Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  “Glaistig Uaine.”

  “Her. I feel like I just got clued into a missing piece of the puzzle. They’re sentient. Maybe they’re sleeping, like she said. But they’re not dumb, and I think I’m getting an idea of what happens when they wake up.”

  “Is it something we can use?”

  “Not here. Not in the Birdcage.”

  “What a shame.”

  “God,” Amelia muttered. ”Why did I ask to come here? If I’d realized sooner-”

  “Why did you ask to come here?”

  The words hit her like a physical blow. She hugged her arms close to her body, and her hair fell down around her face. ”My sister. I used my power on her. Unmade her.”

  “I’m sorry. A result of sibling rivalry? A fight?”

  “Love,” Amelia’s voice was small. Her shoulders hunched forward. He took her by the hand and led her to an alcove, where far fewer people would be able to see her if she cried.

  “Alas, love. The cruelest emotion of them all. I’m sorry.”

  Marquis considered hugging her, but he didn’t. Part of it was the way she’d shied at his touch before. He would let her approach him in her own way. Another part of it, a small part of it, was the notion that Glaistig Uaine seemed to consider the girl to be at her level.

  It was a long time before she spoke. ”You said, before, that family was the most important thing.”

  “Something like that.”

  “I… would you understand if I said I didn’t consider you family? I- I’m glad you’re here, I’m glad to talk to you, but Victoria was my family.”

  “I understand, yes.” Expertise let him mask the pain her words caused him. I abandoned you to them because I was too proud to stop being the Marquis of Brockton Bay. I should understand that you grew more attached to them than to me, yet I can’t.

  “I feel like I have to do something. This feels important. If I could explain, tell someone who understands…”

  “There’s no escape, I’m afraid.”

  “And,” Amelia blinked tears out of her eyes, “Already, I feel like I’m betraying Victoria, that I’m already forgetting her. For just a few minutes, thinking about what I just found out from that girl, I stopped thinking about Victoria. It’s my fault she isn’t there anymore, that there’s only that thing I created. If I stop thinking about her, if I stop hurting, then I feel like I’m wronging her.”

  “I suspect the pain won’t stop or heal as quickly as you’re thinking it will. It hasn’t been that long, after all.”

  “Except… if it stops at all? If I ever forget, then I’ve subtracted something from the big picture. It’s not that she was perfect, but…”

  “But you need to maintain the memory. Come.”

  He gripped her hand and pulled her behind him. She was too busy wiping tears from her eyes and snot from her upper lip to protest.

  Still, he was glad that her face was mostly clear by the time they reached their destination. A tinker sat at the corner of the dining area with tools strewn around him. Makeshift devices crafted from the raw materials of their surroundings.

  “How much for a tattoo?” Marquis asked, “For her?”

  Amelia stared at him.

  “Five books and five fags,” the tinker replied.

  “Old books or new?”

  “Either.”

  Marquis turned to his daughter. ”If you decide to get it, I would advise a symbol rather than a face. He won’t get the description exactly right, and the image will distort your mental picture.”

  “I couldn’t remember her face as it was when it counted, anyways,” Amelia said, a dark look crossing her face.

  “You’ll have the memory of your sister in physical form, so you can never forget as long as you live. And when you’re done, we’ll take you back to your cell. You can talk to the empty room, say what you need to say, and Dragon’s surveillance will catch it.”

  “It’s like praying,” Amelia said.

  “Except there’s a chance someone will listen and act on it,” Marquis replied.

  Amelia nodded and sat down on the bench, then she began explaining what she wanted to the tattoo artist.

  ■

  The house program that monitored the Birdcage followed the girl as she parted from her father and entered her cell in Cell Block W.

  When she spoke, she addressed Dragon. The program began transcribing the message as it did every word said within the Baumann Parahuman Containment Center.

  Tracking programs then began reviewing the message. Flags were raised as key words came up with some frequency, descriptions were run against a corpus of records in parahuman studies and more flags were tripped.

  Sixty-two miles above the surface of the Earth, the Simurgh changed the course of her flight.

  Following protocol for when Dragon was deployed on a mission, the system routed the message to one of Dragon’s satellite systems. The resulting message was scrambled by the dense signature of the Endbringer en route to Dragon.

  Receiving the garbled transmission from the satellite, a subsystem of the Dragon A.I. proceeded to sort it. A scan of the message by a further subroutine saw it classified as non-pertinent, and a snarl in the code from Defiant’s improvised adjustments to her programming saw the message skip past several additional safeties and subroutines. The message was compartmentalized alongside other notes and data that included flares of atmospheric radiation and stray signals from the planet below; background noise at best.

  Considering its job done, the house program archived the transcription among fifteen years of conversation and notes from the Baumann Parahuman Containment Center.

  The Simurgh flew on.

  16.11

  I’d sensed the movement of his finger a fraction of a second before the gun went off, and tried to lean out of the way. It didn’t help. Dodging bullets wasn’t a trick I had my repertoire. Judging by the way the gun followed me as I moved, Thomas Calvert either knew his way around guns or he was using his power to help ensure he hit his target. Or, more likely, it was both.

  Getting hit, the smallest part of me could only think costume can’t stop a bullet after all. Except it wasn’t even a complete thought. Just a momentary disappointment as I felt the impact of the bullet passing through my chest to my back.

  I hit the ground, my mouth agape, and I couldn’t feel my heartbeat in the aftermath of the hit. It felt like a sledgehammer had hit me in the dead center of my torso. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t even think in a coherent fashion.

  But the remainder of my bugs were already flowing out of my costume as I fell prone. Capsaicin bugs moved in the general direction of Thomas Calvert and his soldiers, pre-prepared cords of thread unspooled from beneath my costume, trailing behind flying insects. I couldn’t think straight enough to orchestrate a smart attack, to tell them to go for the weak points, but they advanced swiftly, biting exposed flesh and forming a barrier between me and my attackers.

  Calvert backed away, his nose and mouth tucked into the crook of his elbow, eyes squinting shut. He emptied his clip in my general direction, but he didn’t have a bead on me. He couldn’t see, between the cloud of bugs between us and the bugs crawling on his face.

  I had flying insects catch the end of his gun with a cord and pull it off target further, and he backed up. I went a step further and wound threads around other guns, hoping to forestall the inevitable onslaught of bullets. If I could find leverage, someone or something that was moving, and pull them off-target before they shot me down-

  When he spoke, his voice was raised to be heard despite the muffling effect, “Out of the room. Fill it with bullets… no. Scratch that.”

  He’s coming up with counter-counter-plans before I even have a strategy in mind.

  “…Set her on fire. Her costume is bulletproof, and I want this done. I need to attend to other matters.”

  I couldn’t breathe. I could exhale, was huffing small breaths of pain, but I felt like my chest had caved in. My pulse
wasn’t pounding, my blood seemed to move too slowly through my veins, and I couldn’t inhale to inflate my crushed chest.

  Through my bugs, I could sense the two men stepping forward. Each wore gas masks and each had a bottle in one hand. A pungent odor trailed behind them, overwhelming and oppressing my bugs’ senses of smell and taste.

  I pressed one hand to my chest, as if I could gauge the damage done, and reflexively pulled it away as I touched something hot. A snarl of metal, embedded in the thickest portion of the armor I’d designed into the chest, and it was hot enough that it hurt to touch it. A bullet, I thought. I’d never considered that bullets would be hot.

  The realization coupled with the sting of the burn at the base of my palm helped to clarify my thoughts. The bullet hadn’t penetrated. I’d felt, what, the shockwave of the bullet hitting? Or I’d filled in the blanks wrong in the expectation of getting shot?

  It didn’t matter, because one of Thomas Calvert’s soldiers had just flicked the switch on a lighter, and I realized the bottles they were holding had to be makeshift molotov cocktails.

  Though my body was numb and my responses felt too sluggish, I reached behind my back. With some of the non-flying bugs still residing in my utility compartment, I found what I was looking for in a flash, drawing it from the slot I’d dedicated to it and getting it in position in my hand in an instant.

  I aimed the pepper spray at the lighter and fired. It offered ten feet of range, and they were on the other side of the room, with a heaping mess of containment foam between us.

  The pepper spray ignited and set fire to his sleeve and the shirt around his upper body. The lighter dropped to the ground as he thrashed, trying to pull his shirt off despite the gloves and the gas mask he wore.

  It wasn’t the brightest move, trying to stop someone from lighting a fuse by setting them on fire, but I wasn’t in a position to be picky. I tried to push myself to my feet, but my chest flared with pain and I collapsed, putting me in a position that was almost worse. The pain lanced throughout my ribcage, as if the structural integrity wasn’t there, and putting any strain on my torso threatened total collapse of everything that held it together.

  My bugs were already moving towards the other guy with the molotov. He’d hesitated at seeing his buddy go up in flames, and now cords of thread were winding around the neck of the bottle, the fingers that gripped it and his wrist, entwining them.

  “Irritating,” I was aware of Thomas Calvert’s voice in the next room. He’d retreated and shut the door behind him, but it burst open as the man with the molotov tied to his hand beat a retreat before it could be ignited by the still-thrashing man. Calvert added a snarled, “Damnation.”

  “If we use grenades-” one of the soldiers started.

  “Do not use grenades. I assure you it does not work out the way you imagine it will. Give me that.”

  I could sense Director Calvert tearing the bottle free of the man’s hand. I began arranging my bugs, creating a loose net with threads. It wouldn’t stop the forward momentum, but I had some cord left. I began winding it around the light fixture on the ceiling. If I could catch the bottle-

  He didn’t do as I’d expected, he didn’t light the rag, for one thing, and he didn’t toss the bottle at me. Lobbing it underhanded, he tossed it at the floor just past the door. The bottle shattered and the contents, gasoline by the smell of it, spread across the other half of the room.

  The burning soldier that was still in the room with me screamed, yelped out the word, “No!”

  He made a break for the door, and Calvert shot him. The bullet wasn’t enough to stop the soldier’s forward momentum, but one of the other soldiers kicked him hard in the stomach. Calvert used his foot to push the door closed as the man fell onto his back, landing in the pool of gasoline and broken glass.

  His still-burning clothing ignited the accelerant. In a heartbeat, the floor in front of the door was on fire, and the room was filled with the shrill screams of the thrashing, burning soldier.

  I experienced a moment of animal panic. The kind of mindless fear that was hardwired into our brains on a basic level, so that we, like a wolf, a deer or an ape would, knew that fire was bad. Smoke was bad. Fire was a thing to run from and I had nowhere to run.

  I shook my head. Had to think.

  There was one exit to the room. To get to it, I’d have to leap over a heap of containment foam, which I wasn’t sure I could manage with the way my chest was hurting and with no real running start. Even if I passed the hurdle -and failure would mean I was stuck and trapped- I’d have to run through a pool of burning gasoline, avoid tripping on the flailing, burning man, get to the door and pull it open.

  Except Calvert was calmly, efficiently ordering his men to gather tables and chairs and stack them against the door, as if the fire in the next room wasn’t even a concern. A chair was propped up so it was under the doorknob, a heavier dining room table blocked the door itself. Three soldiers worked together to move a tattered sofa, lifting the end to put it on the table.

  My bugs. I didn’t have enough here in the building, not enough to mount a serious attack on Calvert. Most of the ones I’d brought with me had burned up as the room caught fire. Some clung to Calvert and his men, but they were too few to do more than hurt and annoy. In my mindless fear, I’d called for my bugs to come to me. Or my passenger had, perhaps. Maybe it was the two of us, working together through my subconscious.

  Either way, I had only a few usable bugs, a whole mess of useless ones like moths, houseflies, cockroaches and ants from the surrounding neighborhood, and Thomas Calvert, Coil, was on his way out of the building.

  I looked at the bigger scene. I was in one of the areas that had been abandoned when Leviathan attacked. This house hadn’t been nice to begin with, and the flooding had made things worse. Calvert had prepped the area prior to teleporting me in. The house sat on the corner of the block, and the two neighboring houses had been bulldozed. There were no people in range that I could see. He would have cleared it out so there were no eyewitnesses. Portable chain link fences had been put up and bound together with loops of chain at the perimeter of the property. He was stepping through an opening now, and his men closed it behind him, threading chain through. Going by the lock one soldier held in his hand, they clearly planned to lock it as they had the others.

  Just past the perimeter of the fence, there were a dozen trucks and cars surrounding the building, each turned toward the property, their headlights on. Squads of soldiers stood beside and in front of the trucks, guns raised and ready. Most had machine guns or handguns, bandoleers of grenades and all-concealing body armor. Three had containment foam dispensers.

  Leaving the property would be impossible, which didn’t matter because I wasn’t capable of leaving the room. There were two windows, only one of which I could reach, and both were boarded up. Not even just boarded up against the window frame, but the planks of wood were long and fixed to the studs of the wall, too. I ran my hand over the end of one plank and felt the raised bumps of nails or screws. An ant climbed off my fingertip to move over the surface of one bump.

  Screws. Screws with hexagonal slots. Because Calvert wasn’t willing to risk that I’d have a screwdriver on hand with a more typical head on it.

  I laughed. It made my chest seize up in pain, it probably sounded a little crazed, but I laughed. It was too much.

  This would be a perfect time for a second trigger event. Hadn’t Lisa said that my mind-power link was enhanced whenever I felt trapped? I doubted I’d ever feel more trapped than I did right this moment. I couldn’t see just how far the fire reached, because I was blind, and the heat of the fire was killing the bugs I needed for sensing my surroundings. I had only a minute or two before the room became an oven and killed off the rest, leaving me blind and roasting to death.

  I coughed as a wave of smoke hit me, and ducked my head low to keep breathing.

  No, I probably wouldn’t burn to death. I’d suffocate as the flame
ate up the oxygen, go out quietly before I started burning. Maybe I’d trigger then, after things got that bad. It wouldn’t help, probably. I couldn’t think of a single permutation of my powers that would get me out of this mess.

  I went on the attack, sending my bugs after Calvert and his people. Too many were useless, many weren’t even capable of biting. Still, I found three black widows in the immediate area. After a moment’s consideration, I delivered them straight to Calvert. They found flesh at his neck and bit.

  He swatted at them, pinched one between his fingers, and raised it in front of his face. Then he said something I didn’t catch.

  There was no hurry in his movements as he flicked the dead spider to the ground and called out an order to his men.

  The order, I feared, I actually heard and understood. It helped that I had enough context to guess what the words were and fill in the blanks.

  Burn it to the ground.

  “Fuck you,” I whispered, pressing my hands to the wooden planks. I coughed as I inhaled another waft of smoke, then coughed harder as the combination of the pain in my chest and the smoke I was inhaling in my attemtps to catch my breath made for a self-perpetuating cycle. Calvert’s men were lighting more molotovs, tossing them over the fence they’d erected. One hit the side of the building. Another hit the front porch. Three or four more hit the lawn and surrounding property.

  Calvert glanced over his shoulder, then confidently strode over to a car and took a seat in the back. He didn’t have the driver take him away. No, he’d be more interested in watching, in verifying that things went according to plan. Putting himself in the car meant only that he was out of the reach of my bugs.

  Not that he’d seemed concerned about the black widow bites.

  Chances were good he’d already taken the necessary antivenins. Damn it, and the antivenin that worked on black widow spiders also worked on any number of other spiders. He’d probably suffer side effects, but that wouldn’t be immediate.