Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  That left the problem of Siberian and whether she would come after us when she lost Amy’s trail.

  “Let’s go,” I spoke. ”Let’s check the twelve o’clock position from Siberian to see if we can’t find her creator further on. Loop around.”

  Grue and Tattletale kicked the dogs into action.

  I judged that Amy and Siberian were far enough apart, now. I used my bugs to direct her to a door that was ajar, leading her into a small shopping mall.

  I tapped hard on Grue’s shoulder, and the darkness immediately around us began to fade. I asked, “You can tell where Amy is?”

  “I have a bit of her power. Don’t trust myself to use it,” he grunted. ”Missing something in the interpretation and analysis part of it.”

  “Clear the darkness around her so she can find a spot to hide.”

  He grunted a response, and the darkness folded around us a second time.

  I was focusing on four things at once: staying seated behind Grue, guiding Amy, tracking Siberian’s location and trying to find Siberian’s real body. I could sense her as she made her way up the side of a building.

  Grue’s darkness was heavier, now. It sat lower on the streets. From her vantage point, Siberian couldn’t see us, couldn’t see Amy, but she could see the tops of taller buildings.

  What was she looking at?

  Through my swarm-sense, I could feel her dropping back down to ground level. I expected a splash or shattered pavement, but there was nothing. She was snapping her invulnerability out to affect the surface she was landing on.

  She was heading in Amy’s general direction.

  I reached up and pulled on Grue’s right arm. He veered in that direction.

  Couldn’t find Siberian’s real body. Was it really close, like Cherish had said? I noted one man who fit the general description, but he was barricaded in his room, surrounded by cans of food. There was no reason for Siberian’s real persona to situate himself here. Even so, I tested him, attacking him with bugs to see if it got a response.

  Not that I was sure that there was a link connecting his real self and her projected form. It was an assumption, and maybe a dangerous one. I wasn’t sure exactly how much control Brian had managed with his own projection when he’d borrowed that fragment of Siberian’s powers.

  No. My gut told me Siberian wouldn’t operate like this if there wasn’t some link. There had to be some kind of range limit on the projection, or he wouldn’t have any reason to follow Siberian from city to city. The fact that he was supposedly in this area meant it might even be a fairly short range. If he was an unwilling participant, a recipient of a power with unfortunate side effects, like Labyrinth, then she’d have to direct him from one place to another with threats. It would require more interactions between her selves, and that would mean something would have been given away.

  Along similar lines, if she depended on him to keep her going, then she had to keep him safe from the other members of the Nine. There was infighting in the group, apparently, though I’d seen no sign of it with the team thus far. Keeping the ordinary man safe wouldn’t be a problem if he shared Siberian’s senses like I shared those of my bugs. She could keep an eye out for trouble and he could slip away or hide if a member of the Nine came around.

  Until Cherish joined the group. I wonder how that had played out. Some sort of deal? Threats, overt or implied?

  Siberian was on the far side of the two-lane road that stood beside Amy’s hideout. She didn’t walk straight for Amy, but walked down the street with an almost casual slowness. She had one arm out, a hand tracing the side of the building she was walking by, as if to guide her through the effects Grue’s lightless world.

  My swarm felt dust shower onto them in her wake. It was unexpected, and it demanded investigation. I moved them across the wall, and felt a gap. She wasn’t just putting her hand on the wall, but her hand and forearm through it. What did that mean?

  My bugs felt more dust fall from above. A moth was bludgeoned by a rock that fell from above.

  I felt realization hit me like a bucket of cold water.

  Her hand was punching through the exterior wall of the building, but it was also tearing through the supports and load bearing areas. She’d made her way halfway through the ground floor. By the time she finished, part of the building was going to collapse and fall.

  If the building tipped in the direction of the shattered area, it could easily fall on the mall where Amy was hiding.

  My bugs formed a picture on a wall near Amy. A rectangle to represent the skyscraper Siberian intended to bring down, a squatter rectangle to represent the mall, a ladybug for Amy and a moth to represent Siberian. I demonstrated what was about to happen.

  Faster and easier than explaining with words.

  Still, I included one word for good measure: ’RUN’.

  I could feel Amy making a break for it. She headed in the wrong direction at first, northwest instead of northeast, and I used a giant arrow to direct her.

  The building began to collapse only ten or fifteen seconds after I’d transmitted the message. Grue’s power didn’t do anything to stop the rumble from reaching us. From what my bugs could gather in the chaos that followed, the building seemed to slump, the lower levels buckling and crackling. Just when I thought it had settled, the upper portion tipped over, crashing into the small parking lot and the entrance of the mall.

  Amy wasn’t in the impact site, and she probably wouldn’t have been even if I hadn’t warned her. Still, it was a demonstration of power, it was intended to scare an already terrified Amy, and it served both purposes. She was running directly away from the site of the devastation, ignoring the bugs I had on her hand. In her pell-mell run , Amy stumbled into a post meant to keep carts from being taken out of the mall and fell hard.

  “Right,” I spoke into Grue’s darkness. He obeyed.

  Siberian was giving chase, entering one end of the mall at the same time Amy made her way out of the opposite side. Siberian had guessed the most likely hiding spot and then used the falling building to dash Amy’s hopes of safety and get her out of hiding and running. With the way the roads funneled together into one four-lane road, Amy would either have to take a left, take a right, or go straight. Chances were good she would take the latter, because it put her the furthest from Siberian.

  With my directions, we looped around the mall and made a beeline for Amy. Siberian was advancing too, but while she was in the right general area, she didn’t have a means of finding Amy, specifically. Instead, she leaped from one area to another, pausing for a second or two at a time.

  What was she doing?

  I swept the area with my power, but I couldn’t find anyone resembling Cherish’s description of Siberian’s real self.

  Was I missing something? If Cherish had been lying outright, I was under the impression that Lisa would have caught some tell. There had to be something else to it. Something I could use to identify the man behind the monster.

  What was she? Unstoppable, a deceptively strong, deceptively tough juggernaut of a woman.

  Something caught her attention. A vibration in the road? Or had she used her power to protect the ground, and sensed some impact as the dogs walked on it?

  Either way, she started to chase us. We could have turned at a right angle, to hopefully throw her off, but both Grue and I knew that if we did, and she continued straight, she’d run straight into Amy.

  Fast. She was fast. Not as much as Battery or Velocity might have been on a good day, but highly mobile.

  The thought clicked into the blank I was looking to fill. How was her alter ego getting around? I’d assumed he was traveling on foot because that was how ninety-percent of the city was getting by. Very few cars on the road had access to gas and the ability to traverse the broken, flooded streets. But if there was a range limit to the projection, how was he keeping up with the woman who could ignore air resistance and leap across a city block in a single bound?

  I shoul
dn’t have been looking for people. I should have been looking for vehicles. Had I overlooked anything like a truck or a van interior he could be hiding inside? Or was he still in a location outside of my range? Or -I wasn’t ignoring the possibility- had Cherish lied or misled us?

  Damn it! The extra possibility threw my hopes of finding the man totally out of whack.

  My respect for Grue grew a hundredfold as he veered straight for Amy without my asking him to. We swept past her, and I caught her around the shoulder. Grue offered one hand, and we lifted her together, kicking and struggling, onto my lap. I wrapped one arm around her chest, to keep her securely in place. She was breathing hard, almost hyperventilating.

  It took her a few seconds to realize we weren’t Siberian. She might have calmed down at that realization, but she didn’t get a chance.

  Siberian closed the gap in a single bound, crashing into Bentley, Lisa, Trickster and Sundancer and shoving them forward into the rest of us. We sprawled, and I felt my leg bend painfully as Sirius rolled over it.

  Grue banished his darkness. I could see the six of us and the two dogs, lying on the road. Nobody dead.

  And there was Siberian. Faintly glowing eyes, black and white striped skin, straight hair in similar variations of black and white, trailing to her tailbone.

  “Thank you, Grue,” Tattletale said. Had she asked him to cancel out his power? It wasn’t like he was borrowing any power that would work on Siberian, and as for the concealment effects, they wouldn’t do much.

  And, as it turned out, she wanted to talk. She pulled herself up to a standing position and raised one hand, palm facing Siberian. ”Hold on.”

  Siberian stopped.

  “I think you should know,” Tattletale smiled, “We’re here for three reasons.”

  Siberian’s eyes narrowed.

  “Reason number one, we’re trying to save that girl. I mean, if I’m being perfectly honest, I don’t know if I would have risked it, but we do have some more compassionate people on our team.” She glanced at me. ”For better or worse.”

  I could see Siberian flex her fingers. Her nails were long, and they were sharp. There wasn’t anything special about them, on an aesthetic level, but they did have the benefit of her power. If she raked those across a surface, they would leave gouges. Didn’t matter how hard or dense the material was.

  “Reason number two, we’re aiming to kill you. See, we know about your… other self.”

  There wasn’t the slightest reaction from Siberian.

  “And the third reason, I think you should know, is sort of tied into the first. We’re making you waste time. Longer you take to kill Panacea, here, the better off we are. Awfully arrogant of you to leave your team and go off to pick off candidates like Amy. The rest of your team? Crawler, Jack, Mannequin and Bonesaw? Right this second, they’re getting a surprise visit from the rest of our team. What do you think-”

  Siberian flickered and disappeared. Tattletale’s jaw dropped.

  “Shit,” Trickster cursed, “She-”

  “Just get a phone! Warn them!”

  14.03

  “They’re not answering,” Tattletale reported, as she lowered the phone from her ear. ”They’re already engaged.”

  “You fucking idiot. I swear,” Trickster stabbed one finger in her direction, “If Ballistic dies because you fucking gave it away-”

  I could see Tattletale’s eyes narrow, “My power told me there was a damn good chance she’d just run for it. Eighty, ninety percent.”

  “Well, your power was wrong, wasn’t it?” Trickster retorted.

  Tattletale ignored him, looking at me, “Anything? Can you find him?”

  I shook my head. ”No. I think he might be in a vehicle, so he can keep up with Siberian. I realized it late, I haven’t been looking for one this whole time, but I’m sweeping the area now.”

  “Shouldn’t we go?” Sundancer asked. ”We can go help Ballistic and your team.”

  “Would love to,” Grue said, “But Bitch warned us about using her dogs past the fifteen minute mark. It’s wearing off, they’re getting smaller and weaker, and if it gets to the point that they’re not comfortable carrying the load, they may lash out.”

  “How many minutes has it been?” Trickster asked, glancing at Bentley.

  “Long enough I wouldn’t risk it,” Grue said.

  I looked at Sirius. I hadn’t noticed while we’d been riding him, but he was smaller. His exterior tissues were fitting looser, in the same way skin tended to hang loose on someone who had been morbidly obese and recently lost weight.

  And just to his left, I could see Amy backing away, holding her hand.

  “Amy,” I spoke.

  She startled as if I’d slapped her. Everyone’s eyes turned to her.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “No, I’m not okay.” Her head trembled a little as she turned to glance at the others. She returned her attention to me. ”She bit off my fingers.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I raised my hands to show her I wasn’t armed. ”We tried to get to you as fast as we could.”

  “My fingers,” she moaned, as she looked at her hand. ”I ran as fast as I could, but it wasn’t fast enough. She kept catching me.”

  “I know. There was nothing you could have done,” I said.

  “It’s not right,” Amy shook her head. She was still backing away. “This isn’t the way things should be. Superpowers and Endbringers and things like Siberian… it’s so fucked up. We- there should be a way to fight back, but there isn’t, so much of the time.”

  “There is,” I said. ”It’s hard to find, but there’s always a way.”

  Tattletale turned her head, “Hey, Amy, listen. Can I ask you a quest-”

  “Don’t,” Amy snapped, shifting gears from self-pity to fury in a heartbeat. “Don’t talk to me. Don’t even look at me, you bitch.”

  “This is important.”

  “What part of what I just said did you not understand!?”

  “You’d think we didn’t just save your life,” Trickster said, folding his arms.

  “You did it to delay Siberian. Or so she said,” Amy replied, glancing at Tattletale.

  “It was one of the reasons,” Tattletale started, “Skitter-”

  “Shut up!” The words were a screech as they came out of Amy’s mouth.

  Tattletale turned a hundred and eighty degrees, so her back was to Amy, and looked in the direction of Grue and I. ”I’m done. No point, fuck it. I’m going to try calling the others again while you handle this.”

  There were a few long seconds of tension as we all stood there, Tattletale a short distance away, phone to her ear.

  I decided to break the silence. ”How are your fingers? You’re using your power to keep the bleeding down?”

  Amy glanced at her hand, and a dark look crossed her face. ”Yeah.”

  “I’ve got bandages, if you want them. Only the most basic first aid supplies, but maybe they’ll help?”

  “Okay.”

  I got the small kit from my utility compartment and approached her. She kept still while I got out the disinfectant, bandages and tape and covered the fingers Siberian had shortened by one segment.

  “How can you even be teammates with her?” Amy asked me. ”Are you friends?”

  “We are.”

  “Everything that happened to me, it’s like it all snowballed out from the moment you assholes robbed the bank.”

  Me too. I’d met and ultimately joined the Undersiders because of Tattletale, and everything had followed from that.

  “She didn’t plan that. It might have started that way, but she wasn’t the cause of everything that followed,” I said. I wondered if I was trying to convince myself.

  Amy glared down at the ground. A quick glance showed that Grue, Trickster and Sundancer were all trying to avoid engaging in this conversation.

  She spoke at a low enough volume that I doubted the words were reaching the others. ”I’ve had nig
htmares about her. Not saying I take back how I shouted at her, but she brought up shit, and the fact that Victoria heard it, I couldn’t shake it. It affected the way I thought, the way I acted. Victoria knew something was up, she respected my privacy, but she had suspicions. If Tattletale hadn’t said anything, I could have dealt with Bonesaw coming to my house and fucking with me, getting me to break my code. Or Bonesaw might not have come at all. I don’t know. Victoria would have listened to me, maybe. Given me the benefit of the doubt.”

  “We didn’t expect you to be at the bank. We were cornered, Tattletale used the power she was given to get us out of that spot. I’m sorry it happened.”

  “She was the catalyst in my whole life falling apart. Tattletale was.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And you can be friends with her, and you still think of yourself as a good person?”

  “I… don’t know that I do think of myself that way. I’ve probably done more damage than good, by trying to help others.” Dinah, the people in my territory, now Brian.

  “But your intentions were good, then? You were trying to help?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then tell me what to do.” She didn’t meet my eyes. ”I don’t know anymore. I’ve spent so long helping others, and I’m so scared, I feel numb. My brain isn’t working. Can’t think straight. I- I just don’t know anymore. I’m not making any promises, I won’t fight, won’t face the Nine, don’t want to talk to Tattletale, but…” she trailed off, unable to finish her thought.

  I swallowed. I couldn’t even manage with myself, and now she wanted me to guide her?

  “Okay,” I said. My mind was going a mile a minute. She was one of the most powerful parahumans native to Brockton Bay. How was I supposed to use her?

  One idea crossed my mind, and I hated myself for thinking it, for the stark fear I felt at the thought. ”Okay. I won’t ask you to face the Nine. But you can give us the ability to go after them, to fight them. There’s this part of the brain that Bonesaw called the… Corona something. Corona potential? Can you access mine? Tweak my power, give me more range? As much as you can.”