Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  She nearly said take a deep breath. She corrected herself. “-a few seconds and keep doing your relaxation exercises. Flex your extremities, relax them. Flex, relax, steadily work your way up, inch by inch. Look at me. I’m not worried. I’m in this suit. I feel safe. Okay?”

  “O-okay.”

  “I want you to think of all the progress we’ve made since the start of the year.”

  “But something popped in the suit just now.”

  “We wear the same suits for multiple patients. That was a safeguard to protect any patients that might collide with us. It’s not meant for you. Don’t worry.”

  Jessica hated lying to her patients.

  “It’s not- it’s okay?”

  “It’s okay,” Jessica soothed. “You remember our goal, right?”

  “Christmas?”

  “I think you’re well on your way to your goal. That’s what you think of when you’re trying to be positive, right? You can celebrate Christmas with a few other patients, people who you can’t hurt. I just met one of them, I think. A new patient of mine. She’s someone who could use some friends.”

  Like a dozen frog’s tongues, tendrils snapped across the length of the room to the ‘bed’, encircling it. In another second, as though each tendril were elastic bands stretched to their limits, Sveta had shifted there, her tendrils gripping the post as she hung from it. Jessica was free.

  Sveta was little more than a very pale face with thin tendrils streaming around it like hair. Small organs dangled from the largest of the tendrils that extended from the back of her face. A small symbol marked the girl’s cheekbone: a stylized ‘c’, in black.

  It took Sveta a second before she relaxed enough to let the tendrils uncoil from the post. The tendrils settled in the air, in a rough facsimile of where a person’s limbs might be. She’d positioned herself so that the organs could rest on the ‘shelves’ on the post.

  “I’m sorry,” Sveta said, eyes downcast.

  “I’m fine. I understand,” Jessica soothed. She shifted position, and one tendril snapped out to catch her leg, gripping her around the knee, squeezing and twisting with a strength that could have torn every ligament in her knee and wrenched Jessica’s calf from her upper leg. Sveta flinched, closed her eyes for a second, and the tendril moved back to the post. The suit had held. No damage done.

  “Can… can you tell me about her? The girl you just saw?”

  “I can’t talk to you about my patients, just like I couldn’t tell them about you.”

  Sveta clutched the pole harder. “I understand. Was she… was she a bad guy? Like me?”

  “Do you think you were a ‘bad guy’?”

  “I killed people. Yes.”

  “It wasn’t you. It was your power.”

  “I still killed people.”

  “I think that’s a good topic for today’s session. But there’s a few things I want to cover first, before we get into the meat of it, so let’s put a pin in that topic for now.”

  “Okay.”

  “She was a superhero, I can say that much without betraying any confidence.” And you’ll hear it from the staff sooner or later. Better to hear it from me. “There may be wiggle room. Maybe I could convince one of the hospital staff to stop by, and she could tell you a bit about the new patient through the intercom? If the patient gives consent?”

  Sveta’s eyes lit up. “Yes please.”

  “I can’t make any promises.”

  “I understand.”

  “Now, have you been keeping that journal?”

  Sveta snatched a notebook off of the small table with the art supplies, reaching out and bringing it to her faster than the eye could follow. She passed it to Jessica with just as much speed and force. Even with the air bags filling the void in the protective suit and offering a cushioning effect, Jessica had to take a step back to catch her balance.

  “May I?”

  Sveta nodded, bobbing the mask with the mass of tendrils behind it.

  The bed-post contorted into an ‘s’ shape as the girl twined around it. It indicated some kind of negative emotion. Jessica paged through the recent entries. The letters of the words were exaggerated, and they got more so as the writer got agitated. Worries, daydreams about being human, the vividness of her imagination when she pictured places like she’d drawn in the mural, her day-long spell of depression after waking up from a dream where she’d been human, in bed with a boy…

  Jessica closed the book. None of this was so unusual, capable of explaining the sudden anxiety she saw now. “Can I ask what’s bothering you?”

  “I… why aren’t you scared of me?”

  “Because I have no reason to be,” Jessica lied, meeting the girl’s eyes.

  The truth is that it’s because I’ve spent more time in the company of monsters than Legend, she thought. Trust me, honey, you aren’t the scariest I’ve run into, not by half.

  ■

  Friday, June 17th, 2011, 10:15

  “You’re not the person that was here last week,” the redheaded boy said, shutting the door behind him.

  “We rotate. The PRT doesn’t want any therapist developing a bond to the point that they could manipulate a cape. By rotating through three or four for a given area, they can ensure that one therapist will be able to identify manipulations on the part of any of the others.”

  “Doesn’t that kind of defeat the point? Not letting us develop a bond, no trust?”

  Yes, Jessica thought, but she said, “It’s not my place to say. Is that what you’re hoping to get, here? A one-on-one relationship? A bond of trust?”

  “And now it begins,” he said. “Answering questions with questions.”

  “An unfortunate fact of the job. Would you like to sit?”

  The boy let himself sink into the chair.

  “What should I call you?” Jessica asked. “I prefer to use real names wherever possible, but I understand if you’d prefer the confidentiality of a codename.”

  “Clockblocker. Dennis. Whatever. You get crucified, drawn and quartered if you betray our secret identities, right?”

  “Nothing that graphic, but the penalties are severe, and they include extensive jail time, and forfeiting the credentials it took me eight years to get. You strike me as someone who’s paying a great deal of attention to the workings of the system. Where people are, how they’re operating.”

  “I have to, don’t I? You ignore that stuff, you get fucked,” Dennis said.

  “That’s the second time in two minutes you’ve brought up consequences. Is that something that concerns you? Consequences?”

  “In the last three months, my dad’s leukemia came back, Leviathan destroyed a third of my hometown, the Endbringer killed my best friend and teammate, and another of my teammates, the Undersiders abducted one of my teammates-”

  “Shadow Stalker.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I talked to her after that incident. Anyways, I’m sorry to interrupt. I’m trying to frame it all in my head.”

  “They left her so fucked up she went and broke her parole. Um. It’s all been unravelling. People I care about and rely on are getting knocked around, screwed over by dumb luck or because they let their guard down. Aegis, Gallant, Amy and Victoria, Battery, Shadow Stalker…”

  “Did you care about Shadow Stalker?”

  “She was a teammate.”

  “I know. But the way your thoughts seemed to connect there, it sounded like something more.”

  Dennis shrugged. “It makes me sound like a sleazebag if I say it, but I can get away with that here, right?”

  She let herself smile a little, “Yes.”

  “She was hot, and when you spend four or five hours a day with the same people, and you’re a guy, and the one girl in the group that’s around your age is that good-looking, maybe you look forward to seeing her.”

  “That doesn’t make you sound like a sleazebag. It makes it sound like a perfectly normal teenager with a mild crush.”

&
nbsp; “Maybe? Not really; I couldn’t stand her as a person. It still sucked balls, hearing what I did about her going to juvie, on top of everything else.”

  “Did you see yourself in her shoes, at all?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re very mindful of consequences and the dangers you’re facing. Are you afraid you’ll suffer a similar fate?”

  “I dunno. No. If I’m worried about anything like that, it’s that there’s a worse fate waiting out there for me.”

  “A worse fate?”

  “With all the stuff the capes bring to the table, there’s a hundred bad endings that are possible that wouldn’t have been possible thirty years ago. You hear about what happened to Victoria and Amy Dallon?”

  Victoria. The vivid mental picture disconcerted her briefly. “Um. Yes I have.”

  “Case in point,” Dennis shrugged. “And there’s all the stuff that went down with the Slaughterhouse Nine, too.”

  “Scary business.”

  Dennis shrugged.

  “Are you sleeping well?”

  “Way I’ve been working, sleep isn’t a problem. Head hits the pillow, I’m out.”

  “And the stress of all of this, it’s not affecting your diet?”

  “No. I mean, my diet’s not great, but that’s just trying to work around shift schedules and crap, you know?”

  “I know,” Jessica smiled. “Work makes it hard on me too. I was going to walk you through some coping methods for anxiety, but it seems like you’re getting by.”

  “Too busy to think, really. I prefer it that way. I don’t know if anxiety’s the right word.”

  “No? What word would you choose?”

  He paused. “I dunno.”

  “Take your time. It’s not a big deal if you can’t come up with one.”

  “It’s… I feel like there’s probably a word, in another language, but English doesn’t have it. Not despair, but… that feeling you get when you’re losing?”

  “You feel as though you’re losing?”

  Dennis nodded, leaned back in the leather seat. “We’re fighting a war. The consequences don’t seem to hit the bad guys as hard. We fight Leviathan, and people act like we won, because the casualty rates were lower than they’ve been in nine years. Slaughterhouse Nine come, and again, there’s a lot of people who act like it was a victory because only half of them made it out of the city. Nobody but me seems to notice that, hey, those guys still lived. They escaped.”

  “Maybe they share the same thoughts you do, but they don’t want to face that reality because it scares them.”

  “Maybe.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Looking at the general notes from your last appointment, you gave the a-okay for him to mention that you were working on some coping mechanisms for your anger?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you want to keep working on that, or do you feel like it’s more under control?”

  “It’s pretty much under control. I was… my dad was dying, then. Amy healed him.”

  “I see.”

  “I… I regret this.”

  “Regret what?”

  “Joining the Wards. The rules, the bureaucracy. It’s… fuck, I mean, I appreciate having the resources. Guys to make the costume, even this.”

  “Talking to me?”

  “Sure. Make sure my head’s screwed on right. But at the same time, being stuck in a classroom after Leviathan attacks, because the rules say I have to be in school a certain number of hours a day? It’s fucked. I wonder if the villains are winning because they don’t have to worry about that stuff.”

  “Could be.”

  “I don’t get it. I almost think I could be okay with things if I understood them. Why the fuck do they get away with this shit?”

  “I can’t give you the answers you want, and I’m afraid that answers to questions of that magnitude aren’t going to appear nearly as fast as we want them to.”

  “I know.”

  “But you’re very observant, Dennis. I’ve already said as much. I find that we often find what we’re looking for the moment we stop actively searching for them. Perhaps spend less time looking for the answer, and keep an eye out for opportunities to learn the answer.”

  “Psychobabble,” he said, smiling a little.

  “Sorry,” she said, returning the smile with one of her own.

  ■

  Friday, June 17th, 2011, 13:01

  “Jessica?” Weld asked, peeking his head in the door.

  “Come in,” she said. “It’s good to see you, Weld. It’s been a little while.”

  Weld closed the door and settled in the reinforced chair she’d brought into her office in anticipation of the appointment.

  “Have you picked a name?” she asked.

  He chuckled lightly. “I’m Weld. That’s it for now.”

  She nodded. Studied him, at ease in his chair, hands folded across his stomach.

  “So. A lot’s happened,” she said.

  “Endbringer, Slaughterhouse Nine. Losing control of the city. Did you come from out of town?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it on the news? What’s been going on here?”

  “It has been. I try to catch the eleven o’clock news, and it seems there’s a new story every night, detailing recent events in Brockton Bay.”

  “What kind of picture does it paint?”

  “Of?”

  “Of the city. Of us? The villains?”

  “Things look worse than they are, if you go by what’s on television. It paints a positive picture of the local heroes, I have to say. Not entirely undeserved, if you ask me.”

  “Thanks for saying so,” Weld said.

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “I’m not. It’s only been five days since the Slaughterhouse Nine fled. Smoke’s clearing, and I’m not liking where we’re at.”

  “Where are you at?”

  “Villains who took territory before everything went to hell are still holding the territory after. Us? We’re not in good shape. We lost Battery.”

  “I heard. I’m sorry.”

  “We got hit harder, and while they’re picking up the pieces, nobody’s jumping to help us.”

  “No?”

  “Flechette’s going back to New York before too long. Nobody’s replacing her, or any of the ones who died. Maybe they think we’re cursed, or maybe it’s career suicide to try to help a city that can’t be helped.”

  “Does that matter to you? Career?”

  “Some. There was mention of me maybe climbing the ranks. I’m marketable, but I’m a freak, too.”

  She thought of Sveta. “It sounds like you’re being unfairly harsh on yourself.”

  “It’s how it was explained to me.”

  “I see. That’s unfortunate, that a colleague would make you out to be a freak.”

  “Water off my back. Honest. It doesn’t bother me.”

  “Is there anything-”

  She stopped as his phone rang.

  “Sorry,” he looked genuinely guilty as he reached for the phone, “Way things are-”

  “I totally understand. Please, go ahead.”

  He answered. “Weld here… yes. Skitter? With Parian. I understand. No, I get it. We’ll see if we can track her.”

  He was already out of her seat. “If it’s okay-”

  “Go. You have a team to lead.”

  “Flechette said the local villains in power just made a move on a Rogue friend of hers. I’ll… could I wrangle a longer session next week?”

  “That could be arranged. Go,” she said.

  He was at the door when she called after him, “and Weld, I want you to pick a proper name!”

  ■

  Friday, June 17th, 2011, 18:01

  “Fuck them! Fuck her!”

  “Lily-”

  “Fuck! Fuck!” Lily paced.

  “Lily, please, could you sit?” Jessica asked.

  Lily stoppe
d, resting her hands on the back of the armchair.

  “It’s clear something happened,” Jessica said. “You ask me to come, and that’s totally, one hundred percent okay, but I can’t do anything to help until you explain what happened.”

  “They got her.”

  Jessica felt her heart sink. “Who?”

  “Parian. Skitter got to her.”

  “The Rogue your teammate mentioned. Was she hurt, or killed, or-”

  “Turned.”

  “Turned?”

  “She changed sides. Ran into Skitter, with Ballistic wreaking havoc in the background. Knew something was up. Tattletale fucking with our heads or something. Then Skitter goes into this good cop bad cop routine, but she’s using Ballistic as the bad cop, the idea that if we don’t go along with her plan, he’ll try to kill us. Makes Parian an offer she can’t refuse.”

  “Power? Money?”

  “Money. Two hundred thousand dollars, so that Parian’s friends and family who were mutilated by the Slaughterhouse Nine could pay for surgery. So Parian could go to school.”

  “A lot of money.”

  “And she asks Parian to leave. And it’s… it rips my heart out, because she’s my one good friend here. Because she’s more, I… I can’t remember if I’ve talked to you about it. You PRT therapists all sort of blend into each other.”

  “We’ve talked about it. You had feelings for her.”

  Lily folded her arms on the back of the chair, rested her forehead against her wrists.

  “Did you tell her about those feelings?”

  “No. No I didn’t. I was thinking about it, but now I can’t ever, because if it pushes her away, she’ll be totally, completely beyond my reach. Completely on their side.”

  “Do you think she reciprocated?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes, I thought yes. Other times, I thought yes, but not nearly as much as I had feelings for her. And there were other times I thought definitely no. But I couldn’t ask because by the time I got up the courage, the Slaughterhouse Nine had murdered most of her family and her friends, and the ones who weren’t dead were… altered. Fuck, my feelings weren’t even on the third page of the list of priorities there. It was about taking care of her, helping her. It’s what you do for friends.”

  “It is. It sounds like she was lucky to have you.”