by wildbow
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 or
b 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.
I’m sorry it took me so long to help Mark.
Good bye. I love you all,
Amy.
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.