Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  “Is she okay?” he asked, gesturing to the girl in the corner.

  “Not one of her better days.”

  He nodded.

  “Elle,” he spoke, gently, “May I come closer?”

  They had learned the hard way, that the more distant the girl was, the stronger her power. This made her particularly dangerous when she was so lost that she might not recognize him. Cruel irony, Gregor observed, that she had virtually no power at all when she was most herself. It was a problem they hoped to find an answer to, someday.

  The girl in the corner turned to meet his eyes. He took that for consent, approached her, and pressed a sandwich into her hands.

  “Eat,” he instructed her.

  She did, almost mechanical in her movements.

  After Faultline had enlisted him and Newter, a job had taken them into a high security asylum. They had been there to question someone about the Dragonslayers, a villain group that used tinker technology stolen from the most powerful and highest profile tinker in the world for petty theft and mercenary work. Their invasion of the asylum had not gone as well as it might have, and had led to a high-tech lockdown of the facility. Not only did it extend their mission by several hours, but it had led to issues with one of the residents, a parahuman that apparently had to be moved regularly, lest her influence over her surroundings spread beyond the confines of her cell, making her a serious problem for the staff, other residents and unwitting bystanders.

  In the end, after dealing with the dispatched squad from the Boston Protectorate and getting the information they needed about the Dragonslayers, they had recruited the girl.

  He watched and waited long enough to ensure she was on her way to finishing her sandwich, then turned to leave. Emily gave him a small wave of the hand in goodbye, and he nodded once in acknowledgment.

  His final stop was the office at the end of the second floor hallway. He peered in the window, then let himself in as quietly as he could.

  Faultline, owner of Palanquin and several other cover businesses across Brockton Bay, was seated at a large oak desk. In front of her, in the midst of ledgers, notebooks and university textbooks, was something that looked similar to a xylophone, a series of rods lined up next to one another, strapped tight to a board.

  Faultline was in her professional clothes; a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and black slacks tucked into shiny black riding boots with steel toes. Her wavy black hair was tied back in a ponytail. She wore no mask – those employees of Palanquin who ventured as far as this office were too well paid to turn on her. Her features were perhaps too sharp to be called conventionally attractive, but Gregor knew she was certainly more attractive than Newter or himself.

  As Gregor watched, she closed her eyes, then swiped her hand across the top ends of the rods. Red and blue energy crackled, and coin-shaped pieces of wood, metal, stone and plastic fell to the desktop. Other rods, several of which were green wood, were untouched.

  “Fuck,” she muttered. She swept the coin shaped bits of various materials into a trash can that sat beside her desk. Glancing up at where Gregor stood just inside the doorway, she raised one eyebrow.

  “I did not wish to interrupt you.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Maybe distracting me will help.”

  “If you are sure.” He approached the desk, setting the paper bag down on it, “It was seven o’clock, nobody had eaten yet. I got us some sandwiches.”

  “Thank you. How’s Elle?”

  “Spitfire said she was having a bad day, but she has eaten now. Perhaps tomorrow will be better.”

  Faultline sighed, “Let’s hope. It’s very easy to let yourself grow attached to that girl, know what I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fuck!” she swore, as she swiped her hand over the rods and, again, the green wood refused to be cut.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We’ve talked about the Manton effect.”

  “The rule that prevents some powers from affecting living things. You have been trying to remove such restrictions from yourself.”

  “Without luck. It’s a matter of time before we’re on a job, things come down to the wire, and I’m too weak, because of this arbitrary limitation.”

  “I find it hard to believe that anyone who has toppled a building on someone could call themselves weak.”

  “That was luck more than anything else,” she sighed, as she adjusted the positions of the rods.

  “If you say so.”

  “It’s not like there isn’t precedent for this. We know for a fact that some capes who were once held back by the Manton effect have figured out a way around it, or past it. Narwhal being the most obvious case.”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a school of theory that says that the Manton effect is a psychological block. That, because of our empathy for living things, we hold back our powers on an instinctual level. Or, maybe, we hold back against other living things because there is a subconsciously imposed limitation that prevents us from hurting ourselves with our own powers, and it’s too general, encompassing other living things instead of only ourselves.”

  “I see.”

  “So I’m trying to trick my brain. With this setup, I move from inorganic material to dead organic material to living tissues. Green wood, in this case. Or I mix it up so it goes from one to the other without any pattern. If I can trick my brain into slipping up, anticipating the wrong material, maybe I can push through that mental block. Do that once, and it’d be easier for future tries. That’s the theory, anyways.”

  She tried again. “Fuck!”

  “It does not seem to be working.”

  “No kidding. Do me a favor. Rearrange these. Don’t let me see them.”

  He approached the desk, unstrapped the rods, shuffled them, and then strapped them in place while she sat there with her eyes closed.

  “Go,” he told her.

  She tried again, eyes still closed. When she opened them, she cussed a few times in a row.

  Gregor stepped around the desk, grabbed her by the throat with his left hand, and pulled her out of the chair. He shoved her to the ground and climbed atop of her so he was straddling her, his knees pressing her arms down. His grip tightened incrementally.

  Faultline’s eyes widened and her face began to turn colors as she struggled. She brought her knees up into his back, but one might have had more success hitting a waterbed. The effect was the same. Beneath his skin, which was tougher than one might guess, his skeleton, muscles and organs all sat in a sea of viscous fluids. His skeleton, he’d learned, was more like a shark’s than a human’s. It was a flexible cartilage that bent where bone would break, and healed faster than bone. He’d been hit by a car and climbed to his feet shortly after. Her kicks would not have much effect.

  “I am sorry,” he told her.

  Her struggles gradually became weaker. It took some time before she started to go limp.

  He waited a second longer, then released her. She sputtered into a cough as she heaved air into her lungs.

  He waited patiently for her to recover. When she looked more or less in control of her own breathing, he spoke, “Months ago, we were talking about this subject, the Manton effect. You mentioned how it might be possible for someone like us to have a second trigger event. A radical change or improvement in their powers as a result of a life or death moment. Such might explain how one broke the Manton rule.”

  She nodded, coughing again.

  “It would not have worked if I had warned you in advance. I am sorry.”

  She shook her head, coughed once, then answered him, her voice hoarse, “It didn’t work anyways.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What if it had worked, you big lunatic? What did you expect me to do to you? Cut off your hand? Kill you?”

  “I thought perhaps my hand or my arm, at worst. I do not think you would kill me, even in a moment such as that. You have done much for me. Even if it proved impossib
le to reattach, I would not say it is a very attractive hand,” he examined the hand he’d just used to strangle Faultline, “To lose it, for something you have been working on for a long time is not a regrettable thing.”

  “Idiot,” she pulled herself to her feet, coughing again, “How the hell am I supposed to get pissed at you when you say something like that?”

  He stayed silent.

  “Well, either that’s not going to work, or I need something that gets me even closer to death… in which case I’m scratching it off the list anyways.” She moved her chair and sat down at her desk, shoving the apparatus with the rods into the trash. “I like being alive too much to dance on that razor’s edge.”

  “Yes,” his voice was quiet.

  “Thank you, by the way, for trying that” she told him, as she emptied the bag of one and a half sandwiches. She returned Gregor’s half-sandwich to the bag and put hers aside, unopened. “I don’t expect it was easy.”

  He shook his head.

  “So, returning a favor, then. Sit down.”

  He pulled a chair over and sat on the other side of the desk.

  “A year ago, you agreed to give me a share of your earnings in our little group, if I put them towards answering some questions we had.”

  “I remember.”

  “I’ll talk to the others about this, soon, but since you were the one that paid the most, I thought it only right that I share with you first.” She opened a drawer and retrieved a file. She pushed it across the desk. “This is what I’ve found, so far.”

  He opened the file. The first page was an image, high resolution, of a stylized ‘u’, or a ‘c’ turned ninety-degrees counter clockwise. He touched his upper arm, where a tattoo identical to the image marked him.

  “Whoever it is,” Faultline explained, “Whether it’s one person or many, is very, very good at covering their tracks.”

  He turned the pages. The next set of pages were pictures, crime scene reports, official files and news articles about various parahumans, each set of pages relating to a specific one. The first was a monster of a man with a beetle-like shell covering his body. Gregor himself was the second.

  “You and Newter, you already know, aren’t alone. On a steady basis, parahumans have been turning up across North America. Retrograde amnesia, all marked by that same tattoo as you are on various parts of their body. Each was dumped in an out of the way location in an urban area. Alleys, ditches, rooftops, under bridges.”

  “Yes.” Gregor turned more pages. Each set of pages had more individuals like him.

  “Here’s the thing, though. At first, most were strange in appearance. As many as four out of five monstrous parahumans, if you’ll excuse the term, follow the pattern, and that number might increase if you got a chance to examine or get a decent interview with the others. The tattoo, amnesia, their first memories are waking up somewhere in a strange city.”

  “At first, you said?” Gregor asked, “This changed?”

  “Turn to the red tab.”

  He found the red tab that stuck out and turned to that page. A high quality picture of an attractive redheaded girl.

  “She showed up in Vegas. The whole casino thing has bitten the dust, pretty much, since parahumans who could game the odds or cheat started showing up. But there’s underground games, still. She participated in a few, and had a bounty on her head in a matter of days. She’s calling herself Shamrock, and I’d put good money on the fact that she’s got powers that let her manipulate probabilities.”

  “I see. Why are we talking about her?”

  “Next page.”

  He turned the page. “Ah.”

  It was a grainy surveillance camera image. Shamrock was in the midst of changing clothes in what looked like an underground parking lot, and, though partially obscured by her bra strap, the tattoo was visible on her shoulderblade. A stylized ‘u’.

  “That’s puzzle piece number one. Given the dates, and you’re free to look them over in your own time, going by the first sightings, the people that are showing up with these tattoos are getting less and less monstrous with each passing year. Not always, but it’s a trend. Then, boom, we get Shamrock. No strange features to speak of.”

  He turned ahead a few pages.

  “Puzzle piece number two. I’m afraid it’s one of those cases where things have been covered up too well for us to verify, but I’ll tell you what I heard. Tallahassee, Florida, just three months ago, a rumor circulated about someone calling themselves the Dealer.”

  “What was he dealing?”

  “Powers.”

  “Powers,” Gregor echoed her.

  “Pay him an amount in the neighborhood of thirty five thousand dollars, the Dealer gives you something to drink, and you join the ranks of the heroes and villains in the cape community. Powers in a bottle.”

  “I see. How does this relate?”

  “Because one individual claiming to be a customer made a blog post about his transaction. It’s near the end of that file. In his post, he described the Dealer as having a metal suitcase filled with vials. Engraved on the inside of the lid…”

  “The same symbol as the tattoo,” Gregor guessed.

  Faultline nodded, “And that’s where we stand.”

  “I see. Can we track down this individual with the blog?”

  “He’s dead. Murdered by two unnamed capes less than a day after he made the post.”

  “Ah.”

  “What I think is that someone out there has figured out how people get powers, and they’ve made a business out of it. But the first attempts didn’t go so well. It could be that, if the chemistry is bad, the people who drink the stuff become like you, like Newter, like Sybill and Scarab.”

  “So this person, or people. You think they are experimenting. They have been refining their work, and the physical changes have become smaller.”

  “And this Dealer was either their salesman, or more likely, someone who stole some of their work and tried to profit from it. The people he dealt to didn’t get the tattoos.”

  Gregor’s chair groaned painfully as he leaned back.

  “What is next?”

  “No one’s seen or heard of this Dealer since the blog poster was murdered. The Dealer’s either dead or gone to ground. So we follow our other lead. I’ve got private investigators looking for Shamrock. I’m thinking we wrap up our contract with Coil, here, then, if we’re lucky enough that our PIs find her before the bounty hunters do, we pay her a visit. Either she can tell us something, or we can offer her a position on the team.”

  “Or both,” he said.

  “In an ideal world,” Faultline smiled.

  Arc 6: Tangle

  6.01

  I squared off against a very thin Japanese man of Grue’s height. He held a knife in one hand and a katana in the other.

  A narrow smile crossed his face as he made his katana blade whip around himself at lightning speed.

  At my command, a swarm of wasps flowed from beneath the armor of my costume and set themselves on him. There was a moment of bewildered swatting before he started howling in pain. Both katana and knife fell to the ground as he started using his hands to flail at the swarm.

  I drew my baton and struck him across the bridge of his nose. I wound up hitting him much harder than I intended to, as he just happened to bend forward at the same moment I swung. As he reeled, blood streaming from his face, I lunged forward with a low swing to hit him in the side of the knee.

  He crumpled to the ground and writhed, in too much pain to retaliate. I bent down to pick up the knife, which looked cheap, and the katana, which looked antique. I used the knife to cut the katana’s sheath from his side, then dropped the knife and kicked it into a storm drain.

  With the sheathed katana in one hand and my baton in the other, I looked over the evening’s battlefield.

  The building that loomed over us was a tenement, like countless others in the Docks. Five or more apartments in an area so small it should
only hold three at most. Ten or twelve families sharing a single bathroom and shower. That reality was ugly on its own, but word had been that the ABB was turning tenement buildings like this one into barracks for their soldiers. That the less than enthusiastic recruits, the ones with bombs implanted in their heads, were being gathered up here so they could be watched, trained, equipped, and deployed by the ABB’s captains.

  I’d balked at first. I’d been worried that it was a ploy on Kaiser’s part to get the organized villains of Brockton Bay to attack a building full of helpless people. Even after Tattletale had confirmed this was an ABB base of operations, I’d had my doubts.

  Had my doubts, that was, until we’d attacked and ABB soldiers had flooded out of the building like ants from an anthill. Clowns from a clown car. A ridiculous number of people, anyways, for a building that wasn’t all that big.

  We were outnumbered twenty to one, but I doubted any of us were really breaking a sweat. There was nobody with powers fighting in the ABB’s defense, since only Bakuda was uninjured and we had an idea of where she was holed up. That meant that all we had to worry about were their rank and file gang members, and we’d already taken out the guys with guns.

  Blazing fires as tall as I was dotted the road around the tenement. In other spots, patches of darkness lingered. There was no power to the area and there hadn’t been any for days, probably the military’s work, and the battlefield was lit by the flame alone, giving the ongoing fight had an almost hellish appearance to it. The faces of the ABB members contorted in pain and fear. The villains advancing, implacable, with faces like Grue’s skeletal helmet, Spitfire’s modified gas mask with the lenses reflecting the flames and Gregor’s doughy face with barnacle-like bits of shell crusting it.

  And me, I supposed. The yellow lenses of my freshly repaired mask, mandible design framing my jaw.

  I headed towards where the fight was mainly happening, and came face to face with a twenty-something man. I immediately pegged him as one of the recruited. Someone who wouldn’t be fighting if it weren’t for the bomb planted in his brain. He held a baseball bat pointed at me like it was a blade.