Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  “I’m willing to play ball,” I said. “I just want to figure out what the he- heck you want, first. Do you want, like, ladybugs? There’s color there, a nice red cloud. There’s only, um, two hundred and twelve ladybugs in my range. But I could use them. Or… butterflies? There’s more butterflies than ladybugs.”

  I accessed the butterflies in my swarm, drawing them to me.

  “Tekky,” Hoyden said, “Turn around. They’ll love this.”

  “Tecton,” he mumbled, stressing the word. “I hate ‘techy’, ‘tech geek’ and all those names. Just like I hate being the camera guy, the guy who the PRT gets to fix the vans when they want to cut work early…”

  I drew the butterflies into formation, a stream of them following after one another.

  “I just want you to realize that this is what you’d be asking me to-”

  “Yes,” Glenn said, cutting me off. “Excellent! They did say you were smart.“

  “You’re serious,” I said.

  Clockblocker was laughing silently, his shoulders shaking.

  “Serious as cancer,” Hoyden mimicked her superior. “All Glenn cares about is the image, the PR. Up to you to figure out how to hold yourself like a ‘lady’ while you’re dealing with street thugs with guns.”

  “You would know, Hoyden,” Glenn said. “I’d hoped something would sink in for you, with you having more meetings with me than anyone has in the past year.“

  “Stick to business, please. Where did you get all those butterflies, anyways?” I think it was Rime, on the comms.

  “Rooftop gardens,” I said. “There was a whole block with older buildings and a garden on every roof, while we were heading this way. Lots of balcony-mounted flower troughs, too.”

  “We’d need to get you a steady supply,” Glenn said. “I wonder how we arrange that.“

  “They’re really going to make me the butterfly girl?” I asked.

  Clockblocker only laughed harder. I was pretty sure he was faking it, at this point. He couldn’t find it that funny.

  “If this is a problem,” Defiant said, the earbud’s digital sound only compounding the faint digital note of Defiant’s voice, “We can cancel the job, take a few days to discuss the tools you need to do the job effectively.”

  The worst of both worlds. I’d be backing down, they’d probably argue for this as a way to keep me ‘tame’, and I’d look disobedient.

  “No,” I said. “You want me to use butterflies, let’s do that.”

  “For real?” Hoyden asked.

  I nodded. “We’re picking a fight with the Adepts?”

  “This is only a branch,” Prism said, over the comm, “They have three primary properties. They don’t hold territory, so the local gangs leave them be. The idea is to discourage them. Fight only so long as you’re confident you’ll win. Communicate what’s going on, and we’ll step in if need be. With luck, this will be a setback for them, and cause to stop headhunting from our side.“

  “Okay,” I said. “Who’s in charge?”

  “Me,” Jouster said.

  It would be weird to not be the leader, after heading the Undersiders. “You okay with me as recon?”

  “Suppose you have to be, if you’re limiting yourself to butterflies,” he said.

  “I wasn’t going to limit myself to recon,” I said.

  “You’ll tear them to shreds with butterfly bites,” Vantage said. “Do butterflies bite?”

  “They don’t have mouthparts that can bite,” I told him. “They have proboscises.”

  “So are you like, super smart or something?” Hoyden asked.

  “No,” I answered her.

  “Don’t get distracted by the new member,” Jouster said.

  I noted what my bugs were telling me. “There’s three of them inside. Two men, one woman. The men have groupies with them, I think. In their bedrooms. There might be more, but they don’t have costumes on.”

  “They should have numbers on their sleeves. Roman numerals.”

  “I can’t really see through the bug’s eyes,” I said. “One second…”

  I found the woman, sitting on the couch, a laptop on a coffee table in front of her. The bugs traced her sleeve.

  “It’s not embroidered, I can’t sense anything raised, and the bug’s eyes can’t make out the letters. Sorry.”

  “Check the surroundings,” Jouster said. “Tools? The group’s practices involve using tools, ritual, rites, chants, and all that crap to try to achieve better control over their abilites.”

  “Kind of makes sense,” I said. “Abilities get stronger when you’re in a mental state closer to how you were thinking before your trigger event, so-”

  “Wait, what?” Clockblocker cut me off.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I triggered while I was in a locker. I’ve been thinking, I get just a little stronger when I feel trapped, or when I despair, or when I feel betrayed. My range extends.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jouster said. “Three of them. No tools?”

  “Sort of a tool. A rod, short, barely a foot long, and blunt, no barrel or anything. Carved, I think.”

  “Not sure,” Jouster said. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”

  “Um. But if you look,” I pointed. “There’s birds. Usually they’ll pick off a few bugs that get too close, but they aren’t moving.”

  “And there’s some inside?” Jouster asked.

  “Three… five birds in cages inside the apartment,” I said.

  “Felix Swoop, tier three member of the group,” Jouster said. “Master-blaster hybrid. Controls birds, but not as much control as you seem to have. Thing is, he applies fire immunity and pyrokinesis to the birds, programs them with movements. You said he’s distracted?”

  I noted Swoop’s presence in the bedroom, tried not to pay too much attention to the particulars of what was happening inside. “Definitely occupied.”

  “Let’s move,” Jouster said. He began striding across the street. He raised his voice, “Back away from the building!”

  No reaction from the men in the bedroom or the woman on the sofa. They couldn’t hear it.

  I directed my swarm. Bugs moved through the crowd, and I organized the swarm so it was surrounded by butterflies, masking the core of the ‘disturbing’ black swarm within.

  Cheating, maybe, but I’d do what I had to. The irritating part of this was that I had to look at the swarm to make sure everything was in place. It’d become natural sooner or later, but I really didn’t need more handicaps.

  “Back away from the building. You can watch the fight, but watch from the other end of the street,” I spoke through my swarm.

  So weird, to be doing this with a veneer of legitimacy.

  “What are you doing, Weaver,” one of the capes asked me, through the earbud.

  “Warning the crowd. I can mimic my voice by using the sounds my swarm produces, only I’m using mainly butterflies.”

  A bit of a fib, but it would fit what Tecton was seeing by way of his camera.

  “Keep us updated on your thought process and strategies.“

  Jouster led the way into the building.

  “I’m using the silk cords I prepared earlier to hamper the birds on the balconies,” I said. “There’s a pigeon roost above, but I’m covering the door, so hopefully Swoop won’t have access to all of those pigeons. And I’ve got other bugs surreptitiously gathering in the clothing that Swoop and the other male discarded. I’m assuming I can use the scarier bugs if the public isn’t about to see?”

  “That goes against the spirit of what I was talking about,” Glenn told me.

  “Yeah,” Hoyden said, from just behind me, “You should want to use butterflies and butterflies only.”

  Tecton pushed the door open, splintering the lock and snapping the chain with just the strength of his power armor.

  “Tecton in last,” Prism said. “We’ll want eyes on the scene.”

  “I’m the toughest of us,” Tecton protested.

&
nbsp; “Don’t flatter yourself,” Hoyden said, patting his chest as she walked by.

  “Two upstairs there, with two more that might be initiates, might be civilians,” I said, raising my voice a fraction. I pointed in the direction of the two men. I moved one hand to point at another point. “One woman there. All two floors up.”

  I hung back as the heroes ascended the stairs, and got to see as Tecton placed his hands against the frame of the door.

  “Let me know when,” he said. “And brace yourselves.”

  We’d gone over the powers in this particular group before we left. I knew what Tecton and Clockblocker were capable of, obviously. That left Vantage, Jouster and Hoyden. I could track them as they broke into the apartment.

  Jouster’s blaster-striker hybrid power involved his lance, a power that conducted along the usual channels, only the form it took varied. He speared through the computer, then swung the blunted side of the weapon at the couch. The woman rolled out of the way, and energy rippled away from the lance, freezing and shredding cushions.

  He could choose the effect, making it fairly versatile. Concussive blasts, fire, ice, lightning, suction and disintegration, among other things. Trick was that he had to hit to deliver the effect.

  The advantage, conversely, was that he had another power. With a brief-lived burst of superspeed, he closed the distance to the woman, coming to an abrupt stop just in time to kick her in the midsection.

  Clockblocker followed, stepping forward to touch the woman and freeze her.

  “Woman is Paddock,” Jouster said, through the earbud.

  “Caught her,” Clockblocker said.

  Hoyden and Vantage were already breaking into the other rooms, interrupting the men and women at play.

  Vantage had super strength, but his strength and reflexes scaled up as the number of opponents rose, with diminishing returns. He wasn’t especially durable, but he packed short-range teleports. Very short-range – a matter of two or three feet, at best. He teleported to help close the gap to Swoop and slammed one hand into the man’s collarbone. The woman scrambled for cover.

  “Anyone want to break the wishbone?” he quipped.

  The other man raised a hand at Hoyden, and she stopped in her tracks. He almost leisurely stood, taking the hand of the girl beside him, then reached down to collect his robe, and recoiled in horror at the bugs that festooned it. He couldn’t get to the rod, whatever it was supposed to do.

  “Heads up, Hoyden’s ensorcelled or something,” I said, communicating through the earbuds.

  “Nuh uh,” I could hear her speak through the earbud. She caught the cape from behind, then hurled him through the doorway, at Clockblocker. He stepped on the man’s bare back, and the man was frozen.

  “Cape two captured,” Clockblocker said.

  Hoyden was one of the capes with a mess of powers. Things she hit exploded, things that hit her suffered a retaliatory explosion. She was stronger, more durable, and to top it all off, she had a peculiar resistance to damage and powers that improved as she got further from her target.

  Between them, they each had the ability to apply their abilities in devastating ways. They were team captains for a reason.

  Wait, was this okay? I’d barely done anything. I was used to hanging back, supporting my allies, and delivering decisive strikes where necessary, but I was supposed to be proving something. Would I be able to say I’d achieved anything definitive?

  Was that intentional?

  I hurried up the stairs in double time. I reached the door frame, and I got a look from Jouster.

  Definitely intentional. He’d had his team bulldoze through the capes, leaving nothing for me. I’d provided recon, but would that be enough?

  “Securing the bystanders,” Clockblocker said, from across the room. He approached one of the women, and she made a squeak of alarm as she jumped back from his reaching hand. “Shhh, it’s okay. Doesn’t hurt. If you’ve done nothing wrong, there’s nothing to worry about. You’ll wake up in a few minutes, visit the police, and then go home.”

  She glanced at Jouster, as if looking for confirmation, and Clockblocker touched her, freezing her.

  The other woman was pulling on pants, the kind of skinny jeans you pulled up inch by excruciating inch, if you were lucky enough to have actual hips. She still wore a black bra, and way too much eye shadow.

  “Last one,” Clockblocker said. “You can call in the PRT vans.”

  She buttoned up her jeans, then ran her thumb along the chain that ran from her belt loop to her pocket.

  “Wait,” I said. The chain- there were charms on it. “Those charms.”

  “My embellishment,” she said.

  “Shit!” Jouster said. “Clock!”

  Clockblocker lunged, but she leaped back. Landing on his hands and knees, Clockblocker reached out, firing the fingertips of his glove at her, each trailing cords that extended to his gauntlet. Two of the cords looped around her limbs as they made contact. Thick, I noted. Not fishing lines that might cut when they were frozen in time.

  He froze them, then freed his hand from the glove. She was immobilized.

  It wasn’t enough.

  “It’s Standstill,” Jouster said. He broke into a run, charging her with his lance held ready.

  “Thirteenth Hour, now,” she retorted. Her eyes flared with light, and I felt my body jolt.

  “Tecton!” I spoke through my bugs.

  My heartbeat slowed to a glacial pace, my breathing slowing. My outstretched hand started drifting down, the strength to hold it up slowly leaving my body.

  Thirteenth Hour collapsed, going limp in the midst of Clockblocker’s suspended wires. Jouster, mid-stride, did much the same.

  My thoughts were slowing down, volition gone. The others were the same. My sense of time… I was reminded of a dream I’d had, of being put under a spell by Coil. Scopolamine.

  Clockblocker’s power wore off the various Adepts, one by one. They composed themselves, dressing.

  Swoop dialed a number on his phone, approached the sleeping Thirteenth Hour while holding it to his ear. He lifted her chin and kissed her, staying beside her to catch her as the cords were released.

  “Spot of trouble,” he said, with a faint accent. Australian? British? “Wouldn’t mind one of the top tiers. They’ll have reinforcements.”

  My eyelids drifted closed. I didn’t have the will to raise them.

  But I could follow my bugs as they stirred, converging, moving as if with a mind of their own.

  Following my unconscious directives?

  The bugs went on the offensive, biting, stinging.

  No. It wasn’t even a coherent thought. I’d get in trouble.

  “No,” the bugs whispered, their droning forming crude words.

  Swoop and the others startled at that. I could sense their movements through the accumulated bugs. He made a hand gesture, murmured a phrase, and birds took flight from the cages around the apartment. After a moment, they ignited, winging their way through the thickest areas of the swarm.

  The others would be arriving soon. I had to do something.

  That urgency, more than anything, seemed to translate into an order for my swarm. They began moving, bearing silk threads.

  That, I was okay with.

  The binding they performed was carried out as if from some deep-seated, creative part of me, the part of me that would doodle absentmindedly in the margins of my notebook when I was tired in class. Instead of aimless doodles, however, it was cords and lines of silk extending from table legs to feet, from wrists to earrings and between the loops of shoelaces, and it was all accompanied by the butterflies that I was still maintaining in formation.

  Swoop’s improvised phoenixes couldn’t get close enough to burn those things without burning the individuals in question.

  The other Adepts were arriving. My sense of time, still, was obscured. Where were the Protectorate capes?

  How long would we be stunned like this?

&
nbsp; Swoop, one hand pressed to his collarbone, moved his other arm to allow a flaming pigeon to rest on one hand, then winced in pain as he wound up nearly yanking an earring out. “Curses!’

  He really said things like ‘curses’.

  I did not want to lose to these guys.

  The bugs were still moving, aimless, without my active direction, but they were using the silk cords.

  Butterflies, I thought.

  The butterflies I’d been prepared to use moved into the formations I’d instructed, joining and complementing the swarms of bugs that were weaving webs of silk over and around the four Adepts, including the sleeping Thirteenth Hour. I could sense her breathing.

  How to break the spell?

  Tecton.

  He was under the effects. I could tell, by how his arms had drooped from where he had them on the door frame.

  If this was simply a kind of hypnosis…

  I called bugs to me, directed them to gather on my face.

  Not enough… they couldn’t get through my mask.

  Without me asking it to, a cockroach started chewing through the fabric. The fabric that wasn’t nearly as strong as spider silk.

  The female Adept that Jouster and Clockblocker had attacked as they entered the apartment made her way toward the kitchen, stumbled as a silk cord around her knees failed to give her enough give.

  “Annoying,” she said.

  “Admirable, almost,” Swoop commented. “This is the sort of thing we hope to train, and she’s already a fair hand at it, isn’t she?”

  “Whatever,” the woman said. She drew a kitchen knife from a wooden block on the counter, then began cutting the most obvious threads.

  Seconds, minutes, hours passed. I couldn’t say for sure. There was fighting outside. Capes fighting capes. I couldn’t focus my attention on it.

  With the hole in my mask now large enough, the cockroach wormed his way in.

  Two ways this could go, I realized, as it dawned on me what I was doing. What my passenger was doing? Either this worked, or it would fail disastrously, and they’d be distracted, at the very least.

  The cockroach reached the back of my throat. I gagged and coughed.

  And that disruption was enough to shake off Thirteenth Hour’s influence. My thoughts began to coalesce into something more coherent.