the newspaper clippings and online information in chronological order, and a funny thing happened. Seems like your power is weaker some days, stronger on others. I mapped it out. You have some form of internal battery or fuel that drives your power. After going days without using your power, you’re stronger. After periods where there’s more sunlight, your power is stronger. You absorb light of any kind, I suppose, and later spend it to use your abilities.”

Theo thought he might have seen a tiny flash of concern on Kayden’s face.

“It’s been an overcast week, and you’ve been using your powers a great deal, trying to put the Pure on the map. So think very hard about what you want to do next. Because if I’m right, and your power is spent, you might not succeed in killing me. And I would retaliate by killing all three of you.”

“You’re underestimating me,” Kayden spoke, her voice hard.

“Then blast me away. Turn me into a smear in your hallway, if you think you’re strong enough, quicker with your light than I am with a knife. Prove me wrong,” Jack smiled. He waited a few seconds, and the only noises in the hallway were Aster’s mewling complaints.

Jack stepped into the hallway and turned toward the stairwell. ”Thought so. Be grateful. That boy is the only reason you and your daughter are alive right now. He’ll explain. Train him. Make him strong, make him vicious. Let him take whatever path he needs to take. You and your daughter owe him that.”

Kayden looked down at Theo, who glanced at Jack for just a second, then looked up at her and nodded quickly. Urging her. Jack wouldn’t be doing this if he didn’t think he could get away.

“Alright,” she spoke.

Jack didn’t offer anything further. His knife twirling in his fingers, he stepped toward the door by the elevators, kicked it open, and stepped inside. As he made his way down, he whistled a merry tune, the sound echoing through the stairwell until the moment the doors shut.

Theo handed Aster to her mother. He felt dazed at the magnitude of what faced him. Two years.

11.c

Spitfire had often complained that having a power based around creating flame meant you faced two kinds of opponents. There were the people who burned, who were the majority. Civilians fell into this category. Unless the person with the power was amoral, which Spitfire wasn’t, this actually wound up being a detriment, because of the easy possibility of life altering injuries, death and scars. The kind of thing that brought heroes down on the villain’s head in full force. The second group was the foes who didn’t burn. People in armored suits with enough covering, people with forcefields, people with foreign materials either forming or surrounding their bodies, the list wound up being fairly long.

“Spitfire, run!” Faultline ordered.

Burnscar wore a red dress and had chosen to go barefoot rather than wear shoes. Her dark brown hair was a tangled mess above staring green eyes. Her skin was pale, giving a greater contrast to the red of her clothing and the dark the circles under her eyes. The round scars of what were likely cigarette burns formed individual rows down from the bottom of each eye to her jaw. She strode forward through the flames she’d set on the streets outside Faultline’s now-deserted nightclub, Palanquin. Sweeping her arms to either side, she spread the flames along the breadth of the road, drew the heat into her palms, and then hurled it at her opponents.

Burnscar didn’t seem to have the same reservations about incinerating more vulnerable enemies that Spitfire did.

Gregor the Snail caught one fireball with a hurled glob of slime, extinguishing it. The other landed in the middle of the group, not striking anyone, but nonetheless driving them apart. Newter was at one side of the resulting blaze in the middle of the street, Faultline and Shamrock at the other, with Gregor and Spitfire at the back, furthest from Burnscar.

Spitfire turned to run, and Burnscar drew together another fireball, lobbing it forward, where it soared high in the air before it began to drop. The fireball collided with Spitfire, smashing the girl to the ground. Flames licked off of her fireproof suit and the pavement around her, and it was long seconds before she was able to start pulling herself to her feet.

Burnscar drew fire up around herself, blinding the others, and in a moment, she was beside Spitfire, clutching the girl’s throat with her fingertips, pushing her down against the ground that was still burning with traces of the fireball’s heat.

Why couldn’t this be one of the areas where the streets were flooded? Why did Palanquin have to be on this hill?

“Get her!” Faultline shouted. Shamrock drew her gun and fired, and Gregor launched a stream of slime toward the spot where Burnscar crouched. The slime put out the flame where it landed, and in the moment the splashing slime and the billowing smoke obscured her, Burnscar disappeared.

“There!”

Burnscar had emerged from a patch of flames fifteen feet from Spitfire, and was striding toward the girl, ensuring Spitfire was in the way of any potential attacks from the rest of Faultline’s crew. She seized Spitfire and began dragging her toward an alley, one hand around her throat. Wherever Burnscar stepped, she left burning footprints, and the flames slowly swelled and spread to join with one another, a trail of fire forming a path behind her.

Newter lunged forward, leaping over the flame that separated him from Gregor and then hopping to the nearest building to grab a bag of trash with his tail. Twisting his entire body, he whipped the bag at Burnscar. It struck her, and she staggered back, losing hold of Spitfire.

Burnscar dropped into the flames that covered the pavement and emerged from the flames just behind the others.

Elle, from the second floor room of Palanquin, banged on the window, trying to alert her comrades.

Like a flamethrower, twin streams of fire shot from Burnscar’s hands, striking Shamrock, Faultline and Gregor. Catching sight of the attack at the last second, Gregor did his best to shield Faultline and Shamrock with his bulk. Newter threw more trash and rubble towards Burnscar, and succeeded in interrupting her assault on his teammates.

Faultline was on fire, her costume alight. Gregor slimed her to put it out, then wheeled on Burnscar.

The same instant he turned towards her, the flame around her flared up, consuming her.

They turned to look for her, simultaneously trying to back away from the flames that spread with each of Burnscar’s attacks, and they missed seeing the crouching form in their midst. Only Elle, from her higher vantage point, was able to see Burnscar.

To say that Faultline and her crew were friends wasn’t meaningful enough. Elle saw them as family. And she was helpless to do anything to save them.

Her power was available to her, but the range was too small. She needed time to soak it into an area, and she’d gone for a walk earlier. Two hours since she’d gotten back, and her power was limited to her room, the neighboring rooms, the upstairs hallway and the exterior walls of the building that surrounded these areas. Not enough to reach the street where the fighting was happening. And if she moved beyond the boundaries, she would be losing ground. Any time she moved to a new place, beyond the limits of where her power was taking effect, her area of influence shrunk to a few feet around her, only to start gradually bleeding out once more, faster with each passing minute.

She tried using it anyways. Closing her eyes, she reached for the other worlds.

Pocket worlds, as she interpreted them. Realities that were a blank canvas to be altered according to her thoughts, both conscious and unconscious. They were lucid dreams that were big enough, detailed enough, intricate enough to swallow her up, as they so often did. She could make new ones at a whim, but she found it better to build on what she already had.

There was the high temple. Faultline and the hypnotist they’d hired had talked her through it, building a place that wasn’t so influenced by Elle’s negative thoughts and ideas. It was a place she associated with personal triumphs, with her inner strengths. At the opposite end of the coin was also the bad place. Of the worlds, it was the biggest by far. Nothing she could use there, she knew. She was intimately familiar with every aspect of it. She had spent a long time there.

Her eyes snapped open as explosion erupted in the street. She saw Faultline, Gregor and Shamrock tumbling through the air.

Elle clutched her arms to her body. The lonely hallways… no. The burning towers. Definitely no.

The barren ruins. She’d almost forgotten. It had been her first attempt at making a world outside of the bad place. It had worked up until the moment negativity and self loathing crept in through the cracks, filling in details where she didn’t want them. Ugly details. What had resulted was a beautiful, solemn landscape rigged with traps and pitfalls, as if the landscape itself was eager to hurt or kill anyone who didn’t watch their step. As she focused on that world, a small part of her consciousness flew over the landscapes, an image in a second mind’s eye. Fields of tall grass, collapsed walls half covered in moss, the remnants of an old castle, a stone hut with a tree growing out of it. She’d always had a soft spot for things that had once been beautiful but had transformed into a different kind of beauty as they aged. She liked the look of a tree that had grown to splendor and then died, the statue worn by years of hard rain. This was the aesthetic that had shaped the ruins. Until everything turned ugly, unpredictable and dangerous.

Today was a good day. She’d exhausted herself earlier in the week by taking on the Merchants on what she could easily mark as a bad day. It seemed she was veering to the other side of things: she’d eaten, gone for a walk, even ventured to have a conversation with Faultline. She could only do those things because her mind’s eye, the gate to those other worlds, was nearly closed right now. The drawback was that this also meant that the use of her power was slow. As though she were looking through a spyglass, trying to find a distant detail, she could only take in one scene at a time.

She found what she wanted. An age-worn statue of a woman in a toga, holding a large urn. Focusing on it, she pushed.

It was agonizing. Not the use of her power – that was easy, unavoidable. Even on a good day like today, her power worked without her asking for it. The floor under her feet was turning into a stone tile, grass and moss growing in the cracks, as if the ruins were leaking into the real world. It was agonizing because the emergence of the statue was slow. Brick folded out of the way as it appeared from within the outside wall of Palanquin. It slid forth at a glacial pace of a quarter-inch every second, and it wasn’t small.

The fire had spread across the street and to the wall of the building opposite Palanquin. Burnscar was using it to travel great distances at a moment’s notice, simultaneously spreading the flames further with every attack or spare moment she had. Newter was quick enough to avoid her attacks while hurling objects at her to attempt to distract and batter her, but he couldn’t approach to make contact with her and knock her out without her burning him, and his range of movement was quickly narrowing as the fires spread. Not only were new patches of flame created when she attacked, but she frequently paused to will the existing fires to swell and extend further in every direction.

Gregor was hurt, but he was trying to control the spread of the flames, while protecting Faultline and Shamrock. His skin glistened, which made Elle think he was covering himself in something that would protect him from being burned.

Her power was still so slow. Only half of the statue had emerged. Not enough. She needed the entire thing.

Burnscar had noticed the statue, and paused to pelt it with fireballs. Elle winced as the head broke free, felt a momentary despair as one arm shattered. But the rest was intact. Just two or three minutes.

Gregor caught Burnscar with a stream of slime, and the young woman disappeared in a swirl of fire.

Burnscar had appeared just behind Gregor, Shamrock and Faultline. Before they could notice and react, she drew a ball of flame into a condensed point between her hands and released it in a violent explosion of heated air.

“No!” Elle screamed, banging on the window.

Faultline wasn’t moving, and Elle couldn’t quite tell through the smoke that covered the street, but she might be burned. Gregor… Gregor wasn’t moving either, and he lay in a patch of fire. However fireproof the slime he’d coated himself in might be, he wasn’t immune to being roasted. Shamrock was limping away, limping towards the statue, and Newter was evading a fresh series of attacks from Burnscar. Only Spitfire was largely untouched, helpless to do anything against an opponent that was not only fireproof, but who could walk through fires as easily as anyone else might use a doorway to move from one room to the next.

This wasn’t right. Her team, her friends, her family were all moments away from being obliterated.

She had to focus. The statue wasn’t enough. She needed a mechanism. The one that was attached to the statue in her mind’s eye didn’t work. Something else. She searched. A portcullis with a wheel… no, too rusted, the chain too prone to snapping. Ah, there. A math puzzle, where a ball was set to roll down a series of tubes, with its path being determined by a series of levers, each moving a paddle that would adjust the ball’s route.

So frustrating. On her worst days, the days when her view of the other worlds was so expansive that she could barely register the real world, she didn’t have to put things together like this. She could shape things as she made them come into the real world, and they emerged as quickly as she wanted them.

Fitting everything into the statue, she had to use some of the math puzzle, the lever, some of the statue’s existing mechanism, positioning it all so that they fit together as she pushed it into existence.

A fireball caught Newter in the stomach. He was knocked from where he clung to the wall, falling to the ground. He had to roll out of a patch of ground that was licked by orange flame.

Burnscar turned to Shamrock, who was waiting for the lever to emerge. A fireball was flung at the red-haired woman, who ducked too slowly. The flame clipped her in the shoulder in its route to punch a hole in the wall, directly where the lever was. Pieces of the mechanism tumbled around Shamrock. Gears, levers, paddles and fragments of the switch.

“No!” Elle shouted, “No!’

Her effort had been for nothing. Could she cobble something else together? Would it matter? Their opponent had an idea of what Elle wanted to do. She wasn’t going to offer the opportunity.

The last piece of the math puzzle emerged within the brick walls of Palanquin. Two inches across in diameter, the ball fell along its set route. Rolling down a slight slope, dropping through one spot where the paddle was pointing down, landing on the next slope, rolling in the opposite direction, over two paddles.

Elle grabbed her chair and shattered her window. Gripping the sides of the window, ignoring the glass that bit into her fingers, she screamed, “Shamrock!”

Both Shamrock and Burnscar looked up at her.

She slapped the wall with her hand, leaving bloody fingerprints where the glass had cut her, “The ball needs to go right!”

Burnscar launched another fireball at Shamrock, and Shamrock leaped to one side.

“What ball!?”

Elle couldn’t tell her, not without letting Burnscar know. She could feel the ball making its way down the last slope, dropping down the far left, to where the mechanism and the lower half of the puzzle had been devastated by Burnscar’s fireball. Shamrock would get a glimpse of the ball through the hole in the wall, as it dropped down… now.

Elle felt the almost imperceptible influence of Shamrock’s power. The woman was a telekinetic and clairvoyant on the smallest of scales, capable of making small changes and knowing how to use them to make big things happen. The ball moved a few millimeters to the left, hit a splinter of wood and bounced toward the right, spinning. It landed, and the spin of its rotation coupled with the help of an additional nudge carried the ball to the right, and down into the chamber behind the statue.

There was a rumble, and water began pouring from the stump of one arm and the urn the statue held. It poured down around Shamrock, flooding out onto the street to quench the fires on the ground level. Soon it was only the patches of flame on the walls that remained.

Shamrock raised her gun, aiming at Burnscar, and fired. Once, twice. It was hard to tell if the shots hit home, because Burnscar was already wreathing herself in flame, disappearing to appear from the burning wall nearest Spitfire.

Spitfire ran, and Burnscar chased her. Elle could see Shamrock hesitate, then leap through the curtain of water that poured from the urn, giving chase, hoping to help her teammate.

“No!” Elle shouted. But her voice was drowned out by the sound of the water. Soon the pair were gone.

Her phone. She needed to phone them, let them know. Where was it?

In the kitchen. Stupid. She’d been in one of her momentary fugues when they’d been gathering dinner, she had to have left it there. And if she ventured any further than the upstairs hallway, maybe the ledge above the dance floor, she would be losing any ground she’d gained with her power here.

A horn… some kind of noisemaker. A bell? There was a bell in one area of the barren ruins, if she could only find it.

Burnscar dropped from the burning wall opposite Palanquin. Retracing her steps. She looked up at the window that Elle stood behind.

She’s not after Spitfire. She’s after me, Elle thought, with a moment’s despair.

Burnscar trudged through the expanding pool of water to enter Palanquin’s front door. The club was empty, there was no power, no music. Even the employees were attending to their personal lives. It was just Elle and Burnscar.

It was a minute before the door to her bedroom opened.

“There you are,” Burnscar said.

Elle looked away.

“Hello, old friend,” Burnscar said.

She wasn’t good at talking, even on a good day. ”Mimi.”

“Long time.”

Elle nodded.

“I’m… I’m sorry about your friends. I didn’t come here planning to do that. It’s just… you know.”

Elle nodded, trying to keep her outrage off her face.

“I- Fuck. I’m really sorry, you know? I can’t help it.”

You can. You just don’t try hard enough.

But Elle didn’t voice her thoughts. She nodded.

“I don’t think I did any permanent damage. They’re alive.”

“Thank you,” Elle managed. She couldn’t entirely suppress the bitterness in her voice. Burnscar didn’t seem to notice.

“I- I wanted to talk. Like old times.”

Old times. Elle couldn’t help it. Her thoughts turned to the bad place, the biggest of her worlds, the world she had spent the most time.

“Back when we were both having our good days? We’d talk, and I really liked those times. I look back on them fondly. One of the few moments I treasure.”

Elle nodded. Behind Burnscar, the door to her room was changing to metal. A tiny window was expanding, bars already closing down like teeth. The wall around the door was growing tatters of cloth that rippled like they were blowing in the wind.

“Fuck,” Burnscar said, “I don’t even know where to start. Since I learned you were in this city, and the group wanted to come here, I’ve been looking forward to this, seeing you again, but now I don’t know what to say.”

“The weather?” Elle tried, lightly joking. The wrong thing to say.

“I don’t want to talk about the weather!” Burnscar snapped the words, in a mixture of desperation and anger. Her eyes flashed orange and flame flared around her hands, then it all faded.

“Sorry.”

“I… um. How are you? How have you been, since you escaped?”

“Been… been good. Good people.” So hard to articulate my thoughts, even on a good day. “They take care of me. Faultline helped… more than any doctor I’ve had.”

“The doctors,” Burnscar scowled.

“You?”

“I… did you know I escaped at the same time you did?”

Elle shook her head.

“I did. But I had no place to go. I had some bad days. I was lonely, scared. Some guy tried to convince me to be his whore, earn some cash, get fed… I refused, but he kept coming after me.”

“Sorry.”

“I… I really wanted to be good. I’d told myself I wouldn’t use my power. But I had to protect myself, you understand?”

Elle nodded. The cloth around the door had started to settle into a shape. Padded walls, lined with barbed wire and jagged rows of glass. There were stains of shit and blood on some of the cloth, now, growing and swelling. She tried to will it to stop, to focus on her high temple. Her safe place. But looking at Burnscar, that place felt so far away. It was out of her reach.

Burnscar went on, “So I used it to scare him off… but you know how it works. You know what happens with my power.”

“I remember.”

“I… the doctors say that using my power, it adjusts the chemical balances and connections in my brain. Empathy, impulse control, my emotions, they disappear as I use my power, and I can’t help using my power if there’s fire nearby. It snowballs, because I use my power more when I don’t have that self-control, when I don’t care about the people I’m near, and when I’m in that headspace I don’t want to leave it.”

“Yeah.” And you retreat into that state to avoid facing the guilt over things you’ve done. You use it to hide from your own fears. If I blame you for anything, it’s for that.

Burnscar shook her head. ”If you hadn’t put out most of the fire out there… I dunno what I would have done.”

I have a pretty good idea.

“So I burned the pimp to scare him, then I burned him to hurt him, for payback over his hounding me, and then I couldn’t really stop myself. I burned him to death. Fuck. That was the start of a bad few weeks.”

“Sorry.”

“I- before I knew it, the Slaughterhouse Nine had found me. Shatterbird recruited me. And now I’m stuck. I’m trapped. You know there’s a kill order out on me? If I try to quit, either the Nine or the cops will off me. So I keep going, I work for them, and it all just gets worse.”

“Surrender? Go to the birdcage?”

“They’d find me. You don’t even know what these guys are capable of. Our newest member, she replaced Hatchet Face, though he’s still around… kind of. She can find people. There’s no place secure enough to keep me safe until they took me to the Birdcage. I almost think they’d be able to get me in there, if they wanted to. Siberian? She’d be able to get me. Even in the Birdcage. She always gets her prey.”

“Can’t keep hurting people, Mimi.”

“I have to. I- I can just use my power. Stay in that headspace where I don’t feel bad, where I act the way the Nine expect me to.”

The bad place was intruding on the room further. Elle spoke up, “Mimi… Can I touch you? Anchor you? Don’t want my power to hurt you.”

“So you want to keep me out of your world?” Mimi smiled and shook her head. ”No way. Half the reason I came here was because I heard you were making beautiful things these days. I have to see it. The things you can make, now.”

Then she turned and looked around. Her face fell as she saw the padded walls, the bed that had become a cot, the shit stains, the blood, the needles in the corner, the broken glass and the razorblades that were embedded in every surface, waiting to catch anyone unsuspecting that put their hand or foot in the wrong place.

“No,” Burnscar said.

Elle tensed. ”Sorry.”

Burnscar’s face fell. ”This… this isn’t beautiful. I remember this.”

“Would show you the others… if I could.”

Burnscar’s voice was choked. ”But you can’t. Because I remind you of the asylum. I remind you of the bad times, the times you were most miserable.”

Elle looked down at her feet, swallowed past the lump in her throat.

“I thought we were friends. We had our moments, didn’t we? Only a few times, when we were both allowed out of our cells, when we were having good days. A few jokes, stories. I mean, I know that some of the time I was coming off a bad spell, so maybe I snapped, or I called you names, or threatened you…”

Burnscar trailed off. Elle stayed silent.

“It. It wasn’t, um.” Burnscar stuttered. Her eyes flashed orange. ”Did you see me as a friend? Don’t you dare lie to me.”

Elle couldn’t come up with a reply. They used me as an enticement to get you to cooperate.

“Oh fuck. Fuck me, I’m sorry,” Burnscar said. She turned away, fumbled with the metal door. Elle realized it had locked, adjusted things to allow it to open. Burnscar pulled it open, then stopped in the doorway. Her back turned, the girl said, “I’m sorry about your friends. I really hope they’re okay.”

“I do too.”

“I’m glad you’re doing well. I hope I didn’t fuck everything up.”

It took a bit of courage, but Elle hurried to cross the room and wrap her arms around Burnscar, hugging her from behind.

“We had some good times,” Elle lied. ”Take care.”

Burnscar pulled away, and Elle let the girl go. She saw Burnscar find the door to the indoor balcony that overlooked the dance floor, heard her run down the stairs.

Elle sank down against the wall, pushing away the sharp things that would cut her with a use of her power. She put her head in her hands and closed her eyes to the sights around her. She’d wait a few minutes. She’d take a few minutes wait until she could be sure Burnscar was gone, then she would leave to check on the others.

It would be weeks before she had made up for the ground she had just lost, in terms of her mental health, in pushing past the bad memories and the bad place. She reassured herself with the thought that she would get better, in time. She’d gotten there once, she could get there again. If the others were okay.

As for Burnscar? There would be no helping that girl.

11.d

There was a faint tapping sound. A clink of something hard on metal or glass.

It came again, a second later.

Colin looked up from his computer. Ears peeled, he turned his head to the left and waited. Clink. He turned his head the other way, in the hopes of pinpointing the source.

He heard a scraping noise, then the sound once more. He couldn’t say where it came from.

He opened an instant message window on his computer and sent a message:

A few seconds passed, then it came again.

As casually as he was able, he glanced towards the window. Tinted glass, bulletproof, and reinforced with a low degree forcefield. It would be easier for someone else to go through the wall than the window, but he couldn’t see through walls. Nothing outdoors. Just an overcast sky hiding the majority of the moon, and a faint drizzle of rain. No person or animal, nothing else.

Clink.

He whirled around, grabbing the model of his nanobranch disintegration weapon from the stand on his desk. It was miniaturized, a mere pocket knife that Piggot could use for demonstration. Still, it would serve better than any chair or tool he might pick up.

He briefly debated going for the helmet with the link back to his old suit’s combat analyzer. But it wasn’t set up, it would cost him precious seconds – twenty or thirty – before he connected to the main server. Until that happened, the helmet would only render him blind. A blank display.

Something moved in the gloom behind the vent. There was a flash of something white or light gray, and the vent rattled, a puff of dust flowing down where the screws held it in place. Again, there was the sound. Clink.

The vent exploded from the wall with enough force to fly across the room and embed in the opposite wall. It was hard to make out in the cloud of plaster dust, but Colin saw a hand, all white, each joint segmented, fingers splayed, palm facing the room.

The hand tipped forward, and then dropped to the floor alongside the attached forearm, a length of chain stretching from the vent to the ‘elbow’.

Other body parts followed, each separated from the rest, encased in a white shell. An upper arm, two halves of a torso, then a head. The rest of the body followed, flowing to the ground like a liquid to pool there. The right arm and the left leg were separate, detached, with only ball joints at the end.

Colin noted that the flat expanse that would join the left side of the chest to the right had a clear pane to it. Organs were inside, cut cleanly down the middle, and they pulsed with activity, throbbing wet against the glass or glass substitute. There was technology in there too. Regulators and filtration systems, and other gear that was designed to fit into the gaps between the most vital systems. Weapons, tools.

He knew this one from the briefings. Mannequin.

The realization of what he was up against spurred him to action, pushed him beyond that momentary paralysis that came with the grim sight of the internal organs. While Mannequin was incapacitated, he charged, clicking a switch on the handle of his knife to activate the disintegration effect. A static grey cloud formed around the knife.

Colin was two paces away when a telescoping blade speared out from Mannequin’s hand, straight at him. It was luck as much as reflexes that let him stop his run, his feet sliding on the smooth ground, before he ran into the weapon. He dropped onto his back, instinctively rolling with the fall to reduce the impact.

The blade snapped back into Mannequin’s hand with enough force that the hand and forearm it was attached to recoiled from the impact. It flipped into the air, and the blade snapped out again to impale the top of the door frame.

The chain retracted with a faint whirr, and the forearm snapped into place on the upper arm, which soon connected to the shoulder of the torso. The chain joining the two halves of the torso together reeled in and locked into place by way of some unseen mechanism, the seam between them almost invisible. Colin felt a faint tug from his weapon as some electromagnetics kicked into effect. The unattached arm and leg flew to the shoulder and pelvis and snapped into place.

The head was the last thing to join the tall, thin body. The chain slowly reeled it in, dragging the head along the floor, lifting it off the ground. It swung, bouncing off one leg, the stomach, then the shoulder before it finally connected to the neck, the very top of the head scraping the ceiling. There were no eyeholes, no earholes, nor any vents for air intake. There was only a head as white and smooth as an eggshell, with shallow indents where the eyes and mouth should be and a small bump for the nose.

Mannequin raised one hand and placed it on the top of his head. With a sharp twist, he snapped it into place with an audible click. He tested the range of motion, tilting it forward, backward, to either side, then spinning it around three-hundred-and-sixty degrees.

“Dragon,” Colin whispered, “Are you getting this?”

“Help is on the way, Colin.” The whole room was outfitted with speakers, microphones and microcameras. Her voice came from the speaker directly behind him, so quiet that he would have thought he imagined it, if he didn’t know her.

Mannequin tested the rest of his body, while Colin slowly climbed to his feet. Every joint was too flexible, and was capable of moving in every angle. For a moment, Mannequin’s fingers were like worms, each knuckle bending in impossible directions.

Was the killer hoping to intimidate him? Nobody would test these mechanics in front of an enemy, so this was most likely a demonstration.

Four blades sprang from Mannequin’s left forearm. The limb began to rotate, slowly at first, then faster, until the four blades were whirling like a helicopter propellor. Colin tensed, preparing to jump the moment the limb shot towards him. He’d never wanted his suit so badly.

The propeller-like whirl of the blades gave the arm some buoyancy, and it shifted enough to come into contact with Mannequin’s leg. All at once, it ricocheted, shearing through the computer, bouncing violently off of Mannequin’s head, then his leg again, the desk, then his arm.

Colin watched every movement of the bouncing blades, waiting for the moment it would fly free, or the second Mannequin charged. There would be no dodging that unscathed.

But Mannequin didn’t move. The spinning slowed, and the whirling blades settled into a rhythmic bounce against Mannequin’s leg, until it had stopped entirely, the arm swinging gently. The blades retracted.

Mannequin didn’t speak, he made no sound.

Long moments passed.

“Talk to me, Dragon,” he murmured. His voice shook just a touch. Any second now, Mannequin would cut to the chase and attack, and he could die at this monster’s hands.

Her voice was quiet behind him. As much as anything, it helped keep him calm. “Mannequin. Original name Alan Gramme. Tinker, originally went by the name Sphere. Specialty is in biomes, terraforming and ecosystems… or it was.”

Colin nodded slowly. He knew this, but it was reassuring to get a recap.

“He became newsworthy when he took on a project to build self sustaining biospheres on the moon. He had ideas on solving world hunger, and building aquatic cities near cities plagued by overcrowding. And he was putting it all into effect. Until-”

“The Simurgh,” Colin finished.

“His wife and children were killed in the attack, years of work ruined. Everything fell apart. He went mad. He cut himself off from the rest of the world. Literally sealed himself away.”

Colin looked at the cases that surrounded each individual body part. Each body part a self-contained system. Everything nonessential stripped away and replaced.

Her voice was even quieter than before as she said, “He has a body count, Colin. You know…”

She trailed off, unwilling to finish.

“I know,” he finished for her. Like other serial killers, Mannequin favored certain types of people as victims. His prey of choice included rogues, those individuals seeking to make a profit from their abilities, especially those looking to better the world… and tinkers.

Mannequin swayed slightly on the spot. Like a doll with a broken neck joint, his head flopped onto one side, until it was perpendicular to the floor. There was a click as he slowly righted it.

“What do you want, monster?” Colin growled, “Little point in coming after me. I don’t have much of a life to look forward to. I’ve already lost everything!”

Mannequin didn’t move.

“You’d be doing me a fucking favor!” Colin shouted, “Come on! Come get me, you freak!”

There wasn’t a movement or sound from the killer.

There was a sound from Dragon. In a tone that was afflicted with agonizing disappointment, like a mother who had just found out her son had been arrested for a felony, she said, “Oh, Colin.”

Colin didn’t speak. He waited for elaboration.

“The PRT got a tip from one of the villain teams. The Slaughterhouse Nine is in town.”

“So I gathered.”

“They ran it by some of the experts. Colin, the consensus they came to was that Slaughterhouse Nine are in Brockton Bay to replace their ninth member.”

He stared at Mannequin, and the realization made his blood run cold.

“Me!?” he shouted.

The faceless man cocked his head to one side.

Colin roared, “I’m a fucking soldier! I made a call that could have saved millions of lives! Billions! You’re ten times as fucked up as I thought you were if you think I belong in your group!”

Uncaring or oblivious to the outburst, Mannequin turned and examined the ruined computer. He picked up a key that had been thrown off the ruined keyboard and turned it over in his fingers.

“Listen to me, you psychopath!”

“Colin!” Dragon’s voice hissed from the speaker, not as quiet as it had been. “Don’t provoke him! Help is nearly there!”

Colin had to stop to control his breathing, and he bit his tongue to keep from saying anything further. His enemy had to have heard her, but didn’t seem to care.

Mannequin fished through the broken keys from the keyboard, found another, and folded one finger back to pin it against the back of his hand. He ejected a blade from his wrist and used it to scrape the letters that were still intact off the board. They clattered to the desktop, and a few fell to the floor.

The featureless white head swiveled one way, then the other.

After a long moment, one arm dropped to the floor, the chain going slack. The hand crawled over to pick up another key, then the arm reeled in.

Colin tensed as Mannequin approached, backing up as far as he was able The window was just behind him now, and he could almost imagine the crackling of the rainwater vaporizing against the forcefield.

The villain turned and placed the keys down on the edge of Colin’s desk. The first key was the letter U.

Six inches away, Mannequin put down an M, sideways. He corrected it so it was upright. Directly beside it, the villain put down an E.

He stepped away from the desk and faced Colin once more.

“You… me?” Colin asked.

Mannequin cocked his head.

“Is this a riddle?”

Mannequin swiveled his upper body to face the other direction and reached for the shattered monitor. He picked out a piece of glass and a piece of glossy black plastic. Pressing them together, he raised it to the right side of his face, looking down at Colin. Slowly, Mannequin changed the angle of the shard of glass with the black backing.

It took two long seconds before the villain’s intent became clear. Colin tensed, and Mannequin froze, fixing the angle of the shard.

With the black backing, the glass reflected an image. With the angle Mannequin had carefully found, the image reflected was half of Colin’s own face, overlapping with Mannequin’s head.

“No,” Colin muttered.

“Quiet!” Dragon’s voice whispered from the nearby speaker, “They’re in the building, they’ll be there to help you in two minutes, maybe less! I can see them on the security cameras!”

“I’m nothing like you!” Colin screamed at the villain.

Mannequin stared at him with the shallow, empty eye sockets.

“I didn’t date, I didn’t have kids, because I wanted to be out there, helping! I knew that any attachments could be used against me, so I went without! I was fucking smart enough to do that!”

“Colin!” Dragon pleaded. Her voice was louder.

The villain didn’t move.

“Fucking answer me! Spell the fucking words with keys if you have to!” He roared the words at the mad tinker.

Mannequin swayed slightly, then righted himself with a sudden, jerky motion, as if he’d collapse into a heap if he wasn’t careful. He used his hand to shift his back into place with an audible click.

Colin went on, “I was out there every day, helping. I took steps to fight evil and take down criminals every day, small steps, baby steps.”

“Colin, stop, please!”

Dragon’s words didn’t matter. He was going to die anyways. He’d known the moment he recognized Mannequin. He’d go down fighting, hurt this motherfucker the only ways he could.

“You want to compare us, freak? Maybe we both had bad days. Days where nothing went right, days where we were too slow, too stupid, too weak, unprepared or tired. Days we’ll look back on for the rest of our fucking miserable lives, wondering what we would have done different, what we could have done better, how things could have played out. The difference between us is that I actually did something with my life, and I’m still trying to do more while I serve my sentence!” He stopped and took a breath. “You started your big projects, got every fucking person in the world to get their hopes up, and then you failed to finish anything because you couldn’t hack it when your fucking family got killed! You insult their fucking memories every motherfucking second you exist like this!”

Mannequin slammed him into the wall with more strength than he might have expected the artificial body to have. The blade came next, springing from Mannequin’s hand to pierce the shoulder that led to Colin’s stump of an arm and stick through the wall behind him.

The villain withdrew the hand, then punched the blade into Colin’s stomach. Once, twice, three times.

Dragon’s scream came from every speaker in the room.

A slash of the blade caught Colin across the face, blinding him in one eye and tearing through the bridge of his nose.

None of it hurt as much as it felt like it should have. More serious wounds didn’t tend to, odd as it was.

Colin tried to laugh, and found he couldn’t. He could feel blood flowing into his mouth and throat through the gaping wound in his face. He let his head hang forward, so the blood could mostly flow out of his mouth.

He tried to move forward, lunge with his knife, but he couldn’t pull his shoulder from the wall, even though the blade was no longer pinning him there. Was it a lack of physical strength, or something mechanical, flesh and bone shoved into the hole in the wall?

Couldn’t lapse into that kind of thinking.

Still had the knife. One hole in the self-contained systems that were one of Mannequin’s vital body parts would cause a leak of fluids, an introduction of pathogens that Mannequin surely wouldn’t be able to fight off.

He tried to speak, but there was too much blood in his mouth, and he only managed to start coughing violently, spraying blood on the white of Mannequin’s chest. His vision was getting hazy.

He wouldn’t be able to distract the lunatic with words while he acted. He could only pray.

Don’t do it for me, God. I probably don’t deserve the chance. Do it for every soul this motherfucker would kill from here on out if I fail.

He thrust out the knife, swept it towards his opponent’s chest cavity. His hand stopped.

With his vision in his good eye failing him, it took him a second to see why. Mannequin’s hand gripped his wrist.

He pushed, as if he could beat this monster in strength. By some miracle, his hand moved a fraction closer to his enemy’s chest. He redoubled his efforts, and it moved still closer.

A blade stuck out of Mannequin’s upper arm, near the elbow joint. The upper arm fired like a small rocket to stick in the wall, and for a second, there was slack in the chain. Colin thrust the knife forward, came within inches of making contact with Mannequin’s chest before the chain reeled in and the metal links went rigid.

The chain started to gradually reel in, and Mannequin started pulling his hand backward, toward the wall where the section of arm had stuck.

Then, as if to taunt Colin, Mannequin dropped to a crouch, moved his face less than an inch from the blur that marked the edge of the blade’s effect.

No!

He couldn’t say where, but he found some reserve of strength. The knife inched closer. Hairs away. He could see the material of the casing smoke just beneath Mannequin’s ‘eye’, a dark patch revealing itself beneath.

Mannequin’s head fell, tipping over backwards to strike the ground, dangling from the chain, out of reach of the blade. Still holding Colin’s wrist, the headless villain stood straight.

He was toying with me.

Mannequin wrenched his hand back, as if to make it clear that he had let him get that close, that Colin had never really stood a chance. Colin was pulled to one side, and he didn’t have the strength in his midsection to keep from falling over. His knife clattered from his grip as he fell to the floor.

The villain picked up the knife, examined it, then pressed the button to test it. The last thing Colin saw before darkness consumed his vision was the bastard using the weapon on the wall beside the window, dust billowing where it made contact.

In the last seconds of consciousness, he heard Dragon’s voice, as if from a far away place. “No! No, no no! Colin! Stay awake! I need you!”

Her voice was the first thing he heard when he woke. “Welcome back.”

“I survived,” his voice rasped. He’d had a tracheotomy. The only explanation for his throat being this sore would be having a tube rammed down it. Looking around, he saw a laptop propped up beside him, and a get well card from Miss Militia. She must have put the laptop there when she left the card.

“Your heart stopped nine times on the operating table,” Dragon said, “A lesser man wouldn’t have made it.”

“How?”

“Artificial parts. I supplied your headquarters with a 3D scanner of my design weeks ago. I had them make the parts I specified. The on-site doctors kept you alive long enough for the scanner to make the necessary components, and they followed my instructions in installing them.”

“Good girl,” he told her, with genuine affection.

“I’m sorry about your face.”

He tried to raise his hand, but found it attached to IVs. He had to maneuver it carefully as he lifted it to his face, so as not to tangle the wires. Almost seamlessly, his flesh transitioned into a smooth plastic and back to flesh again.

“It’s alright,” he said.

“Your new eye doesn’t work. I think I know what’s wrong with it, and I can get you something that will work, I just need time.”

“You have better things to be doing.” He coughed and regretted it as pain ripped through his throat with the movement of the muscles. His stomach felt strange. He started to speak, cleared his throat, then said, “I think I could pull off an eye patch.”

“The parts won’t last. All of this is prototype stuff. Some of it I revised and invented while you were in surgery. They’re temporary, but I can make better. I’m afraid you’re going to need to go under the knife a few times. More than a few.”

“That’s fine. Thank you for all this.”

There was a pause.

“You’re a fucking idiot, Colin. That was the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.”

He laughed. His breath caught with the pain each laugh produced, but he couldn’t help it.

“Yeah, I hope that hurt.”

“Wanted to provoke him. See if I couldn’t find an opening.”

“I repeat: Stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Was going to kill me anyways.”

“Was he? He could have killed you there. He didn’t.”

“He tried.”

“No, Colin. Look.”

The laptop screen on the table beside him lit up, and a browser page opened. An image loaded.

A photo. Mannequin had left a message. 3 keys, again, on the edge of the desk. BR8.

The eight, Colin supposed, was meant to stand in for a second B. ‘BRB’, an acronym used by countless denizens of the internet and innumerable cell phone texters. Be Right Back.

“Could be meant for you guys.”

“Or it could be for you.”

“He left me for dead. He couldn’t really expect I’d survive.”

Dragon didn’t reply. He thought of Mannequin. Despite the silence, despite the uncanny behavior and the dramatic self mutilation, Mannequin was a brilliant man. A man who could have looked at the resources that were available in the building, who could have figured out Colin was in touch with Dragon, done just enough damage to push him to the brink of death.

“Shit. He probably could,” Colin conceded.

He stared at the photo for several long seconds, then turned away.

Hoping to inject some levity into the grim conversation, he smiled and asked her, “What was this I heard when I was passing out? ‘I need you’?”

The silence stretched on for so long that he knew he’d made some faux pas. He just wasn’t sure what. Stupid. This was the kind of thing that had cost him his position, started the dominoes falling in such a way that they’d led him to being prisoner in that room, led to him being an easy target for Mannequin, to him being here, in this bed. Never knowing what to say, or how to say it, or who to say it to.

He was about to apologize when Dragon said, “Those prosthetics I gave you? They were part of a bigger project. Something I’d intended to use for myself.”

She was a cripple? He’d known she had survived Leviathan’s attack on Newfoundland, was it such a surprise that she’d gotten hurt then? It would explain her aversion to showing her face. One of the things she’d given him was a facial prosthetic.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t know.”

“No, it’s not that,” she paused. ”There’s something you need to know about me.”

11.e

The high-pitched song of steel rang through the air as sword parried sword, struck shield and fell to the ground. Somewhat less sweet were the guttural grunts and muffled slaps of flesh being battered and struck. A boot in the stomach, an elbow or fist striking a face.

Hookwolf walked between the groups of his sparring recruits. They were tired, pushing themselves through their exhaustion. All wanted to be here. The training was too punishing for anyone who didn’t. With small exceptions for eating and sleeping, their days were filled with exercise, hand to hand sparring, gun training, and practice with melee weapons.

The main adversaries of the Chosen were mercenary soldiers, police and trained heroes. Why should the standards of his Chosen be any lower than theirs? No, if his group was to represent the true Aryan warrior, they had to have higher standards. They had to be the best.

It was that knowledge, that commitment that drove his trainees to give their all. Too many saw the Aryans as hatemongers, failed to see the greater picture, the hope for raising humanity to a higher level. He stopped at one end of the room to watch their progress, watch for the ones who had the killer instinct he needed. Stormtiger and Menja were at the other end of the room, looking for the same. Stormtiger had cast off his mask, and wore only face paint. He still walked a little stiffly from the gunshot wounds that he’d taken to his legs. Othala had attended to them over the past few weeks, would give him a half-hour to an hour of regenerating ability each night until he was better, but knees were slow to heal. Menja wore her armor, her expression stern as she watched the form and habits of the combatants. Cricket sat in one corner of the room, typing on a laptop without looking at the screen, taking notes on the trainees.

Hookwolf looked at Menja, and she raised one hand, two fingers extended. Signalling, she pointed to two of his thirty-four recruits. A bald man in peak physical condition and a twenty something girl with the ends of her hair in thin bleached blond braids. A little too much like cornrows for his liking. Maybe it was supposed to be ironic. He liked her first pick, though. He’d noticed the bald man. He’d committed their names to memory on first meeting them, but he’d forgotten some. He knew the man was Bradley, the girl was Leah or Laura or something like that. His own pick was a lean scrapper in his early thirties, Ralph.

“Stop!” he ordered.

As one, his recruits pulled away from their fights and sheathed their blunted swords. Not all of them were able to stand straight. More than a few had bloody noses or black eyes.

“You’re three days into our week of training. If you’re still here, you’re doing us proud.”

He could see a few of them stand a little taller at that. Hookwolf had been a fighter before he’d been a fighter with powers. He had spent a great deal of time around athletes, knew all too well that just a little recognition and a little motivation could make a world of difference.

“Some of you have earned special attention. You’ve fought harder, meaner or better than the others. Bradley, come here.”

The bald man approached.

“Menja.”

Menja stepped through the gathered recruits to stand beside Bradley.

“You two are going to fight. No weapons, no armor. Menja? You can use your powers, just a little.”

Menja smiled, then she grew a foot and a half. Bradley stood at a height of just over six feet, but she still loomed head and shoulders above him. She unstrapped her armor and threw it aside.

Bradley looked at Hookwolf, a flicker of concern crossing his features.

“Part of the reason for this is that I want to see how you do against someone bigger than you,” Hookwolf said. “You’re tired. You’ve been training and sparring all day, Menja hasn’t. Tough. If you’re going to represent the Chosen as one of our elite, you’re going to be expected to go up against capes. Things will be just as one-sided or worse.”

Bradley looked to his left, sizing up Menja.

“Think you can fight her without embarrassing us? If you think you can do it, you might just have a place as one of our lieutenants or as a leader of one of our warbands.”

“I’m no coward,” Bradley replied. He turned to Menja and adopted a practiced fighting stance.

Hookwolf watched with approval as the two squared off. It was clear from the start that Bradley was thrown off guard by how strong Menja was, and doubly apparent that he wasn’t used to fighting someone with better reach or more power behind their hits. But he was trained, and he was familiar in how to use his body, and he adapted quickly.

Bradley shifted to the defensive, and Menja struck with sharp kicks to his side and lunging steps forward to jab at his face. He timed a grab and quickly shifted to an arm lock, forcing Menja to bend over. For just a moment, it seemed like he had control of the situation, but Menja snapped back to her normal size, slipping her arm free, then struck at him, simultaneously growing. He was shoved to the ground.

“Enough,” Hookwolf said.

It wouldn’t do to let the man defeat Menja, and it was looking increasingly possible that he might. It would hurt her pride and weaken the position of his powered lieutenants in comparison to the unpowered ones.

“Good man,” he said from behind his mask. He offered the man a hand, and Bradley took it. ”Well done. Welcome to the Chosen’s elite.”

Bradley nodded and stood at attention.

Hookwolf turned to the blond girl. “Leah, was it?”

She looked surprised to be picked, but she nodded.

“Menja likes you. I don’t. You get one chance to prove me wrong. Menja? Who would you set her against?”

There weren’t many options. Stormtiger couldn’t walk, Menja wouldn’t nominate herself, and it wouldn’t just be a hassle to go get Rune, Othala or Victor, but each of the three were either too powerful in a brawl or effectively powerless. That left Hookwolf himself and-

“Cricket,” Menja said. ”Same reasoning. Leah’s quick, Cricket’s quicker.”

Cricket stood from her seat in the corner and limped forward. She’d refused the same help that Othala had granted Stormtiger, both for the injury to her leg and the damage she’d taken to her vocal chords when she’d had her throat slashed, in a time before he’d met her. It would have taken a few days at most to restore her to peak condition, but she valued her battle scars too highly.

“Up for this, Leah?” Hookwolf smiled. Cricket’s injury to her leg slowed her down some, but the young woman was anything but a pushover.

Cricket reached to her side and picked up a small silver tube. She pressed it to the base of her throat, and her voice came out sounding distorted and digital, “Something’s wrong.”

“With the fight?” Hookwolf asked, raising one eyebrow.

Cricket opened her mouth and pressed the tube to her throat to reply, but didn’t get a chance. The windows shattered with an explosive force, knocking the majority of the people in the room to the ground. Hookwolf was one of the few to remain standing, though he bent over as shards of glass tore through the layer of skin that covered his metal body.

He took a moment to compose himself in the wake of the blast. His ears rang, and he bled from a dozen cuts, but he was more or less fine. His people were not. They groaned and screamed in pain, accompanied by the sound of car alarms going off outside.

Two trainees and one of his graduated Chosen were dead. They’d been wearing glasses, and the glass had penetrated their eyes to tear into their brains. The others were all wounded to some degree or another. Some had been hit by the glass that flew from glasses others were wearing, others from the windows, and one or two others had patches of blood rapidly expanding around pockets where cell phones had been stowed.

Why couldn’t they have put the cell phones away before they started sparring?

Leah lay dying, and Stormtiger had one hand pressed to his throat, blood billowing from a cut that may or may not have nicked an artery.

Hookwolf tapped into his core, the ‘heart’ from which his metal sprouted inside his body. He could feel it start to churn with activity, and the metal he already had encasing each of his muscles began to stir. Soon it was lancing in and out of his pores, criss-crossing, some blades or needlepoints sliding against others with the sounds of whetted knives. In a few seconds, he had covered his body, to protect himself from further attacks.

“Shatterbird!” he roared, once he knew he was secure. There was no reply. Of course. She was attacking from a safe position.

An attack from her meant an attack from the rest of the Slaughterhouse Nine. Daunting, but not impossible. He was virtually invincible in this form. That left few that could actively hurt him. Burnscar. The Siberian. Crawler. There was Hatchet Face, the bogeyman of capes. With the exception of Hatchet Face, the group wouldn’t be able to do much harm to him unless he was forced to stay still.

More troubling were the Nine he couldn’t put down. The Siberian was untouchable, an immovable object, invincible in a way that even Alexandria wasn’t. Even if he were capable of hurting Crawler, he wouldn’t want to. Mannequin, he wasn’t sure about. He knew the crazed tinker had encased himself in a nearly indestructible shell. As strong as Hookwolf was, he faced that distant possibility that any of these people could pin him down or set him up to be taken out by others.

Who else? He wracked his brain. Jack Slash was the brains and leader of the operation. Not a threat unto himself. Shatterbird couldn’t harm him, he was almost certain.

Bonesaw. She was the wild card, the most unpredictable element in terms of what she could bring to the table. So often the case with tinkers.

He strode across the room to the windows and gazed out at the city block surrounding the home base of the Chosen. Glass was still raining down from the sky, glimmering in the orange-purple light of the setting sun. Every window in view was broken, empty of glass. Car windshields, streetlights and signs had all been affected, and the surrounding surfaces of wood, metal and fiberglass all bore the scuffs and gouges of the fragile shrapnel.

Every piece of glass in the room suddenly stood on end, points facing upward. He gave it a moment of his attention, then turned to the world beyond the window, hoping for some glimpse of his adversaries, a clue about where they were.

“Cricket,” he called out. ”You alive?”

He heard a sound, movement, and turned. She was gingerly searching through the carpet of weaponized glass shards for her artificial larynx. She found it and pressed the cylinder to her throat. ”Alive.”

“You said something was wrong. What did you notice?”

“Sound. The glass was singing. Still is.” She pointed at one wall. Hookwolf followed the line to a building across the street and a little ways to one side.

His ears were ringing, but he doubted that was it. It would be something subsonic that Cricket noticed with her power, then.

“You come with me, then. Menja, Stormtiger, I leave it to you to see to my Chosen. See if Othala is able to help.”

“On it,” Menja said. Thin trails of blood ran down from the points where glass splinters had pierced her skin, but the damage hadn’t gone any further. She stooped down and picked up Stormtiger in her arms.

Orders given, Hookwolf drew the majority of his flesh into a condensed point in his ‘core’, felt himself come alive as more metal spilled forth. Only his eyes remained where they were, set in recessed sockets, behind a screen of shifting blades. He was half-blind until the movement of the blades hit a rhythm, moving fast enough that they zipped over the surface of his eye at speeds faster than an eyeblink.

He let himself fall from the third floor window and hit the ground in a state that was more liquid than solid. Blades, spears, hooks and other twisted metal shapes all pooled on the pavement, absorbing the impact.

He pulled himself together, in his favored quadruped form. Looking up to the window, he created a tall spear from between his ‘shoulders’. Cricket leaped out and caught the pole, slid down until she could hop off and land beside him, skidding on the glass covered surface. She looked annoyed as she looked down at her shoes, raising one foot off the ground to investigate the underside. Glass had embedded in the soles.

He would have told her to ignore it, but he couldn’t speak. For that matter, neither could she.

Cricket pointed, and he led the way with her following directly behind him. As he walked, he wasn’t moving his limbs quite so much as it might appear at first glance. Instead, he extended one growth of metal as he retracted another, only generating the illusion. A hundred new parts growing each second to suggest shifting musculature, a cohesive form, when he was anything but. Only the core skeleton, the shafts of metal that formed the limbs from the shoulders or hips to his knees, actually moved without retracting or extending.

Glass rose from the ground to fit together into a window that floated in the air and he smashed through it with one of his forelimbs. Another barrier appeared, thicker, and he smashed that as well. The glass began to form into dozens, even hundreds of barriers. He quickly found one strike wasn’t enough to clear the way.

Through the mess of dozens of dirty and wet panes of glass, he saw her. Shatterbird. A sand nigger, going by memory and the color of her exposed skin. The upper half of her head was covered in a helmet of colored glass, and her body was covered with a flowing garment made of tiny glass shards, like scales.

He rose onto two feet, standing straight, and reconfigured his arms. With spears as big around as telephone poles, he punched through thirty or forty panes of glass all at once, then did the same with his opposite hand. It was slow progress, as the glass constantly reformed and pieced itself back together a few feet ahead of him, but he was closing in.

She abruptly dropped the barriers and changed tactics. The majority of the glass in the area formed into one shape, a cone of solid glass, pointing towards the center of the purple-red sky, two and a half stories tall.

Raising one hand, she shot it straight up into the sky above, until it was just a speck.

Hookwolf lunged for her, only to find that the residual glass that remained on the ground was denying him traction. His metal claws failed to find grip, failed to crack the glass, even with the heavy impacts and his impressive weight. Closing the distance proved slower than he’d hoped.

The massive spike of glass plummeted from the sky. He knew it was coming, had kept an eye out for it, and timed a leap to coincide with its descent.

No use. It veered unerringly for him, speared into him with enough force that it nearly sheared him in half. Cricket uttered a strangled scream as she got hit by the fallout of glass shards and scraps of metal.

“Stand,” Shatterbird said. Her voice held traces of a British accent, and her body language and the crisp enunciation made her sound imperious, upper class. “I know you survived.”

Hookwolf struggled to pull himself together. He used hooks to pull the metal back towards his core, where it could be reabsorbed, recycled. It didn’t take much of his reserve of internal energy to create and move the metal, but it took some, and he’d rather not run out.

It was a risk, he knew, but he needed a few moments to pull himself together and rebuild his body. He let his head and upper chest emerge from the core, taking form in the hollow metal ‘head’ of his canid form.

“What do you people want?” he asked.

“Person. Singular. I am the only member of my group here,” Shatterbird informed him.

“Arrogant.”

“You can be arrogant when you’re strong enough. You should know, Hookwolf.”

“You here to make trouble?”

She shook her head, her helmet sparkling in the light cast by the setting sun. ”I’m the Nine’s primary recruiter. I have an eye for people who can thrive among us, and I have brought more than five individuals on board. I thought long and hard before settling on you. I am not about to let you turn me down.”

So that was why she hadn’t hit the entire city with the blast, shattering the glass and maiming or killing hundreds. She hadn’t wanted to kill any prospective members, wanted to reserve her power for when it would be most dramatic.

“I’m fine where I am.”

“This isn’t a request.”

“Is that so? You going to make me?” He was nearly restored. He could fight now if he needed to.

“Yes. I know who you are, Hookwolf. I spent some time researching your history.”

“Not that interesting.”

“I beg to differ. You ally with the Aryan groups. Run one, but your motivations seem to be different. I have guesses as to why, but I’d rather you tell me.”

“Tell you? Why should I? I think we’re done here.”

Shatterbird raised one hand, then frowned, her lips pursing together. ”Hm.”

Cricket climbed to her feet. She was bleeding badly where she had exposed skin, and chunks of glass were partially buried in her arms and legs. There was the quiet rasp of her laughter.

“Pride goeth before the fall,” Hookwolf said, striding towards his enemy. ”Seems as though Cricket can use her subsonics to cancel you out.”

“Seems so,” Shatterbird answered, rapidly backing up to maintain some distance from Hookwolf.

“And here I was thinking you’d won the lottery with powers. Incredible range, fine control, devastating force, versatility… and all it takes is the right noise and it all falls apart?”

“Guess the men who bought my power should ask for a refund.”

“No. Not interested in being conned into a game of twenty questions to figure out what you’re talking about. Not giving you a chance to figure a way out.” He punched one of his massive spears at her, and she threw herself to the ground, rolling beneath the impaling weapon. As she stood, she drew a gun from the folds of her glittering dress. She fired between Hookwolf’s legs at Cricket, the noise of the shots ringing through the air.

Hookwolf didn’t even need to look. He laughed, “No. Afraid my lieutenant is a little too fast for you.”

“Look out,” Cricket’s said from behind him, the artificial sound of her voice detracting from the inflection and urgency.

A tide of glass slammed into him. Standing on only two limbs, his balance suffered, and he wasn’t able to keep from being pushed onto his side.

“Wasn’t aiming at her,” Shatterbird said. She fired several more shots, simultaneously releasing a shard of glass from her free hand. Hookwolf turned, saw Cricket clutching her throat. She’d dodged the bullets, but Shatterbird had controlled the flight of the glass shard she shot at Cricket much in the same way she’d controlled the descent of the massive spike of glass. It had struck its target. “Just needed to break her concentration.”

Cricket collapsed, large quantities of blood spilling through her fingers and around her hands, where they clutched her throat.

“Now it’s just you and me,” Shatterbird said. She dusted herself off, not giving any concern to the sharp edges of the glass shards that made up her garment. ”We talk.”

“I think I’ll kill you instead,” Hookwolf growled.

“What’s the rush? In fact, any moment we delay, you have a chance of reinforcements arriving. Your Stormtiger, your Othala, your Menja, they could all do a little something to assist you. It’s in your advantage for us to delay the fight.”

“Except I’m more than capable of putting you down myself.”

“Perhaps.”

He adjusted his form, dropping to four legs once more. The aesthetic suffered, but he created two needle-tipped limbs at his shoulders, poised like scorpion’s tails.

“Ah, that’s much better,” she said, “But you’re still too attached to conventional forms. Why have legs at all?”

“They’re enough.” He pounced. She leaped to one side, and almost glided to a position across the street. She was using the glass of her costume to levitate herself.

From her new vantage point she told him, “I did say I had my suspicions about your motivations. I think I’ve come to understand you. Jack encourages this, you know. Understanding our targets, be they recruits or victims. You learn a lot being with him. I believe you, Hookwolf, are a born warrior.”

He pounced once more, driving both foreclaws at her and following up with two quick jabs with his needle-tipped limbs. She dodged all three hits, then swept a carpet of glass beneath him as he pounced quickly after her. He landed and skidded on the surface like one might with a carpet of marbles, falling onto one side, and she threw a tidal wave of glass shards at him, driving him across the street to distance him once more.

He stopped to draw his head and upper body back into the core. The wave of glass had come too close to penetrating the head of his form and cutting his flesh. It was dangerously vulnerable.

A warrior at heart, she’d said. He’d thought, sometimes, that he was born at the wrong time. Had he been born in Rome’s heyday, the Crusades or any of the great wars, in eras where martial pride and strength were valued, he thought he might have been a great person, a soldier feared on the battlefield. He would have relished that life. Here, now? Even with powers, he wasn’t so notable. People with a tendency for violence and a thirst for blood just didn’t thrive.

“What I can’t figure out-” she paused to throw herself up to the top of a four-story building, then raised her voice to be heard on the ground, “Is what you’re doing with these ‘Chosen’ of yours.”

He couldn’t speak to answer her, and only climbed the building’s face. He was three-quarters of the way up when she leaped down, soaring toward the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. Always keeping her distance.

A gale caught her, and her lateral movement stopped. As wind twisted around her, she was driven down into the street, hard.

Hookwolf would have laughed if he could. He looked at his headquarters and saw Stormtiger crouching by the front door, clutching a blood-soaked rag to his throat. Stormtiger wouldn’t interfere where it counted, but he would give Hookwolf the opportunity to confront his opponent. He adjusted his position and fell to the street next to Shatterbird. She held one leg while laying on her back. She’d fallen badly.

Stalking towards her, he heard she was still talking, ”You call them Fenrir’s Chosen. I’m a scholar, believe it or not. I know Fenrir was one of the beasts that brings about Ragnarök, the death of the gods. Fenrir was the beast who slew Odin, Allfather, king of the gods. Fenrir was a wolf. Too coincidental for that to be an accident on your part.”

He stirred the blades that made up his form, pushing himself to be bigger, more dangerous as he closed the distance.

“A sword age, an axe age. A wind age, a wolf age. A world where none have mercy. I can believe this is your goal, your ultimate objective. Do you crave to reduce this city to darkness, blood and ash, so that only the strong will survive? Do you tell your followers that it is only the pure will rise to the top in the new world order?”

He set one clawed foot down on her. He could feel some blades on the underside of his foot bite into her flesh. She didn’t fight him or resist.

“Join us,” she said, her voice strained.

He formed a head and mouth. His voice echoed from within his metal skull, “You describe me as a warrior, why would I join petty killers?”

She shifted her position, huffing out sentences between gasps of pain. “Only a matter of scale. Need more like you in our number. Frontline combatants. Capable of carving murder through the ranks of the innocent. Through our enemies. We could be great warriors.”

“Not interested.”

“We could create your Ragnarök more than any number of Chosen.”

“They are my people. I won’t turn my back on them.”

“Then kill me.” A thin smile crossed her face, though her expression was drawn with pain. When she spoke, it was in more short sentences. “But know that your dream is over. Unless you come with us. Once nominated you’ll be tested. By others, whether willing or not. I have left notes. Urging them to kill your soldiers. To raze any place you might call home. To bestow fates worse than death.”

He raised his claw from her. She was bleeding from wounds in her stomach and pelvis.

He’d had a hard enough time killing this one. If the other seven arrived? No, he wouldn’t be able to stop them alone, and his lieutenants were not strong enough to hold them off.

“And you won’t rescind these orders and requests?”

“I will. If you join. You give me your word, I leave. You will be tested. Your people left alone. When the test is done you’re… either dead or one of us.”

“What is it you want?”

“Make history. Names in books. Taught to schoolchildren for years. Centuries. Our goals…” she winced, pressed one hand to her stomach, “Coincide.”

He pondered for a few moments. Could they escape? No, you didn’t escape the Nine. He’d already considered fighting, but that option was out.

There was a possibility he could lay a trap for them. Or buy time for his people to escape.

“Fine.”

Another thin smile crossed her face. She used her power to raise herself to a standing position, her toes only barely touching the ground. ”So loyal.”

“But I won’t forget what you’ve already done. If you survive, I will wait for the right time and place, and I will kill you. One day.”

“Already thinking like… one of us. Rest assured. I will survive.”

Glass drifted towards her to fill the injuries, cracking in the right spots so each fragment fit the wounds perfectly. The smallest particles of glass, a fine cloud of dust, flowed forth to fill the gaps.

Then she rose into the sky. Hookwolf signaled for Stormtiger to hold his fire.

He wasn’t going to accept this. They’d insulted him, hurt his people. They wanted to subvert his mission and twist it to their own ends? No.

His face twisted into a scowl as he looked over the glass-strewn street, and at Cricket’s prone form. He’d told Shatterbird he’d kill her sometime in the future, had hopefully led her to expect something further down the line.

No, he would go through the motions of their ‘test’, even join them for the short-term. But he’d kill them sooner than later. Before they left the city.

He looked at his people, saw Othala hurrying over to Cricket’s side to grant the young woman regenerating abilities. Rune was hurt, the right side of her face torn up, healed only enough to close the cuts and stop the worst of the bleeding. Probably Othala. Everyone else was injured to some degree, many gravely.

He’d need help from elsewhere.

11.f

If each of the tens of trillions of universes were like pictures, then they were organized into a mosaic, constantly rearranging itself and shuffling. Taken in as a whole, it was a muddle. Depending on how it shuffled, sometimes patterns emerged. A predominant color, perhaps, or lots of scenes that were blurs of motion and activity.

But there was more to it. There were faint sounds, for one thing, and they weren’t just two-dimensional. Just the opposite – they were each a fully realized world, and each was continuous, like a slideshow or film reel that extended vast distances forward and backward from any of the scenes of focus. Things got even more complicated when each of the slideshow reels forked out and branched as they moved further away. The only thing stopping them were the terminus points. The first terminus wasn’t complicated. The now, the present. It moved inexorably, steadily forward, consuming the individual realities as they ceased to be the future and became the now.

The other terminus was somewhat more ominous. Every branch ended at some point, some sooner than others.

Dinah Alcott knew that those branches were ones where she had died. Right now, there were a lot of them, more coming into view with every passing second. Almost all of the images in the mosaic were either black or crimson. Either the lights were on and everything was covered in blood, or they were off, and she was effectively blind.

She concentrated, and the mosaic organized into two portions, one slightly larger than the other. In one half, that death-terminus came very soon. In the other, it was some distance off. She judged the size of the individual parts, and the number snapped into her head.

43.03485192746307955659 percent chance she would die in the next thirty minutes. The chance was steadily ticking upward with each passing second, with possible realities becoming impossible and fading from her view, or being replaced with other possibilities, effectively shifting over to the other side.

Anxiety crept up on her. She wanted her ‘candy’, to take the edge off, to help clarify her thoughts.

She knocked on the door to her room. She heard Coil say something on the other side and tested the knob. Finding it unlocked, she stepped through.

Coil sat at his desk, on the phone. She didn’t want to talk to him, but she wanted to die less.

“It’s unfortunate,” Coil was saying. ”Step up recon, call in a secondary team to ensure twenty-four seven surveillance. We’ll want a replacement for our Leah the moment they start recruiting again. Yes. Good. Let me know.”

He hung up.

“Coil?”

“What is it, pet?”

“Forty-four point two zero three eight three percent chance I die in the next half-hour.”

He stood from his desk. ”How?”

“Blood or darkness. Don’t know.”

“The chance I die in the next thirty minutes?”

She thought, and felt the mosaic shift into a new configuration. Coil’s face predominated each tiny scene, active, speaking and alive in some, unmoving or dead in the others. “Forty two point seven zero nine percent for the worlds where I don’t die. Don’t know about the worlds where I’d die first.”

“And, say, Mr. Pitter? The chance he dies?”

“Forty point-” She stopped as Coil raised a hand.

“So whatever it is, it happens here, and involves everyone here. Chance of survival if we leave?”

“Ten point six six four-”

“No. Chance the average person in the city lives if we leave?”

“Ninety-nine point-”

“So we’re targets. It’s not an attack on the city. If we mobilize the squads? To one decimal place?”

“Forty-eight point one percent chance I survive, forty-nine point nine percent chance you survive.”

“No difference. Worse if anything,” he said. She nodded, and he rubbed his chin, thinking.

Time was running out. She fidgeted.

“I need some candy, please.”

“No, pet,” Coil said, “I need you focused. What-”

She interrupted him, which always she tried to avoid doing, but she was feeling desperate. ”Please. I’ve been using my power a lot. I’m going to get a bad headache, and then I won’t be useful to you.”

“No,” he said, with more ferocity than she had expected. ”Pitter isn’t here to administer it, and won’t be until this situation is over. Listen. Chance that we survive Crawler’s attack if my soldiers use the laser attachments I’ve provided? The purple beams?”

Crawler? It took her a second to get her mental footing. Coil was using his power. She wasn’t sure how it worked, but she could always tell when he was doing it because the numbers always started changing all at once, and he knew things he couldn’t. He’d know about things and numbers she might have told him, except she didn’t remember telling him.

“Thirty Nine point one-”

“If I deploy the Travelers that are on site at the moment?”

“Thirty point-”

He pushed his monitor off his desk in a fit of anger. It crashed to the floor, pieces of screen rolling and sliding onto the rug at one end of the room.

Striding around the desk, he seized her by the arm and pulled her out of his office.

“Candy. Please,” she said, whispering.

“No.”

Gripping her wrist so hard it hurt, he drew her into the main area of his underground complex.

“Get battle ready!” Coil shouted. It was so out of character for him to shout. ”Threat incoming!”

The soldiers that were at ease in the lower area of the base jumped to action, grabbing weapons and protective wear.

It wasn’t going to make a difference. The numbers weren’t changing enough. But he was already upset, so she didn’t tell him that.

Trickster, Oliver and Sundancer appeared, running along the metal catwalk. Sundancer had her mask off, and her permed blond hair was damp against her scalp with sweat. Oliver was in casual clothing, like Trickster. He was good looking, his features chiseled. Athletically built. Trickster wasn’t. He had a hook nose and long hair that didn’t suit him, but she knew he was smart, and she would have guessed it even if she didn’t know, just going by the way he looked at stuff.

“What’s going on?” Trickster asked.

“My pet has graciously informed us that Crawler of the Slaughterhouse Nine is less than thirty minutes away from entering this complex and murdering us all. Suggestions outside of the obvious would be appreciated.”

“Trickster and I could go and try to stop him,” Sundancer suggested.

“Outside of the obvious, Sundancer. I’ve asked my pet. You try that and we’re all more likely to die.”

“Why?”

“He’s a regenerator,” Coil answered, sounding irritated at having to explain, “And he regenerates exceedingly quickly. More to the point, he has the added advantage that any part that grows back is stronger than it was before, typically with extra features, growths and increased durability to render him more resistant to whatever hurt him or give him other capabilities. These adjustments are not only permanent, but he’s been working on it for some time.”

Trickster added, “I read up on these guys after you mentioned them the other night. Crawler eventually becomes immune to whatever was hurting him, and he’s that much less human, afterward. He wants to get hurt, wants to further his transformation, like a crazed masochist or someone with a death wish. Throws himself into suicidal situations and then comes out stronger. Which may be why he’s here. The soldiers?”

Coil shook his head, “He’s immune to conventional ammunition and explosives, and most likely to most unconventional forms of ammunition and explosives as well. The laser attachments might have some small effect, but not enough to draw him here.”

“Which makes me wonder all of a sudden how he found us,” Trickster added.

Coil shook his head, “One thing at a time. If he is here because he’s seeking someone who could harm him, the only individuals on site who would be capable are Sundancer and your Noelle.”

That gave the three teenagers pause.

“Noelle? But who even knows about Noelle, except-”

Coil raised his hand to silence Trickster. ”Pet, the chance that Crawler would seek out Noelle first, given the opportunity?”

She felt the images filter out until she was looking at a pattern of scenarios. The vague shape of the hulking figure, the open vault door. The images snapped into two groups, one vastly larger than the other.

“Ninety three point four percent.”

“Shit,” Trickster swore. ”That’s why he’s here. Just like Leviathan, Crawler’s coming after her?”

“I find every piece of evidence we gather only supports our working theory on your teammate,” Coil said. He turned to Dinah, “The chance of survival if we were to give him what he wanted? Give him access to Noelle?”

“Hey, no,” Trickster said.

“Eighty-one point nine percent chance we survive the next hour-”

“A start,” Coil noted.

Something about the image bothered her. She pushed forward, seeing the possible realities that unfolded after that. Very, very few extended any meaningful distance into the future.

“Six percent chance we survive the next five hours.”

Coil stopped, then sighed. “Thank you, pet, for clarifying that.”

She nodded.

“Awesome,” Trickster responded, his voice thick with sarcasm. With a more serious tone and expression, he said, “Let’s not give him access to Noelle. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Coil conceded. ”Any further ideas?”

Time’s running out. She looked at the numbers for herself, even though she felt the initial throbbing pains at the base of her skull that foretold the encroaching headaches. 53.8 percent chance I die in the next thirty minutes.

“Pet,” Coil said.

What she didn’t get from his tone, she grasped from the vague images she saw of her most immediate possible futures.

“No,” she pleaded, before he’d even told her what he wanted.

“It’s necessary. I want you to look at a future where we survived, and I want you to tell us what happened.”

“No. Please,” she begged.

“Now, pet.”

“Why is she so against this?” Trickster asked.

“Headaches,” Dinah answered, pressing her hands to her head, ”It breaks my power. It takes days, sometimes weeks before everything is sorted out and working again. Headaches the entire time, until everything is sorted out, worse headaches if I try to get numbers in the meantime. Have to be careful, can’t muddle things up. Can’t lie about the numbers, can’t look at what happens, or it just becomes chaos. Safer to keep a distance, to make and follow rules. Safer to just ask the questions and let things fall into place.”

“We don’t have time to play twenty questions,” Coil said. ”Would you rather die?”

Would she? She wasn’t sure. Death was bad, but at least then she’d go on to the afterlife. To heaven, she hoped. Finding an answer and surviving would mean days and weeks of absolute hell, of constant pain and not being able to use her power.

“Pet,” Coil said, when she didn’t give him an immediate response, “Do it now, or you won’t get any more candy for a long while.”

She could see those futures unfolding. He would. She could see the pain and the sickness she experienced, the full brunt of her power without her candy to take the edges off, complete with all of the details she didn’t want. Worst of all were the feedback loops. To go through withdrawal from the drugs, from her ‘candy’, while simultaneously being able to see and experience echoes of the future moments where she was suffering much the same way? It was a massive increase in the pain and being sick and mood swings and insomnia and feeling numb and skin-crawling hallucinations. There was no limit to these echoes, the feedback from her futures. It would never kill her, knock her out or put her in a coma, no matter how much she might want it to.

She had come close to experiencing it once, early on in her captivity. Never again. She would obey Coil in everything he asked for before she risked that happening again.

“Okay,” she murmured. She picked out one of the paths where they survived. Even looking too closely at it made her head throb, like it was in a massive vise and someone had just cranked it a fraction tighter. Some of the possible worlds around the fringes of her consciousness disintegrated into a mess of disordered scenes as she pushed forward. The scenes and images of the less possible worlds flew around her mind like razor-sharp leaves in a gale, cutting at everything they touched. ”It hurts.”

“Now, pet. As quickly as you can.”

He didn’t know. It was something else, like trying to will herself to stick a hot poker in her body, in her brain, knowing it would remain there and burn her for weeks before it cooled.

But she did it, because as much as it would hurt, it would hurt more if she didn’t get her candy. If Crawler got his hands on her, it wouldn’t hurt at all after those first few moments of pain, but that was bad too. It meant dying.

She focused hard on that scene, taking it from an image small and vague enough that it could have fit on the end of a pencil to something full size. Her head exploded with pain. She caught fragmentary images as she felt herself double over and heave the contents of her stomach onto the metal catwalk and Sundancer’s legs and feet.

Sundancer could have yelled, but she didn’t. Instead, she fell to her knees and grabbed Dinah by the shoulders to steady her. It was just in time, because Dinah felt fireworks erupt in her brain, felt her body go spastic. Too much, too fast. The image was overly sharp and detailed, overwhelming her senses, shredding all sense of time and present.

It was long moments before she could even piece together what the others were saying and doing. She was lying down, her head on Sundancer’s lap, a cold cloth against her forehead. Oliver leaned next to her, holding a bowl of cold water.

“-running out of time!” Trickster shouted. Coil stood just behind Trickster, arms folded, staring out over the railing, at his underground base.

“Give her a moment,” Sundancer said. ”Whatever that was, it just knocked the poor kid out.”

“That deadline she gave us? It’s here. Now.”

“I know, but pressuring her won’t help anything.”

A smell hit her. Like the bitterest black chocolate in the world and overly strong coffee, the odor so thick on the air that she could taste it. With her already upset stomach, it made her want to retch.

“Smells bad,” she said. ”Make the smell go away.”

“She’s conscious. Is this smell a clue?” Trickster turned.

“No. It’s a symptom,” Coil answered him, not turning to look at her or them. ”She may be dizzy, dazed, or she may rub or scratch at herself until she fully recovers. Don’t let her scratch her corneas or rub herself until she bleeds.”

Dinah tried to recall what she’d seen. ”Darkness.”

“You mentioned that earlier, pet.”

“We were in the dark, and it smelled like meat. It smelled like sweat, too. And we were all pressed in close together.”

“Where?” Coil asked.

“There was a metal door in front of us. Big. The vault door downstairs.”

“Noelle’s room,” Trickster said, an instant before Dinah put the pieces together.

“How many of us, pet?”

“Everyone here was there,” she looked towards the soldiers.

“Is she in there?”

“She was. Yes.”

Coil turned and swept her up in his arms. Her skin crawled at the contact of her body against his. She didn’t say or do anything about it, in part because she wasn’t able, too sick, hurting too much. The other reason was because she had seen the numbers shift each time she flinched away from his touch or made her disgust known. Little differences. He was angrier with her, more curt, if she pulled way, if she complained about it.

There was safety in the numbers, in following the rules she set on herself. It kept her power in order, it ensured Coil was tolerant with her, and it meant she didn’t have to go without her candy for even a short time.

Coil took the stairs two at a time as he descended to the ground floor, Trickster, Oliver and Sundancer hurrying after him.

“You,” Coil called out, not even bothering to recall the employee’s name, “The vault door. Open it. Squad leaders, organize your groups!”

There was a faint crash in the distance, and a vibration rippled through the complex.

“Pet, the chance that Crawler kills us, now that we’ve undertaken this route?”

“I don’t. I can’t.” Her head hurt so much.

“Try,” and in his hard tone, she heard the unspoken threat of having her candy taken away.

She did. The scenes had no order to them. They were all jumbled, and trying to pull some semblance of order and sense into them was like thrusting her hands into fire and razor blades, thrusting her mind into fire and razor blades. A long groan of pain was drawn from her throat, and the strength went out of her body.

“You’re killing her!” Sundancer gasped.

“No,” Coil said, as if from a place far away. ”I’ve had her use her power to check. This may be miserable for her, but she can’t die from it.”

Coil touching her, that overpowering phantom smell, the fear, the nausea…

“I need to barf.”

Coil set her down and held her by the wrists as she leaned forward to cough up mouthfuls of bile. Her stomach was already empty of food.

“The number, pet?”

Sundancer bent down to hold her, so her shoulders weren’t being twisted with her arms held behind her by Coil.

“Three point one percent,” Dinah gasped out.

“Reassuring,” Coil said. The vault door opened before them. ”Trickster? Would you announce our imminent arrival to Noelle?”

“Yeah,” Trickster sighed. ”Fuck. I hate to do this, but can I get a number?”

“Trickster!” Sundancer admonished him, sounding horrified, “You can see how much pain it’s causing her.”

“It’s important. Kid, what’s the chance that Noelle kills us?”

There was another series of crashes, closer.

Dinah shook her head, “Please. I just want to put everything back together. Every time I use my power, it all falls apart and it hurts.”

“Pet, it’s the last question we’ll ask you tonight. I promise,” Coil said.

So she did. She reached for the number. It can’t kill me. It doesn’t do permanent damage. It just hurts. It’s my brain telling me my power shouldn’t be used to find answers like that.

The words she used to convince herself did little to soften the pain that came with digging for a number once more. She screamed, and tears flowed down her face as she sank into Sundancer’s arms, screwing her eyes shut.

“Nine point eight percent,” she managed. Was she being carried? They were venturing inside, past the first of the two heavy vault doors. How much time had just passed? Where was Trickster?

“That’s good information to have, pet,” Coil said, from somewhere near her. ”Squad leaders. As you gather inside the containment room, I want you organizing your troops into ranks, your backs to the door. Weapons need to be locked, loaded and ready to fire. Be sure to equip the laser attachments and battery packs. Don’t venture any further than ten paces inside.”

There were affirmative responses. Dinah could hear guns cocking.

Another crash, the closest yet. The sound of rubble and concrete falling echoed through the underground complex.

“He’s here,” Coil said. ”Last people inside, hurry. Close the first door.”

Dinah opened her eyes. They were in a concrete room with steel girders at set intervals, as if forming a cage against the inside of the room. It smelled like meat that had gone bad.

The second vault door slowly swung closed as the last few stragglers slipped through the gap. Employees, technicians, people in suits, some soldiers. They packed in close at the end of the room closest to the door, their bodies pressing against her. Three fifths of the chamber were left unoccupied.

And on the other side of the room – darkness. Trickster was emerging.

“How is she?” Coil asked.

“Scared. Hungry. She said she didn’t get her meal tonight,” Trickster answered, his voice quiet.

Coil folded his arms. ”She did. I personally observed the delivery. I suspect she’s needing more food as of late. Unfortunate we find this out now.”

“She asked me to turn out the lights on this end of her room. Said it would be easier if she can’t see us.”

“Do it,” Coil ordered. He strode over to one of his squad captains and spoke in the man’s ear. Dinah thought she might have overheard something about night vision goggles. She closed her eyes, as if it could help shut out the pain that continued to tear through her skull.

The pink of the light shining through her eyelids turned to black as the lights went out.

“I’m sorry,” A girl’s voice whispered in Dinah’s ear. Sundancer?

Dinah tried to answer, but her voice came out in a croak.

“I’d help you if I could, but I can’t, you understand?” Sundancer whispered to her. She had her arms around Dinah. She smelled like barf, but that was Dinah’s fault. ”It’s not just that my friends and I are in a bad spot, or having to help Noelle, or even that I don’t think I could save you on my own… We made a promise to each other, when everything began. Fuck, it sounds so stupid, sounds so lame, when I say it like that.”

There was a crash nearby, the sound of metal on metal.

Then a massive impact against the vault door made the room shudder.

Sundancer kept talking, as if oblivious to the ongoing attack. ”When you’ve been through hell and back again with a group of people, when you’ve all lost everything, and you collectively stand to lose more? I- I don’t even know what I’m saying. Maybe there’s no justification for letting you go through what you are. I just… they’re all I’ve got. I’m sorry.”

Dinah reached up and fumbled around until she found Sundancer’s hand. She didn’t have a response, couldn’t speak if she’d been able to think of what to say. She just held the hand tight.

A series of hits collided with the metal door. A roar rattled through the air, painfully loud despite the muffling effect of the intervening wall. It was a roar heavy with frustration and anger.

There was the sound of guns cocking. She almost missed it in the midst of the steady, relentless crashes that came from the metal door.

“I’m so hungry,” a girl’s voice echoed through the chamber. She’s close.

“I know, Noelle,” Trickster answered. ”Just a little while. Let’s go back to the other side, away from these people.”

Noelle sounded like someone who was very, very tired. ”Can’t wait. Can’t wait at all these days. I can smell them.”

She wants food as badly as I want my ‘candy‘, Dinah thought. The difference is that she can and will take what she wants, even if it means eating one of us. I don’t have that power.

God, her head hurt. Worse, she knew this was the calm before the storm. Her head would hurt more with every passing hour until she wanted to die.

“You can hold on,” Trickster said, his voice gentle. ”You don’t want to come any closer than that. You know what your power does. None of us want that.”

“No.”

“And these guys, as good as they are, I can’t be positive that one of them won’t shoot you in a moment of panic. We don’t want that either.”

“I’d live. Don’t want to, but I’d live.”

“You would. But would I? Would Oliver and Marissa, if you went berserk? They’re in here too.”

Sundancer spoke up, calling out, “Remember the promise we made together.”

Noelle didn’t reply. The silence lingered, punctuated by the heavy blows on the metal door, echoing through the concrete chamber.

“Come on, Noelle. Let’s go back, before you or someone else here does something they’ll regret,” Trickster urged.

The banging continued.

“Come with me, Krouse? We can talk alone?”

“That sounds good,” Trickster said.

Dinah felt the tension in the room ease. The pain in her skull didn’t get any better. She set about the tedious task of trying to reorganize the images in her head. Building a house of cards in an unpredictable wind. Every time the numbers changed, what she’d started to sort out fell apart.

She’d have to wait until a period of calm before she made any real headway. The passage of time would help as well. Then it wouldn’t be so painful to use her ability.

She got caught up in the painstaking operation, and it was some time before she realized the banging had stopped. Still, the gathered people in the room waited. Just in case Crawler was bluffing them, waiting until they opened the door.

Long minutes passed before Coil gave the order.

Dinah was blind. Her power too fragile and painful to use, so she couldn’t see the future that awaited them outside the door. Her heart pounded in her throat as the door was opened. The first squads moved out, fanning through the complex to find if Crawler was lurking in some corner of the underground base. They returned and gave the all-clear.

Emerging from the gloom, she squinted in the face of the flourescent lights. Claw marks gouged the outside of the solid steel of the vault door, each at least half a foot deep. The catwalk had been torn down at one side of the complex, and innumerable boxes of weapons and supplies had been crushed or scattered across the floor.

“Candy?” she asked. ”My head hurts.”

“You can have your candy, pet. Go to your room, I’ll call Pitter in and send him to you.”

With her armed escort, she headed to her room. She collapsed gratefully on her bed.

She knew she’d regret it, but she used her power. She had to know. It would be one more use, to hold her over, and she would stop using her power for the next few days, at least. Weeks, if Coil let her.

She clutched her covers and bit her pillow as her head erupted with pain. More than half of the groundwork she’d so carefully laid in place over the past hour fell apart as she pulled the scenes into two groups. Minutes passed before she had her number.

31.6%.

More than four percent higher than it had been yesterday.

Thirty-one point six percent chance she’d get to go home someday.

11.g

A teenager with a red streak dyed into her dark hair strode down the street in rubber boots. Three hours past curfew, alone.

She drew a smartphone from the pocket of her jacket, then set to untangling the earbuds. How did the damned things always get so knotted together? They were like Christmas lights. Not that she’d ever untangled Christmas lights, but she’d heard how Christmas lights got tangled.

Popping the foam-covered buds into her ears, she began thumbing through the music as she walked.

J’adore-

Sweet Honey-

Love me, love me, you know you wanna love me…

Love me, love me, you know you wanna love me…

Her head nodded in time with the beat, and she slipped the phone into her pocket.

She supposed she could have bought something to coil up the cord of the earbuds, or replaced the music playlist instead of deleting everything that didn’t appeal. It wasn’t like she didn’t have money. It was an option. What stopped her was the fact that she had a pattern going. Everything she owned and everything she used day-to-day was stolen. The shirt on her back, her shoes, the music, her laptop. She kind of wanted to see how far she could get before she caved and actually bought something.

Love me, you?

Love me, true?

Her boots splashed as she danced a little circle, murmuring the words. The light drizzle had wet her hair, and she pushed it back out of her face, stretched her arms out and let the raindrops fall against her closed eyelids.

It wasn’t as though she was in a rush.

She’d walked long enough for six songs to start and finish before someone stopped her.

“Miss. Miss!” He was barely audible over her music.

She turned and saw a man in military gear, forty-something, his face heavily lined. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, he had a short buzz cut, a bit of scruff on his cheeks and chin, and his face was beaded with droplets of water. She pulled out her earbuds.

Crazed, kooky, cracked, crazy,

Nutty, barmy, mad for me…

The crooning sounded artificial coming from the earbuds that dangled from her hand, nasal.

“What’s up?”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m excellent.”

“There’s a curfew during the state of emergency. I don’t want to scare you too badly, miss, but there’re rape gangs, murderers and human traffickers on the street. All people who would prey on a pretty young woman.”

“You think I’m pretty?” She smiled, stepping closer.

“I have a daughter about your age,” he replied, smiling tightly.

“That doesn’t answer my question. Do you think I’m pretty?” She stepped even closer, ran her finger down his chest.

“Yes, but-” he paused, gripping both sides of her jacket. He pulled the jacket together, then did up her zipper all the way to the top, around the heavy box that dangled around her neck. ”That’s all the more reason for you to be careful, understand? Do you have a home or a shelter you’re staying at?”

She didn’t reply. Her brows knit together and she undid her jacket and stepped away from him.

He went on, “I can give you directions to the nearest shelter if you want. It’s new, just a little ways up Lord street here. There may be space.”

“I’m staying with some people.”

“Do you need directions?”

She didn’t reply. She studied him instead.

“If you’re willing to wait, I can give you a ride when I’m done here. I’ll get relieved in five or ten minutes, but we could talk in the meantime. You can sit in my jeep, and you’ll be dry.”

She hesitated. ”Fine.”

The man led her back to his jeep. She sat in the passenger seat while he stood outside, his eyes on the surroundings, occasionally exchanging words with the person or people on the other end of his walkie-talkie.

After a few minutes, he climbed into the driver’s seat. ”The men who were supposed to take over the watch are late. Something about fires downtown.”

She nodded.

Crazed, kooky, cracked, crazy,

Mental, dotty, whacked, loopy…

“Do you mind turning off your music?”

“I like it,” she said. ”I hate silence.”

“Well, I’m not about to deny someone their coping mechanisms. Where do you live, or where did you live, before the attack?”

“Out of town.”

He raised one eyebrow, but he kept looking out the windows for possible trouble. He put the key in the ignition and started the car so he could use the windshield wipers. ”Sounds like there’s a story there. People don’t just come into town at a time like this, and if you were just visiting, you would have evacuated already.”

“Oh, we’re visiting because it’s a time like this,” she smiled.

“Thrill seeking?” his voice hardened. ”That’s not only stupid, it’s disrespectful.”

“The people I’m staying with? They’re the Slaughterhouse Nine. I’m one of them.”

“That’s not funny.” His voice went hard, any gentleness gone.

“It’s really not,” she agreed with a smile.

He went for his gun, but he didn’t get that far. She closed her eyes for a moment, listened for the music that came from his mind and body. The jangling, dissonant noise of alarm, the throbbing percussion of mortal fear, every part of his body shifting into fight or flight mode. The underlying notes spoke to his personality. His love of his family, his fear that he was about to leave them behind, anger towards her, a momentary anxiety that he was overreacting. She grasped this in the fraction of a second.

Reaching for that mortal fear, she wrenched it. When that wasn’t quite enough, she pulled at it and twisted it until everything else was squeezed into the far edges.

He screamed, throwing himself as far away from her as he could get, his weapon falling between the seats.

Crazed, kooky, cracked, crazy,She twisted other parts of his emotional makeup until he was compliant, adrift in apathy, obedient. ”Stay.”

Nutty, screwy, mentally diseased…

He stopped retreating. He was still breathing hard from his momentary panic, but that would pass.

She leaned towards him and ran her hand along the top of his head. It was like rubbing a toothbrush, spraying minuscule bits of water onto the wheel and dashboard.

“Good.”

He stared at her. There was fear in the look, and she didn’t have the heart to erase all of it. A little was good.

“I want to drive. Switch seats with me.”

He nodded dumbly and climbed out of the jeep. She made her way over to the driver’s seat, then waited for him to climb in before she peeled out.

The jeep cut through the shallow water that covered the roads. Others had noticed her leaving, she knew, and were following in their own vehicle. She could sense them, each a fingerprint of emotions in deeply individual configurations. The mix of personal pride and confidence that she sensed in them suggested they were military. The soldiers that had been taking over for this guy?

Not much time to do it. She searched through the feelings of her passenger, found the networks of brotherly love, trust, camaraderie, and adjusted each until the music was one of tension, suspicion, paranoia. Then she set his fight or flight reflexes into high gear.

“Get the gun.”

He fished for it between the seats, picked it up.

Then he pointed the gun at her.

“No, stop,” she said. Too unspecific. Fuck. Still need to work on that. She hit him with as much doubt and indecision as she could manage to keep him from shooting her. Then she stalled all of the ‘music’ that flowed to and from that one point in the very front of his brain. She knew the music was her way of understanding and interpreting the biological processes that drove people’s emotions. By listening for it, she knew what they felt, knew what the emotions were tied to, vaguely.

There would only be one thing in his short-term memory that was that important right now. Her. With that link severed, he would now feel nothing towards her, couldn’t summon up any self-preservation, anger or hatred. Another tweak, redirecting the flow of emotion from his family to her, and he would feel an extreme aversion to the idea of shooting her, wouldn’t be able to shoot her any more than he could his own daughter.

He pulled the gun away, dropped it into his lap. He crumpled over, his hands to his head, then moaned, “No.”

She was close to her destination. She pulled the jeep to a stop and hopped out, the other jeep pulling up just a ten or so yards away. Two soldiers got out.

“Hey!” someone shouted at her.

She turned her back to them, slipping her ear buds in. The music had looped back to the first track. She got her phone out and skipped forward a few times, pausing to delete one song. She sang along, “Love me, love me, you know you wanna love me…”

“Hey!”

She could sense her passenger climbing out of the jeep, hear the garbled murmurs of warning, questions. There was a burst of fear from all three, then the sound of multiple guns firing. She smiled. The authorities would have a hell of a time figuring out what happened there.

She’d had her doubts about coming to Brockton Bay. It had been a turn off to know that areas lacked power, that still more areas lacked working plumbing. But Burnscar and Bonesaw had both been excited to come, and Jack Slash had bent to Bonesaw’s wishes, pushing for the group to come this way. Crawler, Mannequin and Siberian had seemed fairly indifferent. Not that Crawler or Mannequin showed much emotion. She’d thought she had an ally in Shatterbird, at least, but the woman hated her, and the uptight bitch had gone along with the plans to visit Brockton Bay just to ruin her day.

But it was interesting, she had to admit. The landscape of people here was so different. So many people here were so insecure, so worried. Most were on the brink of some kind of emotional breakdown, needing just one event, one piece of bad news before they broke down completely. Others had already been broken, or they’d turned vicious and started preying on their fellows, seeking out vengeance on those who had wronged them in a past life. In their pre-Endbringer life.

People here were so deliciously fucked up.

This kind of situation, ordinary citizens were doing things they’d never even have considered before. Stealing, hurting their neighbors, bartering things they once considered precious for clothing, food, toilet paper and other essentials. Emotions were raw, far closer to the surface, easier to manipulate.

Her music cut off. She checked the phone. An alert on the screen notified her that the battery was dying.

She swore. No more time to waste. She dialed a number, but didn’t hold the phone up to her ear. Good. Now she had fifteen minutes.

She reached out and started feeling for the outliers. The emotional fingerprints that stood out from the rest.

The other seven members of the Nine were out there. Not hard to find. One or two were interacting with some other outliers. The most fucked up people in this fucked up city. She’d studied each of these unknown outliers over the course of a week, watching their emotions shift as they went out about their lives, sometimes visiting the areas they tended to hang around, to get a sense of their environments. Slowly, she’d pieced them together, created profiles, discerned which ones had powers and described them to the other members of the Slaughterhouse Nine. Each had made their picks:

The buried girl. The arrogant geek. The dog lover. The daydreamer. The warlord. The scaredy cat. The broken assassin. The crusader.

And all she wanted was a few minutes to pay a visit to hers. She didn’t have to name that one. He was familiar enough. She smiled.

Two men sat on the steps outside the building. She knew immediately that they were soldiers, but they weren’t official. They wore black, and they wore body armor that she hadn’t seen before.

“No,” she stopped them from reaching from their guns with a mixture of doubt, apathy and anxiety. Complementing her words with a heavy surge of depression, guilt and self loathing, she ordered them, “Kill yourselves.”

It wasn’t immediate, but their willpower wasn’t enough to stave off some of the strongest and most agonizing emotions they would have felt in their lives. It was quick when their composure cracked, the guns flying to mouth and temple to fire.

She could sense the others inside the building, alarmed at the gunshots, moving toward the front. Four more soldiers and four others who stayed back. Not soldiers.

She didn’t wait for them to step outside. She did the same thing she’d done to the guards stationed outside, crushing them with despair, overwhelming them with loathing and paranoia. It was only slightly faster than it had been here. Here, there had been an enemy for the soldiers to focus their negative energies on, to distract them. It was surprising how important that could be.

Nearly a minute passed before the fourth gunshot sounded, marking the death of the last soldier here.

She tried the front door and stepped inside. The inside was nicer than the outside, watertight, heavily reinforced. A feminine looking teenaged boy with a mop of dark curls stood at the other side of the building. He had two men and a woman guarding him.

“Jean-paul. Ça va?“

“It’s Alec now. Regent in costume.”

“Alec,” she smiled. ”Still sounds French. I approve, little brother.”

“Cherie,” he ran his fingers through his hair. “What the fuck?”

“If we’re changing our names, I’m going by Cherish. I wanted to make an entrance.”

“Man.”

“You’ll find others.”

“Fuck,” he sighed.

She reached for the three people who stood between her and her brother, manipulated their emotions towards Alec. Filled them with suspicion, paranoia, hate.

They didn’t budge.

“Cut it out, Cherie,” Alec said, “I’m controlling them.”

“If I remember right, you lose control if they’re hit by enough emotion,” she smiled. She turned up the intensity.

“If I’m farther away. Seriously, stop. It’s irritating.”

One of the men fell to his knees. His hands were clenched at his sides. Beads of sweat rolled down the faces of the other two, tears appearing in their eyes.

“While I’m doing this, you can’t tell them to attack me.”

“Unless I’ve gotten stronger over the past few years,” Alec answered. The man who was still standing reached for a knife and started walking towards Cherish.

She hit the knife wielder with fear and indecision, saw him stop.

For nearly a minute, they engaged in a tug of war over the three subjects.

“Seems we have a stalemate,” she said, finally.

“Did the dirty old man send you?” Alec asked.

She shook her head, “Daddy? I went my own way. After a bit.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Unfocused. For the longest time, I thought he was building up to something. Lots of kids, ensuring they had powers. Thought he’d try to topple the other gangs and become ruler of organized crime in Montreal.”

“But?”

“But it didn’t happen. Time passed, he never made a push for it. Guillaume got his power, you know. Ten or so of us kids, and three of us could control people one way or another. Four if we count you. We had what we needed to pull off something huge, and Daddy decided he wanted a celebrity among his girls. Took us on a road trip to a film set in Vancouver, kidnapped this star, took her back to Montreal. So petty.”

“Somehow I’m not surprised.”

“Heroes came after us, from both Vancouver and Montreal. Half of what we had built and earned as the Vasil family just kind of got trampled in the fighting that spilled out from that. All because Daddy wanted to bone someone famous. I got fed up, left.”

“So you’re on your own. And he didn’t send the others after you?” Alec moved one of his subject’s legs so she would fall to the ground rather than point her gun at the man standing next to her.

“He did. Guillaume and Nicholas. Guillaume just has to touch someone and he can sense everything they do for a good while. Nicholas just wallops you with pants-shitting waves of terror. Literally thousands of eyes and ears looking for me, can’t fight when they do get close to me.”

“Right,” he said.

“Anyways, it got old real fast, them constantly finding me, constantly making me pack up and run somewhere else. Besides, the freedom to do what I wanted and go where I wished kind of lost its appeal when the boredom set in. I would’ve done it even if my big brothers weren’t coming for me, but I joined the Nine.”

She looked at the multitude of small changes that crossed Alec’s expression and smiled.

“Well,” Alec said, after processing her statement, “That was dumb.”

“It’s exciting. I decided I needed to earn a place on the team, both to scare our brothers away and to add some spice to my routine. Took out Hatchet Face to do it.”

“I got the info on him a day or so ago, after I heard the Slaughterhouse Nine were in town. Isn’t he immune to powers? That’s pretty much what he does. Super strong, enhanced toughness, big… and your powers just stop working when he gets close. Or they go haywire.”

“He is immune to powers, but he didn’t get close. See, difference between me and Daddy is that I have range. I can use my power even if I can’t see the person I’m using it on. Through walls, from the building next door. Hatchet didn’t get close enough to me to turn off my power. He tried, but it works both ways. I was prepped to run any time my power stopped working, because it told me he’d found my trail or guessed where I was.”

“Ah. I sort of remember that bit about your power. The part that sticks in my head is that you don’t have long-term benefits. It wears off, and your targets build immunity pretty quickly.”

Cherie shrugged.

“I’m not the best when it comes to strategy, but I’m thinking… I’m going to win here. Eventually. You can’t run without me getting control over my people and sending them after you, you can’t use them to attack me, and if you stay, I can try doing this.”

Her arm jerked involuntarily.

“Remember me practicing my power on you when it was new?”

“I remember, little brother,” she frowned, looking at her arm. ”Daddy had us all practice on each other.”

“Well, I still remember how to hijack your body, pretty much. Info that’s stored away in whatever corner of my brain makes my power work. I’m thinking I could get control over you pretty fast if I tried.”

“Fuck,” she said. ”I think we’d both be happier if you didn’t.”

“Oh? You going to tell me the Nine will come after me if I don’t let you go?”

She shook her head, then used one hand to brush the hair away from her face. ”No. This.”

She reached inside her jacket, and Alec made her hand seize up, the fingers striving to bend the opposite way.

“It’s cool,” she said. She winced with pain, then used her splayed hand to work a metal case the length of her forearm out into plain view. It dangled from a thick cord that stretched around her neck. ”See this?”

“Yep.”

“It’s a bomb. Very simple. A block of explosives rigged to a timer. Any time I call the right number, the timer will reset. I did make the mistake of letting my phone battery die, but I figure I’ve still got a couple of minutes. If you keep me here for any longer than that, I go kablooie.”

“Is that a threat? Sounds like a win for me.”

“You’ll probably get blown up as well. Or maimed,” she smiled.

“I could walk away.”

“And lose control over your minions as you get further away? Please do. I can make the call when you’re gone.”

His emotions were so muted. Dim. How much of that was Jean-Paul or Alec’s personality, and how much was his natural immunity, built up over years of exposure to Daddy? She couldn’t get a sense of what he was feeling, which was disappointing.

However faint his feelings were, she could sense the slightest change. A chime of attention. He didn’t look at any of the puppets that he was struggling to control, but she could sense his attention flicker to the woman. A thrum of confidence.

They both dashed towards the woman at the same moment. In their hurry to get to her, they collided, falling to the ground as a trio.

The woman wasn’t in any shape to fight, but Alec did strike Cherie across the head, fairly ineffectually. She retaliated by kicking him, then grabbed his wrist as he tried to draw the weapon he had in his pocket. It was a gold-painted stick topped with a crown. She couldn’t see why he wanted it, but he did and so she wasn’t about to let him have it for just that reason.

He changed tactics, rolling over to drive one shoulder into Cherie. With his free hand he tried to reach for the gun holster worn by the woman. That had been what caught his attention, gave him that surge of confidence. Cherie fought with him, pulling him away, and then got one leg under him to roll him away. She pinned him, holding his wrists to the floor.

“Got you, little brother. You still suck at fighting.”

He stared up at her, panting for breath and looking half-bored at the same time. He used his power, and she let go of his left hand to strike him across the face. He stopped.

She smiled, “Thought you should know that things got pretty shitty at home after you left. Daddy got really overprotective, angry. It sucked. Sucked worse when we couldn’t find you.”

“Sorry,” he said, in what she judged as the least convincing tone he could manage.

“My payback? I’ve nominated you for the Nine.”

“Not interested.”

“Doesn’t matter. You get nominated, you’re tested no matter what you want… and a few of the Nine don’t want to have two Vasils on the same team. Shatterbird hates my guts, for some reason. Crawler doesn’t respect me. Jack thinks it would be boring. So what I’m thinking is that this test? The initiation? It’s going to be a little harder for you. They won’t be testing you to see if you’re mean enough, bloodthirsty enough, creative enough. They’re just going to try to kill you.”

“Fuck,” Alec said, his eyes widening.

“Have fun with that,” she smiled, standing. She had to leap back to avoid being stabbed with the gold-painted stick as she released his wrist. ”Now we’re even.”

“Fuck you. That’s not even at all! I leave home, so you arrange to have me killed by some of the scariest fuckers on this side of Earth?”

“Yep,” she smiled, smug. It was good to see she could provoke him, get a response out of him. Was that because she’d done it well, or had he gotten more emotional as of late?

He ran his fingers through his hair. ”Lunatic.”

“What I find really interesting is that you’ve got some connections. A girlfriend, maybe? No. Nothing romantic. You have friends? A team?”

He stayed silent.

“Come after me, I go after them. You may be immune, but they aren’t.”

“Fine.”

“And remember, I can always tell Daddy where you are. He’s pissed you left. Pissed I left, but he’s too scared to come after me. Not with the Nine having my back.”

“They don’t have your back, Cherie.”

She shrugged. ”Close enough.”

“No. They’re going to kill you someday. Probably sooner than later, when you’re no longer useful and they want the thrill of the hunt again. You’ve probably seen what they can do. Fates worse than death. Just don’t ask for my help when you realize it’s happening.”

“Whatever.”

“You just screwed me over, Cherie. Don’t know why you did it, but I think you did a pretty fucking good job of it. You trying to be like Jack? Trying to act like them, pretend you have a place there? Rest assured, you screwed yourself ten times as bad as you screwed me.”

She scoffed at that.

“You’re way out of your depth. As good as you think you are, they’re better.”

She smiled and shook her head, “We’ll see. I’m gonna leave now. You’re going to let me. Cool?”

He sighed. ”Can’t really stop you or you’ll fuck with my team, right?”

“Right. But first…” She bent down and searched the woman who was sweating, panting, and twitching with the combination of Cherie’s emotional assault and Alec’s physical control. She found the gun, and then found a cell phone. She dialed the number to reset the timer on the bomb she wore.

She felt a touch relieved as the call went through. That could have been a pretty lethal mistake on her part. She’d have to break her rule and buy a cell phone charger.

“Bye, baby brother.”

“Go die horribly, sis.”

She smirked and turned to leave, putting a touch of extra sway into her walk as she made her way out the door.

She had this. A few weeks, one or two months at the most, she could be one of the most dangerous people in the world, barring the obvious exceptions like the Endbringers.

What Alec didn’t know was that her power did have long-term effects. Subtle, but they were there. Emotions were like drugs. People formed dependencies and tendencies. If she hit someone with a minute amount of dopamine every time they saw her, it would condition them until she didn’t even need to use her power to do it.

Just a little while longer, she told herself, and I’ll have the Nine wrapped around my little finger.

11.h

Amy sat on her bed, staring at the piece of paper in her hands. The header at the top was stylized, a silhouette of a superhero with a cape flowing, with a script reading ‘The Guild’ extending to the right.

She had to stop reading there. The paper had been on Carol’s bedside table, and Amy had found it while collecting a change of clothes for Mark a week ago. Carol had probably been reading it to him late the previous night, and maybe forgot to put it away due to a mixture of exhaustion and the distractions that came with waking up each morning to a disabled husband and a ten-year career in jeopardy.

Amy knew she shouldn’t have read it, but the header had caught her attention. With her family’s fate uncertain, she had found herself reading, to see if they were joining the Guild, if something else had happened that could distract them from this.

Now that door was open, and she could never shut it again. She didn’t care so much about the possible hit on her. No. What shook her was that she now knew who her father was. She even suspected that, like Tattletale had told her months ago, she’d always known. She just hadn’t dug for it, hadn’t put the pieces together.

Marquis had been an aspiring crime lord in the bad old days of Brockton Bay. It had been a time when the villains had been flocking to the city to profit off the booming tech and banking sectors, to recruit mooks and henchmen from the city’s unemployed dockworkers. It had been an era when the heroes hadn’t been properly established, and the villains had been confident enough that some didn’t give a second thought to murdering any heroes who got in their way. Marquis included.

The bad old days were how Carol and Mark referred to that time. There were more heroes now, and there was more balance between the good guys and the bad, but things were arguably worse now. Everything was in shambles.

Marquis had been an osteokinetic. A manipulator of both his own bone and, provided some was exposed, the bones of his enemies. He’d been notorious enough that she’d heard about him despite the fact that he’d been arrested more than a decade ago, that the city and the public had remembered him. He’d lived in the outskirts of the city, residing in a large house in the woods, just beneath the mountains.

She thought maybe there was something familiar about that idea. Was it imagination when the vague image of a house popped into her mind? The study with the black leather chair and countless bookshelves? Or was it memory, something recalled from her early childhood?

To all reports, the man had been heartless, callous. Wasn’t she? She couldn’t bring herself to care anymore when she went to the hospitals to heal the injured and sick. It was a chore, something she made herself do because people wouldn’t understand if she stopped. There were only so many people she could heal before she became desensitized to it.

What else did she know about Marquis? She vaguely recalled Uncle Neil talking about the man when he’d been talking to Laserdream about villain psychology. There were the unpredictable ones, the villains who were hard to stop because you couldn’t guess where they’d strike next, but who were less practiced in what they did and made mistakes you could leverage against them. There were also the orderly ones. The ones who were careful, who honed their methodology to perfection, but they repeated themselves, showed patterns that a smart hero could use to predict where they struck next, and often had rules or rituals a hero could turn against them.

Which wasn’t to say that one was smarter than the other, or that one was better. Each posed problems for the local authorities and capes. Marquis had fit into the latter category, the perfectionists, the pattern killers. He’d had, as Neil explained, a warped sense of honor, underneath it all. He didn’t kill women or kids.

Not hard to pull the pieces together. She could remember how quickly Neil had dropped the subject when he realized she was listening. He hadn’t outright said that they’d caught Marquis, but she could imagine that the weaknesses that Neil had been outlining had been what they’d used. Send Lady Photon, Brandish and Fleur against the man. Add the fact that Amy had been there, a toddler, and Marquis had been too concerned about collateral damage to go all out.

It was him. She didn’t want it to, but it all fit together.

It was all so fucked up. She was so fucked up.

There was a knock on her door. She hurried to hide the paper.

“Come in,” she said, trying to compose herself in the span of one or two seconds.

Carol opened the door. She was pulling on the gloves for her costume. “Amy?”

“Yeah?”

Carol took a few seconds before she looked up from her gloves and met Amy’s eyes. When she did, the look was hard, accusatory.

“There’s word about some strange howling near the Trainyard. Glory Girl and I are going on a patrol to check on it.”

Amy nodded.

“Can you look after Mark?”

“Of course,” Amy said, her voice quiet. She stood from her bed and headed to the door. Carol didn’t move right away. Instead, Amy’s adoptive mother stayed where she was, staring at Amy. Amy reached the door and had to stop, waiting for Carol to speak.

But Carol didn’t. The woman turned and left the doorway, Amy meekly following.

They don’t understand.

Mark was in the living room, sitting on the couch. No longer able to don his costume and be Flashbang, Mark could barely move. He had a form of brain damage. It was technically amnesia, but it wasn’t the kind that afflicted someone in the movies and TV. What Mark had lost were the skills he’d learned over the course of his life. He’d lost the ability to walk, to speak full sentences, hold a pen and drive a car. He’d lost more – almost everything that let him function.

What little he regained came slowly and disappeared quickly. It was as though his brain was a shattered glass, and there was only so much he could hold in it before it spilled out once again. So they’d patiently worked with him, helping him to hobble between the bedroom, living room and bathroom. They’d worked with him until he could mostly feed himself, say what needed to be said, and they didn’t push him to do more.

Victoria was in costume as Glory Girl, but she was unclipping a bib from around his neck, something to ensure he didn’t stain his clothes while he ate. Amy’s adoptive father turned and smiled gently as he saw the other two members of his family. It was all Amy could do to maintain eye contact, smile back.

“Ready, mom?” Victoria asked.

“Almost ready,” Carol said. She bent down by Mark and kissed him, and he was smiling sadly as she pulled back. He mumbled something private and sweet that his daughters weren’t privy to, and Carol offered him a whispered reply. Carol stood, then nodded at Victoria, “Let’s go.”

They left without another word. There was no goodbye for Amy, no hug or kiss.

Victoria can’t even meet my eyes.

The slight hurt more than she’d expected. It wasn’t like it was something new. It had been going on for weeks. And it was fully deserved.

Amy felt her pulse pounding as she looked at Mark. Made herself sit on the couch next to him. Does he blame me?

It was all falling apart. This family had never fully accepted her. Being in the midst of a family that all worked together, it was hard to preserve secrets. Amy had learned a few years ago, overhearing a conversation between Carol and Aunt Sarah, that Carol had initially refused to take her in. Her adoptive mother had only accepted in the end because she’d had a job and Aunt Sarah didn’t. One kid to Aunt Sarah’s two. When she’d taken Amy in, it hadn’t been out of love or caring, but grudging obligation and a sense of duty.

Mark had tried to be a dad. He’d made her pancakes on the weekends, taken her places. But it had always been inconsistent. Some days he seemed to forget, others he got upset, or was just too distracted for the trips to the ice cream store or mall. Another secret that the family hadn’t kept – Mark was clinically depressed. He had been prescribed drugs to help him, but he didn’t always take them.

It had always been Victoria, only Victoria, who made her feel like she had a family here. Victoria was mad at her now. Except mad wasn’t the right word. Victoria was appalled, seething with anger, brimming with resentment, because Amy couldn’t, wouldn’t, heal their father.

They’d fought, and Amy hadn’t been able to defend her position, but still she’d refused. Every second that Victoria and Carol spent taking care of Mark was a second Amy felt the distance between her and the family grow. So she took care of Mark as much as she could, only taking breaks to visit the hospitals to tend to the sick there. She’d also needed a few to process the letter she’d received.

The letter. Carol wasn’t angry in the same way Victoria was. What Amy felt from her ‘mother’ was a chill. She knew that she was only justifying the darker suspicions Carol had harbored towards her since she was first brought into the family. It was doubly crushing now, because Amy knew about Marquis. Amy knew that Carol was thinking the same thing she was.

Marquis was one of the organized killers. He had his rules, he had his code, and so did Amy. Amy wouldn’t use her power to affect people’s minds. Like father, like daughter.

“Do you need anything?” she asked Mark, when the next ad break came up.

“Water,” he mumbled.

“Okay.”

She headed into the kitchen, grateful for the excuse to leave the room. She searched the dishwasher for his cup, a plastic glass with a textured outside, light enough for him to lift without having to struggle with muscle control, easy enough to grip. She filled it halfway so it wouldn’t be as heavy.

Tears filled her eyes, and she bent over the sink to wash her face.

She was going to lose them. Lose her family, no matter what happened.

Which meant she had to go. She was old enough to fend for herself. She would leave of her own volition, and she would help Mark as a parting gift to her family. She just had to work up the courage.

Drying her face with her shirt, she carried the mug into the living room.

The TV was off.

Had Mark turned it off because he’d wanted to sleep? Amy was careful to be quiet, stepping on the floorboards at the far sides of the hallway so they wouldn’t creak.

A girl stood in the living room, five or so years younger than Amy. Her blond hair had been curled into ringlets with painstaking care, but the rest of her was unkempt, filthy. She stared at Mark, who was struggling and failing to stand from the couch.

The girl turned to look at Amy, and Amy saw that some of the dirt that covered the girl wasn’t dirt, but crusted blood. The girl wore a stained apron that was too large for her, and the scalpels and tools in the pocket gleamed, catching the light from the lamps in the corner of the room.

Amy recognized the girl from the pictures that were hung up in the office.

“Bonesaw.”

“Hi,” Bonesaw gave a little wave of her hand. A wide smile was spread across her face.

“What- What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see you. Obviously.”

Amy swallowed. “Obviously.” Was it possible that Allfather had arranged for a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine to murder her?

Amy’s eyes roved over the room, looking for Bonesaw’s work. Nothing. She looked over her shoulder and a shriek escaped through her lips. A man was not two feet behind her, tall and brutish, his face badly scarred and battered to the point that it was barely recognizable as human. A long-handled axe sat in one of his massive, calloused hands, the head resting on the floor. Hatchet Face.

“Runnn,” Mark moaned, urging her. She didn’t give it a second thought. She dashed for the front door, threw it open with enough force that a picture fell from the wall.

Hatchet Face stood on the other side, blocking the doorway.

“No,” she gasped, as she backed towards the living room, “No, please.”

How? How had he gotten there so fast? She turned around and saw he was still there, still in the hallway.

There were two Hatchet Faces?

Then the first one exploded into a cloud of white dust and blood spatters, momentarily filling the room. Amy could hear Bonesaw’s giggling, felt her heart sink.

“Get it? You figure out what I did? Turn around, Hack Job.”

Amy had figured it out, but Bonesaw’s creation demonstrated anyways. He turned his back to Amy, and she saw what looked like a tumorous growth on the back of his head, shoulders and arms. Except the growth had a face, vaguely Asian in features, and the lumps inside the growth each roughly corresponded with organs and skeletal structure. The jaw of the figure that was attached to the back of Hatchet Face’s body was working open and closed like a fish gasping for air. The stitches were still fresh.

“You mashed them together. Oni Lee and Hatchet Face.”

“Yes! I can’t even begin to tell you how hard it was. I mean, I had to conduct the operation from a remote location, using robots, because I would lose my Tinker powers if I got too close to the big lug. And I had to fit their bodies and nervous systems together so that they could use their powers without messing up the other.”

“Oh god,” Amy mumbled. Is this what she’s going to do to me?

“Had to add in a control frame and perform a spot lobotomy so Hatchet would obey me, you know. He didn’t lose much. Was never very bright.”

“And Oni Lee?” Amy was almost afraid to ask.

“Oh, I barely touched his brain. He suffered some moderate brain damage from his close brush with death, but I revived him. His brain’s more or less intact, even. He can’t control his body, but he’s alert and aware, and he feels everything Hatchet does,” Bonesaw smiled wider.

“That’s horrifying.”

“It’s not a perfect mesh. I only just started doing these mash-ups. Still practicing. Hatchet’s power isn’t working as well anymore, and I’m worried about physical wear and tear as they teleport, but it’s still one of my better works. Took me four whole hours.” Bonesaw clasped her hands in front of her, shifting her weight from foot to foot, waiting expectantly.

Amy swallowed. She didn’t have words.

Bonesaw smiled. “I thought you’d appreciate this more than anyone.”

“Appreciate this.”

“You’re the only other person who works with meat. I mean, we’re different in some ways, but we’re also really similar, aren’t we? You manipulate people’s biology, and I tinker with it. The human body’s only a really intricate, wet machine, isn’t it?”

Others were entering the room now. From the kitchen, a woman, the structure of her face altered into something that was more rat-like than human, conelike, ending in a squashed black nose that had staples around it. Bonesaw had added a second set of teeth, all canines, so that the woman would have enough as her jaw was stretched forward. Drool constantly leaked between her teeth in loops and tendrils. She was pale, except for her face and patches all down her body, where patches of ebon black skin were stapled in place. Her hair was long, dark, and unwashed, but most unnerving of all were her fingers, which had been replaced by what looked like machetes. The clawtips dragged on the hardwood as she stumped forward on feet that had been modified in a similar way, no longer fit for conventional walking.

The third was another Frankenstein hodgepodge of two individuals, emerging from the hallway where the amalgamation of Oni Lee and Hatchet Face -Hack Job- had exploded. The lower half was a man who must have been built like a gorilla in life, rippling with muscles, walking forward on his knuckles. His upper body grew up from the point the other body’s neck should have begun, an emaciated man with greasy brown hair and beard, grown long. He was not unlike a centaur, but the lower half was a brutish man.

Then there were the other things. They weren’t alive. Spidery contraptions of scrap metal, they lacked heads, only consisting of a box half the size of a toaster and spindly legs that moved on hydraulics, each ending in a syringe or scalpel. A dozen of them, climbing onto the walls and floor.

“Murder Rat used to be a heroine, called herself the Mouse Protector. One of those capes who plays up the cheese, no pun intended. Camped it up, acted dorky, used bad puns, so her enemies would be embarrassed to lose to her. Ravager decided she’d had enough, asked the Nine to take Mouse Protector down. So we took the job. Beat Mouse Protector, and I took her to the operating table. The other Nine tracked down Ravager and collected her, too. Just to make it clear that we don’t take orders. We aren’t errand boys or errand girls either. Now Ravager gets to spend the rest of her life with the woman she hated, making up.”

Amy swallowed, looking at the woman.

“The other, I’m trying to figure out a name. The one on the bottom was Carnal. Healer, tough, and healed more by bathing himself in blood. Thought he had a place on our team, failed the tests. The one on the top was Prophet. Convinced he was Jesus reborn. What do you call a mix of people like that? I’ve got a name in mind, but I can’t quite figure it out.”

“I don’t know.”

“So you’re bad at names too?” Bonesaw grinned. “I’m thinking something like shrine, temple… but one with multiple floors. Um.”

“Pagoda?”

“Pagoda! Yes!” Bonesaw skipped over to her creation, wrapped her arms around one of his, “Pagoda! That’s your name, now!”

None of the three monsters moved or reacted. Each stared dumbly forward, Murder Rat drooling, the others appearing to be in a daze.

“That’s good!” Bonesaw smiled at Amy, “I knew we’d make a good team!”

“Team?” What could she say or do to escape? Failing that, was there anything she could use to kill herself, so Bonesaw couldn’t get her hands on them, turn them into something like those things? In the worst case scenario, she could use her power on Mark before finishing herself off.

Except she wasn’t sure it would matter. Amy was incapable, but there was nothing saying Bonesaw couldn’t raise the recently dead.

“Yes, team! I want you to be my teammate!” Bonesaw was almost gushing.

“I don’t-” Amy stopped herself, “Why?”

“Because I always wanted a big sister,” Bonesaw replied, as if that was answer enough.

Amy blinked. Sister. She thought of Victoria. “I make a pretty shitty sister.”

“Language!” Bonesaw admonished, with surprising fierceness.

“I’m sorry. I- I’m not a very good sister, I don’t think.”

“You could learn.”

“I’ve tried, but… I’ve only gotten worse at it as time passed.”

Bonesaw pouted a little. “But think of the stuff we could do together. I do the kludge, the big stuff, you smooth it over. Imagine how Murder Rat would look without the scars and staples.”

Amy looked at the onetime heroine, tried to picture it. It wasn’t any better. Worse, if anything.

“That’s only the beginning. Can you even imagine the things we could make? There’s no upper limit.”

There was a beep from the answering machine. It began playing a message. “Amy, pick up! We’re looking at dealing with Hellhound, and there’s injured. Call Aunt Sarah or Uncle Neil over to look after dad and get over to the-”

The message cut off, and there was the sound of a clatter, a distant barking sound.

“I don’t think I have it in me to do stuff like that,” Amy said. If nothing else, I can’t disappoint Victoria any further.

“Oh. Oh!” Bonesaw smiled. “That’s okay. We can work through that.”

“I- I don’t think we really can.”

“No, really,” Bonesaw said. Then she snapped her fingers.

Hack Job flickered into existence just in front of Amy, and there was little she could do to escape. She cried out as the man’s massive hand smashed her down onto her back, a few feet from Mark.

Mark struggled to stand, but Murder Rat darted across the room to light atop the back of the couch and press one of her three-foot long claws against his throat.

Amy was pinned. She tried to use her power on Hack Job through the contact he was making with her chest and neck, only to find it wasn’t available. She couldn’t sense his body, the blood flowing in his veins, or any of that. Even her own skin felt quiet, where she normally felt the pinprick sensations of innumerable, microscopic airborne lifeforms touching her. She’d barely even realized that was happening until it stopped.

“Jack’s taken me on as his protegé. Teaching me the finer points of being an artist. What he’s been saying is that I’m too focused on the external. Skin, bone, flesh, bodies, the stuff we see and hear. He’s told me to practice with the internal, and this seems like a great time to do that.”

“Internal?” Amy replied.

“It’s easy to break people’s bodies. Easy to scar them and hurt them that way. But the true art is what you do inside their heads. Do you have a breaking point, Amy? Maybe if we find your limits and push past them, you’ll find yourself in a place where you’ll want to join us.” A wide smile spread across Bonesaw’s face as she settled into a cross-legged position on the floor, facing Amy.

“I- no. Please.”

“You’re a healer, but you can do so much more. Why don’t you go out in costume?”

Amy didn’t respond. There was no right answer here.

“Are you afraid to hurt someone? That could be our first exercise.”

Amy shook her head.

“Murder rat, come here. Hack Job, back off.”

Hack Job let go of her, and she tried to scramble away, but Murder Rat pounced on her, pressing her down against the ground. The woman smelled rank, like a homeless person.

“So here’s the lesson,” Bonesaw said, “Hurt her, take her apart. If you go easy on her, or if you leave her in a state where she can move, she’ll cut you, and then she’ll cut a body part off that man on the couch there.”

Murder Rat placed a blade against her cheek, scraped it down toward her chin, as if giving Amy a close shave.

She reached up and touched the woman’s chest. Without Hack Job touching her, her power was coming back quickly. She felt Murder Rat’s biology snap into her consciousness, until she could see every cell, every fluid, every part of the woman. The two women. She could see Bonesaw’s work, the integration of body parts, the transfusions of bone marrow from one woman to the other, the viruses with modified DNA inside them, skewing the balances and configurations until she couldn’t tell for sure where one woman started and the other began.

She could also see the metal frames inside the woman, interlacing with the largest bones of her skeletal system, the needles in her spine and brain. Bonesaw’s control system. There was something around the heart, too. Metal, with lots of needles pointing inward. She was rigged to die if the control frame was ever disabled. The woman, no, the women, were awake in there. One and a half brains contained in a synthetic fluid in her skull.

She targeted the ligaments at the woman’s shoulders and hips. Cutting them was easier than putting the things back together again. Dissolve the cells, break them down.

The woman collapsed onto a heap on top of her.

“Excellent! Pick her up, H.J.”

Hack Job picked up the limp Murder Rat, put her down a short distance away from Amy. Bonesaw walked over to her creation and propped up Murder Rat so she had a view of the scene.

“I’m surprised you didn’t kill her. The healer, letting someone suffer like that. Or are you against mercy killing?”

Again, there was no answer she could give that wouldn’t worsen her situation.

“Or are you against killing in general? We can work on that.”

“Please. No.”

“Pagoda. Your turn.”

Pagoda approached with an awkward lurch, and Amy managed to stand and run. She got halfway to the front door before Hack Job materialized in front of her, barring her way. He pushed her, and she fell. Pagoda lurched over to her and pressed her down.

“I use my creations to collect material for other work. It’s a circle, using them to get material for more creations. Having the Nine was essential to get things started, and to help get things going again if a hero managed to put down a few, but now I’m in good shape. I stick around because they’re mostly fans, and they’re kind of family. I want you in my family, Amy Dallon.”

“Please.”

“Now, I’m willing to make sacrifices to see that happen. Same thing as with Murder Rat. You don’t stop Pagoda, I’ll have him hurt the man on the couch.”

Amy used her power on Pagoda, felt his body, much the same as Murder Rat’s in so many respects, though the metal frame with the needles in his spine was different. She reached for the ligaments at his shoulders and hips, separated them.

The first had grown back before she’d started on the third.

“He heals,” Bonesaw informed her. “Two regenerators in one. There’s only one good way to stop him. Try again.”

Pain. She inflicted pain on Pagoda. No reaction. She’d have to reach into his brain to make it so he really felt pain again. She tried atrophying his muscles, with no luck. Anything she did was undone nearly as fast as she could inflict it.

“Five seconds,” Bonesaw announced. “Four.”

Sending signals to his arms to get him to move. No. The metal frame overrode anything she could do with her power to control him.

“Three.”

Amy used the only option available to her. She disconnected him from the metal frame that Bonesaw used to control her subjects. She could sense it as the metal shifted into motion around his heart. Not needles, as there had been for Murder Rat, but small canisters of fluid.

“Two… one… zero point five… Ah, there we go.”

Pagoda lurched backward and broke contact with Amy, her power no longer giving her an insight into what was happening with him. He sat down, using one hand to prop himself up. A moment later he slumped over, his eyes shutting. His breathing stopped.

“A chemical trigger for something I already put in his DNA, when I was patching his regeneration abilities together. Reverses the regeneration so it does the opposite, starting with the heart.”

Amy looked at her hand. She’d just taken a life. A mercy, most probably, but she’d killed. Something she had promised herself she would never do.

She shivered. It had been so easy. Was this what it was like for her father? Had she just taken one more step toward being like him?

“Ready to join?” Bonesaw asked, looking for all the world like a puppy when her master had the leash out, ready for a walk. Eager, brimming with excitement.

“No,” Amy said. “There’s no way.”

“Why? Whatever’s holding you back, we can fix it. Or we can break it, depending.”

“It’s not- don’t you understand? I don’t want to hurt people.”

“But we can change that! We’re not so different. You know as well as I do that anything about anyone can be changed if you work hard enough.”

“Then why don’t you change? You could be good.”

“I like the other members of the Nine. And I couldn’t make anything really amazing if I was following rules. I want to make something even more amazing than Hack Job, Murder Rat or Pagoda. Something you and I could only make together. Can you imagine it? You could use your power, and then we could make one superperson out of a hundred capes, and all of the powers would be full strength because you helped and we could use it to stop one of the Endbringers, and the whole world would be like, ‘Are we supposed to clap’? Can you picture it?” Bonesaw was getting so excited with her idea that she was almost breathless.

“No,” Amy said. Then, just to make it clear, she added, “No, it’s not going to happen. I won’t join you.”

“You will! You have to!”

“No.”

“I have to do like Jack said. He said I won’t be a true genius until I’ve figured out how to get inside people’s heads.”

“Maybe- Maybe you won’t be inside my head until you realize there’s no way I’m going to join the Slaughterhouse Nine.”

Bonesaw frowned. “Maybe.”

Amy nodded.

“Or maybe I need to figure out your breaking point. Your weak spot. Like that man there.” Bonesaw pointed at Mark. “Cherish said you sleep here, and you’ve been around him for a while… so why haven’t you healed him?”

Amy shivered.

“Who is he?”

“My dad.”

“Why not fix your dad?”

“My power doesn’t work on brains,” Amy lied.

“You’re wrong,” Bonesaw said, stepping closer.

“No.”

“Yes. Your power can affect people’s brains. You have to understand, I’ve taken twenty or thirty people apart to figure out how their power works so I can put them back together again the way I want them. I’ve learned almost everything about powers. I’ve induced stress of all kinds on people until they had a trigger event, while I had them on my table and wired to computers, so I could record all the details and study their brains and bodies as the powers took hold.”

Twenty or thirty people she’s taken apart. However many others she’s tortured to death.Bonesaw smiled, “And I know the secrets. I know where powers come from. I know how they work. I know how your power works. You have to understand, people like you and me? Who got our powers in moments of critical stress? The powers aren’t meant for us. They’re accidents. We’re accidents. And I think you could see it if you were touching someone when they had their trigger event.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to. What you need to know is that the subjects of our power, the stuff it can work on, like people? Like the fish lady in Asia? The boy who can talk to computers? Our powers weren’t created to work with those things. With people or fish or computers. It’s not intentional. It happens because the powers connect to us in the moments we have our trigger events, decrypt our brains and search for something in the world that they can connect to, that loosely correlate with how the powers were originally supposed to work. In those one to eight seconds it takes our powers to work, our power goes into overdrive, it picks up all the necessary details about those things, like people or fish or computers, sometimes reaching across the whole world to do it. Then it starts condensing down until there’s a powerset, stripping away everything it doesn’t need to make that power work.”

Amy stared.

“And then, before it can destroy us, before we can hurt ourselves with our own power, before that spark of potential burns out, it changes gears. It figures out how to function with us. It protects us from all the ways our power might hurt us, that we can anticipate, because there’s no point if it kills us. It connects with our emotional state at the time the powers came together, because that’s the context it builds everything else in. It’s so amazingly complicated and beautiful.”

Bonesaw looked down at Amy. “Your inability to affect brains? It’s one of those protections. A mental block. I can help you break it.”

“I don’t want to break it,” Amy said, her voice hushed.

“Ahhh. Well, that just makes me more excited to see how you react when you do. See, all we have to do is get you to that point of peak stress. Your power will be stronger, and you’ll be able to push past that mental block. Probably.”

“Please,” Amy said. “Don’t.”

Bonesaw reached into her apron and retrieved a remote control. She pointed it at Mark, where he sat on the couch. A red dot appeared on his forehead.

“No!”

One of Bonesaw’s mechanical contraptions leaped across the room, its scalpel legs impaling the suede cushions on either side of Mark. One leg, tipped with a syringe, thrust into Mark’s right nostril. He hollered incoherently, tried to pull away, only for two mechanical legs to clutch his head and hold him firm.

Amy’s screams joined his.

“I’m doing you a favor, really!” Bonesaw raised her voice to be heard over the screams. “You’ll thank me!”

Amy rushed forward, hauled on the metal leg to pull it from Mark’s nostril, pulled at the other legs to tear it from him and then hurled it away. Lighter than it looked.

“Now fix him or he’ll probably die or be a vegetable,” Bonesaw told her. “Unless you decide you’re okay with that, in which case we’re making progress.”

Amy tried to shut out Bonesaw’s voice, straddled Mark’s lap and touched his face.

She’d healed him frequently in the previous weeks, enough to know that he was remarkably alert in a body that refused to cooperate or carry out the tasks he wanted it to. Not so different from Bonesaw’s creations in that respect. She’d healed everything but his brain, had altered his digestive system and linked it to his circadian rhythms so he went to the bathroom on a strict schedule, to reduce the need for diapers. Other tune-ups she’d given him had been aimed at making him more comfortable, reducing stiffness and aches and pains. It was the least she could do.

Now she had to focus on his brain. The needle had drawn ragged cuts through the arachnid layer, had injected droplets of acid into the frontal lobes. More damage, in addition to what Leviathan had inflicted with the head wound, and it was swiftly spreading.

Everything else in the world seemed to drop away. She pressed her forehead to his. Everything biological was shaped in some way by what it had grown from and what had come before. Rebuilding the damaged parts was a matter of tracing everything backwards. Some of the brain was impossible to restore to what it had once been, in the most damaged areas or places where it was the newest growths that were gone, but she could check everything in the surrounding area, use process of elimination and context to figure out what the damaged areas had tied to.

She felt tears in her eyes. She had told herself she would heal him and then leave the Dallon household. Actually doing this, fixing him, taking that plunge, she knew she would probably never have found the courage if she hadn’t been pushed into it.

It wasn’t that she was afraid to get something wrong. No. Even as complicated as the mind was, she’d always known she could manage it. No, it was what came after that scared her more than anything. Just like finding out about Marquis, it was the opening of a door she desperately wanted to keep shut.

She restored his motor skills, penmanship, driving a car, even the little things, the little sequences of movements he used to turn the lock on the bathroom door as he closed it or turn a pencil around in one hand to use the eraser on the end. Everything he’d lost, she returned to him.

He moved fractionally. She opened her eyes, and saw him staring into her eyes. Something about the gaze told her he was better.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I’m so sorry.” She wasn’t sure what she was apologizing for. For taking so long to do it, maybe. Or for the fact that she would now have to leave.

His attention was on his hands. She could feel it through her contact with him, the power he was just barely holding back. And Bonesaw? The little lunatic was somewhere behind her.

She drew Mark’s hands into his lap, between her body and his, where Bonesaw would be less likely to see.

An orb of light grew in his hands.

“It worked! Yes!” Bonesaw crowed.

Mark flicked his eyes in one direction, offered the slightest of nods, his forehead rubbing against hers. Amy flung herself to one side as Mark stood in one quick motion, flinging the glowing orb at the little girl.

Hack Job flickered into existence just in time to have to orb bounce off his chest. It exploded violently, tearing a hole into his stomach and groin. The villain flew backward, colliding with Bonesaw.

But two more copies of Hack Job had already appeared, and the scalpel spiders were responding to some unknown directions, leaping for Mark and Amy.

Amy grappled with one spider, struggled to bend its legs the wrong way, cried out as the scalpels and needlepoints of the other legs dragged against her skin.

A blast sent her tumbling, throwing her into the couch and dislodging the spider. Mark could make his orbs concussive or explosive. He’d hit the spider with the former, nothing that could seriously hurt Amy. She climbed to her feet, picked up the oak side-table from beside the couch and bludgeoned the spider with it.

More explosions ripped through their living room as Mark continued to open fire, hurling the orbs with a ferocity that surprised Amy. When Hack Job tried to block the shots with his bodies, Mark bounced them between Hack Job’s legs, off walls and off the ceiling. Almost as if he could predict what his enemy would do, he lobbed one orb onto the couch. It exploded a half-second after one of Hack Job’s duplicates appeared there.

More duplicates charged from either direction, and Mark dropped a concussive orb at his feet, blasting himself and one of the duplicates in opposite directions. He quickly got his footing and resumed the attack, fending off one duplicate that turned his attention to Amy, then going after Bonesaw.

Bonesaw had retreated into the hallway that led into the bedrooms at the back of the house, the basement and the kitchen at the side. Mark threw an orb after her, obliterating the hallway, but Amy couldn’t see if he’d struck home, not with the clouds of dust that were exploding from Hack Job’s expired duplicates. Between the time it had taken to create the orb, throwing it and the lack of a scream after it had gone off, Amy knew Bonesaw would have gotten away.

There was an extended silence. Bonesaw and Hack Job were gone, leaving only Pagoda’s body and the limp Murder Rat. Long seconds passed as the dust settled.

“That woman. Can you help her?” Mark’s voice sounded rough-edged. It hadn’t been used in its full capacity for a long few weeks.

“Her mind is gone, and not in a way I think I could fix,” her voice was hushed.

“Okay.” Mark walked over to Murder Rat and adjusted her position against the wall until she was more horizontal, almost lying down. He crossed her claws over her chest, and then formed an orb of light the size of a tennis ball.

“Rest in peace, Mouse Protector,” he said. He placed the orb of light in the gap where two claws crossed one another, just over her heart, then stepped away.

There was a small explosion and a spray of blood.

“I’m sorry,” Amy said, “So sorry I didn’t help you sooner, that-”

Mark stopped her with a raised hand. “Thank you.”

She didn’t deserve thanks.

“Are you okay?” He asked.

She looked away. Tears were welling out. “No.”

“Listen. Sit yourself down. I’m going to call your mother and sister, make sure they’re all right after dealing with Hellhound, let them know what happened. Then I’ll call the Protectorate. Maybe they can help guard us, in case Bonesaw comes after you again.”

“She will. But I- I can’t sit. I’m going to my room. I’ll pack so we leave sooner.”

“You sure?”

She nodded.

“Shout if anything happens.”

She nodded and turned to go, picking her way through the destroyed hallway. The floorboards that looked like a giant-sized version of pick-up-sticks. She was only halfway when she heard Mark on the phone.

“Carol? It’s me.”

Her face burned with shame. She made her way to her room and began packing her things into a gym bag. Clothes, toiletries, and other things, mementos. A small scrapbook, a memory card filled with pictures of her, her cousins and her sister. She found a pad of post-it notes and scribbled out a few words.

She wouldn’t be coming back.

Amy opened her bedroom window and climbed out, pulling the bag out behind her.

It would be better this way. Maybe, after weeks or months, she could stop worrying, stop waiting for the other shoe to drop, for everything to fall apart in the worst way. She’d already had to face finding out about Marquis. She’d taken a life. She’d broken one of her cardinal rules. She wasn’t sure she could take any more.

She just had to get away.

Amy cursed the curfew as she saw the figure in the air above her. When people weren’t allowed out on the streets after dark, it made those few who did venture out that much more visible. Not what she’d wanted, not when she was trying to avoid this exact conversation.

It was even more problematic when she walked at maybe three or four miles an hour, limited to following the paths the roads and alleys allowed her, when her sister could fly at fifty miles an hour. She should have hid, instead of trying to make some distance.

Victoria stopped midflight and hovered in the air, five feet above the ground and five or six paces in front of her.

“I was just at the house. I don’t even know what to say,” Victoria spoke.

“Pretty self-explanatory. One of the Nine came, house got trashed, I healed Mark.”

“Why? Why heal dad now, when you couldn’t before?”

“I only did it because I had to.”

“That’s what I don’t get. Why couldn’t you? You’ve never explained.”

“I can’t tell you.”

“So that’s it? No explanations? You just up and leave?” Victoria asked.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

Amy looked away.

“We could get you a therapist. I mean, Mom was setting aside money for Dad’s care, we could use that to give you someone to talk to.”

“I… a therapist wouldn’t be able to help.”

“Geez, what’s going on? Amy, we’ve been together for a decade. I’ve stood by you. I’d like to think we were best friends, not just sisters. And you can’t tell me?”

“I can’t. Just let me leave. Trust me when I say it’s better.”

“Fuck that! I’m not about to let you walk away!” Victoria floated closer, reaching out.

“Don’t touch me,” Amy warned her sister.

Looking lost, Victoria stopped and spread her arms. “Who are you, Amy? I don’t even recognize this person I’m looking at. You go berserk at the bank robbery over some secret I’ve totally not gotten on your case about. You apparently say something to Skitter that causes this huge commotion in the hospital after the Endbringer attack. You… I don’t even know what to say about your reaction to Gallant’s death, the way you distanced yourself from me at a time when I was hurting the most.”

Amy looked down at her feet.

“And most of all, you just leave dad to suffer, when you could have healed him? You lash out at me, here, when I’m trying to mend fences and be your sister?”

“You want to know who I am?” Amy asked. Her voice sounded hollow. ”I’m Marquis’s daughter. Daughter of a supervillain.”

“Marquis?”

Amy nodded.

“How did you find out?”

“Carol left some paper out. I think it’s under my pillow, if you want to look for it.”

“You have his genes, but you’re Carol and Mark’s daughter,” Victoria replied, her voice firm. “And they’re going to be worried. Come home.”

“They don’t care. They don’t love me, not really. Trust me, this is better for everyone.”

“I love you,” Victoria said, stressing the ‘I’. She dropped to the ground and stepped closer.

“Don’t touch me!”

“Idiot,” Victoria grabbed her sister by the shirt collar and pulled her into a painfully tight hug.

“Don’t,” Amy moaned into her sister’s shoulder.

“All of this? We’ll work it out. As a family. And if your idea of family means it’s just you and me, then we’ll work it out together, just the two of us.”

All it took was one moment of weakness, and she was weak. At the end of her rope, desperately lonely, haunted by her father’s shadow, her shame at being unwilling and unable to help Mark until now, the idea that one of the Slaughterhouse Nine thought she belonged with them?

She was losing everything so quickly. Victoria was all she had, and it was the choice between abandoning that for everyone’s good and keeping Victoria close.

She felt Victoria’s body more acutely than she felt her own. Every heartbeat, every cell brimming with life.

Like a flame at the end of a long fuse, leading to a stick of dynamite, her power traveled from the side of Victoria’s neck to her brain. It was barely a conscious action on Amy’s part.

Victoria let go of her, pushed her away. “What did you just do?”

Amy could see the revulsion slowly spreading across Victoria’s face.

The magnitude of what she’d just done hit her with a suddenness and pain she likened to a bullet to the chest. “Oh god. Please, let me undo it.”

She reached out, but Victoria stepped back.

“What the hell did you do?” Victoria asked, her eyes wide, “I felt something. I feel something. You’ve used your power on me before, but not like this. I- You changed the way I think. More than that.”

Tears welled at the corners of Amy’s eyes. “Please. This is what I was afraid of. Let me undo it. Let me fix it and leave, and you can go back to Mark and Carol and you three can be a family, and-”

“What did you do!?”

“I’m sorry. I… knew this would happen. I was okay so long as I kept following my own rules, didn’t open that door. Bonesaw forced me to open it.”

“Amy!”

“You have to understand, for so long, you were all I had. I was so desperately lonely, and that was at the same time I was starting to worry about my dad. I got fucked up, my feelings got muddled somewhere along the line, and it’s like… maybe because you were safe, because you were always there.”

“You have feelings for me,” Victoria answered. She couldn’t keep the disgust out of her voice, she didn’t even try. “That’s what Tattletale was using as leverage, wasn’t it?”

Amy couldn’t meet Victoria’s eyes. She looked at her hands, appalled at what she had just done.

“And Gallant? I was thinking you secretly liked him, but-”

Amy shook her head. “I hated him. I felt jealous because he had you and I never could… but I never acted on those feelings. I never acted on any of my feelings, until just now, and all I want to do is to take that back.”

“When I was at the lowest point in my life, when the boy I thought I might marry someday was dead, were you secretly elated? Were you happy Gallant died?”

“No! Vic- Victoria, I love you. I wanted you to be happy with him. I just… it hurt at the same time.”

“Oh my god,” Victoria whispered, the revulsion giving way to something worse. Realization.

“I- I tried to keep things normal between us. To act like your sister, keep it all bottled in. It’s just tonight was such a nightmare, and I’m so scared, and so tired, and so desperate. Bonesaw forced me to ignore all the rules I was imposing on myself. All the rules I was using and following so I wouldn’t do anything stupid or impulsive.”

“Anything stupid. Like what? What did you do?”

Amy’s voice was a croak as she replied, “…make it so you would reciprocate my feelings.”

She chanced a look at Victoria’s face, and she knew that the horror she saw in her sister’s expression didn’t even compare to what she felt.

“Please. Let me fix it. Then I’ll leave. You’ll never have to see me again.”

“What in the world makes you think I’d let you use your power on me again!?” Victoria shouted, taking to the air, out of reach. “Who knows what you’re going to do to me!?”

“Please?” Amy begged.

“I can find someone else to fix it. Or maybe, at the very least, I can show some fucking self-control and realize it’s my sister I’m having those feelings about.”

“You can’t. I- Oh fuck. You’re underestimating what I did. Please. If you never ever give me anything else, if you never talk to me or look at me again, just let me fix this.”

Victoria shook her head slowly, then scoffed. “Good job, Amy. You just did an excellent job of taking every instance of me defending you, every instance of my giving you the benefit of a doubt, and proving me fucking wrong. You were worried about being as fucked up as your dad? Congratulations, I’m pretty goddamn sure you just surpassed the man.”

With that said, Victoria was gone, flying into the distance.

Amy sank to her knees on the flooded street.