by wildbow
The stuffed animal had stopped in the middle of the cafeteria. Either it didn’t hear Bonesaw or something else had its attention.
I could feel that not unfamiliar sensation of darkness creeping in around the edges of my vision. Was I passing out? How much blood was I losing?
I blinked three times. Stall.
“No, no.” She stroked my hair, and my forehead lit up with a burning pain where she’d cut. “We should get this done before you drop dead. Don’t think I can’t see the changes in your breathing and pupil dilation.”
She started up the saw and pressed it against my skull. The horror of what she was doing was compounded by the most god-awful noise, and a grinding vibration of my skull.
If it hurt, I didn’t register it, because the noise of the tool had drawn the stuffed animal’s attention. It charged for us, slamming through the glass sneeze guard of the dining hall’s serving counter. It struck Bonesaw, hard, and the saw slid across my head, cutting through my hairline. I didn’t care.
My rescuer was some kind of cartoonish dinosaur made of black and blue fabric. I could see the logo of this health club repeated several times over the stuffed animal’s exterior.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Bonesaw slowly stand. The two combatants were at opposite points in my peripheral vision; Bonesaw stood to the far left, Parian’s creation to the far right.
“That’s really rude,” Bonesaw said, putting inflection on each word. “I was having a nice conversation with Skitter, and you interrupt?”
She snapped her fingers, and mechanical spiders leaped from a spot I couldn’t see to latch onto the stuffed dinosaur, much as they’d done with me.
Needles, saws, scalpels and drills attacked the dinosaur, and it, in turn, smashed the spiders to the best of its ability. Though it clubbed the spiders into pieces with its hands, feet and tail, it still continued to march steadily towards Bonesaw, moving over me and the others.
Bonesaw, for her part, was retreating, holding a pair of test tubes in one hand, dropping what looked like color-coded sugar cubes into them with the other. She glanced around quickly, then lunged for a nearby counter, grabbing a bottle of water. She upended it over the test tubes, going for haste over precision. More than half of the water splashed around her feet.
Parian’s creation struck the villainess a second time. Bonesaw was thrown into a metal shelf unit with enough force that she dented it. One test tube slipped from her fingers.
The other, she whipped at the stuffed dinosaur. It hit with enough force that it shattered on impact.
The dinosaur struck Bonesaw a third time. Heavy as the impact was, Bonesaw was cornered and she couldn’t go flying as she’d done before. My view of the scene was limited to the back of the Dinosaur’s head, and the occasional view of an stubby-fingered arm as it was drawn back for a haymaker punch. It pounded her, one hit after another.
My heart sank as I saw the stuffed dinosaur begin to deflate. It backed away from Bonesaw, and I saw a spreading area on its side where the fabric was thinning out, bleaching. Once the first holes appeared in the fabric, the rest of the process was swift. It crumpled almost explosively, revealing a figure inside.
Parian threw off the cloth that had covered her and used her power to rip away her sleeve and part of her dress where it was disintegrating; whatever had eaten at the fabric of her dinosaur armor was continuing the process with her clothing.
I could see Bonesaw too. Her face was bloodied, her nose gushing blood, and her cheek was a ruined, abraded mess. Whatever had eaten at Parian’s dinosaur had gotten on her too, devouring the edges of her dress, one sock and part of the shoe on the same foot.
“Rude.”
“You killed my mom,” Parian’s voice sounded hollow.
“My teammates did most of the actual killing, so I don’t think I did, if that makes you feel any better.”
“My aunt, my best friend, my cousin… they were all here.”
“Wrong place, wrong time?” Bonesaw shrugged. She slapped at a wasp that had managed to get in position to sting her. She wasn’t in the area of her anti-bug smoke anymore.
“They told me to run, to protect the kids. But they were supposed to escape while I handled that,” Parian sounded lost, dazed. “I thought they’d get away, so I played dead. I didn’t know.”
She wasn’t a fighter, I remembered. She had held her own against Leviathan, but she didn’t have experience. I wanted to scream at her, to make her stop talking, to do something to Bonesaw.
“If it makes you feel any better, some of them might still be alive. We didn’t kill them all.”
Parian snapped her attention to Bonesaw, “What?”
“Some we left alive, so I could give them five-minute plastic surgery. My spiders handled most of it. Implants under the skin, some chemical dyes for hair…”
“Plastic surgery?” Parian shook her head. “What? Why?”
“To make them look like us. They’re all running around out there, drawing enemy fire and freaking out. It’s funny. And of course, it’ll take a dozen visits with doctors less talented than I to get something even resembling their old faces back. Can you imagine how many people are going to double take when they look at them, before they’ve all been fixed? Like, ‘Oh no, it’s Siberian!’, except it isn’t.”
Parian flung one hand in Bonesaw’s direction. I didn’t see what happened next, but the bugs that were still drifting in Bonesaw’s direction to attack her were telling me that there were threads stretching between the two of them. A bug settled on the point of a needle where it had impaled the side of Bonesaw’s neck. Twenty or thirty needles with attached threads extending between them and Parian’s sleeve.
Bonesaw crunched something in her mouth, “You’re playing so rough. Ow. I think you broke one of my teeth, with your dinosaur.”
Parian ignored her. A twist of her hands, and Bonesaw was lifted into the air, spread-eagled. Bonesaw’s skin stretched where the needles pulled at it. Parian advanced towards the villain.
Broken tooth? No. When I’d kicked Cherish earlier, hadn’t she said that Bonesaw had reinforced her teeth? Surely the psycho would have done the same for herself.
She was lying.
And there was nothing I could do to alert Parian.
Parian picked up one of the scalpels Bonesaw had placed near me. Her hand was trembling even after she had it in a white-knuckled grip. “I don’t want to do this. I never wanted to fight. But I can’t let you walk away. That’s the most important thing. I’m willing to compromise what I believe in, compromise myself, to do that.”
Bonesaw rolled her eyes.
Wall! Barrier!
My bugs left Bonesaw’s presence to form a barrier between her and Parian, but they were too few. Too many had died against Bonesaw’s bug killing smoke. Parian ignored them.
In one motion, Parian stepped close and stabbed the scalpel into Bonesaw’s throat. Then she did it again, and again, stabbing over and over, hysterical.
It wasn’t enough blood. I knew it, and Parian had to know it.
Bonesaw spat into Parian’s face. Her own flesh burned as whatever chemical she had been holding in her mouth spilled down her lip.
Parian, for her part, dropped the scalpel, tore her mask off and staggered blindly in the general direction of the sink, her hands over her eyes.
No.
What I wouldn’t give for the chance to change this, to act, to offer even one word of assistance.
Bonesaw turned her head and spat again, some residual chemical directed at the threads. When that didn’t achieve the desired result, she repeated the process. The threads snapped and she dropped to the ground.
“Burned mah tongue,” Bonesaw said, to nobody in particular. Or to me? She stuck it out to demonstrate. It was scalded, blistered and covered with dead white flesh in much the same way her lip was. She spat again.
Parian reached the sink, cranked on the tap. There was no water. She threw herself to one side, feeling along the
counter for something, anything to wash out her eyes.
“You’re lucky I’m so nice,” Bonesaw said. She lifted up the tattered bottom of her dress to dab at her lip and tongue. I could make out test tubes, equipment and pouches, all belted to her thighs and stomach. “If I was a less forgiving person, I’d make you regret that.”
Parian sagged to her knees, hands still on the counter, heaving for breath.
“But instead, I’ll leave you alone to think about what you’ve done,” Bonesaw said. She plucked some of the needles out of her skin. “I’ll finish with these guys, and later, I can show you what I can do with a needle and thread. It’ll be fun. Common interests!”
“Making friends, Bonesaw?”
No. Any vestige of hope I’d had disappeared.
Jack leaned over the counter. Burnscar stood beside him, looking troubled.
“Jack! Yes! I’m having lots of fun! These people are so interesting,” Bonesaw smiled.
“You hurt yourself,” Jack frowned. “Your mouth.”
“The doll-girl ambushed me. But I’m okay. I can fix myself after I’m done here.”
“You’ll have to finish fast. We’re going.”
“No!”
“Yes. The enemy’s recouping from the first few hits, and they’re stalling Siberian and Crawler. Only a matter of time before they engage in one good flank and blindside one of us three. We leave now, and all they remember is how hard we hit them and how little they could do.”
“But I have research!”
“Bring three. We won’t be able to bring them all along, and you know they get messy if you leave them like that for too long.”
“Only three?” Bonesaw pouted.
“Only three.”
“Then, um. Skitter…”
I felt hands seize my feet and pull me away from my teammates. Burnscar. She held me under one arm, my head and arms dangling. Beads of blood dripped down to the floor.
“Um, um. Tattletale. I want to see what her brain looks like, too.”
“Tattletale it is.”
“And Trickster! Because Ball-of-fire girl killed Hack Job. I want another.”
Hack Job?
“Trickster it is. Finish off the rest.”
“Can I leave Brian there? I have to show my art to people to get known.”
“Brian, is it? Hm. I think that’s a very good idea.”
“Yes! Then we’ll go from first to last. The girl with the horns.”
Imp?
The small circular saw started up with its high-pitched whine.
Then it stopped. I could hear a strangled noise.
“Aw. Look at his heart beating! So fast!”
Burnscar turned, and I could tell they were looking at Brian.
Another strangled noise, trying and failing to form words. It was so forced and ragged that it made my own throat seize up in sympathy.
“You don’t want to see your sister die, huh? That’s sweet,” Bonesaw said. “Maybe you should have taught her the basics. Don’t have to see her if she’s going to walk straight into a modified wolf trap. Did you know? She turned off her power just so she could beg for help. From us. She’s not very bright.”
He made a sound that might have been a growl or a howl of rage, but there was no volume to it, and it was more high-pitched than anything else.
“Don’t worry!” Bonesaw said, “I’ll take good care of your friends.”
I felt a hand pat my cheek.
“Come now, Bonesaw,” Jack said.
“It’s just so funny, watching him react. His heart beat faster when I touched her.”
“It did. But we should go. Burnscar? Torch the ones we’re not bringing.”
“I wanted to!”
“You had your chance, little b. You got distracted.”
I could feel the heat of nearby flame as Burnscar manifested a fireball in one hand.
Darkness rolled over Burnscar’s feet, a carpet. There was no direction to it, and very little volume. It pooled on the ground and spread.
“Yes! He’s doing it! Can I look? I just want to get the hard drive!”
“No.”
“But—”
I could feel my heart pounding, pounding, then stop. The pain was gone. I was gone too. I had no body, only perception.
The scene was familiar. At the same time, I couldn’t have said what happened next. It was like a book I’d read years ago and promptly forgotten, too strange to commit to memory.
Two beings spiraled through an airless void, past suns, stars and moons. They rode the ebbs and flows of gravity, ate ambient radiation and light and drew on other things I couldn’t perceive. They slipped portions of themselves in and out of reality to reshape themselves. Push further into this reality to ride the pull of one planet, shift into another to ride that slingshot momentum, or to find some other source of momentum elsewhere. Ten thousand thousands of each of the two entities existed simultaneously, complemented each other, drew each other forward. They shrugged off even the physical laws that limited the movement of light, moving faster with every instant. The only thing that slowed them was their own desire to stay close, to keep each other in sight and match their speeds. Yet somehow this movement was graceful, fluid, beautiful even. Two impossible creatures moving in absolute harmony with the universe, leaving a trail of essence in their wakes.
I focused on one of them, and I got the sensation that this wasn’t a scene I’d seen before.
I could see what it saw. It was looking forward, but not in distance. Ten thousand pictures at once. Seeing situations where it arrived at its final destination. Earth. The farther forward it looked, the broader the possibilities. It was looking for something. Paring away the branches where the possibilities were few. An Earth in a perpetual winter. An Earth with a population of hundreds. An earth with a population of more than twelve billion, that had stalled culturally, a modern dark age with a singular religion.
And it communicated with its partner. Signals transmitted not through noise, but wavelengths transmitted across the most fundamental forces of the universe. In the same way, it received information, it worked with its partner to decide the destination.
It viewed a world, one point in time in the present, and in a heartbeat, it took in trillions of images. Billions of individuals, viewed separately and as a tableau. Innumerable scenes, landscapes, fragments of text, even ideas. In that one heartbeat, I saw people who were somehow familiar. A young man, a teenager, out of place among his peers, men who were burly with muscle. They were drinking. He was tan, with narrow hips, his forehead creased in worry above thick glasses, but his mouth was curled in the smallest of wry smiles over something one of the men was saying. A snapshot, an image of a moment.
It was my world, my Earth it was looking at.
Coming to a consensus, it transmitted a decision. Destination.
The reply was almost immediate. Agreement.
More signals passed between them, blatant and subtle. A melding of minds, a sharing of ideas, as intimate as anything I’d seen. They continued to communicate, focusing on that one world, on the possible futures that could unfold, committing to none, but explored the possibilities that lay before them.
They broke apart, the two massive beings that spiralled together, and I gradually lost my glimpse into what they were thinking, what they were communicating. Whatever view they’d had of the future, they were losing it. It was too much to pick through on their own.
Where have I seen this before? I thought.
But somewhere in the course of forming and finishing the thought, I’d broken away from whatever it was I’d seen. It was slipping from my mind. The void I was in was not the world of the entities, but Brian’s world. Brian’s power.
The darkness coiled around me, through me. It was different, slithering past my skin to brush against my heart, tracing the edges of my wounds, the gouge in my skull that Bonesaw had made with her saw, slithering over and through my brain.
I coul
d feel my power slip just a little out of my reach, my range dropping, my control over the bugs just a touch weaker.
But I could still see through my bugs. I could still feel what they felt. They’d gathered for the barrier I’d tried to erect between Parian and Bonesaw, and they’d dispersed in the time since, touching everyone present. Burnscar had put out her flame, was cradling her hand to her chest. I could feel Bonesaw and Jack, standing a short distance away. I could feel Trickster, Sundancer, Tattletale, Parian, Ballistic and Imp. I could feel Grue, hanging from the wall of the walk-in freezer.
I could feel another person, someone who hadn’t been there a moment ago. A man standing in the darkness.
The man strode forward, uncaring about the darkness. He caught Burnscar around the face with one broad hand, and he brought it down hard against the counter. I was dropped to the ground. Burnscar fell across me, limp and unmoving, and the man flickered out of existence.
The darkness slipped away, retracing its steps through my body, undoing its passage between my organs and joints, through and inside my blood vessels.
A clearing formed. An expanse of dim light, lit only by one shaft of light that managed to come in through the corner of a window. Burnscar’s head was pulverized, unrecognizable. She lay limp, unmoving, dead.
“Interesting,” Jack said, looking down at his fallen teammate.
“Yes! I’m almost positive I got this on record!” Bonesaw squealed.
“Which you’ll have to leave behind. We’ll retreat.”
“I just need the hard drive! I’ve been trying to get data like this for ages, and it’s a new system!”
Bonesaw started to head for the walk-in fridge where Brian was, but Jack grabbed her by the back of the neck. “No.”
“It’s ‘kay! Two seconds! I’ll be right back!” She slipped out of his grip, running into the freezer, opening one of the cases that looked Mannequin-made.
The darkness continued to dissipate around Brian, and I was aware as a masculine figure flickered into existence in the midst of the cloud, in one corner of the walk-in freezer.
It was Brian, but it wasn’t. It was colored in monochrome, with one eye open, the other half-formed. Markings in white covered his flesh, spiraling out from one pectoral, covering his chest and stomach. His hands were white to the elbow, and he was sexless. A ken doll with only more white patterns between his legs.