by wildbow
“I’m afraid, Skitter, that this deal doesn’t quite balance out. I intend no offense, but my initial impression is that my pet is far more valuable to me than you are.”
No. My heart sank.
“But I can accept it,” he spoke. “Provided you prove to me that your talents are worth losing hers. I admit, the active assistance you can provide might prove more useful when the city is firmly in my grasp, when I have less to be concerned about in terms of day-to-day operations.”
I nodded, numbly.
“Anything else?”
I shook my head, then turned to leave, wordlessly.
When I went downstairs, Tattletale and Regent were already gone. Maybe they were checking out their new places. Grue and Imp were in the ‘living room’, opening crates of stuff to see the supplies they had available.
I wasn’t up to talking to them, or explaining the recent conversation.
Leaving the building without a word, I sloshed through the water. I realized my fists were clenched, and my glove was sticking to itself, thanks to the residual containment foam. Annoying. I wondered if I could scrub it off.
When I peeled my fingers away from the glove, I realized my hand was shaking.
I took a deep breath, to calm my nerves. I could do this. Whatever I had to do, I was going to help that girl.
Interlude 10
“I’m letting you go,” Regent lied.
He made Shadow Stalker drop to all fours on the ground and forced a grunt from her mouth. With the same ease as he moved his own body, he made her load her bolt and spin to point her crossbow at him. There was no danger of her shooting him; he was fully in control from start to finish.
He could feel her striving and straining to move her finger, to pull the trigger and plant an arrow just above his collarbone. Every iota of her willpower must have been focused on the task.
“There’s a catch,” he spoke. “My power? Once I’ve figured someone out? It’s a lot easier to control them, after. Any time you come near me, I can do this. I can use my power and retake control in the blink of an eye.”
He had her raise her crossbow and point it at her temple.
“Next time I get control? I’m keeping you for a full day. Maybe two, if I feel like pulling an all-nighter. And here’s the funny part,” there was no humor in his voice, “I’m going to do it even if I’m in civilian clothes, if my power tells me you’re in range. You won’t even know when it’s coming. You’re now a liability to the Wards, and you won’t ever know when or where I’m going to get control again…
“Unless you leave. Skip town. Join another team.”
He had her nod, stiffly, awkwardly. He felt her rising heartbeat, the slight increase in her breathing, which he managed, controlled. Her muscles clenched, an involuntary reaction just beyond the scope of his control. She’d realized what he was doing. Rather, she knew what he wasn’t doing.
He wasn’t letting her go.
“Now let’s walk you off to the other end of the city before I release you. I don’t think you’re quite stupid enough to try and follow us, but I think my teammates would be more comfortable if they were sure.” He rolled his eyes.
That said, he turned her around, activated her power and walked her through the door.
Regent looked at the others, shrugged. “Good enough?”
Using the shadow form, she could cover a lot of ground very quickly. For long minutes, he exercised her power, the ability to be as light as a feather, enjoyed it. He even liked the running, too, when he turned off her power and just legged it. This girl was in good shape. He could tell she exercised regularly, that she ran on a regular basis. Running was almost effortless, and it felt good, even with the aches and pains of the recent brawl. Months or years of practice had fine tuned her body.
Fighting had been much the same way, but it had been even better. Her muscle memory had been so primed for punching, kicking, takedowns and evading that he’d almost been able to let her go on autopilot, let her body handle things on its own.
Not that he could, really. But it had been easy. He loved that sort of thing. Maximum reward for minimum effort.
That same philosophy of minimizing the work he had to put in, sticking to what he enjoyed and the things that interested him, it was an advantage here. Brian, Lisa and Taylor had their own dynamic. They were friends. He considered Brian a friend, but it was more along the lines of someone he could play video games with, talk about movies. It wasn’t much different from if they were coworkers or roommates. He smiled at the thought. They kind of were, when it came down to it.
Regent knew he was a background character, for the most part. He played along, he didn’t make waves, he didn’t stand out. He wasn’t close to any of the others.
He was cool with that. In fact, it suited him perfectly.
He was cool with it because it meant that when they were all heading out to meet Coil, nobody noticed that he was distracted, or that he wasn’t joining in the conversation. His control got worse as the distance between himself and his puppets widened, which meant he had to devote more focus to Shadow Stalker and the act of keeping her movements fluid. He ran into the same issues when he controlled more people, and there was the irritating side effect that his own coordination, speech and fluidity of movement all suffered to the same extent that his ‘puppets’ did. Were he to open his own mouth now and speak to Brian or Taylor, he might stutter or slur his words. It was almost more trouble than it was worth.
Almost. He was surprised to realize how much he’d missed this. It was like a high, a whole other set of emotions, of physical sensations. Real life, just being Alec, only Alec? It paled in comparison. It was dull.
He wondered sometimes if dealing with his father had messed up something inside him.
He could remember being young, maybe eight or so, fighting with two of his sisters over the fact that he’d wanted to watch the music channel and they wanted to watch some craptastic stop motion cartoon. They’d outnumbered him two to one, and he’d known he would lose the argument. So he’d thrown a tantrum, started screaming.
The entire atmosphere in the house had changed in a second. His sisters went from argumentative to conciliatory in an instant, changed the channel to the music, tried to give him the remote. One of father’s ‘girls’ came in and tried to quiet him down. When he hadn’t, she’d clamped a hand over his mouth.
It hadn’t been enough. Dear Old Dad had come marching out of the master bedroom. Nikos Vasil. Heartbreaker. Tall, wearing only boxer briefs, with a muscled, lanky physique, long hair plastered to his head with sweat. Father had taken two or three seconds to assess the situation before using his power on Alec, his two sisters and the ‘girl’ with a hand over Alec’s mouth. He hit each of them with stark terror. The kind of fear you experienced when you were claustrophobic and you woke up in a coffin six feet underground.
Then father had gone back into the bedroom and slammed the door behind him.
It had been around summer when that happened, Alec mused. He didn’t have many ways to tell time, back then, since he hadn’t gone to school, and the days kind of passed. Still, it had been hot, he remembered. Between that summer and Christmas, Alec hadn’t opened his mouth to speak once.
That was only one of a dozen or so experiences that came to mind. So yeah, maybe father had broken something in the process. Maybe it had been the emotional equivalent of staring into the sun for far too long, too many times, being left almost half blind.
Or maybe it was his own power. He could be two, three or four people at the same time, feeling what they felt. By the time he was a teenager, he’d experienced every kind of drug, in someone else’s body, had slept with himself as various boys and girls. How was being just ordinary Alec supposed to compare?
Shadow Stalker wasn’t emotionally dulled. Her emotions were rich, uninhibited. She was passionate in her emotions: angry, judgemental. Even the negative feelings were something he could savor in their own way. He wasn’t
really experiencing them—it was more of a very involved spectator role. Her fear was thrilling in the same way a fantastic scary movie was, with the detail and the immersion cranked up to eleven.
He leaped straight up into the air, then activated the shadow state. When she was as high as she would get, he had her grip her cloak in her hands and use it to guide her descent so she could land atop the roof of the gas station. He stopped, stretched her arms. She was breathing hard, but not as much as his Alec-self would be after even half as much running. He could feel the endorphins being pumped into her body from the hard exercise, and he was all the more aware of it because he had his other body to compare to. She was an athlete.
He ran her hands down her chest, felt her breasts, the muscles of her stomach. Stretching once more, he clenched her hands, felt the muscles in her arms flex. He felt her shudder in revulsion.
“Almost forgot you were in there,” he murmured, barely loud enough for her to catch. Not that it mattered. She was as aware of the movements of her mouth as he was. He could mouth the words and she would probably understand. He smirked for her benefit as much as his own.
“So. Bet you’re wondering what’s up,” he commented. “Funny thing about having this control over you, I can feel your emotions, your body’s reactions. Like a really, really good polygraph test. I wasn’t even half done saying my piece back there when I caught on to the fact that you were too pissed and too angry to back down and walk away. There’s no way you’re going to leave town if I let you go, right?”
He felt her struggle to open her mouth and respond. He could have let her, by giving her some limited control over her own movements, but he didn’t.
“Right. So I’m taking it upon myself to ensure this all goes smoothly. My teammates have other shit to worry about, and I’m kind of enjoying flexing my powers. So I’m dealing with this situation myself. You and I? We’re going to go another route.”
He fished in her belt and pockets and began withdrawing the contents. He tossed the things he couldn’t use over the edge of the roof. Billfold, spare cartridges for the crossbow, a small knife, spare strings for the crossbows, bandages, keys and a Wards ID card fell to the ground by the side of the gas station, in and near an overflowing dumpster. There were plastic cuffs in the belt, but he couldn’t be bothered to fish out every last one and throw them all away. At the right hip, he found two cell phones. Success.
One of the phones looked years out of date. The screen was scuffed so badly it was barely readable, and the plastic cover for the plug slot at the bottom was missing. The other was a touch screen smart phone. He didn’t recognize the make or the model, and the interface when he turned it on and touched the screen was unfamiliar. Special issue from the Wards? Whatever. Not important.
The smart phone was password protected. That was more Lisa’s thing, but he did have one trick up his sleeve. Holding her fingers above the keypad, he let them follow through with the most natural feeling sequence of numbers, ingrained into the mind-body connection through the habitual repetition of a sequence of movements over weeks or months. Muscle memory.
It took two tries. The first felt slightly off at the end. The second was spot on, and was rewarded with a vibration of the phone and a menu.
“Contacts,” he murmured, pressing a button, “Weld, Clockblocker, Vista, Flechette, Kid Win… boring. Nothing I can work with, here.” Director Piggot? No. Some potential there, maybe, but she was probably on top of this body-snatching situation. Fully informed.
He scrolled down. Beyond the contacts that had been pinned to the top of the list, there was a short list of contacts that were sorted in order of who had been contacted most recently. At the top of the list was an ‘Emma Barnes’.
He checked the other, older phone. No password. A quick examination showed it was her civilian phone.
“Taking this out on patrol? Is that stupidity or arrogance? What if you lost it?” He shook his head, then offered her a dramatic gasp, “What if it got into the wrong hands?” Her voice was far better for the gasp than his own was. He couldn’t help but chuckle after hearing it.
This Emma girl was listed in both of the phones. Now he had a strong suspicion as to who it was. A quick read of the received texts gave away Shadow Stalker’s name, but he already knew that. Taylor had let it slip, before.
Her pulse was pounding now, and he could feel a growing sense of… what was that? Outrage? She was pissed at the invasion of privacy.
He tried a giggle on for size, to see if he could, and to see if it irritated her. It worked on both counts.
No text messages had been exchanged on the smart phone, so he dug through the archive of old texts on the crummy old phone. Lots sent to Emma. Some sent to a Madison. Others, relatively few, to a mom, a Terry and an Alan.
When he’d gotten sick of paging through the texts in the order that they’d been sent, he went looking for the saved texts, the messages Sophia had deemed important or noteworthy enough to save from being deleted. What he uncovered was telling. He had to do more digging to find the rest of the discussions for each message Sophia had saved, in order to get as much a sense of things as he could. It was hard, when each series of texts was in response to some event he hadn’t participated in.
Some were inane, others he just didn’t understand. Then he found one that gave him pause, that confirmed his suspicions about who Emma was.
Emma: what r u doing with her bag?
Sophia: am in art class atm. was thinking i can fill it with paint when teach leaves room. put it in lost&found. her art midterm is inside so she might look for it and find it and
Sophia: be all yay i found it and then she looks inside and sees its fucked
Emma: lol.
Sophia: what did you say to make her cry? that was awesome. blew my mind.
Emma: (SAVED MESSAGE) crying hrself to sleep for a week? she told me she did after her mommy died
Sophia: you r so evil
Emma: ya ya
Sophia: can i use that one on her? saving that one for posterity btw
Emma: won’t have same bite to it. brilliant bit was the suprise. that slow realization abt what i meant.
Sophia: teach me o master
Emma: lol
Emma: wont be as good but i was thinking of that day. think i remember musc we were listening to when she got the phone call abt her mom.
Emma: we shld wait a while and then see if she cries agn if we play it in hallways or b4 class.
Sophia: and we cant get in trouble for just listening to music
Emma: ya
Sophia: cant believe you were her friend.
Emma: she was lame but not depressing and lame @ same time.
Regent closed the phone, threw it casually into the air, and then caught it on the way down. He did that a few more times, thinking.
“Huh,” he said.
Long seconds passed. He knew he should feel bad for the dork, but he only felt annoyed. He felt worse about the fact that he didn’t feel bad than he did about what he’d just read.
Something to thank father for, maybe.
“You are not a nice person,” he spoke to Sophia with a note of irony in his voice. He could feel her try to respond.
He smiled slowly, “Let’s see…”
He thumbed through the phone’s menus until he found an email option. He verified it could send attachments.
The smart phone in his other hand, he found the web browser and did a search for local high schools.
“Hmmm. What school do you go to? Arcadia? No. Immaculata? No. Clarendon? Nope. Winslow?”
He felt the slightest of reactions from her. A hitching of breath, maybe. And there was nothing she could do to stop it, because the reactions were hers only because they were involuntary.
“Awesome.” He searched for the web site for Winslow High School, and whistled tunelessly to annoy Shadow Stalker as he found the teacher’s emails. He began painstakingly entering them into the recipient field.
He typed out a message for the email itself:
found phone. stuff inside is concerning. thought u should see what ur students r doing.
Her thumb hovered over the button that would send the email.
“Nah,” he decided. He felt a wave of relief from his host.
That relief swiftly faded as he turned her eyes to the smart phone and searched for Brockton Bay’s police force.
When he’d added that email to the list, he added another line:
contacting police to make sure something is done
He sent the email.
He felt an explosion of rage from within Shadow Stalker’s body. Her hands even shook with it. He laughed, and her anger mixed with his amusement to create something that sounded unhinged.
Probably was, when he thought about it. She had multiple personalities, in a way.
He stepped from the roof, and waited until the last second to use her power. Her body exploded into a cloud of shadows. As she pulled back together, he felt a strong discomfort. Not quite pain. In seconds, she had condensed back to her normal form. The pain his hosts felt was something distant. It didn’t bother him half as much. He couldn’t be sure if it was because he instinctually prevented it or if it was something else.
He resumed his whistling as he hopped up onto the railing of a bridge and walked atop it. He dialed Emma, felt a mild reaction from his host: annoyance with a note of anxiety.
Emma picked up on the fourth ring. “What the fuck Soph… what the fuck!? It’s three AM!”
“Terribly sorry,” Regent tried to sound convincing, but it came out sounding sarcastic.
“You said you’d call me hours ago, to give me a recap.”
“I’m sorry,” Regent didn’t trust himself to pull off a sincere apology, so he lowered her voice to a hush instead.