by wildbow
Intense? Focused? Determined?
Fatalistic? More crazy than less?
I held her gaze.
Again, I tapped the phone against the computer screen.
It chirped. The data had been loaded onto it.
“If it was Skitter that asked me, I would have said no,” Dragon said.
I nodded.
“If I was convinced it was Weaver in there more than anything else, I’d feel a lot better about this. Tell me, am I going to regret giving you this?” she asked.
I couldn’t answer. Not even with a nod or a shake of the head. I touched the screen again, going back a bit. Region… Chinese Union-Imperial.
C.U.I.
She knew what I was looking at. “I’m thinking of how we brought the Endbringers in, bullying people into helping, or at least getting them to stop hurting. Is this going to be a repeat? Strongarming them? Using your power?”
I shook my head.
My phone chirped again.
Others. More targets. The Birdcage.
Another chirp.
The rest I’d find on my own, provided all went according to plan.
I turned to the teleporter, then bowed low. It wasn’t because of her culture—she looked European—it was because a bow would have to serve as an apology, as much as a salute would have to serve as acknowledgement and thanks.
I met Dragon’s eyes.
“I wish you could explain,” she said.
I’m glad I can’t, I thought. I turned to leave.
Glaistig Uaine was one hurdle I’d have to cross. Dragon was another.
If everything went to plan, they were the biggest threats to me. Scion excepted, of course.
I left the teleporter behind, making my way outside. I turned on the flight pack.
My bugs sensed the teleporter making her exit, drawing a circle around herself and then promptly disappearing. The Pendragon took off a moment later.
I approached my target. The Simurgh was flying over a set of hills that would have been the Towers district of Brockton Bay, had we been on Earth Bet. She was building something.
The fighting was ongoing, with Leviathan more hurt than alive. Capes were fighting to get to safety rather than trying to hurt Scion.
Scion hit Leviathan, and the last buildings in the settlement toppled.
I turned away. I wasn’t one for prayer, but I wasn’t really one for hope, either.
At the same time, though, everything hinged on their ability to hold out. Scion might leave soon, moving on to another target, but I wasn’t so sure these guys would be able to hold out against one more attack.
I passed beside the Simurgh as I flew. Checking.
No control.
I plummeted.
The Simurgh, for the time being, came part and parcel with Tattletale. When she wasn’t fighting, she was a distance away from my teammate and friend.
I touched ground, then flew through the doorway at an upward angle, moving over the defensive line Marquis had set at the doorway.
I found myself back in Tattletale’s company. Marquis and Lung were close, but not so close they were in my range. Panacea and Bonesaw, for their parts, were tending to the wounded. The two girls froze as they fell inside my range.
Too many patients, on top of Panacea and Bonesaw.
Marquis and Tattletale froze as well, but it wasn’t the same kind of freezing. It was tension.
“No,” Marquis said.
I ignored him.
“My daughter—”
Panacea stood up. Bonesaw followed soon after. They marched in Marquis’ direction.
They passed out of my range. Marquis draped an arm around his daughter’s shoulders, hugging her closer. Bonesaw wheeled on me, and there was a fury in her eyes.
It left only the wounded in my vicinity, along with a handful of others. Members of the backline, the infrastructure elements in Gimel.
“Taylor—” Tattletale said.
I ignored her too.
“I’m sort of getting what you’re doing. I don’t get why, but I think I get what you’re about to do. Don’t.”
I closed my eyes, concentrating. I needed to figure this out before I made any moves, or I’d be putting myself in danger. Problem was… there was so much.
“Taylor, if you go ahead with this, and people start to catch on, you become public enemy number two.”
“Catch on?” Marquis asked.
Tattletale didn’t answer him.
I was pretty sure I had it.
With my power, I seized control of Doormaker and the Clairvoyant. The pair stood, holding hands.
A heartbeat later, a cage of bone erupted from the ground. Bindings wound around my legs.
He laid a trap under the surface of the ground, I thought.
Some of the more mobile injured were backing away from me and my two hostages. The remainder were still in my range.
Bone coffins encased each of them, sealing them to the ground, out of sight.
I paused, doing my best to get a sense of them. I could get the gist of their abilities, focus to try and piece together the details. There were a few capes who could have broken free, a few who were probably capable of slipping out one way or another.
But I didn’t need to go that far.
I exerted Doormaker’s power, and he opened a portal behind Marquis. The other side of that portal was just behind me.
Memories hit me. Being chained to the interrogation chamber, opposite Director Tagg.
Tempered confidence, even now?
The memories were distorted, moving just a little too quickly towards the end of that particular scenario. Except I was looking an awful lot like the person on the receiving end of the abrupt, painful and unexpected murdering.
Marquis’ lieutenants approached. Cinderhands, Spruce, one other I couldn’t name, in dark clothes and chains. Lung was circling around, getting ready to fling a fireball.
I used Marquis’ power to block their paths with spiked barriers of bone. When Lung, Spruce and Cinderhands all tore through the barriers, with claw, some sort of disintegration power and flame, respectively, I used Doormaker’s power again. This time, the portals I opened were only about a foot by a foot across. Four at once.
“Taylor,” Tattletale said. “You’re putting me in a pretty shitty spot, here.”
I checked my phone, tabbing through the pages that had been loaded onto it. There was a blip marking Teacher’s location.
More were gathering around me. I made more doors. One or two dodged out of the way. I managed to catch them, anyways.
“I’m not getting enough details here to paint a picture. I trust the hell out of you, but I’m not sure this is you, Taylor.”
I pocketed my phone, then reached into my belt. I hesitated for an instant, then pressed my hand to my chest for long seconds. I knew I didn’t have time to spare, but… no. I didn’t have time to spare.
I opened a portal twenty feet above Tattletale, then opened my hand. The little tube of pepper spray dropped through the portal. Tattletale caught it.
“You couldn’t have made it easy?” Tattletale asked, looking down at it. “Because standing by while you do this… that’s fucking hard. It’s honestly easier if I’m on their side and I’m helping them stop you. If I can blame the fuck-up job Panacea did to your head.”
I didn’t have a response to that. I used Marquis’ power to withdraw the bone cage and free my own legs.
I opened a doorway and passed through.
Dragon might be my enemy the moment she got filled in on what I was doing, but she was someone I cared about. Teacher had fucked with her.
This next bit was going to be easier.
Speck 30.3
I made my way into Brockton Bay, the Boardwalk. Five more steps carried me into New Delhi. Only a minute later, I was walking through Brockton Bay again, downtown this time.
Los Angeles.
Bucharest.
Brockton Bay again.
&nb
sp; Madison, Wisconsin.
Cauldron’s Headquarters.
Ruins. Places built up by man, painstaking, sometimes over centuries. Layer upon layer of human experience, history, and art, represented in stone and wood and glass. Every single building had been put together with the idea of meeting some specific goal, a specific individual’s tastes, filling a purpose as an institution, or being built to cater to society’s tastes as a whole. Virtually every building had been a familiar place to someone, a home, a place of business. Roads had once been a part of people’s daily routines, bridges a convenience that was appreciated, if rarely acknowledged.
Shattered, eroded, dashed aside. Roads were now uneven slabs, rising and falling, while buildings had folded or leaned over, spilling out their innards. Those same innards hinted at just how much value we’d put into this world we’d built around ourselves.
I realized I’d stopped walking, struck by what I was looking at. There was a tightness in my chest, and I struggled to put my finger on what to call it. It was a sweet feeling, but not a pleasant one. Not nostalgia, but it called to a certain kind of familiarity.
Home, I thought. This is home. Not so much a place I could return to for a hug, to kick my shoes off and let down my guard, not a place where I would sleep and wake up feeling warm. Yet it was a place which was central to me, a place I was rooted in, and vice versa.
I’d defined myself in places like these. The height of my growth, my strongest moments, they’d taken place in open graveyards and the aftermath of tragedies. Not my best moments, not the noblest, but the moments where I’d had the greatest impacts and had made the choices that shaped who I was.
I started walking again. I wasn’t actually traveling to Brockton Bay, to Bucharest or Los Angeles. I could have, but I wasn’t. It was only that the ruins here were so easy to relate to those places, to this home. The memories of the locations were bleeding into my awareness, making it feel almost real.
I wanted to tell myself it was the Clairvoyant in my range, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to. I wanted to say it was the distraction of having to devote a small share of my attention to ensuring that Doormaker kept opening portals when the Clairvoyant recognized someone asking for one.
With a note of desperation, I told myself it was because I was still trying to keep tabs on my power, gauge my level of control, and manage my body. If I couldn’t get a better grip on my own movements, maybe I could get control over my swarm. Over the people I was controlling.
But I didn’t really believe it. I was slipping.
My bugs spilled out over the ruins. My range was shorter, but I could use the relay bugs I had on hand.
Slipping, the thought came back to me.
Losing my mind, losing grip on things.
The Faerie Queen had told me I needed to anchor myself. Except I’d been doing that for a long time. It was how I functioned. Compartmentalizing, identifying a priority, devoting myself to it. Surviving the bullying, the mission to turn in the Undersiders, the mission to save Dinah, to turn the city around, to save the world. I’d had tunnel vision at the best of times, and I’d had both successes and failures.
I functioned best when I had a mission, something beyond the one singular goal before me. Yes, stopping Scion was key, but—
I shook my head. I’d stopped walking again. Had to focus.
I’d use smaller anchors here, smaller things to tie myself down to reality, focusing on my surroundings. If and when the time came, I would abandon them, cast them away in order of size and priority. In a way, it would let me gauge how badly I was slipping.
An exercise of Doormaker’s power let me experiment with the portals. They couldn’t move or drift, excepting the way they were anchored to the rotation of the planet as a whole. Instead, I opened and closed new portals, timing it so the opening of one was a fraction of a second before the prior one closed. I surrounded myself with them, a shifting, shuttering array of portals.
I was put in mind of the moment I donned my costume, of being Skitter the Warlord, with her half-cape, half-shawl. There had been a kind of power to the gesture, to draping myself in the cloth and assuming the title and the role.
As I made my way through New York, I found myself altering the portals, reconfiguring them. I’d drape myself in them like I did in a costume.
They formed a loose three-quarter circle around me, Doormaker and the Clairvoyant, at first, a cylinder with an opening in front of me. When I turned my head, they reconfigured, the portals in my way disappearing, replaced by others.
To streamline the portal creation, I layered them. Two half-circles, overlapping.
And then, because it was the most compact way to fit the portals together, because I needed to make a signature, to make this mine and to make it me, I made them hexagons. A honeycomb interlocking of small, one-foot-diameter doorways, opening up to random points throughout the city, extending my range further than even my bugs could manage. Each one showed a different image when looked through, a wall, a section of overcast sky, a bit of pavement. It didn’t stand out, serving more as a kind of camouflage.
As I experimented, finding the places to set the portals, my awareness of the city expanded in turn.
I sensed some of Teacher’s squads. Groups of men and women, always with at least one person who was more fit than the rest, all dressed in white, or at least in white shirts with jeans. Most had backpacks, and all had weapons. They patrolled, scouting the area, talking amongst each other in low voices.
Always talking about business.
I found Teacher. He had a project in the works, and his ‘students’ were busy scavenging. A different sort of control than I had, with my bugs or the people in my sway. More human, maybe. A society, rather than an army of troops gathered in formations.
The vast majority were active, each with a job to do, a task. Men carried metal and electronics and either broke down materials or shaped them. Women, just a little weaker in terms of physical strength, carried things like wire and baskets of clothing they had looted from stores. Children handled the finer work, etching designs into metal and stitching.
I could almost respect it. Except his motives were clearly selfish.
“Better to be fast than perfect,” he was saying. He paused to touch one of his subjects for a few seconds. The girl stood there, eyes closed, while Teacher resumed talking, “Follow the blue prints, or use the hub stations to get a clear mental picture.”
There were nods from the group around him.
Hub stations. Not everyone was active. There were clusters of two or three individuals that were each together, but I was pretty sure they weren’t what he was referring to. There were also some individuals that seemed to be operating as rally points for the others, arranged in a loose ring around their work in progress. I watched one individual bring a car door to the rally point, touch the man in the center, and then make their way over to teacher. He murmured, “Metal and fiberglass design.”
Teacher touched him for four seconds, and then the man with the door made his way to a table, dropping a backpack and collecting a small crowbar. As he started working, another man at the table stretched, grabbed a backpack, then joined one of the scavenging groups.
It was like a barn raising, but they were working purely in steel and electronics. Individuals that were tired switched to a different job, and everyone worked tirelessly.
They were building a Dragon-craft from scratch.
Not only a Dragon-craft.
“Eight costumes,” Teacher said. He approached a table, lifting one costume off the surface to investigate. “Not so flashy. We want to fly under the radar. Make it substandard, if anything. C-list material.”
There were nods all around. Teacher walked over to another table, lined with tinker weaponry and other tools. His students were loyal, but they weren’t puppets, like mine were. Their movements were natural. The overall system, though, wasn’t natural at all.
I was put in mind of Regent’s g
ames. There was the base of operations, the cluster of villagers managing the city, and there were the more independent squads of people, deployed to the world beyond the base camp, patrolling for enemies, ready at a moment’s notice to be gathered together in a massed attack.
No doubt they were organized by ability. Teacher could grant thinker and tinker powers. If I assumed at least one tinker per group, with the tinkers carrying some ranged weapon or defense, and if the athletic members of the roaming squads were the soldiers, gifted with some knowledge that would give them a small edge in a fight, there were still two or three members in a given group I couldn’t identify.
I wasn’t even finished the thought when one of them perked up, startled. She shouted, “Scatter!”
Her group moved in different directions.
Trouble?
I was the trouble. It’s a fucking precog.
I opened portals, catching her three teammates, one by one.
It took two tries to catch her. She was a fast runner, and she saw where I was putting down my portal before I’d even started, turning a hundred and eighty degrees around and scrambling in the opposite direction.
They were eerily calm, all things considered, much like Doormaker and the Clairvoyant. It made things easier for me. But I knew that ‘easy’ wouldn’t last.
Teacher achieved control over people by giving them parahuman abilities. The organization was important, and everything was key. I’d moved too fast, and now Teacher’s human systems were starting to kick into effect.
Men and women in an isolated cluster dropped to their knees.
“Amber district, team B-six,” one of the students in the group reported. His voice was as clear as a bell in the near-silence of Teacher’s base of operations. There were only the sounds of tools and the steady percussion of hammers striking metal, all in unison.