Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  Could I comment on that? Should I?

  I remained silent. We exited the stairwell at the fifth floor and entered a dark hallway. I clicked on a flashlight, and we made our way down the hall. Trash was piled everywhere, and I was all too aware of the maggots that were crawling on the floor, barely visible in the dim light.

  “Which way?” he asked.

  I pointed. A side benefit of my power was that it made it pretty damn easy to maintain my sense of direction.

  We tried the doors for the two apartments that led in the right direction. Both were locked.

  Trickster touched the doorknob, then looked across the floor at the trash in the hallway. The doorknob disappeared, and a chunk of wood fell to the ground. He repeated the process with the internal mechanisms, and the lock was effectively transported away. He opened the door and walked inside, going straight for the windows.

  “Done this before?” he asked.

  I shook my head. I was gathering my bugs, the stronger fliers, and drawing out lines of silk. Trickster handed me the individual components. A small spy camera, no larger than a tube of lipstick, and a similar microphone. My bugs bound them together with silk and then stretched out more to distribute the lifting among the dragonflies, bumblebees and wasps.

  “Okay, let’s see,” I muttered.

  “Testing, testing, one, two, three…“ My swarm managed some semblance of the words I wanted, a mix of buzzing, chirps and clicks to form the right pitch. Some sounds were hard or impossible to make. The ‘puh’, ‘buh’ and ‘muh’ sounds didn’t form, and I struggled to form something that sounded like a ‘t’ in the middle of a word. It was intelligible, but only barely.

  It would have to do.

  I ensured the rigging around the camera was more or less steady and then sent the swarm out the window. I relied on my power to keep track of it while I opened the laptop Coil had provided and turned on the video feed. When it had arrived outside the PHQ headquarters, I drew it together into a densely packed human form.

  It took six and a half minutes for the Protectorate to react to the figure. That bothered me, on a level. Were they disorganized? Or was it difficulty in communicating and marshaling their forces when they didn’t have phones or other means of passing on alerts? They gathered in the lobby. I adjusted the camera the insects were carrying and made out Weld, Kid Win, Clockblocker, Miss Militia, Battery and Legend. There were three more capes I didn’t recognize. Members of Legend’s team?

  Seeing them gave me pause.

  As Miss Militia stepped outside, I pulled on the headphones, and Trickster did the same.

  “Skitter?” Miss Militia asked.

  “Something like that,” I replied using my swarm. ”I wanted to talk.“

  “Given what happened the last time you were here, I’m not sure we’re on speaking terms.”

  “We have two of the Slaughterhouse Nine in custody. We are prepared to turn one over into your custody.”

  “What? I didn’t hear that.”

  Damn. It sounded natural in my head, as I got them to make the noise, but I wasn’t quite there yet. Maybe it would have been better to just pass a phone to her. I’d gone this route for the dramatic touch, and because I hadn’t wanted them to trace us.

  I rephrased, “Shatterbird and Cherish have been captured. We will deliver Cherish to you if you wish. We are done interrogating her.”

  “Interrogation. You mean torture, don’t you?” Legend asked from where he stood in the doorway.

  “No.”

  “Why?” Miss Militia asked. ”Why the offer?”

  “You can put her in secure custody, and we need your help.“

  “For?”

  “The Nine have captured Grue. We mounted one successful attack this morning, we got two of theirs for one of ours. They will be ready for a rescue attempt. They know our powers. Help us attack. Help us catch them off guard a second time and stop them for good.“

  “You’re not only asking us to fight the Nine, but you want us to fight alongside notorious villains.”

  So I was notorious now? Huh. Couldn’t let that distract me. ”I’m offering you Cherish.“

  I could make out Miss Militia shaking her head. ”I’ll be blunt, Skitter. I’m not Armsmaster. I don’t have a stake in personal glory or renown. I’m not going to pussyfoot around, either. Put a bullet in her skull and be done with it. There’s a kill order on them, nobody’s going to charge you for murder.”

  “Then work with us because it’s the best way to stop the Nine.”

  “I refused Hookwolf when he made the same offer, and I’m going to refuse you. The capes on my teams are good people. I won’t throw away their lives with a reckless attack. We’re going to develop our own strategies, plan, and find a safe way to target them.”

  “And civilians die in the meantime.” I retorted. Grue dies in the meantime, if he wasn’t dead already.

  “We’ve tried the same strategies we use against Endbringers. Multiple teams, allying with locals. Sometimes we get one of them. Sometimes we get three or four. But we lose people, lots of people, in the process. The remaining members of their group always find some way of escaping. The fact that we tried and failed in going all-out gives them notoriety. They bounce back after an attack like that, and they bounce back hard, with creeps, lunatics and killers flocking to them for the chance at that same sort of glory.”

  “The difference between us and Hookwolf is that we’ve succeeded. We have two of them in our custody. You can’t bide your time, organize, and wait for an opportune moment. They have years of experience fighting people who do that. Anything you try, they’ve probably dealt with. We win by catching them off guard with powers they don’t know about, powers they can’t expect and interactions between powers. Calculated recklessness.“

  “We can handle that on our own, with more calculation and less recklessness.”

  “He’s studied you. For any member of your team with more than three months of experience, he already knows everything they can do, their tricks and individual talents. You have powers we need. We have knowledge on their location, firepower of our own and two captives. We’ll only pull this off if we work together.”

  “Putting our lives in your hands,” Miss Militia replied.

  “Only as far as we’d be relying on you,” I answered her.

  “Who are you, Skitter?” Legend asked. He floated closer to my swarm-decoy. ”I can’t get a read on your personality or motivations, and that’s without touching on what came up at the close of the Endbringer event.”

  “My teammate is in the hands of the Nine, they could be murdering more people right this second, and you’re talking about me, of all people?”

  “If we’re going to offer you help, we should know who we’re interacting with,” he said.

  I glanced at Trickster, then back at the image on the screen. ”What do you want to know?“

  “We’ve talked with the people in your territory. Between what they say and what came out at the hospital, I can’t help but wonder at your motives.”

  “There’s someone specific I want to help. If I can improve the lives of others at the same time, then all the better.“

  “So where do you stand, then? Where do you see yourself in terms of the sliding scale of good and evil, heroes and villains?”

  I almost laughed, and some of my humor must have translated in a mental direction to my bugs, because they started making a noise that wasn’t speech. I stopped them. It wouldn’t have sounded much like laughter anyways. ”All of the above? None of the above? Does it matter? Some of us wear the villain label with pride, because they want to rebel against the norms, because it’s a harder, more rewarding road to travel, or because being a ‘hero’ often means so very little. But few people really want to see themselves as being bad or evil, whatever label they wear. I’ve done things I regret, I’ve done things I’m proud of, and I’ve walked the roads in between. The sliding scale is a fantasy. There’s no simple ans
wers.“

  “There can be. You could do what’s right.”

  I was getting an inkling of what Bitch referred to as ‘words’. Prattle that meant so very little in the face of what was happening in the present. Was this the kind of irritation, impatience and anger she felt with so many social interactions? I clenched my fist. ”Speak for yourself. You want to hide here while my group and Hookwolf deal with the brunt of the Nine’s attention. Just like you did with the ABB.“

  “That happened under Armsmaster’s leadership. You can’t blame us for being intelligent about how we go about this.”

  I was disappointed my swarm couldn’t convey my anger. ”I can blame you for being cowards. I’m going. If you want to talk about morality, start by talking to Armsmaster.”

  “Can’t. He’s gone.”

  I paused. Did the Nine get him? ”Dead?“

  “Escaped from his hospital room. With our attention on the Nine, we don’t have the resources to track him down.”

  “Does he know about the Nine’s threat to hit the city with a plague if he leaves?“

  “I hope so.”

  Fuck. Not only was that one more uncertainty stacked onto everything, but Armsmaster was the closest thing I had to a nemesis. Having him running around the city was not a good thing.

  For a brief moment, I contemplated having Trickster teleport me to ground level, so it was me talking to the local heroes, and not just my swarm. I could tell them that I was putting my well-being in their hands, risking them arresting me, as a gesture of good faith.

  Except I couldn’t help but see myself from their perspective. Warlord of the Boardwalk. I’d rotted off Lung’s manhood and carved out his eyes. I’d played an undefined role in Armsmaster’s downward slide. I’d robbed a bank, terrorized hostages with poisonous spiders, attacked their headquarters and used insects dipped in capsaicin to cripple their junior heroes with incapacitating pain. All the while, I’d acted with a seemingly ambiguous morality. Was I a good guy doing all the wrong things? Or did they see me as dangerous and unhinged?

  There was no way I could put myself in their hands without knowing what they thought about me, and frankly, I wasn’t sure how to think about myself. How the hell were they supposed to make a call?

  “So. You in?” I tried, instead.

  I could see him look back at Miss Militia, who shook her head. ”Miss Militia runs the local team, so it’s ultimately her call, but… we’ve talked about it, and I agree with her. No. The risks outweigh the potential benefits.”

  My heart sank. ”Then one final tip. You should know that Bonesaw’s done some surgery on all of her people. Implanted protection for the more vulnerable parts of their bodies. They’re tougher than they look.“

  “Thank you,” Legend said. ”You might not believe me, but I wish you the best of luck.”

  I snarled as I shut the laptop and turned away from the scene, calling my swarm back to me.

  “That didn’t work,” Trickster said.

  “No. And we just wasted a lot of time.”

  “We’ll have Shatterbird working with us, thanks to Regent, and we’ve got Imp as our man on the inside, maybe. We’re going to outnumber the remaining five or six of them, right? It’s not hopeless.”

  “They’ll be ready for us. They’re entrenched, they have a hostage, and we’re totally unable to fight two of them. How long is it going to take to extricate Grue from whatever cage they have him in?”

  “It’s not hopeless,” he repeated. ”Whatever they’re doing to keep Grue prisoner, if I can see him, I can free him.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure.”

  “Would it reassure you to know that your conversation with the local heroes gave me an idea of my own?”

  My head snapped in Trickster’s direction.

  “Come on. We should hurry,” he said.

  13.08

  “I was a lot more comfortable with the risky plan when it was something I thought of,” I said.

  “You said calculated recklessness, right?” Trickster asked.

  “Part of that ‘calculated’ bit is control. Keeping the chaos to a minimum, so we can anticipate and plan.”

  Trickster leaned against the door of the vehicle. “That may be a bit of a problem.”

  “You think?”

  The truck passed over a pothole. Our teams were out in force, our members divided across three trucks. I rode with Trickster, Sundancer and Tattletale. Regent and Ballistic were in the second vehicle. Bitch and her dogs rode in the third.

  This was Tattletale’s first time venturing out of Coil’s base in a little while. Her power was limited when she could only get information by what we communicated to her, and this was the kind of situation where we needed her at full strength. If nothing else, it felt better to have another teammate on the field with us, with Grue’s absence.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. I know Grue isn’t your teammate. You didn’t have to come to help.”

  “We’re all in this together, right?” Trickster said. “You mind if I smoke?”

  I shrugged and Tattletale shook her head. He rolled down the window and lit a cigarette, placing it through the mouth-hole of his hard mask.

  That would be his way of dealing with stress. We were all tense, and we all had our ways of coping. Trickster smoked and stared off into the distance. Sundancer fidgeted. She frequently realized what she was doing and forced herself to stop, only to pick up something else. Her leg would bounce in place, then she would stop doing that and start drumming her fingers on her kneepad in some complicated pattern. It made me think of a pianist or a guitarist fingering the strings. Tattletale watched people, her eyes roving over the rest of us. Her cheek bulged slightly where she touched the tip of her tongue against the backside of the wound Jack had left her.

  And me? I retreated into my headspace, I supposed. I was maybe similar to Tattletale in that I took note of each of the others, but my thoughts were less about simply observing than about cataloguing and mentally preparing. What options did we have? What tools, weapons and techniques did we have at our disposal? Who was going to be backing me up during this operation, and how reliable were those people?

  It was constructive, maybe, but exhausting. There were so many angles to consider, and the stakes were high. Brian’s life, Brian’s quality of life. The rest of us weren’t in the Nine’s clutches, but it would take only one mistake before any one of us could be in the same boat, wondering just how horrible things were going to get for us.

  Maybe fatigue factored in, but the more I thought on our allies, the less secure I felt.

  The information Cherish had volunteered about Coil, true or not, had left me with lingering doubts. I was also acutely aware of the distinct lack of chemistry and camaraderie among the Travelers. They were keeping secrets, with no promises of divulging the information in question.

  The last time we’d all been in a car with Trickster, he’d noted that there were two major problems that Coil was helping them with. Noelle was obviously one. A part of me could buy that there was something serious going on with her, something that necessitated the help of someone like Coil. Another nagging part of me was thinking that there were still too many unanswered questions. What was holding them together as a group? How fragile was that tie?

  Was this really what I needed to be dwelling on?

  I thought over my arsenal and the options I had with my power. I’d developed enough techniques that I was starting to have trouble keeping track of them all. Should I name them? It seemed like something out of a kid’s show, shouting out the names of the abilities as I used them. ’Firebug attack, go!’ ’Silkwrap Strike!’

  I shook my head a little. I was tired. My mind was wandering. I couldn’t remember the last time I had more than five hours of sleep, and I’d barely slept at all last night. Fear and adrenaline usually clarified things, so it probably said something that I was feeling a little dazed despite what we were going into. Some
of that was the constant aggression. Since the Nine had made their presence known, I’d barely been able to relax and let my guard down. After Mannequin had started killing people in my territory, taking even a moment to myself made me feel like I was insulting their memories, that I was failing the next batch of people who would become victims of my enemies.

  “We should stop here,” Tattletale said.

  That was apparently order enough, because the driver pulled over. The long seconds of stillness after the truck had stopped said volumes. We didn’t want to get out of the car, we didn’t want to face the Nine, deal with their traps as we tried to catch them in our own. Two or three seconds passed with tension thrumming in the air, every one of our nerves on edge, ready to act, react, even now.

  The sound of a slamming door from one of the other trucks was the little push we needed to move. We climbed out of the truck and joined the others. Bitch had been the first one out. She had Sirius, Bastard and Bentley with her. We ventured over to a fallen section of wall, peering over it to get a better glimpse of what would be the battlefield.

  The final two members of our group arrived a moment later. Shatterbird landed, stumbling, and Genesis began to materialize in a massive form.

  We were close to the site of our last fight. The Nine had been on their way to Dolltown, and we’d ambushed them, divided them, and then provoked them into extending out of position. Having done that, we’d kidnapped Shatterbird as she lagged behind and then looped around to capture the wounded Cherish.

  Now the Nine were inside Dolltown. I could only hope the noise and fighting of our last encounter would have given most of the residents the time and the motivation to run.