by wildbow
I turned around. Was I? “I don’t feel that much stronger.”
“I spent fifteen years raising you. Two and a half of those years I spent raising you alone. I can see a difference.”
“I’m not saying there isn’t a change. There probably is. I just—I dunno if I’m better because of it.”
“Oh.”
A silence stretched out. Neither of us were adept conversationalists, and any familiarity we’d had was gone.
“Do you want to sit?” he asked.
I nodded and seated myself. There were papers on the coffee table. Two loose stacks, headed with the title ‘Know where you are’. They looked as though they had been printed using a fifteen year old photocopier. I picked one up.
‘Know where you are:
The area extending east of Captain’s hill is believed to be under claim by the supervillains Grue and Imp. Both are members of a group known as the Undersiders, who have joined with the Travelers in an unnamed alliance. These villains will not attack civilians unless provoked, and clean-up is tentatively progressing throughout the area with no objections from either villain.
Grue has the ability to create clouds of darkness. Should you find yourself in one of these clouds, retreat to the nearest cover you remember seeing and assume there is immediate and present danger from vehicles, gunfire, moving pedestrians and fighting between capes…’
I put it down. There was more, noting a lack of information about Imp as well as the gangs and possible rivals that Grue and Imp might be fighting with, but it was over a week out of date.
The second paper:
‘Know where you are:
The area extending west of the ferry station north, including the factories and the remains of the Boardwalk, is believed to be under claim by the supervillain Skitter. Skitter is a member of the Undersiders, who are allied with the Travelers in an as-of-yet unnamed alliance. Skitter is an unpredictable young woman tending towards acts of apparent kindness to those she deems her subjects and bursts of sudden and extreme violence towards those she sees as her enemies. The city is not funding work in her territory, as Skitter is handling matters there.
Skitter controls insects and senses what they do. Anyone with allergies to stings or insect bites would be advised to leave this area. She offers food, shelter and care to anyone who agrees to work under her, but the Dockworkers Association cannot suggest that anyone accept her offers, as her ulterior motives are unknown.
This area is not currently the site of any ongoing disputes between capes. There is limited power in this area. There is limited cell service in this area. There is not water service in this area.’
Again, a little out of date. Our water was running. Still, it was startling to see this here. From the beginning, I’d wanted to keep that part of my life and this part of my life separate. It had been a fierce enough desire that I’d avoided taking revenge on the bullies because of it, at least a little, and it might have had something to do with my running away from home.
“Your DAU has been putting these up?”
“Yes. Making sure people are informed. Too many stories of people taking the wrong path through the city and getting cornered by a mutant dog the size of a small tank.”
“Right.”
“You said you were staying outside the city, with Lisa’s family? At the North End? How did you get here?”
“I walked across the market, down to the Boardwalk and crossed through Skitter’s territory.”
I was pretty sure I wasn’t acting strange as I said the name.
“They didn’t give you any trouble?”
“They stopped me at the border and I asked permission. They were nice about it.”
“Okay.”
Lie after lie.
Another uncomfortable pause.
“Have you eaten? I have some liver and mashed potato in the fridge.”
“I’ve eaten,” I lied. No use taking some of my dad’s money when he was having to sell stuff to get food.
“Would you like some tea?”
“Please,” I said, grateful for an offer I could accept in good conscience. He retreated into the kitchen to put the kettle on.
I looked around. It didn’t feel like my house anymore. I’d only been gone two months, but things were different. Things in the house had moved, or been sold, or they’d been damaged by Shatterbird’s attack.
The atmosphere was different too. I wasn’t sure how much of that was the humidity, the lack of upkeep and the fact that the family of two had been just a family of one for nearly two months and how much of it was me. It was all too possible that I was viewing my surroundings in a different light, tinting things with my paranoia about my dad making the connection between me and Skitter, viewing things more negatively because of my guilt over leaving him.
My dad rejoined me. “If you give me a minute, I can make your bed—”
“I’m not staying,” I blurted the words.
“Oh.” I could see the pain on his face.
In the mutual awkwardness that followed, the vibration of my cell phone was a mercy. I picked it up and checked the display. Heart-c-c-apostrophe-square. Tattletale.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, hopping off the couch and hurrying out the door as I hit the button to pick up.
Please be okay, I thought, shutting the door behind me.
“Hey,” she replied.
“You’re okay? Cactus-B.”
“Sun-Y. Or Sun-N. Whichever you prefer.”
“I’m not sure what color that’s supposed to be.”
“Neither am I. Um. So I talked to Coil. Things have been clarified some.”
“Okay. Should we—”
“It’s fine, pretty much, even if he’s listening in. You’re not in danger. No threat on your life at this present moment.”
“Okay,” I said, not sure how to expand on that. She hadn’t precisely said it was Coil that was the threat, so maybe she was hedging her words to be safe.
“Which scares me,” she confessed.
“Scares you?”
“Um,” she said. It wasn’t like her to be lost for words. “I told Coil that Trickster got injured. I wasn’t sure if you’d told him. He didn’t seem concerned. There was zero indication that his plan had been disrupted. Told him you were on your way back, again, no concern. Everything that had been telling me he was harboring plans to assassinate you was telling me he wasn’t and hadn’t ever been, this time around.”
“Your power lied to you?”
“Um. That’s what I thought. I was thinking maybe I was working under a mistaken impression, tried adding and removing the elements to see if I could get a different result, interpret his earlier behavior differently. No go. And I was doing all this while having a perfectly normal conversation with Coil, until he says something like ‘Very dangerous. You want to be careful who you’re picking a fight with.’”
I felt my blood run cold. I had to sit down on the stair. “He meant—”
“Oh, he totally meant. If I was one-hundred percent sure he was planning on killing you before, I’m five-hundred percent sure he was telling me he knows what we’re up to.”
“What should I do? What should we do?”
“I don’t know. But that wasn’t the end of it. I was still processing what he’d just said when he stepped toward the door to leave. He put one hand on my shoulder, leaned close, and he spoke in this very quiet voice. He said, ‘Be careful, Tattletale. I value your service, but you should know your power isn’t as reliable as you like to think.’”
Sounding civil and caring while expressing a very clear threat. “So the fact that it lied before—”
“It didn’t lie, Skitter. I said he was testing me, before. He was, just not like I thought. He’s found a way to confuse my power, to counteract it. This thing with the hit on your head. It was just to scare us. To let us know that any security my power afforded us, it doesn’t apply to him. He can make us think you’re going to be killed whe
n you aren’t, and—”
“And the opposite is true. He can make us think we’re safe when we aren’t,” I finished.
“Exactly.”
“What do we do?”
“I don’t know,” she said, again. “Listen, I’ve got to call the others. Are you with Grue?”
“No. Maybe I’ll head that way before the end of the night.”
“We’ll figure something out,” she said.
Figure something out? Coil was on to us, he’d effectively taken Tattletale out of the equation, and by all accounts, he seemed confident enough to continue letting us work for him, despite our intended mutiny.
I couldn’t bring myself to agree. “Bye,” I said.
“Bye.”
I hung up.
Before I could convince myself to head back to my territory and start plotting some counteroffensive, I stood from the stair and walked back inside.
Seeing my dad’s face, I was reminded of the dream I’d had, where my dad had turned out to be Coil, where I’d taken too long and Dinah had died. I looked away, made my way back to the couch. My dad set a cup of tea down in front of me, then sat beside me.
I wasn’t religious. Didn’t believe in a higher power. Mundane government was crappy enough, the idea of a divine one simultaneously scared me and made me want to laugh. As a consequence, when I thought of a soul, I was thinking more about some collection of the abstract parts of the mind that covered a person’s mental and emotional well-being, their psyche and the defining aspects of their personality. A more religious view of the soul would probably add up to a rough equivalent.
Whatever my overall motives might be, some part of what drove me was some desire to patch up the damage, fix that part of myself that had been taking a beating ever since I’d gotten that call about my mom’s death.
Only it wasn’t working.
Try to help the city, help the heroes, shore up my sense of self worth, find myself fumbling, tearing and discovering fresh holes in my subconscious makeup, with Dinah and my betrayal of the people who’d become my friends, betraying myself by failing to keep to that overall goal. And there were other moments, moments where I’d been brutal and violent, accidental or otherwise. Moments I’d made sacrifices, or where I’d been callous. It wasn’t subtle, either. The stack of papers in front of me said it, clear as day. Sudden and extreme violence.
Even coming here, it had been at least partially motivated by my desire to fill that hole deep inside, that spot where family was supposed to fit.
I sipped on the tea. My dad had made it with sugar, not honey.
This… sitting here and drinking tea with my dad, my head someplace else entirely? It wasn’t fixing anything. Wasn’t mending or filling anything.
I sipped again, then drank it in big gulps. It burned going down, and I pounded my collarbone, as if I could banish that sensation.
“Taylor?”
I stood and picked up my backpack and shrugged it over the one shoulder. “I’ve got to go.”
He stood too.
“I’m sorry. We’re—we’re heading back, and it’s dark, so we’re going with a group.”
“I’ll come.”
“No. You’d be alone going back. It’s okay.”
He looked hurt. “A hug?”
I hesitated, then stepped close and hugged him with the one arm. He gingerly wrapped his arms around my shoulders and squeezed.
“I’ll be back,” I mumbled into his shirt.
“No vague promises. You’re going to promise,” he said.
“Day after tomorrow?”
“Okay. I don’t have work then, with the mayoral elections. We can eat lunch here and then go to the town hall.”
Oh shit. If Coil had something for us to do—
I stepped away, thinking of a way to formulate an excuse. I saw his forehead creased with worry. As thin as he’d been before, he looked thinner now. Looked years older, wounded, tired, lonely.
“I’ll see you then, then,” I told him.
“See you,” he said, smiling sadly. No pressure to stay. He had no idea what was going on, I hoped, but he was still letting me do what I needed to.
I felt the need to reward him, to express some kind of gratitude, but I had only one thing to offer that he really wanted. “I—don’t know when. But maybe I’ll come home?”
Vague, again. Just like with what I’d said before, there was no set date. I’d said the exact same thing when I’d left in the first place. It was almost an insult.
But I saw him smile. “Anytime, any day. But we can talk about that over lunch, day after tomorrow.”
I nodded and turned to leave. I wasn’t half a block away from the house before I felt the tears welling up, running down my face.
I couldn’t say whether they were because of my love for my dad or my despair for Dinah.
Interlude 15
“Knock, knock.”
Triumph turned around. “Sam.”
She poked her head around the edge of the door, hand over her eyes. Beautiful. She was blonde and wearing her skintight costume. She had the figure to pull it off where so few really did. The kind of body someone worked for. Her mask was off, tucked into her belt.
“You decent?” Prism asked, not moving her hand.
“Yeah.” He finished folding his hospital gown and draped it at the foot of the bed. Not perfect, but it was better than leaving a mess.
“You’re okay to be up and about?”
“Yeah,” he said. He didn’t want to reply with a single syllable again, so he turned to face her. He smiled a little. “I’m tough.”
“Don’t boast. I was with your family while we watched the paramedics cart you off.”
“I made it. I don’t heal that much faster than normal, but I do heal faster, I don’t scar, and I don’t tend to suffer long-term injuries.”
“But you nearly died. Don’t forget.”
“I definitely won’t forget, believe me,” he said. He balled up his bathrobe and put it in the gym bag that already sat on the bed. “I’m surprised you came.”
“We’re dating,” she said.
“Three dates, and we both agreed it wouldn’t be anything permanent.”
“You say that and then you invite me to meet your parents.”
“Because the food at home is better than the rations you’d get anywhere else in this city.” He raised an eyebrow, “But you’re the one checking on me this morning. Didn’t you have a flight?””
“A flight’s easy enough to postpone when the Protectorate’s arranging it. I decided I needed to sleep in after being up all night getting x-rayed, Ursa said she was okay with it.”
“I’m just saying, you didn’t have to stop by.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I wanted to see how Cache was doing. It’s a walk down the hall to see you.”
“Ouch. Allies before guys?”
“There’s got to be a better way of saying that.”
“Probably. How’s he?”
“Burned badly, but he’s healing. We’ll see how bad the long-term damage is.”
“And how are you?”
“Bruised, bit of a limp. Pretty okay overall.”
“Good,” he smiled. “Want to go get some coffee? I’ve been running on so much caffeine lately that I think I’ll pass out if I don’t get my morning dose. I’ll lend you my shoulder so you don’t have to put too much weight on that leg.”
“Coffee’s good. But are there any places that are open?”
“There’s a place in the building.”
Prism made a face.
“Not institution coffee. An actual coffee bar as part of the cafeteria.” He slung his bag over one shoulder and offered her an arm.
“Don’t you need a wheelchair? I thought it was hospital policy to wheel you to the door.”
“It’s fine. Benefit of having a small hospital as part of the PRT building. Pretty common for us to go straight from here to our offices, and there were apparently i
ssues with photographers taking pictures of heroes in wheelchairs as they left the hospital. Director Piggot arranged things this way for exactly this reason.”
“Damn. Need to push for something like that in NYC. Our hospital’s off-site.” She put a hand on his shoulder and they began making their way down the hall.
Ursa Aurora turned the corner and spotted them. Triumph could see the frown lines above the glossy black bear mask she wore, her obvious relief and the quickening of her pace on spotting him. His heart sank. Something’s happened. Or it’s happening.
“Guys!”
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“There’s an issue. Division in the ranks. Looking ugly.”
“The enemy?”
She shook her head. “Our guys. And it’s about you.”
That caught him off guard. He shook his head a little; no time to get into the particulars. He’d deal with the situation himself. “Lead the way.”
Despite the apparent urgency of the situation, they couldn’t run. Prism was hurt and the elevator was the fastest way to their destination. Ursa went ahead to press the button while Triumph helped Prism limp her way there.
“Gentler,” she hissed, after setting too much weight on her bad leg.
“Sorry.”
“I hate this, being injured,” Prism mumbled.
“It’s not too serious?”
“No. Skitter tethered me to the roof so I dropped halfway, stopped, then cut the line so I’d drop the rest of the way. Landed on my side. But being hobbled like this, it brings back bad memories.”
He turned to Ursa as they approached the elevators. “Press both buttons at the same time, three times in a row for the emergency use.”
Ursa did as he’d suggested, and the button began alternately flashing yellow and red. The doors opened almost immediately afterward and they gathered inside. Ursa hit the button for the basement floor: the Wards’ headquarters.
He glanced at her teammate. It struck him that it was inappropriate to ask, but it also felt like Prism was inviting the question. “Would it be bad form for me to ask? About the bad memories?”
Prism shook her head. “Ursa knows, and I’ve been working on getting over it. I already mentioned my history in gymnastics. My dad’s a coach, had spent his entire life pushing me and my siblings to be on the Olympic level. I sometimes thought it was the only reason he had kids. I was pretty close to qualifying when I tore my ACL.”