“We’ll try that, then.”
We headed up to the second level and I settled into my chair. For additional lighting, I had my ‘switch beetle’ flick the concealed switch that was contained in his terrarium. They lit up as I settled in.
Brooks hooked up the blood bag but left the tube hanging, unconnected. Other supplies were arranged on the table he’d had Bryce bring up. He seemed very particular about the order and what was being kept
“For a field medic you seem pretty well versed in this stuff.”
“Worked in many hospitals,” he replied. ”Many places. Often with less than this. Sometimes with more.”
“Okay.”
“We will have to dislocate your shoulder to access the inside of shoulder socket.”
“Okay.”
“You will take muscle relaxant to minimize damage from dislocation. You will need to exercise arm to prevent more dislocations.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, the possibility that it was actually poison, but the muscle relaxant came from the bottle, and they had the brand logo etched into them. One potential danger averted. No way he’d arranged it this quickly.
“I can do that.” I took the pills with a swig from the offered bottle of water.
Sierra arrived with the laptop and a large bag. She handed me the laptop and then plugged it in beneath one of the lower shelves. I balanced it on my armrest, turning sideways so I was sitting with my bad shoulder facing out front, my legs curled around me for as much stability as I could hope for. Sierra began arranging towels and plastic cloth around the chair.
“This would be easier if you just lay down,” Bryce said. I saw Sierra scowl at him.
“It is fine,” Brooks said. He lifted my arm and let it flop back down. I tried not to react to the pain that elicited. ”Only one that suffers is her.”
“Ever a charmer, Brooks,” I commented, but my attention was on the laptop. I used the switch beetle to open all of the terrariums, and withdrew collections of spiders, dragonflies, large moths and roaches.
“They should not touch chair,” Brooks said. ”Or anything on table. Must keep everything as sterile as we can.”
“I know,” I said.
I gathered the components from the bag, using my bugs to draw them out and airlift the miniature cameras, microphones and transmitters into the air. One by one, I turned them on and used the laptop to connect to them. I used my free hand to click through each camera in turn, making their feeds the focus of the main window.
Using my bugs, I drew forms around each, vaguely humanoid. It wasn’t as intuitive as I was forced to use my own eyes to assess the accuracy. Still, I managed to rearrange each until they vaguely resembled me. I marched them down the stairs.
“Outside end first,” Brooks said, starting up the rotary saw.
Not my favorite sound. And the sensation of it sawing at the metal, it brought back even more unpleasant memories. Being on my back, Bonesaw trying to cut a hole through my skull…
I shivered.
“Don’t move,” Brooks said.
I focused on my swarm-clones, staying totally still while he worked on removing the metal end of the dart. They were largely composed of flying bugs, but I was bulking each of the forms out as more bugs arrived, giving them a more solid mass. I used my free hand to pop my ear-buds in.
I felt bad about leaving my territory as often as I had been. People were spooked, scared and insecure. Having a leadership figure that was never around wasn’t helping matters.
This would, I hoped, establish a kind of presence that had been lacking.
Sierra had been coordinating everyone, trying to put people with experience in charge of people who were lacking it. It was interesting, trying to hold multiple conversations at once with the various project leaders. Difficult, too. For one thing, my speech with my swarms was somewhat lacking, missing consonants, but I could still make myself more or less understood. For another, my ears could only process one thing at a time. I managed by talking with one or more swarm-clone while listening with one at a time. After too many misfires and moments of confusion, I scaled down my efforts to a single conversation at once, simply standing silently by with my other selves.
I made a mental note to try to practice with that. Exercising the range of my power hadn’t done anything for me, and there didn’t seem to be any upper limits to how many bugs I could control at once, but there had to be other ways I could train my abilities. Multitasking was one I hadn’t tried yet. Trying to interpret the senses of my bugs was another, though I feared it would take a more concerted effort to effect any sort of change.
When Charlotte returned, I was in the middle of helping a foreman with the layout of a building, using spiders to draw out a loose web in the general shape of the planned shelter, lifting bits of wood to make the lines more visible from a distance. I adjusted the threads as required to meet his needs. Charlotte climbed out of a truck with five more of my people and made a beeline to my swarm-clone. One hundred and ninety people working for me.
Word was apparently getting out about this being a safe haven.
My conversation with her was delayed as Brooks enlisted Bryce in twisting and pulling on my arm while Brooks held my neck and torso. Bryce drove his elbow against my shoulder while it was being twisted to its absolute limits, effectively knocking my arm out of its socket.
I managed to avoid making any noise beyond a guttural grunt, then took a few seconds to try to avoid blacking out from the pain.
As heavily as I was breathing, back in my lair, my swarm-people didn’t show any sign. I focused the whole of my attention on them, as if I could remove my consciousness from my real body.
“Any problems?” I asked Charlotte, once I’d recovered enough to pay attention. Glancing at my shoulder, I could see Brooks making an incision in the skin of my shoulder. He’d managed to open the tear in my costume. I hadn’t been paying attention to how. I deliberately looked away as Brooks tried to forge a path to the inside of my shoulder socket.
“Not sure,” Charlotte said. ”Have a look.”
It was Parian. I’d been so focused on my shoulder, the three-dimensional web-blueprint and my swarm-selves that I hadn’t noticed her getting out of the truck.
“You didn’t leave,” I said, when she’d joined Charlotte and my swarm-clone.
“I didn’t think the money would be real,” she responded.
“Of course it was.”
“It’s… it was a lot of money. Very generous. But we were talking about it, and split between us, it’s not enough to give everyone all the care they need. I told them to go ahead, that I didn’t need a share.”
“Sorry. I was worried it wouldn’t be enough,” I said. ”Are you saying you want more money? I might have to say no. There’s a limit to what I can spare.”
“No! No.” She hugged her arms to her body, looking around at the people who were working. ”Just… I thought maybe I should hear you out.”
“Okay,” I responded.
“Except it’s not really you?”
My clone shook her head.
“Can I talk with the real you?”
“I’m in my lair, and I’m preoccupied. You’ll understand if I don’t reveal the location, given who your friends are?”
“Yeah,” she said. She was still looking around, watching as a group moved by, pushing wheelbarrows of burned wood. ”I… I was telling myself that there was no point to taking your offer, that I could use my power and make more money legitimately. But that’s not true at all, is it?”
“Walk with me?” I asked.
She nodded.
I led the way through my territory with my clone as I talked. ”Crime does pay. I made the offer to you because I thought it would be the best way to get your Dolltown residents the money they needed to get their old lives back. Or get as close to their old lives as possible.”
“I kind of hate you,” she said.
“Why?”
�
�You’re making it out like I’m a bad person because I won’t betray Flechette and my own moral code to help them.”
“I don’t blame you for your decision. I don’t think any less of you.”
“But you wouldn’t make the choice I’m making.”
“No. I didn’t.”
“And you’ve done more to help my people than I have.”
“You’ve protected them to the best of your ability through this city’s darkest hours.”
“You really think we’re past that? The bad days?”
“Yes.”
I winced as the grinding resumed, this time inside my shoulder socket. A makeshift rigging inside the cavity caught the metal shavings, while Bryce held the tube to suction the metal shavings out. So far, no assassination attempts. Good.
“I don’t know what to do,” Parian admitted. ”This is… seeing it makes me wish I’d done something like it.”
“I’m not going to push you towards one choice or another.”
“I know. You made that clear when you gave me the money with no strings attached.”
“Look,” I said. ”I know Flechette was saying my perspective is warped, but I think the system… you know, society, it’s like a series of rules and expectations that we established under some general expectations. But recent events have made it pretty clear that those expectations, those assumptions, they might not apply.”
“Because of us? Capes?”
“Yeah. At the end of the day, barring some extreme examples like powerful dictators, there’s always the fact that any bad person who doesn’t have powers can be killed with a gun, a knife, or even a good punch in the right place. That’s not the case with us parahumans. The balance of power is pretty damned off-kilter. Things aren’t fair.”
“Are you making that imbalance better or worse?”
“I’m… addressing the problem. I’m saying there’s no point to trying to hold on to the old status quo when it’s based on a foundation that no longer exists.”
“So you’re going to take over the city.”
“Yes. Because at least for right now, I can give these people what they need.”
I moved my clone’s ‘head’ and followed a group of kids who were running away from my lair, carrying six-packs of water bottles.
“And later?”
“I don’t know.”
We walked in silence, past a bonfire where scrap wood was being burned. Brooks and Bryce, meanwhile, set to shoving my arm back into its socket. All of the ambient pain disappeared in an instant.
Parian needed the money, she needed the assurance that she could help the people she’d failed. I understood that.
“I can offer you one last compromise,” I said.
“What?”
“I can’t guarantee it’ll work, I can’t say if anyone else will accept the proposal, and I don’t know what’s going to happen long-term, but we don’t have to call you a member of our team. We don’t have to call you a villain.”
“But I’d take territory for myself anyways?”
“Yes.”
“Others would call me a villain, just because I wasn’t fighting you guys. They’d know I was cooperating with you.”
“Not necessarily. Maybe the people in charge, the Protectorate and Wards, maybe they’d understand it, but the people on the ground level wouldn’t.”
“The media would out me.”
“I think we control the media. Or enough to throw some doubt into the mix. The rules are pretty simple. You take territory, you hold it, and you ensure that there’s no crime or parahumans operating there without your consent.”
“And Flechette-”
“I don’t know her. I can’t say how she’ll react, but maybe if you explain nicely, maybe if you frame it right, you could convince her it’s for the greater good. So long as she convinced the other heroes to leave your territory alone, let you enforce the law there all by yourself, you wouldn’t have to fight them.”
“And if she didn’t-”
“That’s up to her. Or you.”
She stared around my territory. It wasn’t pretty, there was still devastation everywhere, but things were getting better. It was maybe the only place in the city where things were improving as fast as they were. We weren’t taking two steps forward and one step back. It was all forward momentum. Not even a week had passed, admittedly, but it was progress. And it was apparent.
“I don’t think I could accept if Flechette doesn’t agree.”
“Okay.” The alternative was unspoken. If she does…
“I hate you,” Parian said, and it was answer enough.
Brooks was finishing stitching up the incision in my shoulder. I already had two pieces of scrap spider silk at the ready – one to cover the hole in my costume and another to serve as a sling until my shoulder was stronger. If I adjusted my cape, I could cover the arm so the injury wasn’t too obvious. I stood from the chair and stretched, then reached for my cell phone.
“I can live with that,” I told her, speaking through my swarm-clone. I clicked through my contact list and called the man who was plotting to kill me.
15.z (Donation Interlude #3; Alexandria)
August 20th, 1986
She was being poisoned by people with smiles on their faces.
She hated those smiles. Fake. Pretending to be happy, pretending to be cheerful. But she’d spent enough time here to know that her friends and family would be crying the second they thought they were out of earshot. The strangers had a weariness that spoke to the inevitable. The older they were, the more reality seemed to weigh on them.
Somewhere along the line, they had stopped telling her that the chemotherapy would make her better. The smiles had become even more strained. There was more emphasis on making her comfortable. Less explanation of what was going on.
So when her mother came in to check on her, bringing the mug of heated chicken broth, she pretended to be asleep. She hated herself for it, but she couldn’t stand the lies, the fakeness.
If it wouldn’t have given her away, she would have winced as her mother sat down by her bedside. It meant she might be staying a while.
“Becca,” her mother murmured from behind her. ”You awake?”
She didn’t respond, keeping her breathing steady. She tried to breathe through her nose, so the sores that filled her mouth wouldn’t sing with pain at the contact with the air.
Her mother ran one hand over her head. Her hair was mostly gone, and the contact was uncomfortable to the point that it was almost painful.
“You’ve been so brave,” her mom whispered, so quiet she was barely audible.
I’m not brave. Not at all. I’m terrified. I’m so frustrated I could scream. But she couldn’t. Everyone had painted her as being so courageous, so noble and peaceful in the face of the months of treatment. But it was a facade, and she’d passed the point of no return. It was too late to break composure, too late to stop making bad jokes, faking smiles of her own. She couldn’t complain or use her mother’s shoulder to cry on because everyone would fall apart if she did.
She was their support.
“My little superhero,” her mother said. Rebecca could feel her mother’s hand on her bare scalp once more. She wanted to slap that hand away, yell at her mother. Don’t you know that hurts? Everything hurts.
“You’ve been trying so hard. You deserve better.”
And just like that, from the tone and the word choice, Rebecca knew she was dying.
She felt a mixture of emotions. Relief, in a way. It would mean the chemotherapy could stop; she could stop hurting. There was anger too. Always some anger. Why couldn’t her mother just tell her? When would they get up the courage to deliver that news?
Apparently not tonight. Rebecca heard the scrape of the chair moving as her mother stood, the muffled footsteps as she retreated down the hall.
Tears had been harder to come by since the chemo had started. Most days, her eyes were red and itchy, her visio
n blurry, too dry to cry. But it seemed this occasion deserved them. For a long time, she lay on her side, staring out the window at the cityscape of Los Angeles, tears running sideways down her face, across the bridge of her nose and down to her ear, soaking her pillow.
There was a sign that caught her eye, because it was so bright a yellow against its immediate background of blues and dusky purples. The classic logo of a fast food restaurant.
It struck her that she would probably never get to eat there again, never get a special kids meal with the dinky plastic toy that was meant for kids ten years younger than her. She’d never forget about the toy afterward, letting it clutter the top of her dresser along with the other colorful trinkets and keepsakes.
She’d never get to read the third book of the Maggie Holt series, or see the movie they were making of the first book.
She’d never have a real boyfriend.
It was dumb, but those stupid trivial things hit her harder than the idea that she’d never see her family, her friends or her cats again. The steady tears became sobs, and her breath hitched, making her entire chest seize in pain. The involuntary clenching of her empty stomach was twice as bad, and she started to think she might need to throw up. Or dry heave. Experience told her that would be worst of all.
She’d started moaning without realizing it, quiet and drawn out, trying to replace those painful lurching sobs with something else.
“Do you need morphine?”
The gentle voice startled her, interrupting both the moans and the sobs. Morphine wouldn’t help the most basic, terrifying, inevitable reality she faced. She shook her head.
There was a whispering.
“I’m going to increase the drip just a little, Rebecca Costa-Brown.”
“Who?” Rebecca stirred, turning around to see who was speaking. A black woman with long hair in a doctor’s get-up was messing with the IV bag. But… no name tag. And there was a teenage girl with pale skin and dark hair standing behind her, wearing knee-high socks, a black pleated skirt and white dress shirt. ”You’re not one of my doctors.”
“No, Rebecca. Not yet,” the woman replied.
Quietly, Rebecca asked, “Are you one of the doctors that takes care of people that are dying?”
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