by wildbow
“Then, using a name we’re both familiar with, D-gangrene.”
“I can’t remember names. I don’t think I can use the code.”
“Troubling. You must understand my predicament. For all I know, you’re a third party using Skitter’s voice to make the request. With shapeshifters, empaths and other methods of coercion, I have to be very careful about the dissemination of information.”
“I know.”
The woman was still approaching. Tattletale and Grue weren’t talking.
Something was wrong.
“What if we kept you on the line?” I suggested.
“That will suffice.”
There was a pause, then the sound of background noise. A ring sounded, different from the one before. It was interrupted as Cherish picked up.
“I have never been so sorry to miss out,” Cherish said. She sounded a bit hoarse.
“We’re requesting your help,” Coil spoke.
“Oh, you need my help in more ways than you’re aware of. Not that I’m going to provide it. Skitter’s on the line, I believe?”
“She is.”
“I’m here,” I confirmed.
“And Tattletale and Grue, of course.” She chuckled. “How amusing. Seems like I’m in high demand.”
“They’re looking for Panacea,” Coil said. “Identifying her for us would be one way to achieve revenge on the Slaughterhouse Nine for turning on you.”
“Revenge? Not my interest in the slightest. I’ve learned my lesson and I’ve become the poster child for team loyalty.”
Coil paused, then said, “I’m prepared to offer you some enticements. I imagine your current quarters can’t be too comfortable.”
“Don’t suppose these enticements will be hand delivered?”
“They will be provided by remote control, as your food has been.”
“Some headphones and music would be nice,” she said. “The sound of the waves banging on the hull is driving me crazy.”
“Such could be arranged.”
“Nah, I’m totally fucking with you. Music, as if.”
There were too many things that seemed off. Cherish’s tone among them. I glanced around. The woman was still following us, throwing herself after decoys, verifying they were false, then retracing her steps. She was slowly closing in. I positioned Atlas so he would be ready to distract her if it came down to it.
“You’re stalling?” Coil asked. “I don’t see the point.”
“Just trying to see if I can provoke a reaction from you. There’s only so many times I can read the labels of the shipping containers before I lose my mind. Have to amuse myself somehow.”
“What will it take for you to tell us where Panacea is?” Coil asked.
“Oh, I’m feeling generous, and I want to see what happens. I’ll tell you that as a freebie. They’re at Arcadia. Somewhere in the top floor.”
A freebie. Something was going on, and I wasn’t aware what. I had to piece it together, but I had so little information.
“And maybe I could offer you something, in exchange for some goodwill. Maybe you’ll even want to let me go free, no obligations.”
The feeling of dread that had been following me wasn’t getting worse as the woman approached. It was staying steady, like someone had a gun pointed at me, and they’d had it aimed my way for some time now.
“I’m listening,” Coil said. “But if this is frivolous or another waste of our time—”
“Nah. Critically important. I’ll trust that you’ll take it for what it’s worth and repay me in kind.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s simple. Going by what I’ve been able to observe around the city, there seems to be a major concern. Si Jack effugit civitatem, mundus terminabitur.”
“I’m not versed in Latin,” Coil spoke, sounding annoyed.
“For shame, Coil, for shame,” Cherish said. Her voice was too cheerful. “You can’t sell the cultured supervillain image without the ability to make quips in an ancient language. I had the benefit of my power, languages are easier to learn when you can get a sense of what the other person’s feeling.”
“That was something about Jack?” I asked, “Repeat that in English?”
“Doesn’t matter anymore,” she replied. “The message was delivered. I’ll leave you to think about it.”
If only I could have blamed the miasma for my idiocy. Everything clicked into place.
I kept my voice level, “I don’t think you’ll get much goodwill if we don’t understand what the fuck you’re talking about. Coil? We’re moving out now.”
“Report back when you’ve found the healer,” Coil told me.
I hung up before Cherish could speak, then I glanced at the others. “Let’s go? Arcadia high?”
They nodded.
My heart pounded with such force that my vision wavered. I turned to head toward Arcadia high, joined by the two members of the Nine. Stay calm, don’t let on that you know.
If I could direct the woman to us…
The miasma’s effects had almost made me lose track of her. She was fighting, grappling with mechanical spiders. She went from fighting like an ordinary individual to moving at high speeds and throwing crushing punches, then back again. I couldn’t think of how to help her, and she was obviously unable to help me.
Cherish had been engaging in double-speak, saying one thing to us, while addressing the two people with me the entire time. She’d told them about where she was being held captive, and she’d offered the most valuable information she had to avoid getting tortured to death after they’d freed her. From the way she’d talked about the message being received, one of the people with me had to be Jack.
Jack was slated to bring about the end of the world if he left Brockton Bay, and now he knew.
Couldn’t meet their eyes, didn’t want to speak, in case I let on that I knew. I could barely breathe, I was so afraid of letting my emotions show.
My gun was in the compartment at my back. I’d put it away at the conclusion of our argument, and with the compartment broken in my fall from Atlas’s back, I’d been forced to put it in a place where it wasn’t easy to draw. I couldn’t be sure I would be able to draw it and fire. I was still handicapped, unaware of their powers. I was fighting blind.
If Jack or the girl killed Amy, just about everyone in the city would die violently from the miasma’s effects. But I couldn’t stop them without letting on that I knew. Fighting them put me at a clear disadvantage, and—
“Skitter,” Jack spoke.
I didn’t waste time turning to face him. I gripped the hair of the blonde girl beside me and virtually hauled her off her feet as I dragged her around to a position between Jack and myself. Jack was already swinging his knife.
The knife cut the girl more than it cut me. I could feel it raking across the exterior of my costume, failing to penetrate, but he was swinging it underhand, and it caught me in the chin, slicing through the side of my cheek and up to my temple.
I tried to keep a hold on the girl for the sake of using her as a human shield, but I saw her reach into her dress and withdraw some vials. I shoved her toward Jack, then stepped forward to kick her square between the shoulder blades. She collided with him, interrupting his follow-up swing. For good measure, I drew the bugs from beneath my costume and sent them chasing after her. Some capsaicin-laced bugs, just the few I had remaining.
Jack caught her shoulders and spun her around so she faced me. The vials were already billowing with a chemical reaction. She threw them at me.
I backed away, and they hit the ground between our two groups, black smoke joining the crimson mist around us.
“You’ve outlived your usefulness, Skitter,” Jack spoke.
If I’d just had a minute or two more to decide on a course of action.
“It was fun. I almost wish I’d nominated you for the Nine. You’re versatile, and there’s so many weak points I could have exploited if I’d had more time.
If Cherish’s information on you wasn’t so misleading, I think I could have made you shoot the heroine. To corrupt you like that, it would have been amusing.”
I fumbled for the gun, using my bugs to get a sense for where it was. In the same motion that I pointed it, Jack slapped it out of my hand with two slashes of his knife. He was a dozen feet away, but the knife nonetheless connected with my weapon.
My bugs began to gather like a dark cloud, their mass casting a shadow on the already gloomy surroundings.
“So I end the world? Interesting.”
“The source is a little unreliable,” I lied.
“Still, I would love to see how that comes about.”
“You won’t live to,” I told him.
“I’ll make sure he does,” the girl informed me.
My swarm could feel others approach from the heroine’s direction. They were the size of dogs, and they skipped forward on mechanical legs. The mechanical spiders. Dozens of them, coming straight for me.
If I was judging right, they were running faster than I could.
I sent the swarm after Jack and the girl, massed into thousands of bugs. Some groups clustered so tight together that they looked like massive, amorphous black entities, amoebas floating through a cityscape painted in shades of red and black. Atlas heard my call and headed my way from the place I’d positioned him, too far away to join the fight for a minute or two.
The girl was already mixing something else together. Plumes of white smoke billowed around her, almost luminescent after so long spent in the crimson mist. My bugs died on contact with the gas.
Everything I’d learned about my enemies had been blocked. I had no information on them, no sense of what to expect. They weren’t so handicapped.
She tipped half the vial’s contents into an empty container and handed it to Jack. Both protected from my power, they started backing away.
I moved to edge around the cloud of black smoke, but Jack struck me with the knife. I had to use my forearms to cover my unprotected face. I just had my glasses, some bugs, and a layer of cloth protecting it. Nothing that would guard against Jack’s cuts.
When I’d lowered my arms, they had already turned a corner, running in the general direction of Arcadia high. Running around the cloud of black smoke cost me a precious minute. I made my way around the same corner they’d rounded, and stopped short as I came face to face with another black cloud.
Couldn’t match their speed, not with these noxious clouds slowing me down. With the heroine lying unconscious in the street, several blocks in the wrong direction, I had no allies to turn to. Worse, anyone I came across was as likely as not to be a threat. It was down to Atlas and me, and Atlas was especially vulnerable to both of my opponents. I couldn’t even fly after them without risking being cut down in midair.
I had minimal information on my opponents, while they knew enough about me to completely counter my powers. Topping it all off, the mechanical spiders were steadily, inexorably closing in on me. I’d lost my last fight with the things, and there were dozens more this time around. Couldn’t fly without exposing myself to Jack’s power, couldn’t stay on the ground without getting swarmed.
I swallowed hard and held out one hand to grab Atlas’s horn as he landed. In a moment, we were in the air, giving chase.
I wasn’t thinking about winning anymore. I was thinking in terms of minimizing the damage when we lost.
Prey 14.10
Arcadia high was the school every kid in Brockton Bay wanted to attend. A big part of that was the fact that everyone knew that the Wards attended Arcadia, and attending meant that any one of your classmates could be a superhero or superheroine. To anyone else, you could just as easily be one, too. It wasn’t a rich kid’s school like Immaculata, but it was a good school. Every classmate treated other classmates with the utmost respect. Both the students and the school itself maintained a certain status and pride as a consequence.
Now it was something else, and it inspired entirely different feelings. The front gate looked like it had aged a thousand years, the sharp corners of the cut stone had rounded off, the ivy that once wound around it had withered. The windows of the building were all shattered, empty of glass, and the fields were a patchwork of overgrown grass and mud. With the faint tendrils of colored mist that surrounded the grounds, it looked like a prime location for a horror movie.
I had little doubt I was in the right place.
Panacea’s the healer, top floor. Jack is the slasher, the blond girl the chemist-tinker. Panacea’s the healer on the top floor, Jack is the slasher, the blond girl is the chemist.
I recited the words as a refrain, as if I could hold the names and identities of the major players in my short-term memory by constantly reminding myself of who they were.
The school was on a hill, meaning the water that was producing the miasma was far enough away that only traces of it reached this far. The little vapor that got to the school was held at bay by the stone wall that ringed the school. The design suggested it had been intended more for aesthetics than for utility, but it was serving a purpose nonetheless.
Panacea’s the healer, top floor, Jack is the slasher, the blond girl the chemist-tinker. Panacea is the healer, top floor, Jack is the slasher, the blond girl is the chemist-tinker.
It seemed like the mechanical spiders had lost track of me. They would probably give up the chase and return to their master, but it was one less thing to worry about for the time being.
Jack and the tinker would have gone in through the ground floor. I decided to land on the roof. The second I was on terra firma, I reached for my phone to check. No signal.
I needed to signal someone about what was going on. I was woefully underequipped, and I doubted my ability to win this alone, especially when my opponents weren’t as disadvantaged as I was.
I could use something like a giant nine crafted out of bugs floating over the school to signal that the pair was here… but there was no guarantee that someone would come. There was also the possibility that it would lead to the good guys dropping another bomb on us. That would get the healer and maybe even me killed. Panacea had to survive, or everyone in the city would die in the aftermath of Bonesaw’s miasma.
Panacea is the healer, she’s on the top floor, Jack is the slasher, the blond girl is the chemist-tinker.
I tenderly touched the cut on my face. Jack must have pulled back as I used the tinker as a shield, because the cut was fairly shallow. It was long, though, and my fingertips were wet with blood after I touched my hand to it. I couldn’t distinguish the blood from the black fabric of my gloves, so I couldn’t tell how much it actually was. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
There was a door on the rooftop, and I used my knife to pry the doorknob partially off, then gave it a firm kick to remove it. The lock was built into the handle, and it didn’t take long to figure out how to open it when I could see the internal mechanisms. It wasn’t exactly high security, more intended to keep kids from getting onto the roof than keeping people on the roof from getting in.
Just past the door was a set of stairs that led down into the top floor of the building. It looked like a janitorial closet. I sent Atlas down to check before venturing down myself, and I began distributing my swarm through the school. I prepared silk lines across doorways and hallways to inform me of others passing through, placed ants, earwigs, centipedes and pill bugs on the walls to give me a sense of the layout, and sent flies to scan the interiors of each room to see if I couldn’t find anyone.
Again, I repeated the refrain in my head, reminding myself about who was in the building. I wasn’t sure it was helping, but I didn’t want to get tricked again.
There were two hallways and three classrooms my bugs couldn’t enter without dying on the spot. That marked out a relatively small area that the Nine could be.
The biggest issue was that I couldn’t find Panacea. Did that mean she was in close confines with the enemy? It wasn’t a good thought.
>
As I laid silk lines across possible entryways to alert myself about enemy movements, I was careful to check each area before I advanced further into the building. My eyes searched for details while my swarm scanned the walls and the ground.
I was a short distance away from the Nine when I saw a wet spot on the wall, complete with discoloration of the paint. I sent bugs in, and they felt shards of glass on the floor around the patch. I wouldn’t have said that the swarm smelled anything, but there was something heavy in the air as flies beat their wings, the muscular action simultaneously drawing oxygen in. Whatever it was, it was dense, cloying, odorless and colorless, only extending a dozen feet around the spot.
I backtracked and picked a different route. My pace slowed to half of what it had been as I searched for other telltale details. Twice, I found similar traps, both with that odourless smoke, and twice I had to change my route.
I paused outside the bug-killing zone. Flies had ferried spiders to me, and I started organizing them to produce lengths of silk cord. I left them behind while I creeped closer and listened in.
“…minds do think alike. I did something very similar for Siberian.” A girl’s voice.
“Shut up. We’re nothing alike.” Another girl.
“We could be! Haven’t you ever wanted to start over? I could make you younger! We’d be the same age! And wear matching outfits! Oh! I could do plastic surgery, we could be twins!”
“Did—did you do that to yourself? Make yourself young?”
“No.” A male voice. “Rest assured, Bonesaw’s immaturity is genuine. Both an asset in how it makes her that much more creative, free in her ways. A detriment in other ways.”
“Doesn’t… that bother you? Him saying that about you?”
“Jack knows what he’s doing.”
“I do. I know a lot of things,” Jack spoke, his voice smooth, almost seductive.
“Don’t. I know you’ve got a silver tongue. I don’t want to hear it.”
“You prefer the alternative?” Jack asked, his voice cool.
I could picture him holding that knife of his, the threat all too clear.