Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  “And you?” my dad asked. It took me a second to realize he was looking at Miss Militia.

  “What about me?” she asked.

  “You’ve been quiet. Are you here just in case my daughter turns violent?”

  “No. She’s not violent. Not in that sense.”

  “You don’t have anything to say?”

  “As grateful as I am for the right to free speech,” Miss Militia said, “I’m grateful for the right to silence as well.”

  “Then you don’t agree with your Director?”

  “I didn’t say that. What I’m saying is that there’s no right answer here, and I’m glad I don’t have to be the one to make the decision.”

  “Isn’t that cowardly?” I asked.

  “No. It’s human, to not want to make the hard choices,” she said. She raised one boot off the ground and placed it on the corner of her chair. “And it’s good strategy to conserve your strength.”

  “We’re not fighting,” I said. “We’re not going to get tired.”

  “Physically?” she asked. “No. Emotionally? Mentally? Yes.”

  “You’re anticipating the fight,” I said. “You don’t think there’ll be a consensus in time.”

  She shook her head, then used one hand to fix her hair, tucking it behind one ear. “No. I don’t think there will be a fight. I hope there’ll be a consensus, but it’s not necessary. Your ploys with the portal, controlling the territory around it, it’s clever, it’ll take a lot of time before we can pass legislation or conduct a thorough enough investigation to justifiably seize it. But I’m not worried about that, either, nor am I concerned about the damage Tattletale could do in other areas.”

  “Then why do you need to conserve your strength?” I asked.

  “Because we’re dealing with the devil,” Miss Militia said. “I’m angry at you, Taylor, and half of that is because you put us in this situation, a set of circumstances where we’re liable to lose either way. Because I agree with the conclusions you came to, how the PRT is needed, the need for compromise, and because I can’t condone how you approached those conclusions.”

  She shifted position, and the black-green energy of her flickered from her right hip to her right hand, appearing in her hand, amorphous and shapeless, as if searching for a form to take. When she didn’t grasp it, it darted to her left hip, and the metal of a cutlass clinked against her seat.

  “But I really hate you because we had to call her,” Miss Militia intoned.

  Her?

  Tagg looked at his phone. “Assuming she’s on time, it’ll be less than ten minutes.”

  “Her?” my dad asked.

  “You’ve played your part,” Tagg responded. “Go. It’d be better in the long run. Wash your hands of this, leave. Your daughter’s in custody, she’s going to one prison or another. You can go home and know that it was inevitable, and that this was the best outcome. It takes a few years maybe, but you lament your mistakes, and you eventually make an uneasy peace with what happened to your daughter.”

  “And if I stay?”

  “You won’t have any of that peace of mind,” Tagg said, and that was all.

  My dad looked at me, “I think you’re wrong. Everything before this, it was the times where I thought I had to walk away, look away, times where I thought things were inevitable, that I regretted the most.”

  He took my hand. “I’ll stay.”

  “Thank you,” I murmured the words.

  Our guest didn’t arrive right away. It might have been fitting, in a dramatic way, for her to appear as we finished our dialogue, but things weren’t so carefully orchestrated in the real world.

  “Those things they said you did?” my dad murmured.

  “Mostly true,” I said.

  He squeezed my hand for a moment, but it wasn’t reassuring. Something else. Concern, maybe, channeled through a simple gesture. Concern for me, for what I’d become.

  I wanted nothing more than for my dad and I to talk for a month straight, just to hash things out, to form some kind of balance, some semblance of a connection like we’d once had. Instead, there was only this, like the father-daughter relationship distilled. Not enough communication, barely any familiarity, both of us flooded with very different sorts of fear, confusion, and frustration. I imagined it was much like the bonds that had kept primitive families together in an era when living from week to week was a challenge. Basic, crude, but almost primeval.

  She arrived, minutes later. A woman, tall, in a suit, carrying nothing with her. I sensed her at the periphery of my range, walking with a steady, strong stride.

  I was reminded of the Siberian, almost. The way she moved with the confidence of the indomitable, the way that she was almost careful as she moved among people. Except that where the Siberian was only careful among her teammates, this woman was careful with everybody.

  It took her five minutes to reach us, walking through the crowds, using the pedestrian crossings.

  But the person I found myself comparing her to, as she approached the PRT building, wasn’t the Siberian. It was me. She reached her home ground, and people started to recognize her. They reacted, moving out of her way. Showing respect. Showing fear, in some cases.

  Three of the Wards were in the elevator when it stopped at the ground floor. Kid Win was taking his drone recharge station apart, which meant it was just Clockblocker, Crucible and Vista that crossed paths with her.

  The Wards took only a moment to recognize her as she entered the elevator, and the two native Brocktonites left, pulling a protesting, confused Crucible after them.

  In a matter of a minute, she was opening the door to the cell. A woman, the sort who could be forty but looked like she was in her late twenties. Hispanic, insofar as that was a descriptor, with darker skin and long, straight black hair.

  But more than her description, the part of her that hit me was her presence. Almost without thinking about it, I got out of my chair, standing, the chains of my cuffs pulling taut against the lock on the table. My lawyer, Miss Militia and Tagg all stood, my dad a step behind them, bewildered. The only one not in the know.

  “Chief Director,” I said.

  “Deputy Chief. I’ve stepped down from my position, but I still have to train my replacement,” she said, her gaze piercing through me. I couldn’t even tell that one of her eyes was a prosthetic. “And seeing to some leftover crises. Hello, Ms. Hebert.”

  She extended a hand. As though driven to accept the handshake by a peculiar gravity, I extended my own hand and shook it. Her firm grip could have pulverized me. I might have been less intimidated if I were trapped in a small pen with an angry bull elephant.

  “And Mr. Danny Hebert,” she said. She shook my father’s hand.

  Tagg stood from the chair at the table and moved over one left, leaving the seat for his superior. “Since you’ve made up your mind about staying, you’ll need to know. This is Deputy Chief Director Costa-Brown of the PRT.”

  My father nodded. I was getting the feeling he was almost shell-shocked. To find out about the end of the world, the situation his daughter was in, and countless other things, the name of this woman might not have even processed for him.

  “Otherwise known as Alexandria,” Alexandria said, taking the chair opposite me.

  22.04

  I watched my dad’s expression change. “I don’t understand.”

  “Like I said,” Tagg said, “Peace of mind.”

  “Let’s get started,” Alexandria said. “I believe I’m fully up to speed, unless Director Tagg has agreed to any deals or made any concessions.”

  “Sadly, he hasn’t,” my lawyer said.

  “This is common knowledge?” my dad murmured to me.

  “Since roughly ten days ago,” I said, not taking my eyes off the woman. She was looking at me like Tattletale sometimes did. It made me distinctly uncomfortable.

  “Let’s not make this the focus of our discussion. You wanted to be on board, I presume. You had to be info
rmed, so you understood exactly what it means when I make a threat.”

  “You’re planning to make threats?” I asked.

  “Threats is the wrong word,” she said. “But English is a limited language in some ways. There’s really no word to articulate what I mean. A threat with a measure of inevitability to it. A promise? Too feeble. People break promises too often. A curse? A malediction? Too… magical. An oath? The connotations are wrong. When I say I’ll do something, I make it happen.”

  I didn’t respond. Mr. Calle did. “You seem rather confident.”

  “Overconfident? I imagine I seem that way. It doesn’t matter.”

  I studied her, “When you say you’re going to do something? What is it you’re doing?”

  “Putting an end to this nonsense, for one thing. The PRT, flawed as it is, is my legacy, and I truly believe that it saves lives, or I wouldn’t try to protect it.”

  “I’m trying to protect it,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “But the timing is wrong. Things are too fragile at this moment. It won’t do. We’ll arrange this discussion for another time, weeks or months from now, when things have stabilized.”

  “I… don’t think it works that way,” I said.

  “It does. Truth be told, I’ve relinquished all authority. I’m serving under the new Chief Director, and I’m carrying out his instructions, between the times where I’m instructing him in the particulars of his job. Alexandria, however, remains with the Protectorate, having given her notice that she quits within the week. She’ll continue as a solo operative.”

  An operative for Cauldron, I thought. I didn’t say it aloud. Best to let her dictate what information was acceptable to mention aloud. And she refers to her costumed self as someone else entirely.

  I could see the confusion in my father’s face, the dawning realization of how far in over his head he was.

  “So you’re following orders,” I said. “That’s the worst and scariest excuse in the world, really.”

  “It’s a reality,” she said. “When you’re dealing with organizations as big as these.”

  “And it’s also a reality that you’ll have people at the top who don’t understand how things work on the ground, giving orders that don’t jibe with reality.”

  “You’d be surprised at what I’m capable of understanding,” Alexandria told me.

  “You’re forgetting about the Undersiders.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t forget anything. Your team is now my bargaining chip.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “How’s that?”

  “It’s twenty minutes to six. I’m not in a particular rush, and I actually enjoy the idea of some field work. We can talk for five minutes, and then have ‘Alexandria’ remove one of your teammates from the field. Depending on the situation, I will either arrest them and take them to PRT offices in New York and Boston, or I’ll kill them.”

  I could feel my blood run cold.

  “After, we can talk for another five or ten minutes, and then I will, again, depart to dispatch one of your teammates. I expect that by the time the sun sets at eight thirty, the Undersiders will be either dealt with or so neutered that they aren’t a consideration.”

  “You’re talking about killing teenagers,” my dad said. “Without a trial?”

  “I’m talking about self-defense, if it comes down to it. Tattletale can see through weaknesses. I can’t imagine that she’d be able to leverage mine in the spur of the moment, but I won’t rule anything out.”

  I stared at her. “You’re willing to go this far, yet you couldn’t bring yourself to show up to fight the Slaughterhouse Nine. Or Echidna, when she first showed.”

  “There were extenuating circumstances.”

  “Tattletale, you mean.”

  “No. Tattletale was only a small part of it,” she said. “And it should be obvious that the rest isn’t up for discussion. Three minutes and forty-five seconds. Negotiate.”

  “You mean you want me to make concessions.”

  “I’m saying I’m willing to hear you out. Convince me.”

  “You’re underestimating my team.”

  “And now you’re referring to them as ‘your team’. I thought you left. You committed to this idea of yours, did you not?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I do. But as much as I may be underestimating them, I find that others underestimate me. Strength, durability, flight. It doesn’t lend itself to much imagination, does it? Yet others acknowledge me as one of the strongest heroes in the world. ‘Cape geeks’ debate my effectiveness, protesting that I’m only seen as powerful by association with Legend and Eidolon. Do feel free to interrupt me if you want to talk about more concrete things.”

  I would have, if I could have thought of something to say.

  “My reputation isn’t so different from yours, Taylor Hebert. It’s a reputation that was forged. There have been fifty-six Endbringer attacks in the last nineteen years. I have personally participated in forty-nine of them, and in each fight I’ve attended, I’ve been in the thick of the fighting, personally trading blows with the abominations. The creatures know me. They know how to fight me, and I know how to fight them. Yet I’m still here. Strength, invulnerability, flight. Those are my core powers, but my other power is greater.”

  “Other power?” my dad asked. “I remember. When you started off… you explained the reason for your name.”

  “A reference to the burned library of Alexandria. It’s been mythologized as that era’s sum of human knowledge. I am much the same. I think faster, I think more easily. I know martial arts and I remember everything that crosses my path.”

  Miss Militia reacted to that, giving Alexandria a look I couldn’t interpret.

  She went on. “I would say I am one of three or four people in this world who truly understands what is going on. I don’t have all of the answers, and there are some riddles in particular that we’re desperately seeking to unravel.”

  “We, of course, being…” I said, trailing off. It wasn’t a question. Something about the gravity of the word made my dad look at me, startled.

  “I won’t discuss the others. I’ve been disconnected from my former partners, so it’s a moot point. A debatable point, to use the true meaning of the word.”

  I saw a possible piece of leverage and grasped for it, “If you need answers, then we’re the last people you should be attacking. Tattletale can offer input. Leave the Undersiders in place, and they can work with you where necessary. Treat me fairly, and I’m sure Tattletale will play ball.”

  “There’s two problems with that offer,” Alexandria said. She stood from her seat and adjusted her suit jacket, then turned her attention to her cuffs. “First of all, I believe I mentioned that there’s only a small number of people who truly understand what’s going on. We haven’t shared this information. Why?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  “This isn’t a riddle. It’s quite simple: we don’t want people to know. And we don’t want people to know for good reason. Having Tattletale off leash with all of the information she might discover is a dangerous prospect.”

  “She’s not that unpredictable.”

  “But it’s not a variable we can afford to have in play. As I’ve said, things are fragile. Which brings me to my second point. There’s no reason to leave her here if we can bring her into custody and use her freedom or probationary freedom as leverage to obtain her talents.”

  I frowned.

  Alexandria glanced at Tagg, “It’s time. Five forty-five. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  Ten minutes.

  She was at the door, waiting for the guard to open it, when I called out, “Tattletale won’t listen. She’s too rebellious, wants to be the smartest person in the room. If you force her, she’ll sabotage you, or she’ll just make you put her in the Birdcage, having her here, it’s the only way to get her help.”

  Alexandria paused, then looked back at me. �
��That will do. Information I can use, that changes how I’ll respond to this particular confrontation. I don’t agree, but we can discuss that after. I’ll target one of the others in the meantime.”

  The metal door slammed shut.

  Miss Militia stood. “I need some fresh air.”

  She didn’t ask for permission, and she didn’t even look at anyone as she made her way to the door and knocked for the PRT guard to let her through.

  “Everything she was talking about,” my dad said, “I can’t wrap my head around this.”

  “This is what I’ve been living,” I said. “This has been my day-to-day. My friends and I, facing terminal risk, facing down monsters like her, like Alexandria.”

  “She’s one of the heroes.”

  “Yeah,” I said, meeting my dad’s eyes. It hadn’t been so long ago that I’d been able to cling to that basic idea. The image, as I’d heard it phrased, of the heroes, of the Triumvirate. It had been Armsmaster who instilled the seed of doubt in me, as far as the heroes went. “Do you think she’s that heroic, now that you’ve met her in person?”

  “No,” he said. He looked troubled.

  Shit. I was stuck in a box while one of the scariest heroes around was going after my friends. I’d expected retaliation, had told Tattletale to expect it, but this was… I hadn’t expected Alexandria. She wasn’t even supposed to be with the PRT. Eidolon, we possibly could have dealt with. Or Tattletale could have. Even Legend, possibly. Alexandria was something else. The heroic equivalent of a cruise missile.

  There was Grue’s power, Imp’s power… did Alexandria have the ability to see through it?

  Alexandria was taking her time. She’d said ten minutes, but she wasn’t in a hurry, making her way out of the building.

  “You know, now,” I said. “After the Echidna incident-”

  I could see Tagg stiffen, kept talking, “-Stuff went down. Alexandria was outed as head of the PRT, other secrets came to light. You know the PRT is supposed to be led by non-capes, there was scandal, and now the PRT is falling apart.”

  “I see,” my dad said. “Other secrets?”