by wildbow
Thunder crashed as air rushed in to fill a space where even the oxygen molecules had been cut away.
Something to keep him still.
Another power was needed.
The power was a familiar one. One he’d used to curtail Leviathan’s movements in the Kyushu fight. He reached into another Earth and pulled the cliff faces into this world.
Scion blasted the cliff faces, but his golden light only affected the cliff on this earth. The moment he stopped, more emerged.
He stopped to strike again, this time obliterating the cliff faces on this Earth and the one in the other reality.
Eidolon struck out with the erasure power while Scion was still.
Thunder clapped.
Scion was gone.
No. Not gone. He had slipped into another Earth, avoiding the affected area as easily as someone might avoid a thrown stone by stepping to the right.
Glaistig Uaine approached Eidolon. She granted him the ability to fly.
He banished one power, felt another come back to him. He fed off two more of the injured capes.
He used the new power to shove himself and Glaistig Uaine into the next reality. He fixed his eyes on Scion, then lashed out, shoving part of the golden man into one reality. Scion reeled, then retaliated.
Glaistig Uaine created an obstruction, the tornado-mass of swirling blades and iron that emerged fast enough to absorb the beam’s impact.
Eidolon slashed with another reality push, and Scion disappeared.
Running.
Nearly as strong as I was in the beginning.
He nearly felt like himself.
* * *
May 1986, twenty-seven years ago
A strange place for this discussion.
The woman looked supremely at ease as she took a seat opposite David. The teenage girl who accompanied her was just as confident. Here and there in the little cafe, people gave them dirty looks.
The woman was black, dressed all in white, the girl wore a private school uniform and held a notebook and fountain pen.
They were tidy, prim. David felt underdressed, small.
“I admit to being a little confused,” David said.
“Understandable. You can call me Doctor.”
“No last name?”
“No need.”
He frowned.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“I’m kind of bothered by the lack of a last name,” he said. “If you’ll pardon my saying so.”
“Pardon granted,” the Doctor said, smiling slightly. “Very polite.”
David frowned a little at that. “Somehow, I get the feeling you know everything about me, and I don’t know anything about you.”
“At this stage, very likely. But I’d still like to talk as if I didn’t know all of the details. You applied to the army, and you were turned down.”
David chewed his lip, looking across the cafe. It wasn’t a big town. How many of his father’s friends or acquaintances were here, possibly listening in?
“You aren’t surprised, but… you were still clearly disappointed, crushed.”
“Don’t,” he said. He stared down at the table, his lips pressed into a firm line.
“They aren’t listening, not really. They’re busier looking at a black woman in a town where black women are rare,” the Doctor said.
“Sorry,” David said, suddenly feeling embarrassed.
“Your town isn’t under your control. What is under your control is what happened last week.”
David clenched his jaw. Lines stood out on his throat as he looked out the window.
“You tried to take your life. The army, it was something you wanted?”
“I just—I know I’m not in any condition to fight, to do drills or any of that. But there’s other stuff I can do. Desk jobs.”
She nodded. “I can offer you better than a desk job.”
“Part of me thinks you stole a look at my records,” he said. “And now you’re here to make fun of me.”
“I don’t intend to make jokes at your expense, David. What does the other part of you think, if not that I’m an unscrupulous medical doctor with a bad sense of humor?”
“That if you told me your name, it’d be something sinister. Fire and brimstone. This sounds an awful lot like a deal with the devil.”
“I suppose it does. I’m only mortal, I confess.”
David frowned.
“I can’t make promises, David. Infernal, divine or otherwise. I can’t tell you that you’d be joining the army. Just the opposite. It would raise a number of questions.”
He glanced out the window again. He felt so ashamed of himself he couldn’t meet her eyes. “The army wasn’t the thing.”
“No?”
“I wanted to go do something of my own will. Take charge, take action. Stop living a life where everything is decided for me.”
“By joining the army?” the Doctor raised an eyebrow.
He laughed a little. “I know. Stupid.”
“You wanted independence. I can’t promise it. In fact, if this deal with the devil goes through, it might be something I demand from you. Your assistance, your aid. I need a soldier.”
He took his time thinking about it.
“I’ve thought it over, I get that there would be obligations. Yes. Please. I’ll do it.”
“I did outline the risks? The chances are slim at best.”
“Yes. Well, I obviously don’t put much stake in my own life, do I?”
“Apparently not. Good, come,” she said. “We’ll do this now.”
He nodded.
His hands were stiff to move as he brought them to his sides and unlocked the wheelchair’s wheels. The scars on his wrists were only part of it. The nerve damage from the seizures he’d had several times a day since birth were the rest.
He avoided the eyes of the people around him as the Doctor took hold of the wheelchair’s handles, guiding him to his destination.
* * *
June 24th, 2013, now
He was catching up. Scion continued to run.
A world without air. He held his breath.
A world of magma and smoke. Glaistig Uaine provided the protective shield.
More and more remote Earths, less habitable, less familiar. Earth Bet was a long, long way behind them.
A glimpse here, of Scion with his back turned. A glimpse of Scion, hand raised to attack.
Eidolon counterattacked with a distortion in space, while Glaistig Uaine provided a defense, moving them a distance away.
“Almost,” he said.
“Almost,” she said.
He remembered Weaver’s warning. He couldn’t trust this girl.
But he had to.
Every step of the way, his life had been decided for him. He’d been the disabled kid, carted everywhere by his mother and father, barely able to wipe his own ass. Careers denied him. Superheroics chosen for him. Then predestined events, the dissolution of his career in the triumvirate, the looming end of the world.
This was the closest he’d ever felt to being free, but still, there were obligations. He had a mission, he knew what to do.
Another attack. Glaistig Uaine coordinated with him on this one. Another attack, rending Scion. An attack that would have killed an ordinary man.
He could sense a degree of distress. Of concern. Not as dramatic as the disgust he’d felt from Scion before, but noticeable.
If Glaistig Uaine was going to betray him, it would be now.
“Are you going to stab me in the back, Faerie Queen?”
“Every time—” Glaistig Uaine spoke, stopping as they stepped into a lush Earth, “he uses his power, it costs him time.”
“Time.”
“He experiments, he plays, but he doesn’t yet abandon hope. I don’t abandon hope. The cycle could yet complete, by luck alone. He needs to find his reflection in the mirror. He lost his, like Peter lost his shadow, but another could appear.”
&nbs
p; “This doesn’t answer my question.”
“You are so blind, High Priest. Deaf. He will not let himself run out of time. If he runs out, then he will stop playing, stop experimenting, and simply wait, bide his time in the hopes that another will come to act as his reflection.”
“That’s your goal?”
“It is.”
I believe you.
He redoubled his efforts, no longer worried about defending against a possible attack from just to his right. They passed from world to world as quickly as he could make portals between them. They drew closer… closer still.
And came face to face with Scion, mere inches in front of them.
He’d stopped, turned around.
Glaistig Uaine distanced herself from Eidolon, until she was to Scion’s left. Her body was tense, ready for an attack. Eidolon raised his hand, ready to attack.
Had Scion decided on a tactic that would cost him less time than he was losing by taking Eidolon’s repeated attacks?
He had.
Scion spoke for the second time.
Four words, barely audible.
It took time to sink in.
Eidolon let his hand drop to his side.
He turned the sounds around in his head, trying to convince himself of a different configuration, convince himself he had heard wrong.
But he hadn’t. It dawned on Eidolon. He has Contessa’s power.
How many years did it cost Scion to use it?
Not enough, he was convinced. Scion had defeated him.
Scion raised a hand, and Eidolon didn’t move. Glaistig Uaine was fleeing.
Scion fired the lethal blast.
Interlude 27b
“You needed worthy opponents.”
Cockroaches 28.1
“…Man, oh man, did you ever fuck the dog, here.”
Blaming me?
I’d failed. I’d taken on the world ending threat and come up short. Why had I even expected to be able to do anything? Arrogant.
But someone else responded to the accusation. “We did no such thing, Tattletale. Working with the knowledge we had, we put our best foot forward, as did the others. The fault does not lie with us.”
It was the Doctor, uncharacteristically irritated.
Well, Tattletale was good at getting a rise out of people.
“Do I need to repeat myself, Doctor? You wanted to take charge, you proposed this scenario? Great. Except you didn’t put your best foot forward. It fell apart as a result, and now we’re in a worse place than ever. The dog is fucked. Thoroughly. All available holes.”
“You don’t need to repeat yourself,” the Doctor said. “Please. Your meaning is clear.”
“Can you stop talking about fucking the dogs, now?” another young woman said. Rachel, I suspected.
“Let’s be honest, Doctor. This was a critical moment, maybe the most critical, and you held back your best cards. You could have evacuated most of the people there, and you didn’t.”
“If we had tried and failed, we might have lost the ability to easily move people between worlds. Do us both a favor, Tattletale, and stop pretending you’re a brilliant individual. You have access to a lot of information, but that doesn’t equate intelligence. An intelligent individual would recognize that they don’t have all of the facts.”
Oh hell.
I sat up, ready to intervene, and I felt something off. Enough that I gave up on stepping between them. I opened my eyes, but nobody was in my line of sight. My hand and lower body were intact.
“We’re sinking down to base insults? Trust me, I’m way better than you at that, Dr. Mengele. I get that you’re upset over losing Eidolon, but let’s not cross a line and become enemies. We can’t afford to add more conflict to the pile.”
Losing Eidolon?
Oh hell.
“I was merely stating the facts: namely that you don’t have all of the facts.” The Doctor sighed audibly. “I’d hoped you had something of import to share when you called me in.”
My body was intact, but it didn’t feel right. I experimented, tapping the thumb of my ‘new’ hand against the individual fingertips, then repeated the process, mimicking the movements with my other hand.
“You’ve already shown you have one group of soldiers you’ve been holding in reserve. I know you’ve got more. Weapons, soldiers, tools, tricks. You asked some of the best and brightest of humanity to go fight, as phase A in a series of plans you have in mind. You barely care. So you move on to plan B. That didn’t fucking work. So are you going to throw away more lives, to maybe stop Scion, now? On to plan C?”
I clenched my hands, then stretched my entire body. The sensations matched but it still felt out of sync in a way I couldn’t place.
The Doctor responded, her tone overly patient, “If we’d gone all out, an upset of some sort might have spoiled all plans at once. Then where would we stand?”
“If we’d gone all out from the outset, we might have stopped him.”
“Then answer this, Tattletale, are you telling me you didn’t have any idea about our plan B, plan C and all of the other contingencies, or are you telling me you knew, but you said nothing?”
There was a pause, Tattletale declining to respond.
I glanced around the room. It was dark, and there were curtains at the far end, drawn shut. There were four beds, but two of the four were empty.
A girl with banana yellow hair and feathers sticking out of her scalp sat on the bed that was to my left and across from me. She was sitting on the bed, over top of the covers, with only a folded blanket bunched around her feet. She wore a sky blue shirt, bright orange shorts and lime green eye shadow. Her body language wasn’t a hundredth as vibrant as her clothing.
She glanced at me, and I looked away, not wanting to look like I was staring.
I opened my mouth to speak to the yellow-haired girl, but Tattletale started speaking, and I shut my mouth to listen. I could tell she was in the next room, by the volume and direction of her voice. “…I had an idea, but I’d expected you to play your cards if worst came to worst.”
“A good lawyer won’t ask a question on the stand if they don’t already know the answer they’re going to receive. You should take that under advisement. With the information you have available, you shouldn’t ever make assumptions. The only person you can blame when you’re proven wrong is yourself.”
“I feel pretty confident I can blame you on this one, Doctor.”
“Do what you need to in order to make peace with yourself. At this juncture, it might be all you can do. Buying time and making peace with things at the end. Thank you for wasting my time. Door.”
Tattletale didn’t respond. I could only assume Doctor Mother had left. I reached out for my swarm, and I found for the first time in months that there weren’t many nearby. How long had it been since I slept and didn’t have an emergency swarm nearby for self-defense and investigation? Since I didn’t leave hundreds of thousands of spiders spinning threads of silk?
That wasn’t to say there weren’t any. There were bugs throughout the building, but they hadn’t moved until I woke up. Spiders in corners, bugs in the walls. A hospital, newly built judging by the freshness of the wood. I could smell it.
There were tents just outside, set on grass that was just starting to die.
I hadn’t even registered it consciously when I visited New Brockton Bay, but the grass had been fresh, alive.
It had been days.
I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, sliding them out from under the sheets. I realized I was wearing only the hospital gown.
My costume—
—Would be destroyed, I realized, belatedly. The lower half, anyways. No reason to expect the silk would last if the flesh and bone had been obliterated.
Which raised really strange thoughts on the particulars of having my legs rebuilt. I’d spent years running as a matter of routine. A part of me had been proud of the way I’d honed my body, built up my stamina.
/> Had they rebuilt my legs with that same strength and stamina? With the muscles reflecting the regular exercise? If they had, was it really my strength? If they hadn’t, could I deal with it? Work my way back to where I had been?
If humanity even survived that long.
I needed to go to the bathroom, which made me think of other things. Had my private parts been reconstituted? Had Panacea paid any particular attention to the redesign or accuracy of the architecture or plumbing?
Or had it been Bonesaw that fixed me up?
My skin crawled at the thought, heebie-jeebies from head to toe. No bugs involved. The sensation only served to remind me of how alien the new body parts felt, reinforcing the creeped out feeling.
Someone found a powerful regeneration-granter and healed me. Bonesaw and Panacea had nothing to do with it, I told myself. Nothing to do with it.
The first bugs in the hospital were starting to make their way to me. They crawled up the sides of the bed and up onto the hospital gown I wore. I eased my feet down to the cold tile and steadied myself against the bed.
My body was okay, but I felt out of it in the same way I might have if I’d slept in too long.
Not that I’d had that luxury in some time.
Maybe it was odd, to think about things in this sense, to be concerned about my swarm or my body or the fact that I was tired. Part of that might have been an unconscious form of procrastination.
“Hey,” the yellow-haired girl spoke. She was quiet, but the utterance carried across the room.
I’d been staring down at the foot of the bed. I looked up at her.
“You okay? If there’s pain, or if you don’t feel okay to move, I can hit the button to call someone.”
Her voice was attention grabbing, the pitch and tone shifting very deliberately. Done badly, it might have sounded like she was over-enunciating. She leveraged it well enough that it didn’t sound that way, nor did it detract from the sympathy she was expressing.
I was a little caught off guard by it. Left wordless, I shook my head.
“Things are bad, but I guess you heard that much,” she said.
“Yeah,” I managed.
“I’d explain, but your friends would probably be kinder.”