by wildbow
Rather, the word that left my mouth was a quiet, “Why?”
His eyes studied me, as though he were making an assessment. His words were gruff, the gravelly burr of a long time smoker. He very deliberately set the gun down on the desk, then replied, “You’re the enemy.”
I paused, then pulled off my mask. I was sweating lightly, and my hair was damp around the hairline. The world was tinted slightly blue in a contrast to the coloring of my lenses. “It’s not that simple.”
“Has to be. The ones at the top handle the compromising. They assess where the boundaries need to be broken down, which threats are grave enough. My job is to get the criminals off the streets and out of the cities.”
“By starting fights in schools.”
“Didn’t know it was a school until the capes were already landing,” he replied. “Had to choose, either we let you go, and you were keeping an eye out for trouble from then on, or we push the advantage.”
“Putting kids at risk?”
“Dragon and Defiant both assured me you wouldn’t risk the students.”
I sighed. Probably right.
Someone behind me screamed as a group of my hornets flew to him to deliver a series of bites across his face.
“Barbaric,” Director Tagg said.
“Inflicting pain isn’t the point.”
“Seem to be doing a good job of it,” he commented.
“There are heroes on their way back from patrol, your guys called them in. But there’s also news teams on the way here. We called those guys in. They’ll find your employees covered in welts, every PRT van damaged or trashed. Your employees won’t be able to get any cars out of the parking lot, so they’ll have to walk, which will make for some photo opportunities. A handful of heroes will be a bit the worse for wear. You can try running damage control, but some of it’s bound to hit the news.”
“Uh huh,” he said.
“I couldn’t let you get off without a response from us.”
“Didn’t expect you to.”
“This was as mild as I could go,” I said. “I think you know that. I’m not looking to one-up you or perpetuate a feud. I’m doing what I have to, part of the game.”
“Game? Little girl, this is a war.” His voice took on a hard edge.
I stopped to contemplate that. Rachel was destroying the last containment van, and Tattletale was saying something to her about incoming heroes. I was low on time.
“If it is a war, my side’s winning,” I said.
“And the world’s worse off for it. You can’t win forever,” he said.
I didn’t have a response to that.
He must have sensed he had some leverage there. “All of this goes someplace. Do you really see yourself making it five more years without being killed or put in prison?”
“I haven’t really thought about it.”
“I have. Bad publicity fades with time. So do welts and scabs. Five or ten years from now, provided the world makes it that long, nobody will remember anything except the fact that we fought back. Good publicity will overwrite the bad, carefully chosen words and some favors called in with people in the media will help whitewash any of our mistakes. We’re an institution.”
“So you think you automatically win? Or you’re guaranteed to win in the long run?”
“No. They didn’t pick me to head this city’s PRT division because I’m a winner, Ms. Taylor. They picked me because I’m a scrapper. I’m a survivor. I’m the type that’s content to get the shit kicked out of me, so long as I give the other guy a bloody nose. I’m a stubborn motherfucker, I won’t be intimidated, and I won’t give up. The last few Directors in Brockton Bay met a bad end, but I’m here to stay.”
“You hope.”
“I know. You want to fight this system? I’ll make sure it fights back.”
“So you want to escalate this? Despite what I said before?”
“Not my style. I’m thinking more about pressure. I could pull your dad in for questioning every time you pull something, for example. Doesn’t matter where, doesn’t matter who it’s directed at. You or your team do anything that gets an iota of attention, I drag the man into the building, and grill him for a few hours at a time.”
I felt a knot in my stomach. “That’s harassment.”
I was aware of Tattletale approaching me from behind. She leaned against the doorframe, arms folded.
“It’s a war of attrition,” Tagg said. “I’ll find the cracks, I’ll wear down and break each of you. If you’re lucky, then five years from now they’ll remember your names, speaking them in the same breath as they talk about the kid villains who were dumb enough to think they could keep a city for themselves.”
“He’s playing you,” Tattletale murmured. “He knows he’s got you on a bad day. Best to just walk away. Remember, the Protectorate hasn’t had a good day against us yet.”
I thought about asking him about Dinah, but there wasn’t a point. It was something he could use against me, and I already knew the answer.
I approached the desk and turned around the photo frames. The second showed Tagg with his wife and two young women. A family portrait.
“You have daughters,” I said.
“Two, going to universities halfway across the world.”
“And you don’t feel an iota of remorse for hurting a father through his daughter?”
“Not one,” he replied, staring me in the eye. “I look at you, and I don’t see a kid, I don’t see a misunderstood hero, a girl, a daughter or any of that. You’re a thug, Taylor Hebert.”
A thug.
His mindset was all ‘us versus them’. Good guys versus the bad.
It wasn’t much, but it served to confirm the conclusion I’d already come to. Dinah had volunteered the information. Whatever else Director Tagg was, he wasn’t the type to abuse a girl who’d been through what Dinah had.
“We should go,” Tattletale said. “Rachel’s downstairs with all her dogs, we can run before the reinforcements collapse in on us.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Nearly done. You, back there. Are you Mrs. Tagg?”
The woman stepped a little to one side, out from behind her husband. “I am.”
“Visiting him for the night?”
“Brought him and his men donuts and coffee. They’ve been working hard.”
“Okay,” I said. “And you stand by your husband? You buy this rhetoric?”
She set her jaw. “Yes. Absolutely.”
I didn’t waste an instant. Every spare bug I had flowed into the room, leaving Director Tagg untouched, while the bugs flowed over the woman en masse. She screamed.
He reached for his gun on the desk, and I pulled my hand back. The thread that I’d tied between the trigger guard and my finger yanked the weapon to me. I stopped it from falling off the desk by putting my hand on top of the weapon.
Tagg was already reaching for a revolver at his ankle.
“Stop,” I said.
He did. Slowly, he straightened.
“I’m illustrating a point,” I said.
My bugs drifted away from Mrs. Tagg. She was uninjured, without a welt or blemish. She backed into the corner as the bugs loomed between her and her husband.
“Not sure why. Doesn’t change my mind in the slightest,” Tagg said.
I didn’t respond. The swarm shifted locations and dogpiled him. Stubborn as he professed to be, he started screaming quickly enough.
I picked up the gun from the edge of the desk, joining Tattletale. We marched for the exit together, moving at a speed between a walk and a jog, passing by twenty or so PRT employees, each covered in bugs, roaring and squealing their pain and fear to the world as they stumbled blindly and thrashed in futile attempts to fight the bugs off.
Nothing venomous, the wasps and hornets weren’t contracting their bodies to squeeze the venom sacs. There was nothing that could put their lives at risk. It was still dramatic enough.
“He’s right,” Tattletale comment
ed.
“About?”
“You won’t change his mind with a gesture like that. Sparing his wife.”
“Okay,” I replied. I opened a drawer and put Director Tagg’s service weapon inside, while Atlas ferried Tattletale down to the ground floor.
Atlas returned to me, and I took to the air, flying just above Lisa and Rachel and the dogs as we fled the scene. I made a point of leaving every single bug inside the PRT headquarters, to infest it until they had the place exterminated, which would only be another photo opportunity for the media, or to serve as a perpetual reminder as it took weeks and months for all of the bugs to be cleared out.
The news teams were already arriving on the scene. No doubt there was a camera following us. I remembered Director Tagg’s threat, to bring my father into custody. Only a threat, going by his wording, but it did make me think about how every activity, every thing I did that brought me into the public consciousness, it would be a little twist of the knife that I’d planted in my dad’s back.
Not a good feeling.
Maybe the little demonstration I’d done with Tagg’s wife hadn’t been for him. It could just as easily have been me trying to prove something to myself.
Imago 21.2
Atlas started to falter. Compared to humans and other animals, bugs didn’t quite have the same ability to push themselves past the breaking point. Most bugs were small, and their bodies were hyperefficient, condensed down to the essential elements. If a bug needed to be able to leap, to lunge or to fly, it maintained a certain capacity and it didn’t generally go beyond that. It wasn’t absolute, but I’d found it was a definite trend.
In brief, there wasn’t really a hundred-and-ten-percent. When Atlas started demonstrating fatigue and difficulty in carrying me, I wasted no time in setting him down on the ground.
I ran my hand along the giant beetle’s shell while Tattletale and Rachel caught up.
“Problem?” Tattletale asked.
“No,” I said. “Yes. Can I catch a ride on a dog?”
“Yeah,” Rachel said. She whistled, loud and sharp enough that I flinched, and swept her finger in my direction. One of her dogs took the cue and approached me.
“What’s wrong with Atlas?” Tattletale asked.
“He’s wearing out,” I said. My voice sounded flat. “During the Echidna fight, I saw how quickly he was getting tired, and I chalked it up to the fact that he hadn’t eaten properly while separated from me… but I’ve been realizing that it’s more than that. I haven’t figured out the perfect diet to give him absolutely everything he needs, and I’m only barely managing to maintain an equilibrium. Every time he gets hurt, every time he gets tired, there’s general wear and tear I can’t compensate for.”
“I’m sorry,” Tattletale said.
“That’s the way things go, isn’t it? Nothing works a hundred percent right.”
“I suppose you’re right,” she said. “I have to wonder, when you named him, what was the idea behind calling him Atlas?”
“My mom raised me as a reader,” I said. “He’s a giant-sized Hercules beetle, and the only name-upgrade I could think of from Hercules was the titan Atlas.”
“The titan who bears the weight of the world on his shoulders. Apropos.”
I shrugged.
“And like his master, he’s having trouble with his burden?”
“I’m really not in the mood for the Tattletale psychoanalysis.” I climbed onto the dog’s back. It wasn’t one I knew well, and moved away from me as I climbed up its side, making the process more awkward. Rachel made sound that was almost a bark, almost an ‘ah!’, and the animal went still.
“Maybe it’s not exactly what you want, but what if it can help?” Tattletale asked.
“My issues aren’t ones that can be fixed with words,” I said. “Unless you have any insights to offer about Tagg, a way to make this world suddenly make sense, or a way to make people stop being such assholes, such morons, then I’m not sure I want to hear it.”
“He got to you.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Nothing he said—”
“But he got to you, even if you ignore everything he said.”
“Armsmaster,” I said. “Kaiser. Purity. Miss Militia. Piggot. Dragon… a bunch of others I can’t even be bothered to think of. Why is it so hard to find someone who’s willing to cooperate? To find someone that’s on the same page as me? They keep making these calls I just can’t understand, sometimes unfathomable, stupid calls, and things keep falling apart.”
“They probably look at you and wonder why you can’t fall in line with their perception of the way things should go.”
I shook my head. “It’s not like that.”
Tattletale didn’t interject or argue.
I struggled to find the words. “…What I’m talking about, ideas like keeping the peace, keeping people safe, making sure that everyone’s safe, it’s… they’re not complicated. This is basic stuff. If we can’t get the fundamentals right, then how are we supposed to handle the more complicated stuff, like keeping this city running, or stopping war from breaking out?”
“If we could all handle the fundamental stuff, the larger issues wouldn’t exist.”
“No, he… there’s no way it makes any sense, whether you’re talking fundamentals or larger scale. He attacked a school to, how did he say it, to give me a bloody nose?”
“It’s probably more complicated than that. You know as well as anyone that we put on a mask and play a role when dealing with our enemies. He was playing up a certain attitude because he knew it was the only way to get to you.”
“Why did he have to ‘get to me’?”
“You attacked him.”
“I mean, why did it even have to get to that point? They weren’t as aggressive with Kaiser and Purity, when unpowered members of Empire Eighty-Eight were dragging people from their homes. They didn’t act on this scale when the ABB was dealing in hard drugs and ambushing people on the street to tell them that because of where their parents were born, that they had to be soldiers, prostitutes or pay money every month in tribute. They were doing that to middle schoolers.”
“You took over a city.”
“How is that worse? How does that even compare to those other guys?”
“It doesn’t compare,” Tattletale said. She hopped down from Bentley’s back. She paced between Rachel and I, thumbs hooked into her belt. Rachel stared at me, her expression unreadable, her mask dangling around her neck by a strap. Tattletale continued, “Not really. But it means a world of difference to them. They have to care about appearances.”
“Maintaining appearances is so important that they have to attack a school? Break the unwritten rules?”
“I could go on a whole spiel about the unwritten rules. But that’s not important. For people like Tagg and Piggot, it’s cape business, and they’re not quite part of that. And yeah, appearances are worth putting kids at risk, for what they’re facing. Things are just calming down here—”
Rachel snorted.
“—but they’re only picking up for the PRT. They’re running scared, hemorrhaging members. They’re falling apart, and they’re big enough in the grand scheme of things that we don’t even know the repercussions if this keeps going on. Every team that fights the Endbringers relies on the Protectorate for information, for backup, equipment and even periodic training. But even beyond that, beyond the capes, there are hundreds of millions of people around the world who are watching the Protectorate, looking to them for reassurance. Our perspectives and feelings are barely a factor in the face of those hundreds of millions of watching eyes.”
“Barely a factor.”
Tattletale shrugged. “They put on a brave face, they put a tenacious fucker in office here, and they gear up to take a bite out of us. They don’t want to win. Not completely, not all at once. They need us, because they don’t have the capes to dedicate to protecting this territory, not even with the possibility that the por
tal becomes something big. They aim to take you out, destabilize us, and maybe then they hope to focus on the other bad guys. The Teeth, the Fallen, anyone else who shows up and doesn’t play by the rules. They do something to assure the world that they’re still relevant, and they keep the balance, all with a minimum of resources expended.”
“And in doing that, they fuck with the rules, and they attack a high school.”
“Are you really surprised that they broke the rules? We have, Piggot did, when she wanted to drop bombs on us while letting us act as decoys for bigger threats. The rules are only useful so long as they protect the status quo, and Brockton Bay bent the status quo over backwards and fucked it a long time ago.”
“And the school?”
“Dinah,” she said. “They had some basic, hard numbers saying that you wouldn’t do something disastrous, and they have PR to clean up the mess afterwards. I suspect there’ll be something in the news early tomorrow. They’ll say you were an undeniable threat, they’ll twist things around, fudge the truth or outright lie, and they’ll suppress anything that contradicts that line. After that, they’ll have Tagg and the local heroes keep looking to take a bite out of us, do some damage they can put on camera, for the benefit of the hundreds of millions of watching eyes, and they’ll keep at us until they do. He was being honest about that much.”
I clenched my fist. I didn’t want to think about Dinah.
“Sorry,” she said. “But it’s better you know this in advance, so it doesn’t blindside you when the news—”
“Rachel,” I interrupted Tattletale.
“What?” Rachel asked. Her eyes hadn’t left me.
“Can I borrow this dog? I’ll look after him.”
“He needs to eat. Can you get him back to me by tomorrow morning?”
“I asked Tattletale to ship dog food to every headquarters, the same kinds you feed your dogs, just in case,” I said. “Not tomorrow morning, but I’ll make sure he eats.”
Tattletale frowned, “Skitter, we need to talk about—”
“I got the gist of it,” I said. “Did you ship the food?”