by wildbow
One boy stopped where he was, stopping beside Teacher, a dull and unfocused look in his eyes.
Teacher turned his attention to Contessa, “Whatever happens in the next few hours, we need to be there to pick up the pieces. That was a factor in Cauldron’s plan, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t have much of a role,” Contessa said. “I can’t do anything when Scion’s on the table.”
“To the contrary,” Teacher said. “We very much need your help, or we might.”
She narrowed her eyes. “With?”
“Saving us from ourselves,” he said. “Case in point, we’ve got a crisis that involves one little lady I think you’re familiar with.”
He held up his phone. A picture was displayed.
It took her a moment to recognize the person in the picture, and not because it was an unfamiliar face.
“Weaver?” she asked.
Speck 30.1
I didn’t trigger.
Kind of silly, really, that I’d expected to see something. But this was the opposite. A trigger event worked on the power end of things. This was altering me.
I felt the range of my power halve, as though a guillotine blade had dropped down, cutting it off.
My control began to slip. It wasn’t so severe as the effect on my range, but I could feel it degrading. I was aware of my bugs in a general sense, and they were moving in reaction to my subconscious thoughts, but the end result wasn’t precise. I moved them, but getting them to stop had a fraction of a second’s delay.
Slipping out of my control. Slipping…
Tattletale was nearby, but I was trying not to focus on her. I had to focus on the swarm, I needed to be perfectly aware of what was going on.
An echo of an event from years ago, only this time, Tattletale was one of the ones in the dark. I felt a pang of guilt,and I was surprised at how intense it was. Guilt, shame, a kind of intense loneliness…
This way lies madness, I thought. But the thought itself had an oddly disconnected quality to it. The emotions persisted, and I was aware of the memories. Walking away from the people I cared about, feeling horrible about it, knowing it was the best thing in the end.
Too many would be calling it an error in judgement, stupidity. Why go to such an extreme, especially when there was no guarantee it was the right path in the end?
But it had allowed me to reunite with my father, in a fashion.
I could remember jail too, the way the guilt and shame had manifested as a maddening restlessness, worse than the confinement. The fears that had haunted me, dealing with the other prisoners, the kind of peace that had come with surrendering to my then-current circumstances…
Would this decision lead to something in the same vein? Would I be confined, following a monumental decision that was so selfish and selfless at the same time?
I was altering something biological and mental. I felt my heart skip a beat as my mind momentarily touched on what that kind of confinement might entail.
I was hyperaware of my own body, every movement, the flow of blood in my veins. I was focused on the beating of my heart and my breathing, both picking up speed with every moment.
The sky behind me was bright blue, almost taunting me. Blue was the color I wore when I became a hero. A failure. It made for long shadows, extending down the length of the cave in the direction of the others, in the direction of Doormaker’s portal to Earth Gimel.
No, focus on the swarm.
My range was dwindling with every passing second, and so was my control.
That trace of fear I’d experienced swelled as I realized just how much I wanted that control. I needed to be able to use my mind, to put things into motion when I had an idea.
I need control, I thought.
I tried to open my mouth to tell Panacea, and I couldn’t. I’d pushed my focus out towards my swarm, and I couldn’t reel it back in to my body.
I was still aware of my body, but it felt piecemeal, now. My fist was shaking, I had my head bowed, my teeth clenched so hard against one another it hurt. My heart was pounding, my breath coming out in inconsistent huffs through my nose, pushing just a bit of mucus free. My eyes were wet with tears, but I hadn’t blinked, causing them to build up on the surface of my eyeballs.
All of these things were normal, but I didn’t feel like they were all intuitive parts of a whole. My concept of my body as a connected thing had shattered, the ties broken.
If this continued, I’d be on autopilot from here on out, if I could even put the individual components together to walk.
I need control, I thought.
A moment passed, and I could feel Panacea working to give me that control, changing what she was focusing on. I felt the swarm moving more in sync with what I was thinking and wanting. But this… I could sense what was happening, feel my range plummeting yet again, the guillotine coming down. My range had been cut down further.
Take an inch in one department, lose several inches in another. Lose a whole foot.
Everything was piecemeal now, slipping away.
If this continued, I’d have nothing left. A net loss operation.
Stop, Panacea, I thought. Stop, stop, stop, stop…
My swarm attacked her, and it wasn’t because of any conscious command on my part. The attack was crude, more the swarming behavior of wasps drunk on attack pheromones than the calculated attack I was used to employing.
She stopped, pulling back and falling backwards in a clumsy way.
“Shit, shit, shit, fuck,” a young woman’s voice, from a distance away. Not Panacea.
Tattletale.
I raised my head, and Tattletale startled a little. Why had she startled? The way I’d moved?
“What did you do, Taylor?” Tattletale asked.
What did I do? I wanted the answer to that question, myself.
I looked at Amy, realizing the bugs were still approaching her. I pulled the swarm away, and I felt how hard it was to move them.
I was left with the ruins of my power. My range was maybe a third of what it might otherwise be, the control rough-edged at best. There were bugs in my swarm that I couldn’t control, too small.
There were too many things to concentrate on. The swarm, the nuances of my power, my state of near-panic, and the fact that I no longer felt like a complete, connected human being. The other stuff, it wasn’t that it wasn’t important, but it was so secondary.
Someone large, with flames swirling around his hands, stalking towards me… didn’t matter. My power—was my inability to get a complete picture due to a loss of my multitasking ability?
It was Lung who was approaching, Lung who stopped a short distance away, his breathing hot, muscles tensed, flames rolling over his clawed hands and forearms.
He stared at me, his eyes a molten orange-red behind his mask, his breath hot enough it shimmered in the air. Waiting to see if I was a danger?
“Taylor…” Tattletale said, as if from very far away.
But she didn’t say anything else. She stared for long seconds, and then she paced, walking the perimeter, as if she could get different perspectives on me from the edges of the room. Bonesaw, a little distance away, was half-crouched, tensed, between me, Doormaker and the Clairvoyant. She looked less like a child and more like a wild animal. Reverting to habit, maybe, only without the veneer of the innocent, cutesy, perky child this time.
The stillness of it all was eerie, not helping the growing sense of panic I was experiencing. Everyone’s eyes were on me, and I felt like I might be having a panic attack. I couldn’t regulate my breathing because focusing on that meant my body was getting tenser, my one fist clenched so hard it hurt. Paying attention to my hand meant my breathing started to spiral out of control again. All the while, my heart was pounding. Nothing I could do to fix that.
I closed my eyes, in an effort to shut out the external stimuli, and I felt the moisture running down to the point where my lenses met my cheekbones, settling there. I raised my head to look
at the cave roof.
As if that was some kind of cue, Bonesaw dashed through the doorway.
Why was I crying? It didn’t fit. I was scared, my hand was shaking and I couldn’t be sure how much was fear and how much was because of what Panacea had done. I was angry, inexplicably, frustrated, and I couldn’t shake the phantom memories of being in jail.
Trapped in an uncooperative body? No. The emotions and the thoughts didn’t match with that. Why was I thinking about it, all of a sudden?
I felt almost nauseous, now, on top of the sense of panic and the conflicting, nonsensical emotions I was experiencing. Or because of them, maybe. I felt myself tip over as if I were physically reeling from it all. When my leg moved to catch me, it wasn’t because I gave it the order. It wasn’t a reflexive response either. A third party.
Passenger, I thought. I guess we’re going to have to learn to work together here.
My breathing eased a notch. I had no way of telling if it was the passenger reacting or if it was my own reaction to the realization that the passenger was there.
“Weaver?” A girl’s voice.
I wasn’t sure I trusted my control over my bugs to get a good sense of where she was or what she was doing. I turned my head to see Canary standing by the portal.
“Don’t,” Tattletale said. “Don’t bother her. Leave her alone for long enough that she can get her bearings. Wait.”
“What happened, Weaver?” Canary asked, ignoring Tattletale.
Someone answer that question for me, I thought.
Tattletale? No, she was silent.
Bonesaw was gone.
Canary wouldn’t know.
Passenger? I thought. Any clues?
It was easier to talk to my passenger than it was to speak up and answer the question. Speaking up meant voicing everything that was wrong, my confusion, the fears, the worries, the fact that my body, my mind and my emotions all felt entirely unhinged. Speaking meant trying to talk around the growing lump in my throat.
“You never learned to ask for help when you needed it,” Tattletale said. Her voice was almost accusatory. “I mean, you ask when you approach other groups, and it’s like you’re holding a gun to their heads as you ask, or you ask at a time when it’s hard for them to say no, because all hell’s about to break loose.”
I glanced down at Panacea. She wasn’t moving, aside from rocking a bit back and forth as she breathed, her head slumped, eyes on the ground.
Was it me? Something grotesque? Horrible? Had I changed?
No. I had taken stock of myself, I’d seen myself, and I was still the same, as far as I could tell. Two arms, two legs, two eyes, a working nose, ears and mouth. One missing hand, but that was to be expected.
“Yeah, you asked Panacea. You asked me to play along and arrange stuff, when you went to go turn yourself in. Your handling of the school thing… well, I don’t want to get into a pattern and start cutting too deep. Let’s just say you make a decision by yourself, and then you use others to get help carrying it out. That’s not really you asking for help, is it?”
I didn’t need this, not now. But I looked up, meeting Tattletale’s eyes. She was standing behind Lung, now. He was changing. Was he biding his time?
“While I’m saying all this, kiddo, you gotta know I love you. I adore you, warts and all. You saved me, as much as I like to think I saved you. All this stuff I’m bitching about, it’s the same stuff that got us through some pretty hairy shit, and I love you for it as much as I groan about it. You’re brilliant and you’re reckless and you care too much about people in general when I really wish you’d leave things well enough alone and be selfish. But this?”
This?
“Shit,” Tattletale said. “You gotta forgive me, just this once. Because seeing this and knowing what you pulled hurts enough that I gotta say this. This makes me feel really sorry for your dad, because I’m starting to get a sense of what you put him through.”
She might as well have slapped me full-force. Worse, I deserved it.
So this is what it’s like to be on the opposite end of a Tattletale attack.
“There,” she said. She smiled a little, but it wasn’t a grin, exactly. If it was an attempt at being reassuring, it wasn’t something she had a lot of practice in. “I’ve said what I needed to say. I do have your back, here. Now we need to figure out how we’re going to fix this.”
Which I was okay with, except I wasn’t sure what this was.
“This isn’t easily reversed,” Bonesaw said.
She had returned, and she’d brought others.
Marquis, and two of Marquis’ lieutenants. They’d been delivering wounded up until a bit ago, but their hands were empty now. Marquis was a little dusty, but still elegant and elaborately dressed without being feminine, his hair tied back into a ponytail. He was accompanied by the hyper-neat guy and the guy with arms black from fingertip to elbow. All three looked like they were in full on business mode.
“I’m open to trying,” Tattletale said.
Marquis surveyed the situation with a cool gaze.
“I’m not hearing a resounding yes here,” Tattletale said.
Marquis strode forwards.
“Careful!” Tattletale called out.
I might have dodged if I’d had full control over my own body. I might have dodged if I’d been a little more focused. Hell, I probably would’ve dodged if it wasn’t for the realization that Tattletale was warning Marquis instead of warning me.
I thought she had my back, I thought, as Marquis’ shaft of bone caught me dead center in the chest. I couldn’t have dodged if I’d had full control over my body and my flight suit. It hit me in the sternum, broad and flat, and shoved me back and away.
The bone changed as it pushed me, splaying out in two branches. The backwards momentum made it impossible to get my feet under me, which meant I hit the ground, rump first, then a heavy hit with the hard shell of the flight pack, and finally a crack of my skull against the hard stone floor of the cave.
I came to a stop, and was just beginning to get my bearings when Marquis continued extending the pole. I was shoved further back until my back was against a stone, five feet from the cave mouth, five and a half feet away from the sheer rock ledge above a sheer drop I couldn’t measure with my bugs. The two branches of bone sat on either side of my neck, like the arms of a dowsing rod, pinning me in place.
The skin of his other hand had ripped and torn as the bones of a massive skeletal hand had erupted from his wrist. Judging by its position around Lung and Panacea, he’d apparently used the hand to push or slide them back away from me.
“Oh god,” Panacea was saying, “Oh shit, oh god.”
A sudden display of emotion, as confusing to me as everything else here.
And here they were, Marquis, his men, Lung, Panacea, Canary, Tattletale and the portal duo from Cauldron, staring me down.
“Sixteen feet,” Tattletale said, her voice quiet. “Fifteen point nine-eight feet, to be exact, but we can ballpark it.”
Marquis nodded. “Parahuman abilities wax and wane depending on one’s mental state. Given how volatile she may be…”
“It’s not going to change,” Panacea said, not making eye contact with anyone. She was staring at the backs of her hands, which were flat against the cave floor, or staring at the tattoos that covered them. “I felt how it changed… Not connected to her emotions or those parts of her brain. Not anymore.”
“I see. Good to know, thank you,” Marquis said. He approached three paces, and the bone shaft that extended between his arm and the branches that pinned my neck shrunk a corresponding amount.
He was keeping a distance, a good twenty or twenty five feet away from me.
Why did Tattletale say sixteen feet?
“What are you guys talking about?” Canary asked.
“I would have burned her,” Lung growled the words, ignoring her. “But I thought you would be upset if I burned Amelia in the process.”
&nbs
p; “Quite right,” Marquis said. He didn’t take his eyes off me.
“Oh god,” Panacea was saying, her hands moving to her head, her fingers in her hair, inadvertently pulling it from the ponytail. “Oh fuck me, oh god.”
“Hush,” Marquis said. He laid a hand on her shoulder.
“Well, this is a step forward for you, Ames,” Tattletale commented.
“Don’t,” Panacea hissed the word. “Don’t you fucking dare.”
“…This time you got consent before you screwed someone up beyond your ability to fix it.”
“I’ll fucking kill you,” Panacea snarled.
There was a distant rumble, intense enough it could be both heard and felt through the doorway that Doormaker had open between us and Earth Gimel. The fight was ongoing, and it sounded like maybe they were leading Scion away from the settlement.
My friends were out there. Rachel, Aisha. Here I was, doing nothing.
My hand slid on the stone beneath me as my body tried to push itself to a standing position, only to meet the ‘v’ of bone at my neck. Why had I done that? I hadn’t actually made the decision.
Passenger? I thought.
Was it making decisions with my body, too?
Not a question I could answer definitively. I turned my mind to a question I could focus on.
Sixteen feet.
I saw how the others were spreading out, forming a line behind Marquis, their attention on me. I saw the length of the column of bone.
It belatedly clicked. Sixteen feet was the distance they needed to keep from me.
“I’d like to say I’m sorry for being a little rough,” Marquis said. “I was in a hurry, trying to get my daughter to safety.”
“Aahheuuhhhmmm.”
It took me long seconds to wrap my head around the fact that the sound had come out of my mouth. Not the right syllables, not even something that sounded like words. My hand flew to my mouth. My fingertips dug through the thick spidersilk fabric for some purchase on my lips, as if I could somehow manually get them to start working again. Even the movement of my hand was clumsy.