I saw some people hesitating. The group almost lost its forward momentum.
“He might not be a good guy,” I murmured. “But he’s a hero. Trust in that.”
Or is it the other way around? That apology sat oddly with me.
He held his spear out horizontally, barring our path. It was Charlotte that quickened her step, reaching out to fold her arms around the spear and his left hand.
Others soon did the same. He stood tall in his armor, nearly seven feet, and people almost had to climb on top of him to find a place to hold on.
I almost wondered if I’d had a second trigger event, if I was controlling them, the image was so bizarre.
Then I took a better look at them, at how some weren’t listening to me at all, retreating. Others were being far less consistent, showing a wide variety of emotions. Sheila, the girl with the side of her head shaved, was among them. Her face was etched in anger, of all things, as she clung to Defiant.
A hundred students had joined me, and a hundred students had their individual stories. Their sleepless nights, their individual tragedies and moments of terror. That was all this was.
I wasn’t sure if that was a relief or if it was scarier.
Dragon flew over us, her jetpack carrying her into the air, over the crowd. Students were following beneath her, running. One or two leaped onto tables and jumped to try to catch ahold of Dragon’s foot, but she veered easily to one side.
With Defiant occupied, I was free to bring bugs in through the back door, not having to worry about them being bug-zapped to oblivion. I directed them straight into the vents on the jetpack that were sucking in huge quantities of air. One second it was like a vacuum, drawing in air, the next it was clogged. She lost lift, floating to the ground, and deftly batted aside the reaching hands of the students who were getting in her way.
Her jetpack expanded with an almost explosive motion, fanning out to have four times the number of intake vents, four times the number of output charges, and two laser turrets that curved over her shoulders.
There was no way she could pack that much machinery in that much space. Either it was all crammed into her torso, which was impossible, or Armsmaster-Defiant had tweaked it.
She had liftoff, and she was faster.
And I’d already slipped past Defiant, stepping into the kitchen, and into the narrow hallway. She didn’t have room to navigate, with the other students who were crammed into the entryway.
She turned herself around a hundred-and-eighty degrees and flew out the entrance of the cafeteria, heading outside.
Only twenty or so students were with me, now. Dragon was stopping beside Adamant and Sere. Adamant took her hand, and she lifted off, carrying the pair of them.
Still had to deal with three heroes…
And the massive armored suits that the two had ridden in to arrive. Two.
“No,” Defiant said.
“You were supposed to protect us!” a girl shouted. Sheila, the one who’d been angry, who’d brought a weapon to school and had left the school rather than relinquish it.
“I won’t,” he said.
He was talking to someone else. The vents on his mask were open, hot air flowing out. Was he trying to disperse heat so he wouldn’t burn any students?
“It’s still crude,” he said, “… do more harm than good.”
There was a pause.
“…r freedom isn’t worth possibly losing you.”
Defiant, still at the serving area of the cafeteria, moved. With nine students clinging to him, he was glacially slow, careful to a degree that I might have called agonizing, if it weren’t so much to my benefit.
He needed two hands on his spear to remove the panel in the middle of the shaft. I filled it with my bugs, and he shook it, to try to get them loose. When that failed, he disconnected his glove, letting it strike a student that clung to his leg, before falling to the floor.
I tried to use my bugs to bite his hand, but I found it was a smooth texture, not flesh. Metal or plastic, or something combining the two. He found three buttons in the mechanisms inside the spear and typed in a sequence.
Dragon veered toward the ground, depositing the two capes there before staggering forward in four or five rapid footsteps, dispersing the rest of her forward momentum. She fell into a crouching position.
We made our way outside. The armored suit that Defiant had piloted to the school loomed before us, a four legged mechanical dragon perched on the athletics field, replete with panels of knightly armor. This thing… this wasn’t a fight I could win. Simple A.I. or no, Dragon would have shored up any weakness in logic.
It didn’t move.
We walked between its legs on our way to the parking lot. There wasn’t really another route.
Dragon stood, abrupt, and I flinched.
She turned her head our way, but she didn’t pursue, as we walked through the parking lot to the main road. Adamant and Sere were too far away, Kid Win hadn’t been willing to venture outside a second time, after the faceful of bugs I’d given him before.
Stray bugs drew out an arrow, pointing him to his things. No use letting some stupid kid get their hands on it and blow their faces off or something.
I watched Dragon with my swarm, for as long as she was in my range. I was well out of sight by the time she finally moved. The students had released Defiant, and he approached her side.
She extended a hand, and it tremored, the movement stuttering, palsied.
Defiant seized it in his right hand and pulled her close, wrapping his gloveless arm around her shoulders. He set his chin on top of her head.
My escort and I walked as a group until we were three blocks away from the school.
“Stop,” I said.
They did. The remaining members of the group backed away, turning towards me.
What was I even supposed to say? ‘Thank you’ seemed so trite. They were all so different. There was Fern, and a boy who didn’t look like one of the ones who’d stayed in the city. Some looked nervous, others showed no expression at all. There was no response that encapsulated all of them.
I tried to think of something to say, but the harder I tried, the less anything seemed to fit.
“You saved my dad,” Fern said, as if answering a question I hadn’t asked.
Saved her dad? When?
It didn’t really matter.
“Imp found the bastard who was threatening to do shit to my little sisters,” one guy said. “Tied him to a traffic post. And you work with her, right?”
“You fought the Slaughterhouse Nine.”
“…those bastard ABB guys…”
“Fed…”
“…when Shatterbird…”
“…Mannequin…”
“…Leviathan showed up at the shelter, I heard you were…”
“…Empire…”
A collection of voices, a jumble, to the point that I couldn’t take it all in.
■
I didn’t have a group with me as I walked down Lord street. I turned right, onto familiar territory, my heart heavy.
It wasn’t long before I was close enough. My range was longer, now. Odd. It was supposed to get longer when I felt more trapped, but ‘trapped’ wasn’t the word I would have chosen.
My bugs rose at my command, tracing over the area. It wasn’t so unusual, that there were flies, bumblebees and ants about: the heat of summer, the humidity, the imbalanced ecosystem… Nobody paid them any heed.
A small butterfly found its way into the house. It traced over the glossy smooth armor and helmets of PRT officers, touched the badge on the chest of a police officer.
It touched my dad’s shoulder, moved down his bare arm to his hand. He was sitting at the kitchen table, his head in his hands.
An officer swatted at the bug, missing. The action drew someone else’s attention.
“It could be her,” the woman in the PRT uniform said.
“Fan out!” someone else ordered.
&nb
sp; They spilled out of the house. Orders were shouted, and people climbed into cars, peeling out.
Still at the kitchen table, my dad reached out for the butterfly. I had it settle on his finger. Cliche? Overdramatic? Probably. But I couldn’t bear for my possible last contact with my dad to be through anything ugly.
“Taylor,” he said.
Six and a half city blocks away, I replied, “I’m sorry.”
The butterfly and I took off at the same time.
20.x (Donation Interlude #1; Stan)
“Park there,” Stan said, pointing to a space off the side of the road.
“We’ll be facing uphill, and we still have to unload the equipment,” Nipper piped up, from the back seat.
“There’s a method to my madness. Park, Marshall. I’ll even deign to help unload and carry this time.”
He got a glimpse of Marshall rolling his eyes, but the boy steered the van to a parking spot.
True to his word, Stan was out the door, rolling up his sleeves. Didn’t hurt: the humidity was brutal outside the air-conditioned van. His dress shirt was already sticking to his back.
They were on a hill, and the vantage point afforded them a view of the city. Cranes dotted the skyline, and the buildings themselves were gleaming, the whites and colors brightened by the ambient moisture in the air. It might have looked attractive, but there were spots where buildings were missing, whole areas where the construction was only just beginning.
He could see the white building, not too far away, which was taller than even the skyscrapers immediately around it. He’d investigated it just a few days ago. They’d erected a tall white tent, holding it up with a crane, they’d reinforced it with plexiglass panels and iron reinforcement, and now a more solid construction was going up around it. Slow, painstaking, careful work, filled with redundancies. The workers would be glad to be free of the hazmat suits in this heat.
Brockton Bay wasn’t lacking in stories to tell. The quarantine building alone was one.
“Need a hand,” Nipper said.
He hurried around to the back of the truck. The van had been parked at the side of the road, emergency brake cranked, wheels turned so it would ride up onto the sidewalk if the brake failed, but the steep incline was making it hard to unload the equipment. Much of it was set up to be slid out of the back of the van at a moment’s notice, but that same convenience was an obstacle, here. The stuff was expensive, and if it slid to the road…
He found a space beside her and reached to get a grip on the far end of the camera. It might not have been a problem, but Nipper was short, petite, built more like a thirteen year old than a twenty-three year old college graduate.
She wasn’t suited for the job. She knew the equipment, she was capable with a computer, she had good eyesight, and the tattoos and array of piercings on her right ear were as good an indicator of her creative edge as anything else.
But this wasn’t the job she’d been working towards. She wasn’t one to complain, but she didn’t have stamina, she didn’t have strength, and this, all of this, it was too fast paced for her. She’d have been better, maybe even happier in the newsroom, managing the feeds, maintaining the systems and working on post production.
Marshall hefted the bag out of the back of the van. All the wires, the tripod, the lighting, packed into a dense case. The boy didn’t look like a professional, hadn’t quite adapted to the job he’d been pulled into: from intern to a jack of all trades, filling in the gaps in Stan’s team. Set up, interviewing, driving, gopher… anything and everything. He was drawing in a paycheck, but he was definitely working for it, facing all of the hassles, the intense stresses and dangers of the job, for eleven dollars an hour.
Dangers, Stan thought. Images flickered through his mind. Everyone at the station had seen the feeds, had watched them several times over. Purity taking the camera from Manzaneres, a guy from channel four, then setting her monsters on the man. A man with a wife and a newborn had been murdered, just to make a point.
There was a reason for the shortage of field reporters. It wasn’t limited to Manzaneres, either. The problem was a chronic one. This was a job that put ordinary people on the fringes of events that were dangerous for capes.
“Set?”
Marshall closed the back of the van and locked it. “Set.”
Stan set off, with Nipper and Marshall following, Nipper almost jogging to keep up with his long strides. “Reason we’re parked here is that the school’s on top of the hill. We don’t know how much parking there’ll be, with students possibly taking up spaces, and if we have to drive by, searching for a spot, then someone’s liable to spot us and take measures.”
“Measures?” Nipper asked, a touch breathlessly.
Right. She didn’t have the experience to know. “You’ll see what I mean.”
There were students gathered outside the walls that bordered the school. Police cars were parked at the front, along with PRT vans, but it was the uniformed guards with ‘Arcadia High School’ stenciled on their sleeves that caught his attention.
Guards? It conjured up an image of a prison, rather than a school.
“Nip, get some footage of the uniforms,” Stan said.
She hefted the camera and trained it on the nearest of the uniformed guards. She had to slow her pace to keep the shot steady, but she kept following him. When a group of students obstructed her vision, she shut off the feed and hurried to catch up.
They reached the gate, where a woman with a colorful scarf was talking to a PRT uniform. He signaled Nipper, and the young woman raised the camera.
“Damn it,” the woman with the scarf groaned, as she saw them. The police officer took the opportunity to step away.
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Stan said, “We’re not the enemy.”
“You’re here to bog down an overcomplicated situation,” she said. “I have enough problems without vultures descending.”
“We’re here for the story, that’s all. You’re in charge here?”
“I’m in charge of the school. Principal Howell.”
He made a mental note. Howell, Howell, Howell. She wasn’t the prettiest woman, with old acne scars riddled across her cheeks, a short stature and a nose that didn’t quite fit her face.
“Stan Vickery, channel twelve news,” he flashed her his best smile and extended a hand. She didn’t take it.
“You’re not allowed on school property.”
“I would be if you gave me permission,” he said, dropping his hand. The job was politics as much as it was investigation, creativity and presentation. What did she want? Peace and quiet. “Give us fifteen minutes to talk to your students and shoot a few takes in front of the doors, and I’ll get the word out that we got the story first. Other stations are playing it safer, these days, less crew, less willing to act on sloppy seconds.”
The principal made a face.
Stan smiled, “Sorry. You get what I mean. Give us fifteen minutes, and we’re one less thing you have to worry about today. With luck, I’ll be the only local reporter you see today.”
“With all due respect, Mr…”
“Vickery,” he said, already told you my name. “But you can call me Stan, Mrs. Howell. Fact of the matter is, you let me in the school, and I owe you one. I pull strings or emphasize certain aspects of a story. Not just this one either. Who knows? The next incident could be worse, or more sensitive.”
“Mr. Vickers,” she said. “I’m fully aware that you’re trying to bait me into giving you a sound bite. I won’t comment on this situation, and I won’t be letting you onto school grounds. I don’t want you talking to any of my students.”
“Fine,” he said. “Come on, guys. Let’s go talk to the cops.”
“Seriously? We’re giving up?” Nipper asked.
“Yes,” he said, he took long strides away from the front gate of the school, until he was sure the principal wasn’t in immediate earshot. “No. She’s liable to get on our case if we don’t pret
end to play along. Howell has no authority outside of the school walls, so we interview students there. Marshall, head back in the direction of the van. Talk to students, see if they want to be on TV. Look for the talkative ones and the emotional ones, and point them my way.”
“What about the cops?” Marshall asked.
“They’ll be around later, and cops have better memories than civilians. It’s the students who were at the scene. Go. We don’t know how long we have before other crews show.”
It was a shame the principal hadn’t let him into the school, Stan mused. Silly of her, too. That favor he’d offered her was gold, all things considered. Something she could use to bail a superior out of an awkward position and advance her own.
Your guanxi could be better, Mrs. Howell, he thought. He loved the idea behind the Chinese concept of guanxi. It fit in the same general category as the concepts of friends, family, acquaintances, but it was more based in business and politics. Guanxi was about being able to call up a person one hadn’t seen in years and ask for a favor. To have enough people in one’s debt that there was more implied leverage to use when seeking favors from others.
He’d been introduced to the idea a few years ago, and he attributed much of his recent career advancement to it. It was something to be aware of at all times, and it changed his perspective on things.
He approached a group of teenage girls who were gathered in a group, observing the police and PRT officers. He flashed one of his best smiles at them. He could see one of them glance him over, her body language changing subtly. He directed the smile at her, “I bet you’re dying to talk about what happened here. Exciting stuff.”
“Sure,” the girl replied. “Supervillain doesn’t attack the school every day.”
“Wasn’t an attack. She showed up, and they came after her in her civilian ID.”
“I know it wasn’t an attack,” the first girl replied. “I was just… It’s what others have been saying.”
“Skitter, wasn’t it?” Stan chimed in. He snapped his fingers, and Nipper pointed the camera at the girls.
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