Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  “Did he want you to come here, to frame you?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. ”Doesn’t make sense. Just as easy for ‘Skitter’ to disappear with Dinah, leaving you guys angry but still loyal. I think the way he wanted it, I’d die of the gunshot or burn up in a housefire, and he could use the lack of living reporters in Brockton Bay alongside some bribe money for the Travelers to ensure you guys didn’t know what he’d pulled. Maybe something comes out later about me betraying you, to put it in perspective and put any lingering doubts to rest.”

  “He teleported you into a burning house, shot you, surrounded you with soldiers. And you escaped,” Imp said.

  “Barely.” I touched the knot of metal where the bullet had settled in my armor. ”I guess it’s bulletproof after all. I got away because of stuff he wasn’t aware of, mainly. My costume, tactics I’ve been using in the field, the fact I had a gun. Don’t know if Calvert knew about that. Are you okay, Rachel?”

  Rachel didn’t respond. Her head was turned my way, and I could imagine her staring, trying to read me. Her hand gripped the chain at Bastard’s neck.

  “It wasn’t me,” I told her.

  “It wasn’t her,” Grue confirmed. ”I saw with her power. That box was controlling the bugs.”

  Bitch nodded slowly. I couldn’t see her expression to know whether she was glaring at me or narrowing her eyes behind her mask.

  “If you have any doubts,” I said, “You can stay in a position to attack me if something happens. One whistle or one hand signal away from commanding Bastard or Bentley to tear me apart. I hope you won’t leap to any conclusions, but-”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Are you sure? Because I don’t want there to be any hard feelings or… I don’t want there to be hard feelings.” I’d almost said retaliation, but I’d decided I didn’t want to bring that up.

  “It’s fine,” she said, and there was a touch of anger to the words. ”This shadow and dagger shit pisses me off.”

  “Cloak and dagger,” Imp offered.

  Bitch made a low, grunting noise in her throat that fell somewhere between a huff of anger, a belch and a grunt. ”The way you acted before, the way that person acted when she shot me and the way you’re acting now, none of it makes sense, and maybe that’s ’cause I’m stupid. But I’m going to handle this my way. Next time someone shoots at me, I kill them. Or I have Bastard eat their hands and feet.”

  “You shouldn’t maim people,” I said.

  “Says the person who just emptied a gun clip at us,” Imp said. When Grue and I turned her way, she raised her hands, “Kidding. I’m just kidding.”

  “…Want me to kill them instead?” Bitch asked.

  “No! No. Just… nevermind. But hold back a bit for now. And don’t call yourself stupid. You think in a different way, that’s all.”

  She offered a noncommittal grunt in response.

  “We should talk rescue plans,” I said. ”Calvert invited Tattletale to join him, probably so she wouldn’t tip us off about the body double. That means she’s probably caught. Regent too, since we sent him to look after her. This is the kind of situation we were hoping to avoid by playing along with his grand plan.”

  “Having to tackle his full forces to save Tattletale, Regent and Dinah.”

  “Right. If we go charging into this, we or one of his hostages will get killed.”

  “I could go in,” Imp said. ”Get them, walk them out.”

  “No. He knows us. He’s anticipated something like this. Probably has for the Travelers, too. He’ll have planned around our powers, with counters in mind for each of us. That means video cameras to keep an eye out for you.”

  “Pain in the ass.”

  “Indirect attack?” Grue suggested.

  “It won’t work if he’s holed up somewhere safe. Not with the countermeasures he’ll have put in place. If he’s in his underground base until this all blows over, then he’ll be impossible to access,” I said. I had to stop to cough.

  Nobody chimed in with an answer or idea while I recovered.

  I went on. ”If he’s in the PRT offices, then we’ll probably have to get past the Travelers, his soldiers, his PRT officers, any countermeasures he’s put in place and any countermeasures the PRT put in place. It’d be a question of staggering out his various lines of defense so the more questionable ones are out of sight of the good guys.”

  “And he still has his hostages,” Grue said.

  “Fuck it,” I groaned, then I coughed more.

  “You need a hospital,” Grue told me.

  I shook my head, then regretted it. I felt dizzy. Vaguely nauseous. It was as though simply stopping and letting the adrenaline kick down a notch was letting symptoms emerge. ”Can’t. Not now.”

  “You’re nearly dead on your feet.”

  “I’ll manage,” I said. I turned my eyes to the place I’d been lying while Imp stood over me. ”What if I was dead?”

  “Hm?”

  “Calvert doesn’t have a way to know how this turned out. Do you have phone service?”

  Grue reached for his phone, but Imp had hers out first. ”Sure.”

  “He cut my phone off. I threw it away in case it could be used to track me, or in case it was how he was getting a hold on me with that teleportation device. If he suspected you, wouldn’t he do the same, limit your options?”

  “So you think he thinks maybe something happened. Or he’s waiting to see if we bought his ruse.”

  “He knows I was in the area. I attacked his men trying to save you guys. He had gunmen and explosives teams ready to wipe you off the map if you caught on to what that impostor was doing. So what happens if you call him and tell him you killed me?”

  “He asks us to meet him at one of those secure locations you mentioned, and we can’t refuse without revealing that we know what he tried to pull. And destroying that box might have clued him in anyways.”

  “Fuck,” I muttered.

  “When the other Skitter disappeared with the girl, how did she do it? Exactly.”

  “Teleporting,” I said. ”Threw the first flashbang, teleported out, leaving rubble and another flashbang behind.”

  “Mm,” he said, “Okay.”

  “Why are you so curious about that?”

  “Just thinking something through. Give me a second to think.” He pointed at me, “Make sure you’re taking deep breaths in the meantime. Even if it hurts.”

  I nodded and did as he asked. For a little while, I ignored my bugs and focused on tallying the damage I’d sustained. My breath wheezed and rattled, my chest hurt every time it or something attached to it moved, and my eyes stung when I opened them. Not that there was any point.

  Grue was pacing, breathing hard, while Imp and Bitch stood by. It was a bit of a reversal of the norm. I could sense Bitch scratching around Bastard’s ears, her fingernails digging in deep to get past the areas with armor and bony spikes. Imp was on the other side of the room, leaning against one of the wooden pillars and watching her brother.

  “I’m calling him,” Grue announced, still panting a bit. Before any of us could protest, he said, “Quiet.”

  I closed my mouth.

  He put the phone on speaker. I could hear it ring.

  Funny how something so mundane as the ring of a phone could sound so ominous and eerie, given the context of a situation.

  “Grue,” It was Calvert’s voice. ”What-”

  When Grue spoke, his words were growls, barks. ”You better not have had anything to do with this, or I swear, this is over. We’re done, gone.”

  I could virtually hear Calvert switching mental gears to try to adapt to this. ”Slow down and then explain. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Skitter attacked us and then she used your technology to leave the scene. I know you wanted to keep that girl, but going so far as to fucking turn on us-”

  “Grue,” Calvert’s voice was hard, firm, “Slow down. It doesn’t make sense tha
t I’d arrange things that way. Why go through the motions of giving my pet to Skitter, only to… you haven’t fully explained what happened. You said she attacked you? Are you sure?”

  “Pretty fucking sure, Coil. She shot Rachel and then turned on me. Imp disarmed her. Then she teleported away using the same device you described to us an hour ago.”

  “I… I see. Is Rachel all right? And who else was with you, my driver? You’re all unharmed?”

  “Your driver went ahead. No, we’re all fine, except for Skitter.”

  “You said she teleported away.”

  “She didn’t get more than two blocks away. We chased her down and stopped her.”

  My eyes widened a bit. I could imagine Calvert’s next words before he spoke them, was already moving.

  “Show me. Send a picture through the phone.”

  I shifted position so I lay in the depression that Bastard’s front paws had made in the swarm box. It was a scene I had to stage in seconds, using dragonflies and wasps to carry hairs across my mask, moving my hand so my wrist bent at an awkward angle where the metal folded. The final touch was bringing all the bugs from around the swarm box to carpet me and the floor.

  Not a half second after I finished, I heard the digitized camera sound.

  “I see. That’s quite unfortunate. Where’s Dinah?”

  You know where Dinah is.

  “I don’t know,” Grue said. ”I’m far more interested in hearing how Skitter managed to use your technology to do this.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I saw it with my own two eyes,” Grue said. ”She threw a flashbang, but light and darkness don’t affect me the way they do others. You know that much.”

  Grue was lying, adding an element Calvert wasn’t aware of, to throw him off track. Good.

  “I didn’t, believe it or not,” Calvert said. ”And I don’t know how she would have gotten access to the controls. One moment. I’ll have to call you right back.”

  My swarm felt Grue stiffen. He raised his voice, “Don’t hang up on me!”

  The speaker phone buzzed with the dial tone.

  We stared at each other. Or the others stared and I used my swarm sense to observe. As a group, we were still and quiet for long seconds, the dial tone still blaring.

  Grue hit the button.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Being aggressive, keeping him on his heels. If he’s constantly defending himself, he won’t be able to turn things back on us.”

  “Except he hung up. He’s going to think through his options and give you an excuse when he’s ready.”

  “I didn’t think he’d hang up.”

  I frowned. I was thinking back to the meeting I’d had with the school, when my dad had been with me and we’d accused the trio of bullying. Both Emma’s dad and the school had played their little power games.

  “It’s a tactic,” I said. ”He regains control of the situation by being the one who can call back, and it helps establish the idea of him being an authority figure.”

  “Damn,” he said. ”Sorry. It made sense in my head, but I didn’t think it through, I’m tired. Didn’t sleep last night. I figured it was better to call sooner than later.”

  “It’s okay. Maybe call him back?”

  He didn’t get a chance. The phone rang.

  “This wasn’t the kind of response I wanted, Coil,” Grue growled into the phone, the second he’d answered.

  I heard the beep as he switched it to speaker phone. Calvert was already talking. ”- have sequestered Regent in my custody, out of concern that he controlled Victor to have the young man hack into my systems.”

  “You and I both know that Victor didn’t have that kind of access, and we didn’t know about your teleportation technology until an hour ago.”

  “I fear Skitter may have known, and I’m simply covering my bases. Once we’ve verified what happened and that Regent wasn’t complicit, I’ll release him. You can understand where I’m wanting to be careful, given this turn of events.”

  “I don’t understand anything, Coil,” I heard a tremor of emotion in Grue’s voice. ”I liked Skitter, and she’s dead. The use of the teleporter says you’re complicit. I want to look you in the eye and believe you weren’t a part of this.”

  “We’ll sort this matter out. If you’ll come to my headquarters, we can discuss this.”

  “No. Not your headquarters. Not with the possibility you pulled this shit on us. We’ll meet somewhere else. Somewhere open.”

  There was a pause. ”As you wish. Name a location.”

  Grue, this time, was the one caught off guard. Calvert’s response was fast, and Grue clearly didn’t have an area in mind.

  A place where we’d be able to set up faster than Calvert, ideally open, not riddled with attack routes and vantage points for his soldiers…

  I thought of a spot, and the air caught in my throat as I suppressed a small noise. I almost coughed. I drew the word in the air with my bugs.

  “The market, north end,” Grue said, reading it. ”You know it?”

  “I do. It’s shut down at present.”

  “Right. You come with only one small squad of soldiers, bring Tattletale and Regent.”

  “If-” Calvert started.

  Grue hung up on him. He looked at me, “Authority, right?”

  “Right,” I said. But all I could hear was the emotion in his voice when he’d been talking about the idea that I’d been dead. Pretending. Grue wasn’t a guy who showed his emotions, he didn’t strike me as an actor. Hearing that had affected me more than I thought it would. I didn’t want to ask if it was because he really cared or if it was because he’d tapped into something else, some vulnerability that his recent trauma had left open to him.

  I coughed lightly. ”The market’s a good spot. His people were at the south end of town. It’ll take him a bit to get there, so he won’t be able to stage any kind of ambush.”

  “It works. But if we’re meeting him, what are you doing?”

  “Staying nearby,” I said. ”I’ll wait in the wings. In the meantime, we should see if we can get our hands on something that we could have Bastard maul to the point that it looks like my mutilated remains.”

  “There a butcher still in service anywhere?” Grue asked.

  “We’ll figure something out,” I replied.

  ■

  The market was almost empty, an expanse of asphalt devoid of cars, surrounded by tall grass. There were still faint marks where the treads and scoops of bulldozers had pushed the dirt and debris to the far side of the lot. Only a few stalls were standing, but the displays were empty.

  I felt exposed, naked. I was wearing only my old costume and the built-in makeshift skirt to cover me where the fire had eaten away at the leggings. My utility compartment was the one that had been damaged during our altercation with the Nine, holding the bare essentials, while my new mask and the upper half of my remade costume were presently being worn by the fake we’d made. The sacrifice of the costume hurt, and the process of putting the fake together hadn’t been pretty.

  The head, upper body and arms were simply taken from a child’s mannequin we’d salvaged from the inside of a store display and stuffed into the top of my costume. To get the meat for the torn midsection, I’d had to use my bugs to root out and kill a raccoon from the bins of a dumpster. I’d cut it open and tied the entrails to the base of the mannequin’s torso with my spiders. A wig that vaguely matched my own hair was simply bound to the head. We soaked the body, the wig in particular, with the blood of the dead raccoon.

  Bentley’s tail wagged as he carried the thing delicately in his heavy jaws, one arm and a bloody mess of hair dangling from the left side of his mouth, raccoon intestines hanging out the other.

  I headed into the tall grass and hunkered down. Volumes of insects and arachnids that I’d picked up during our trek to the market settled around me, hidden at the base of the grass.

  Adrenaline kept me
awake, despite the fatigue that I was experiencing. It had been an intense few days, an intense few weeks, with minimal chance to rest. My body was probably struggling to heal, and draining what little reserves I had remaining. Still, I wasn’t about to doze off.

  Calvert arrived after ten or fifteen minutes, pulling up with one armored van. All in all, he had only four soldiers with him. He walked within twenty feet of me as he crossed the tall grass. I was aware of his footsteps crushing my bugs as he passed over the swarm.

  Oblivious, he approached Grue, Imp, Bitch and the dogs.

  “Ah. You brought Skitter. It seems there’s little doubt she’s dead. A terrible shame.”

  “No kidding,” Imp said.

  “I’d suggest my man look over the body, verify that it was her, but I suppose there’s no point trying.”

  “Bentley wouldn’t let you get that close to his treat,” Bitch said.

  Bentley growled, as if he understood the words and wanted to make it absolutely clear.

  “Don’t talk about her like that,” Grue said. ”Calling her a treat?”

  “She betrayed us,” Imp said. ”Why do you care?”

  “Enough,” Calvert said, his voice hard. ”Enough bickering. My time is valuable, and I’m not willing to waste it on entertaining this ruse.”

  I didn’t have many bugs deployed on my allies or on Calvert, but I could still feel the others tense in surprise.

  “Yes, I know. I commend you for trying, I might have believed you, but I do have other resources on hand.”

  “Then-” Grue started.

  “Ah, bup bup,” Calvert raised a hand, “I was talking. As I was saying, I have other resources available. I have a small cadre of supervillains, a small group of heroes, all the resources of the PRT and PRT computer systems, and all of their tools.”

  He snapped his fingers, and soldiers began to teleport down to the edges of the market. Most were positioned so that the Undersiders would have to run off the edge of the pavement, over the grass and into the water if they wanted to get away. Surrounding a target while holding guns only promised to get people shot. The effect, as it was, was good enough.

  The Travelers teleported in behind Calvert, followed by Chariot, Circus, Über and Leet, and a few of his lieutenants. People in suits. One held a laptop while the other typed on it.