by wildbow
“What are your motives?” I asked. “Do you want to help her or hurt her?”
“Yes,” Satyr said.
“That’s not an answer. I thought you said there’s no time.”
“There isn’t,” he said.
“Satyr, I don’t know what’s going on, but you’ve been playing this game of tricks and subterfuge so long you’ve all forgotten how to walk a straight line.”
“Oh, I remember,” he said. “We remember.”
“So you’re just going to stand here, idly threatening us, until Scion attacks? That can’t be right. You’ve lost your mind. Something with your power, messing with your heads…”
“You’ve got it wrong. Powers from a bottle, they mess with your body. Subtle things, but stuff you notice. Heh, the last straight conversation I had with Pretender, he brought it up, joked…”
“Time,” I told him.
“Ah well. It’s you natural triggers who get a little bent in the head, here and there. Isn’t that right, Ms. Lindt?”
My heart dropped out of my chest. I closed my eyes.
“Yeah,” Rachel said, her voice quiet.
I clenched my teeth.
“That’s right,” she went on, a little louder.
“Shadow Stalker. You too, believe it or not. I’ve seen your record. Your attitude, it’s not wholly your own.”
“Bull.”
“I’ve worked with worse. I could give you direction.”
“Honestly? With this shit you’re pulling now? You sound fucking crazy.”
“Shadow Stalker and I are agreeing on this count,” I said. “Trust me when I said that’s a bad sign.”
“If we’re going to resolve this, it’ll have to be soon,” Satyr said.
“You keep doing that,” I told him. “Telling us how little time we have, then delaying. Forcing us into a corner?”
Another half-chuckle, wry.
“You’re not making any sense, Satyr,” I said.
He only offered another short laugh.
“You want us to fight you. To stop you.”
“Probably for the best,” he said.
“No, it’s not,” I said. “We need help, we can’t be distracted by—”
“Enough of this,” Lung growled the words.
“No—” I said, but I was too late.
Flames erupted around his claws.
It cast light on us, on our surroundings.
With the light, Floret could see my knife, off to one side. I hadn’t been planning to use it to attack, but I’d wanted it in hand before we descended. She slung one bud at it. Encased it in crystal. It hit the ground at the base of a cell, by a spotlight.
Leonid screamed, double volume, and it was an eerie, echoing scream that bounced through the area, each echo lower in pitch than the last.
Not that he needed it to reach that far. Each echo of the scream coincided with a fraction of him fading out of existence.
Simultaneously phasing those parts of him in behind our group.
Canary had started to sing, nervous, but Leonid faded in behind her. Two seconds to teleport.
Rachel raised her hands to her mouth to whistle. No sound came out.
I turned, opened my mouth to shout, but Leonid had muted us.
I pointed, instead, but Canary didn’t get my meaning.
Rachel couldn’t get her dog’s attention with snaps or whistles.
Leonid reached out with his claw, up for her throat—
And Rachel tackled him, gripping his wrists. Canary was entirely unawares, up until one of them kicked her ankle in their struggles.
Shadow Stalker and Lung engaged two of the remaining Vegas capes. Blowout stepped in the way, protecting Floret.
And through some unseen signal, some practiced maneuver, he knew to duck as she flung buds at the pair.
One unfolded in the air, tagging Shadow Stalker in her shadow state, and she crumpled.
The other hit Lung. Foot-long tendrils extended from his right pectoral to his right arm, binding to each.
Blowout hit the tethered Lung. Maybe he wouldn’t have been strong enough to affect Lung normally, but the audacity of it and our reactions to that went a long way in giving him a little extra kick.
Satyr forced another copy out in record time, as the other charged me.
I set my bugs on it. On her. My double. She didn’t have my powers.
She was strong. Tougher. She closed the distance to me with ease, with a runner’s strength.
So I moved the bugs to the original Satyr. That bare chest, the eyeholes in his helmet… I attacked Floret, and Leonid, and all of the other capes who had exposed skin.
Golem’s hand knocked her aside. Cuff charged the one Satyr had just created.
Even at this juncture, I knew it wasn’t an even fight. Satyr had outright admitted his team wasn’t a match for ours in a brawl.
Canary tentatively stepped on Leonid’s right hand. Rachel’s dogs got his legs. He screamed, and that sound wasn’t muted.
He began to phase out, reappearing by Satyr. He climbed to his feet.
We outnumbered them, we had better combat powers. The outcome wasn’t in doubt.
Which made Imp’s maneuver all the more insane.
She stepped out into the middle of the group and held the sphere high.
Rotated it, then rotated it back.
Sound resumed around us, as Leonid dismissed the silence effect.
“Don’t, don’t, don’t,” a voice was saying.
It was Sveta, inside the ball.
“Everyone stand up,” Imp said. “And if you fuck with me, I’m opening this thing.”
“Don’t, please don’t.”
“Why?” I asked, again, my eyes on Satyr. The real Satyr.
“I would have been content to wait. To procrastinate until we ran out of time. But you came.”
“Satyr…”
“It’s for love, in the end. Pettiest of all pursuits. Arrogance, greed, even revenge… they’re nobler, trust me. I’ve walked all those roads. But love? It twists all the other things. Makes you misstep, makes you irrational, makes you impatient, above all. We couldn’t have gone down there without getting revenge, without falling to our greed and arrogance. So I was willing to wait. To sit back and put it off, tell myself we didn’t have the firepower, didn’t have the numbers we needed to take on the group at the stairwell. Wait until it was too late.”
“You were willing to die?” Shadow Stalker asked. She sounded offended.
“Better than being the ones who pull the trigger, dash our last hopes,” Satyr said. “You can put down that sphere, Imp.”
Imp hesitated, then lowered the sphere. She locked it, with vents open so Sveta could speak.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“And you probably won’t. If you’re lucky. I’ve said it all out loud, so the lie isn’t worth it, now. You can go. We’ll stand by.”
“Your fucking head games. You’re going to stab us—”
“Weaver,” he said, and there was no pretense in his voice. No joking tone or trace of mockery. Talking straight. “Go. They’re almost through.”
“He is right, Skitter,” Lung growled the word. “I can hear him.”
Lung was looking the way we’d come.
Scion, here. On this floor. I thought I could see the golden light, but it might have been a spot in my vision from looking at Lung with his burning hands.
If we go, there won’t be any escape routes. No exits.
It was as insane as anything Satyr was doing. Everything rational said to go upstairs, to find our way to the doorway, hope that Scion was still half-blind, still holding back.
But I turned, running for the stairwell with the Case-fifty-threes, away from Scion.
I ran hard enough that I couldn’t spare the breath.
I spoke with my swarm.
“Go upstairs, if you want to go.”
Give them a way out.
I could hear th
e others behind me, at varying distances. I could sense Satyr’s group with my swarm. They held their ground as Scion approached.
I don’t understand.
The others were following.
“If you come, there’s no way out. This isn’t even a hail mary, it’s a hope that there’s maybe something we can do. A chance buried in a chance.”
We came face to face with the group that had been working their way through the steel. A mole-man, an ‘extreme deviation’ case that seemed to be made up of lasers, with her petrified body parts capping the ends.
And others, dead. Satyr’s clones littered the area, where they’d brutally fought and killed several of the digging capes. Where they’d died, they’d withered.
With Scion on our heels, we couldn’t afford the time to fight.
Lung, Shadow Stalker and Rachel tackled the ones who remained. A crossbow bolt delivered to the cranium of the laser-girl, dogs attacking the mole-man. Lung’s claws and flames to assist with both.
Without my asking, Cuff jumped into the hole. Imp followed.
One by one, we passed inside.
Golden light flared in the massive room we’d just left behind. No rumble, no devastation, nothing of the sort.
But I could guess what had happened.
Even if I didn’t understand it.
Golem was blocking off the path to us, while others made their way down. Lung, Canary, then Rachel and her dogs. Hands of concrete barred the way, and two larger hands extended from the column, fingers knitting together to form a fence.
It wouldn’t hold Scion for seconds, but it was something.
Three of us remained. Golem, getting ready to descend, me, watching the rear, and Shadow Stalker.
Our eyes met.
She bolted, disappearing through the wall.
I headed down, with Golem following right behind.
Venom 29.7
It wasn’t the most comfortable journey. I could handle uncomfortable. Uncomfortable was better than being upstairs and staring down the bastard that was exterminating humanity.
The opening of the tunnel had ridges, bumps and uneven edges that scraped past me with enough speed and force that I worried it would damage my costume. Probably intentional, giving traction to the ones who weren’t digging. But we passed that area and we hit smoother metal. Traction was harder to come by, the tunnel almost a winding waterslide.
I slid, as the others were doing, bracing my feet against the sides to slow my descent. The bugs I’d planted on my teammates let me track the turns and drops, angling and bracing myself as I ran into steeper drops, sharp turns and outright ten foot drops.
It reminded me of an anthill, in a way. Winding tunnels, irregular, exploratory, treacherous and impossible to navigate.
Cuff slid down and hit the end of the tunnel. A dead end, with a person there. She didn’t slow, instead using her power to hammer her way through, splitting the steel apart and driving herself and the individual at the end through the resulting hole.
The instant Cuff was through into the room on the other side of the tunnel, she and the individual she’d collided with were attacked. Lung was the next in line, followed by Canary, and they were ambushed as well. Lung was pinned against a wall, Canary liberally tossed back into a crowd that waited to disable her.
With Golem behind me, I didn’t want to stop and get my bearings, but I was plunging towards a situation I couldn’t fully grasp. Bugs I’d planted on my allies spread out, but it was too few to get a good picture of who and what was waiting for us.
I didn’t have Defiant’s knife. Floret had encased it in crystal. I could drag it here, maybe, or use relay bugs and wait for the crystal to expire before carting it my way, but that didn’t help me here. I called for my bugs to bring the knife anyways.
Rachel had paused before entry, getting herself sorted out with her pets, meaning she was only just arriving. Her reactions were fast, the commands to her canines quick and efficient.
They swelled as they put themselves between her and the waiting group, growing in size and manifesting their natural weapons. It was fast enough I suspected she’d been starting their growth as she approached the literal light at the end of the tunnel. Bastard’s changes were more fluid, faster, and more symmetrical than Huntress’s, but he was younger, just a little smaller.
A group advanced on the canines without fear. Two people to Huntress, two to Bastard. Young men, if my swarm-sense was correct. The animals weren’t as big as they could get, but they were about as large as a couch. Yet the men didn’t show any fear.
They moved fluidly as the animals lunged, snapping and biting. Confident movements. Two caught Huntress’s head, wrenched it to the side, while the others avoided snapping jaws to catch Bastard’s forelimbs, bodily hauling him up and then throwing him to the ground.
The two animals were brought down in as many seconds. Pinned, as inexplicably as Lung was pinned. Except this wasn’t sheer strength. They were strategic, targeting body parts, one of the young men leveraging his whole body between Bastard’s forelimbs, forcing them apart in a way that the dog’s musculature couldn’t combat.
It was like holding a crocodile’s mouth shut. Jaw strength aside, the crocodile wasn’t built to force it’s mouth open. The wolf wasn’t built to draw its legs together against its chest, but couldn’t get feet under it to stand without dislodging the offending attacker. The other had his head caught and twisted to one side.
Huntress, for her part, was caught by the head alone, which had been forced down. The woman who had Lung pressed up against the wall had one foot on the dog’s muzzle, and was holding it down.
They made it look so easy it was almost effortless. A fifth boy approached Rachel, now disarmed of her dogs.
I forced myself to slow down as we approached a flatter spot. Theo’s heavy metal boots hit my shoulders.
We were still sliding down, but slower. Only seconds before we were through.
“Ambush below,” I managed.
No response. Whoever had dug the tunnel had been digging down when they reached the edge of the room. I supposed they’d stopped when they reached a layer made of a different material, going up to check. Our entry was a straight drop into one end of the room, and I landed flat on my back, nearly colliding with Rachel.
A boy. A teenage boy, clean-shaven, if he even needed to shave, wearing a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up the forearms, his blond hair slicked back, and black suit pants. He backed away a step as Golem and I appeared.
His appearance, the way they’d fought… like Contessa?
Each of the boys were identical.
Lung and Huntress were pinned by Alexandria. Or by Pretender wearing Alexandria’s body, in a way. Lung was changing, the canines swelling in size, and yet she didn’t look worried. Bastard was still on the ground, one of the boys looking as unconcerned as one could look while holding down a half-ton animal.
Behind the boys, a small crowd had gathered.
Doctor Mother, a Manton with the Siberian… or a Manton clone with the Siberian, a claw pressed to Gully’s throat. There were three more case fifty threes, all burly, all bound with heads hanging. Rounding out the group was the Number Man, who had a pen pressed tight against Cuff’s jugular, her costume already torn open at the throat to expose flesh. His foot was propped up on a sphere.
I could see the resemblance between the Number Man and the boys in dress shirts. Twenty or more years of difference, and the Number Man was dressed in a full suit, which somehow made him more imposing, pocket protector or no, but they were too similar to be anything but related.
Was Cauldron cloning? Another contingency plan?
At the very back of the room, separate from the group, were two pale young men, laid out on desks that sat on either side of a reinforced door. A twenty-something guy with flat skin stretched over where his eyes should be, and a guy that was maybe ten years older, with enough bloody bandage around his head and face that I couldn’t
make out his features. Doormaker, I could assume, based on what I’d heard upstairs, along with the Clairvoyant the Doctor had mentioned in the past.
The boy in the suit closed the distance, and Rachel struck out. He batted her fist aside. She kicked, and he casually caught it and leveraged it to throw her off balance, tossing her to the ground.
Maybe a little harder than he had to.
I saw how she fell, saw her back arch, the way she held her arm as she rolled over. She didn’t cry out, didn’t make any sounds of pain, but the degree of pain was clear.
A lot harder than necessary. Had she broken something?
He turned his head towards Golem and I, and he smiled a little. A tight, narrow, mocking smile.
“I’m not your enemy,” I said.
“You came out fighting,” Alexandria-Pretender said. She looked down at Rachel. “Or she did.”
“Bastard was acting like there was fighting going on, ears, hackles up. You attacked us.”
The Number-Man clone kicked her. Casually cruel.
I tensed, but I didn’t act. The fall had knocked the wind out of me. Catching my breath, then—
“Disable her,” the Doctor said.
The young man closed in. Still smiling. Fuck me, was that smug smile irritating. I felt a moment’s sympathy for people who’d had to face down Tattletale. I sicced my swarm on him.
He moved through the incoming insects, eyes open and unblinking as he closed the distance to me. Only a few landed, and they landed in spots where they couldn’t target more vulnerable areas.
That he wasn’t closing his eyes was telling. I used my bugs to try and blind him, to keep him from seeing how I was moving, and I reached behind my back, going for the pepper spray.
He blocked my wrist with his palm, keeping me from aiming at him. Not just sight. Or his sight was more acute than I’d realized. Hearing? Something else?
Be unpredictable.
Pepper spray killed bugs. I didn’t aim for him, but for the pair of us, spraying into open air, into my swarm.
I’d hoped to make him back off, but he didn’t. He ducked low, simultaneously bringing one foot up, catching me in the chest. In the same movement, he rolled to one side, getting away from the mist of pepper spray that was still hanging in the air and simultaneously avoiding Golem’s reaching hand of concrete.