“Who’s she after? We gotta know.”
“No you don’t. Way I figure it, you go into the fight blind, you still stand a pretty good chance of offing her. No skin off my back if a few of you die in the process.”
“You need enough of us alive to deal with the rest of the Nine.”
“Maybe, maybe,” Cherish taunted us with her tone. ”But shouldn’t you hurry? The hero is going to die.”
It was Panacea or Armsmaster. Both were complicated. Panacea wouldn’t be able to defend herself, but Armsmaster was a whole mess of complications.
We hurried to get suited up. My mask in ruins, I wrapped a scarf around my lower face and covered it with bugs. I drew them around my eyes to hide the frames of my glasses.
As I finished up, I glanced at Bitch. Her knuckles were white, her posture rigid.
She was pissed.
I made sure I had all my gear, then joined the rest in filing out. Grue and Tattletale were the last out the door.
Glancing back to check on Grue, finding his posture and expressions unreadable beneath his darkness and costumes, I caught a glimpse of Tattletale messing with one of the pouches on her belt. The pages we’d torn from the book were folded into a tight square, and she was pocketing them for later study. She saw me looking.
“You going to be okay with this?” She asked me. ”You’re the best equipped to find Siberian’s real body and stop her. Him. Them.”
“I’ll deal somehow.”
14.02
Amy Dallon ran for her life. It wasn’t the kind of run one saw in marathons or anything like that. It was mindless, panicked, like a herd animal in a stampede. She took the easiest and most obvious paths available to her, stumbling as often as not, her sole and all-consuming purpose being to put distance between herself and her pursuer. Her left hand was cradled against her chest, the very ends of her pinky, ring and middle fingers missing. Was that intentional? Harming the healing hands?
Siberian didn’t even have to run to keep up. The chase was something she’d honed into an art. Amy had to run around buildings, hurdle over piles of debris, and climb fences. Siberian anticipated her movements, pushed through walls of stone, brick, wood and plaster as though they were tissue paper and ultimately took the shortest, most direct paths. If Amy happened to get a little too far away, Siberian would use a short hop to cross half a city block, often crashing through a wall or the side of a truck in the process.
She could have closed the gap and gotten her hands on Amy at any moment, but she didn’t. She was a cat with its prey, and Amy didn’t have anything that could help her get away. Amy ran and created some distance, getting just far enough that she might think she’d escaped, then Siberian would appear in front of her, or to one side. It happened once, twice, then three times. Each time, Siberian drew closer.
The fourth time she closed the distance, she leaped up to a spot behind Amy and caught hold of Amy’s wrist. Amy jerked as the hold interrupted her forward momentum. She screamed, her legs buckling under her.
Siberian took her time, grabbing at Amy’s other wrist, then prying at her fingers. Three were already missing segments, and Siberian seized the index finger. Slowly, inexorably, she guided the finger to her mouth, her lips parting. Amy thrashed, but couldn’t free herself from Siberian’s grip.
“Shouldn’t we do something?” Sundancer asked. Her hand trembled as she lowered the binoculars. I wasn’t sure how useful Sundancer was going to be, on several levels. Our group consisted of Trickster, Grue, Tattletale, Sundancer and myself, with two of Bitch’s dogs to get us from A to B. The seven of us were gathered behind the wall of a ruined building, a considerable distance from Siberian.
I glanced at Grue. He was tense, rigid enough that I could see his stillness through the darkness. Anything I’d say to him would hurt more than it helped. I turned my attention back to Amy and Siberian, looking through the binoculars. Instead of addressing Grue, I told Sundancer, “Nothing we can do. But I think Siberian is going to-”
As if she’d heard, Siberian closed her mouth. Amy recoiled with her whole body, pulling away, and Siberian let her go, giving her a little push. As her quarry stumbled and started to run, Siberian simply stood there, waiting.
She wanted to give Amy a head start.
Amy wasn’t bleeding as much as she should have been. I knew she couldn’t use her power to affect herself, or this fight would be playing out much differently. But maybe she was using her power to affect microbes on her hands? Changing them into something that could breed, coagulate, and staunch the wounds?
It was what I’d be doing.
But I’d also be trying to use microbes to form some kind of defense. I’d be reaching out for algae or other plant life I could use to obscure my retreat. Something to produce an opaque gas, to block line of sight or give me hiding places. Amy had far, far more versatility than I did, and I had little doubt she’d be able to mimic my power with a little time for preparation. With some forethought, preparation and strategic thinking, she was capable of holding her own, getting away. She had so much potential.
But Amy Dallon wasn’t that sort of person. She hadn’t gravitated toward front-line combat, nor had she gotten in any real fights, to the best of my knowledge. When Leviathan had hit the city, she’d stayed behind to give medical care instead of using her power against him. Now she was panicking, up against an unstoppable enemy and an inevitable fate, and she didn’t have the tools, mental or otherwise, to hold her own. Siberian would catch her and release her over and over, taking her apart piece by piece. Eventually the blood loss would mean Amy couldn’t run any more.
Or maybe Siberian was waiting for Amy to break, mentally. How long could she put up with this before she lost all hope and surrendered herself to a fate of being eaten alive?
Using my power, I began to gather a swarm around Amy. Her initial reaction was to freak out. She thrashed, stumbled, and fell. She landed in the shallow water with her good hand thrust out to prevent herself from landing face first.
Her second reaction, beyond the knee-jerk fear, was to use her power to start shutting mine down.
“Idiot,” I hissed the word.
“What?” Tattletale asked.
“I’m trying to save her life, and she’s turning my power against me.”
Two ways this would go. Either she clued in that I was trying to help, or she died. I was really hoping it wouldn’t be the latter. I didn’t like her, but she didn’t deserve to die. There were very few people in the world who deserved to die like this.
I could feel a not-unfamiliar headache building as I leveraged my power to draw more of a swarm around her. Siberian was watching, uncaring. As was so often the case, my timing had to be specific. She wouldn’t let Amy go as a matter of principle, but she’d let hope dangle in front of both of us. That penchant for offering hope and then dashing it was a weapon she and virtually every other member of the Nine had at their disposal, but it was also a tendency we could exploit. A weakness, if you could call it that.
This would have been easier if we’d had another mannequin like we used in our first victory against the Nine, using Trickster’s power to evacuate Amy, but we hadn’t been near my lair and we’d used every mannequin we had in that fight. We could have kludged something together, something vaguely Amy-sized and Amy-shaped, but time had been tight, and we hadn’t found anything that would serve that would also fit on the dogs. Deploying on the one job with the explosives, mannequins and two or three people riding each dog had been our limit, before.
Siberian took hold of a length of her long hair and combed her fingers slowly through it, her back twisting and arching a little as she reached behind her head, the flank of her body exposed to the diffuse light of the overcast sky above. If Cherish wasn’t fucking with us, the real Siberian was a middle-aged man. What, then, was the projection? Why was it female, when Brian’s had been male and so very similar to him? I would have asked Grue something to try to shed light on the subject
, but I didn’t want to get him thinking about what had happened back then.
My head was starting to pound, my power getting more sluggish. Where possible, I used my bugs to find, catch and kill the bugs Amy had altered with her power. It wasn’t enough; my power was still getting steadily weaker. Amy fell again, climbed to her feet and swatted her good hand through the swarm, disabling those bugs who stayed on her skin for any longer than a second.
It was also making it harder to sweep the area for Siberian’s real body. There were pockets of people here and there. I needed to keep tabs on the ones who fit Cherish’s description; middle-aged, male, probably unkempt, thin. What made it trickier was that I had to find him without him catching on and sending Siberian after us. There was one man nearby, but he was fit. Another there: fat, startling and trembling at the distant sounds of Siberian tearing through the landscape in her pursuit of Amy. I found another, but he was clutching a small child to him, and she clutched him back. Father and daughter, no doubt. The little girl wasn’t Bonesaw, either. Too small. In the next cluster of people- I had to stop and press my fingers to my temples. It hurt. Damn that girl.
I had to cover her, though, so having my bugs near her was unavoidable. Amy needed to be one-hundred percent out of Siberian’s sight before we acted. As if she was actively seeking to make things harder on us, she took a route that carried her out of sight of our binoculars, behind a building. Not that she knew we were there. It was bad luck.
I focused my binoculars on Siberian, instead. Her hair drifted in the wind. The length she wasn’t holding in her hand fanned out, briefly.
“If the wind moves her hair like that, is that a clue?” I asked, looking at Tattletale. ”Like the dust on Glory Girl’s clothes hinting that she wasn’t covered by her forcefield?”
“Ninety-five percent sure I’m right on this score, but her power probably copies her real body’s physiology to some degree, molding all the internal organs and whatever else with whatever reality-scrambling-stuff she’s made of. Her call about what parts of her are affected by what, so I don’t-” She stopped, “Heads up.”
Siberian was letting her hair fall from her hands. She flicked the last strand back over her shoulder.
I collected the swarm into a dozen decoys in the same instant Siberian started striding forward, then scattered them.
Siberian stopped, pivoting on the spot, then lunged for one side of the street. She threw herself through the side of a parked pickup truck, shearing through the fiberglass and metal, and landed in a crouch on the far side of it. She gripped the two sections of the vehicle, tearing where they were still connected on the underside, and then spun in place, holding each half out to one side.
I couldn’t be sure, but as I looked through the binoculars, I was pretty sure that I caught a glimpse of her holding one half of the truck by a glass pane of a side window, index and middle finger on either side of the broken glass.
In most cases, a cape trying to pick up a car by anything but the undercarriage would find it falling apart, the weight of the vehicle pulling it free of whatever section the cape was holding. Siberian didn’t have that problem. She simply extended her power through whatever she was holding to keep it intact.
With a throwing motion, she whipped one section of the truck over her head, hurling it forward so it crashed through no less than five of my decoy swarms. She did a tight spin as she stepped forward and made the second throw into a smooth continuation of the first.
Her accuracy wasn’t quite so good for the second hit. It crashed through the water and hit the ground before it rolled out of my line of sight. It was only through my swarm that I felt it hit Amy and my decoy swarms. Most of the momentum was lost in the initial impact, and it didn’t pulverize her. She was in one piece, at least.
In retrospect, that might have been intentional on Siberian’s part.
“She’s advancing,” Tattletale reported.
“Yeah,” I replied, absently. I was focusing on getting my bugs on site. The bugs that had surrounded Amy and formed the decoys in her immediate vicinity were still there, and I gathered them into humanoid shapes again. I didn’t have line of sight to her, but I could feel them rising in what must have looked like a very human way.
I’d known that using the decoys would provoke Siberian. She wanted to drive home that inevitability of her target’s fate, and that meant she would stop playing around the second she thought Amy might really escape. That was the bad.
The good side of things caught me by surprise. As though a switch was flicked, my power suddenly surged back to its normal strength. Amy was killing the bugs she’d fucked up, so they weren’t scrambling my power anymore. She’d realized I was trying to help.
“Should I attack?” Sundancer asked.
“No,” Grue almost barked the word. ”You’ll give away our location.”
“Let me,” Trickster said.
While Trickster unclipped grenades from the belt of his costume, I focused on Amy. She was standing, slowly, masked by a swarm. If I sent a decoy running in one direction, I was almost positive it would get Amy killed. She couldn’t run faster than Siberian, and however much I scattered the decoys, Siberian could dispatch them all and get her hands on the real Amy in a matter of seconds. If I moved a decoy too fast, it would be a dead giveaway as a fake.
“Really need a distraction,” I said.
“Are you still looking for the real Siberian?” Tattletale asked.
“Of course I am!” I snapped. I might have gone on to point out how we were also here to save her. To save Amy Dallon. I kept my mouth shut: pointless to waste my breath or dedicate any focus to arguing when I could be trying to deal with Siberian.
Trickster was looking through his binoculars, holding one grenade. I saw him pull the pin a second before the grenade in his hand was replaced by a fragment of building.
An explosion erupted a matter of feet from Siberian. The smoke cleared quickly enough, and I saw her turning her head, looking for the unseen attacker. I ducked my head low to get more cover from the ruined wall we all lurked behind.
“Grue?” I asked.
He hesitated.
“Please.”
“Right.” His darkness began to flow from his hands. I climbed up onto Sirius’s back, and Grue was a step behind, taking a seat in front of me.
“Any luck?” Tattletale asked. She’d seated herself on Bentley, her hands on the chain around his neck, and both Trickster and Sundancer were behind her.
My bugs were still searching for the real Siberian. Or her creator, depending on how one wanted to look at it. I was reaching the edges of my range and I hadn’t found anyone suitable. I did find two adult men that were together. Could she have made a friend in her real identity?
Just to be safe, I set my bugs on the pair of them. I didn’t use anything deadly, but I had bugs biting and stinging without flexing their abdomens to inject the accompanying venom. Siberian didn’t react to my assault of the men. I put each of them down as a ‘maybe’, planting bugs in the folds of their clothes to mark them.
“Can’t find her maker,” I said.
“My power’s not detecting him either,” Grue replied, “But my coverage is bad. Give me a second and I’ll let you know the second my darkness connects with him.”
Siberian had noticed the darkness, and I could see her contemplating coming after us, striking at the source of the darkness. Instead, she turned and began making her way toward Amy. The darkness continued to flow, low to the ground, tendrils rising to bind together and fill in gaps, and my view of Siberian was soon blocked. There was another explosion as Trickster deployed another grenade, but it wouldn’t serve as anything but a split-second distraction.
I could feel Siberian. Through my bugs, I could tell the darkness hadn’t reached around that corner to where Amy, my newly reformed decoys and the two sections of truck were.
It was as good a time as any. We needed to delay, so I wrote the words ‘run in 3′ in fron
t of Amy, along with an arrow. The three transformed into a two. Then a one.
I sent the decoys off in different directions.
Siberian lunged just as I’d expected her to, crashing through the decoy that was moving fastest. She plunged her hands into the nearby wall and ripped out a chunk of brick and mortar, flinging it. It broke apart as it left her hands, forming a scattershot spray.
More than one fragment of brick hit Amy, judging from the way she stumbled. None of the hits had been too serious, at least, because she managed to keep moving.
Using my swarm-sense, I formed a mental map of the area. Buildings, cover, features of the terrain. What was a good option? Should I drive her to keep running or to find cover? Would Siberian be able to second-guess my suggestions?
She was experienced in this sort of thing, and would be an experienced tracker. The water that layered the street was something of a blessing, I suspected. Even as it slowed Amy down, it meant there weren’t tracks of mud or anything for Siberian to follow. At worst, there would be clouds of muck stirred up by Amy’s footfalls, and there was little enough sunlight that I wasn’t sure how much of it Siberian would be able to see.
I waited, tense, as Amy ran. I felt the darkness roll over the bugs I’d gathered on and around her, and crossed my fingers that Siberian didn’t have any tricks up her sleeve.
Needed a way to communicate with her. Shifting a small group of bugs onto Amy’s right hand, I felt her shake them off. I tried again, and she left them there. I moved them gradually, until they were gathered on the tips of her ring and pinky fingers. She moved her hand to the right, and I shifted the bugs to her middle and index fingers.
Would she figure it out?
She moved her hand again, and I adjusted the placement of the bugs. From the way she picked up speed, I could tell she was taking my directions. The bugs would serve her as a compass. She wasn’t running as fast as she might, otherwise, but she seemed willing to trust that I wouldn’t direct her straight into a wall.
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