by wildbow
I’d only dodged as much as I had by virtue of the ability to sense where the bugs that clung to the blades were moving, and enough luck to be able to move into a space that escaped the various thrusts. The blood had been from a glancing blow, along the underside of my right breast. I traced it now, as I sat in front of the monitor, feeling the spot over where the scar would be. The fucking things were sharp enough to pierce my armor and silk both.
I could remember my outrage at that fact, the stupid, silly comment that had run through my mind, that I’d refused to say in fear that this video would somehow leak as well.
Can’t believe the blade hit such a small target.
“Everyone okay?” I asked, on the screen.
I listened to the various replies of confirmation. I followed by relating how the armor I’d made them wasn’t sure protection.
Then the camera’s view shifted as I freed myself of the spikes I’d so narrowly avoided—mostly avoided. I took two steps forward, and then threw myself to the ground as a figure sprung from the wall, a woman, moving so fast she could barely be glimpsed. The camera veered again as I rolled on the ground, avoiding two blades that plunged from the underside of her ‘body’ to the ground, punching into the earth.
She had carried forward, uncaring that I’d dodged, slamming into another wall, and she had left a piece of herself in her wake. Or a piece of what she’d made herself out of, anyways. She’d become the city, and this small fraction of herself had been formed out of the light gray brick that formed the building to my right. She’d left the pillar behind, three feet across, barring my path.
My head whipped around as I followed her progress. One more of the rushing figures appeared a block down, two more behind me, simultaneous. A pillar, then a short wall and another pillar, respectively.
“Heroes, be advised,” Dragons A.I.’s voice came over the armband, “The Endbringer Bohu appears to follow a strict pattern. The city is condensed in twenty-four minute intervals, followed almost immediately by the miniature Endbringers producing barriers, walls, pillars, blocking apertures and more. The next phase, occurring gradually over the next ten minutes, will produce deadfalls, pitfalls and a smoothing of terrain features. Following that, we should expect more complex mechanical traps to appear, after which point the cycle will start anew. Be advised that she attacks with the spikes as she enters each phase. Disparities in reports suggest that she is feinting in some cases, feigning an inability to do so.”
“Good news,” Annex said, over our comm system. “She can’t affect what I’m affecting. Bad news is I wasn’t entirely submerged. I’m bleeding pretty badly.”
“We’ll get to you,” Grace promised.
I shut my eyes for a moment. Empty promise, I thought.
There was a distant sound of something massive crumbling. I now knew it was Tecton, tearing through the area. I’d be using bugs to direct him to trapped citizens. I was avoiding the terrain features, he was simply plowing his way through them, doing maximum damage.
The image veered as I approached an archway the Endbringer had created. I paused before entering, circumvented it by going over, avoiding the traps I’d noted with my smallest bugs.
I could see her. Bohu. She was a tower, spearing into the sky, gaunt and stretched thin to the point where her head was five times longer than it was wide. Her body widened as it reached towards the ground, reached into it, extending roots and melding into the landscape. Her narrow eyes were like beacons, cutting through a cloud cover that was virtually racing towards the horizon in the gale-force winds. Her hair, in tendrils as thick around as my arm, shifted only slightly, heavy as stone, despite everything. She dwarfed the other Endbringers in scale, one thousand three hundred feet tall, and her body extended into the city. I couldn’t even guess at the radius she controlled.
Beside her was her sister, Tohu, who would have been almost imperceptible if it weren’t for the glow around her. Tohu, with three faces. Legend’s white and blue mask, Eidolon’s glowing shroud, and Kazikli Bey’s red helmet, each twisted to be feminine, framed by the long hair that wove and wound together to form her body. It condensed into cords and ribbons, and the ribbons and cords, in turn, condensed into her chest and lower body, two torsos made with overlapping versions of the hairstuff, small breasted, with only one pair of legs at the lower half. The colors were extensions of the costumes she was copying, predominantly white here, but with streaks of crimson, green and sky blue highlighting the ridges and edges.
Her four hands were long-fingered, claw-tipped extremities in shapes that served as mockeries of the people she was mimicking. Two of Eidolon’s hands with the blue-green glow around them were holding a forcefield up to protect her sister, while a white-gloved one focused on using Legend’s lasers to target capes who thought flying up and out of the city was a good idea. Not that it was easy to fly in winds like this. Not the sorts of winds that an aerokinetic like Kazikli Bey could make, capable of slicing someone with air compressed into razorlike ribbons. A hand in a red gauntlet was gesturing, redirecting the wind to blow down, across, and in crosswise currents that formed brief-lived whirlwinds.
The me in the video made a small sound as she took the brunt of that cutting wind, hopped down from the arch, entering the city once more. It was just now starting her third phase, the pitfalls and deadfalls, eliminating cover, cleaning up rubble, and slowly, painfully crushing anyone who had been trapped in either of the previous two phases. If crushing wasn’t possible, she would apparently settle for suffocation.
I closed down the video. There wasn’t anything more to hear in the exchange between the Wards, and it wasn’t a good memory.
Another counter to Scion. All too often, he was late to arrive, and once Tohu had chosen three faces and Bohu had claimed the battlefield, well, the fight was more or less over.
“I could hear,” Tecton said. “You were watching one of the Endbringer videos.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Thoughts?”
“We’ve been through a lot,” I said. “I owe you a lot.”
“And we owe you in turn. We’re a team, Taylor. You have to recognize that. You know that. We’ve been together far, far longer than you were with the Undersiders.”
I sighed and scrolled down.
Bucharest, October 10th, 2012 // Tohu Bohu
Notes: First appearance. Loss. Tohu selects Legend, Eidolon, Kazikli Bey. Target/Consequence: see file Kazikli Bey.
Paris, December 19th, 2012 // Simurgh
Notes: Victory by Scion.
Target/Consequence: see file The Woman in Blue. See file United Capes.
Indiscriminate, February 5th, 2013 // Khonsu
Notes: Victory by Eidolon/The Guild. List of the twenty-nine targets here.
Los Angeles, May 17th, 2013 // Tohu Bohu
Notes: Victory by Eidolon/The Guild. Tohu selects Alexandria, Phir Sē, Lung. Target/Consequence: unknown.
We’d participated in more than half of those fights. My eyes fell on the clock in the top right hand corner of the screen.
8:04am, June 19th, 2013
“Listen,” Tecton said. “I’m not demanding anything here. I just need a straight answer, so I know what to tell the others. If you say you’re not going to be here, that’s—I’ll understand. Except not really, but I’ll…”
He trailed off.
“You’ll accept it,” I said.
“I’m going to lie and say yes,” Tecton answered me.
I looked at the list of recent Endbringer fights, flicking my finger on the screen’s edge to scroll up, then down.
“I’ll be there at two,” I told him.
“You will?” He almost sounded surprised.
“We’ve been through too much, and you’re right. I can’t throw it all away.”
“I’m glad.”
“See you in a couple of hours,” I said.
“See you, Taylor. Have a happy birthday.”
“Thank you,” I said, hanging up.<
br />
Eighteen, I thought. I stood and stretched, swaying a little as the craft changed course. A two-fingered swipe on the screen showed the craft’s course and our ETA. Another two-fingered swipe returned me to my desktop.
C/D: Endbringer
28:18:44:34
C/D: End of the World
—16:21:56:50
Sixteen days late. The only person more freaked out than me was Golem.
I’d revised the countdown clock to assume that Jack Slash would appear on the date he’d set with Golem. June fourth was the deadline he’d given, for Theo to find him, to kill him, or the madman would kill a thousand people in some spectacular fashion, ending with Aster and Theo himself.
No appearance, no mass murders.
June twelfth was the date the Slaughterhouse Nine had left Brockton Bay. The day that was supposed to start the two year countdown.
It wasn’t supposed to be precise, but watching the clock tick with each second beyond the supposed deadline, knowing that something could be happening in a place I wasn’t aware of, the mere thought made my heartbeat quicken, an ugly feeling rise in my gut.
Dinah had confirmed to the PRT that things were still in motion, that it was imminent, but the idea was swiftly losing traction.
I’d heard people joke about it. PRT employees who had likened Dinah to the evangelical preachers who promised an endtime, then scrabbled to make up excuses when the date in question passed.
My bugs could sense the insects within the city as the craft descended. Sand billowed in dramatic clouds the Dragonfly settled on the beach.
It wasn’t my ship, but the name was a joke, due to the degree Dragon had been sending me this way and that. Defiant was busy now, so it was mostly her doing the chaperoning, when the Protectorate couldn’t oblige.
The ramp finished descending, and I stepped down onto the beach, feeling the sand shift beneath the soft soles of my costumed feet. I could have flown or floated, but then I wouldn’t have felt like I was truly here.
I ascended a set of wooden stairs to rise from the beach to the street proper, joining the scattered residents who lived here. Men and women on their way to work, starting their day, children on their way to school, many in their Immaculata school uniforms.
I walked, taking it in. The smells, the feel, even the subtleties in pace and general atmosphere, they were familiar, comfortable.
Not good, but they were things I associated with home.
It was an unfamiliar area, but I had studied the satellite maps. I no longer wore my tracking device, but the PRT no doubt knew exactly where I was, for just that reason. If they couldn’t monitor the Dragonfly’s location, they would have found it on my computer.
I could see additions in the distance, the white tower that speared into the sky, the blocky, windowless structure that contained the scar. It wasn’t visible, but I knew I could make my way to the crater and see how they’d drawn up a border around it, done construction work underground to contain the contents and keep the water from eating away at the city infrastructure. I’d read up some on changes in Brockton Bay, had heard more from my dad in our regular visits.
Here, the area was marked with graffiti, always in the same variants, no two pieces alike. Devils, castles, angels, hearts. I suspected the arrangements and combinations meant something. The buildings here were new, quaint, the layout intuitive.
And in the midst of it, they’d wedged in space for an addition. It made for a break in the flow of the footpaths. It forced an abrupt turn, a hesitation as you tried to work out the way to your destination. Accord had drawn out the city plans, and the Undersiders had altered it to make room for this. For a marking.
It fit, somehow, the way it broke the rhythm, the way it didn’t really jibe.
The fact, I thought with a slight smile, that it irritated.
Two masks, resting against one another, one almost resting inside the other. One laughing, the other not frowning, but the expression blank. They were cast in bronze, set on a broad pedestal, four feet high.
I approached, my eyes falling on the objects that had been placed on the pedestal. Wedding rings, a weather-beaten gold that didn’t match the bronze. Twenty, thirty. I might have obtained an exact count, but I didn’t want to dirty it with my bugs.
I turned, looking around, and saw how the buildings surrounding the edifice were marked with graffiti. Castles and landscapes with blue sky above.
“I thought I’d see you first, Regent,” I said. “A kind of apology, for not coming sooner. For not being there at the funeral, if there was one.”
The empty eyeholes of the solemn mask stared down at me.
“I’ve thought about a lot of things in the time I’ve been gone. Framing stuff, stepping back to consider just how fucked up it was that I was spending time with you, condoning what you’d done. You took over small-time gang lords, I know. Took over Imp, even. So why did I let it happen?”
The wind blew my hair across my face. I noticed that there were people staring, looking at me from the other side of the street. Whatever. It didn’t matter anymore.
“Then I think about how you went out, and I think… you know, it doesn’t balance out. One selfless deed, after all the shit you did? No. But that’s your cross to bear, not mine. I don’t believe in an afterlife or anything like that, but, well, I guess that’s the mark you left. When we die, all that’s left are the memories, the place we take in people’s hearts.”
I reached out to touch one of the wedding rings. It was partially melted into the surface of the edifice. I imagined someone could strike it free with a hammer.
Not that I would do that.
“Sounds so corny when I say that, but it’s how I have to frame this, you know? You lived the life you did, with a lot of bad, a little bit of horrific, and some good, and now you’re gone, and people will remember different parts of that. And I think that would sound arrogant, except, well, we’re pretty similar on that score, aren’t we? It’s where we sort of had common ground, that I didn’t have with any of the others. We’ve been monstrous.”
I let my finger trace the edge of the wedding ring.
“I’ve hurt people for touching those.” The voice sounded just behind me, in my ear. I jumped, despite the promises to myself that I wouldn’t.
Then again, she wasn’t someone you could anticipate.
“Imp,” I said.
I turned around to look at her.
She’d been attractive in that dangerous too-much-for-her-age way before, and to judge by her body alone, she’d grown fully into it. She was statuesque, wearing the same costume I’d given her two years ago, when she’d been shorter. A quick glance suggested she’d cut off portions to adjust, wearing high boots and elbow length gloves to cover the gap, and wore a cowl to cover the gaps in the shoulders and neck. It might have looked terrible, but it fit. Her mask was the same as it had been, gray, noseless, long, disappearing into the folds of the cowl as the fabric sat around the lower half of her face, with only hints of teeth at the sides marking the mouth. The eyes were angled, with black lenses, curved horns arching over her straightened black hair.
“Tattletale said you’d be back today.”
“I figured she’d know,” I said.
“Was it worth it? Leaving?”
I hesitated. “Yes.”
I hesitated, I thought.
“I told the others. They’re on their way.”
“Okay,” I answered. Fast response.
No. Too fast. I reached out with bugs, and I sensed the crowd, the way they were standing.
Here and there, there were people who shouldn’t have been paying attention to the scene. A young girl inside one of the buildings with the graffiti-mural on the exterior, holding a baby. A boy was standing a little too far away to see, but he didn’t approach to get a better view.
There were a small handful of others.
I looked at the rings on the memorial. “Heartbreaker’s.”
“He co
llected them. I uncollected them.”
“I’d heard he died.”
Imp nodded slowly. “Said I would. I told you I’d kill his dad for him.”
An admission. I felt a kind of disappointment mingled with relief. Not a set of feelings I wanted to explore. I suspected the sense of relief would disappear under any kind of scrutiny.
“People keep prying them loose, but there’s usually someone nearby to keep an eye out and get a photo or description. I track them down and bring the rings back. Once every few months, anyways. Kind of a pain.”
“It’s how he would want to be remembered, I think,” I said.
“Yeah.”
No snark, no humor? I wondered how much of that had been a reflection of her friendship and almost-romance with Regent.
“And you recruited the kids,” I said. I used my bugs to track the bystanders, my eyes to note more who fit the criteria. Boys and girls, some narrow in physique, most with black curls, others with that pretty set of features that had marked Regent and Cherish. Some were fit on all counts, others mingled two of the qualities and skipped a third. Heartbreaker’s offspring, unmistakably.
“I recruited some. They needed a place to go, and it’s kind of nice, having them around,” Imp said. “They’re good enough at fending for themselves. One or two, you get the feeling they’re almost like him. In a good way.”
“I’m glad,” I replied. Glad on more counts than I’m willing to say.
Then, as I realized that any number of those kids might have taken after their father in the powers department, I was struck by the thought that they might know that, that they might report that relief I was experiencing back to their de-facto leader.
If that was the case, they would also report the way I felt ill at ease, just a little creeped out, as I eyed Imp’s followers.
Imp was eyeing me. I cocked my head a little, the best expression I could give without taking off my mask, hoping it conveyed curiosity.
“I like you better than her,” Imp said.