Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  Grace’s costume was light, in contrast to the dark of Wanton’s. Her new costume was white cloth, almost a martial artist’s outfit, but designed to offer more coverage. Reinforced pads were situated at every striking point, complete with studs to offer more traction and focused impacts. There wasn’t a single hair out of place beneath her combination headband, hairband and mask. She had glossy, wavy locks I was a little jealous of, and a trace of lipstick.

  I wish I’d considered some make up. Not that I wore a lot, or that I’d had the time. I had only what they’d given me in the studio, and they hadn’t gone overboard, on the assumption that I’d keep my mask on. No, if anything it forced me to keep it on. Heavy eyeshadow to make it easier to see my eyes behind the blue lenses.

  Cuff seemed to be in the same department as Grace. She’d done herself up, with a more ornate braid to her hair, and had altered her costume a fraction, to allow for more decorative tailoring at the ends of each panel and the nose of her visor. Slivers of skin were visible between some slats of armor at the upper arms and collarbone. Of everyone here, she seemed the most excited. She couldn’t sit still, but she was smiling, and it was a genuine expression.

  That left Annex and Golem. Golem was uncomfortable, and I couldn’t blame him. Like me, he had details he’d want to hide. His family, his background, the fact that he was in foster care. His costume, too, was a work in progress. It was a resource for him, and maximizing that resource often set him back in the appearance department. Annex, by contrast, had settled into a ‘look’. It was plain, intentionally so. The white cloak was form-fitting, with ribs to keep the fabric straight and close to his body so it was easier and quicker to absorb.

  “Grace,” Tecton said. “No swearing.”

  Wanton snickered a little.

  Tecton pitched his voice lower. “Golem? You’ve got to stop calling adults sir while you’re in costume. You do it as a civilian, dead giveaway. Hasn’t mattered up until now, but this is the test.”

  “I probably won’t say much,” Golem said. “I’m so nervous I feel like I need to puke.”

  “No puking,” Wanton said.

  “No puking is a good idea,” I agreed.

  “Weaver…” Tecton said. He gave me a look, with only his eyes visible behind his helmet. “…I don’t even know. But I’ve kind of gone the extra mile for you, and you’ve done a lot in return, but-”

  The stage manager stooped down a little to talk to us, even though both Tecton and I were both taller than her. “Alrighty, guys! You’re on in five, four…”

  “I still owe you one. I’ll be good,” I told Tecton, just under my breath.

  “One!”

  The jazzy fanfare played. As if that wasn’t cue enough, the stage manager gave us a little prod, literally pushing Tecton forward.

  It was surprising how small the studio was, both the stage with its slate gray floor and fake cityscape behind it and the studio audience. Tecton led the way to the half-circle of a table with the three hosts on the far side. The largest chair closest to the hosts was undoubtedly his, shipped here by the PRT so he could sit down in his armor without crashing to the floor.

  We sat down. Tecton, Grace, Wanton, me, Annex, Cuff and Golem, in that order. The music died as we took our seats, opposite the three hosts. An adult man, African-American by the looks of it, a woman with peroxide blond hair and a girl who could have been her daughter, a brunette who bordered on overweight, with a winning smile and an overly generous chest.

  “Welcome back to Mornings with O, J and Koffi,” the woman said. “School’s out for the day and we’ve got the Chicago Wards here for breakfast. Good morning, guys.”

  We voiced our replies. Wanton gave me a look, smiling, and I made myself smile as well.

  The young girl gave a small wave, “So nice to meet you. We had the team here before, but you guys have definitely changed things up since. Campanile was the team leader then.”

  “Campanile graduated to the Protectorate a little while ago,” Tecton said. “He said to say hi.”

  “You were there too, weren’t you?” Koffi, the man, said.

  “In my old costume,” Tecton said. “Which I’d prefer we didn’t talk about.”

  There were chuckles from the hosts at his comment, and the audience echoed them. It was oddly surreal. I intended no offense to Tecton in thinking it, but the comment just wasn’t that amusing.

  “The updated costumes look good,” Koffi said.

  “We can thank Weaver for that. Any cloth you see is spider silk,” Tecton said.

  “Spider silk, wow!” This from the blonde woman.

  “Cuff and I sort of missed out on that front,” Tecton added.

  “I don’t know whether to be amazed or freaked out,” the younger woman said.

  “We had a giant Japanese crab on the show just a month ago, I think. Jo had to leave the stage,” Koffi said. “I think she’s a little nervous with Weaver here.”

  “That was so embarrassing,” the young woman said. I made a mental note of her being ‘Jo’. “And you’re never going to let me live it down.”

  More laughter.

  Oh hell, I thought. It was all so fake. Fake responses, fake conversation. The personalities, the way they were over-talking, it was like they’d taken everything that irritated me and condensed it into this, and situated it all in front of countless viewers so I couldn’t even respond the way I wanted to.

  “I don’t dislike you, Weaver,” Jo said. “It’s bugs I don’t like. I’m not nervous.”

  “Thank you. Good,” I said. Then, in an attempt to recover the clumsy sentence, I added, “I’m glad.”

  The blonde, who was ‘O’ by the process of elimination, said, “There’s been a fair bit of attention directed at your team. The leaked video thrust you all into the spotlight. Then you dropped off the radar.”

  “Recuperating,” Tecton said. “We’re teenagers. We go to school and play video games and being a cape is only part of it.”

  “Except for Weaver,” Wanton said.

  Both Tecton and I shot him a look, and then I remembered that there were eyes on me. There was a reaction from the audience. Light laughter.

  “What do you mean?” Jo asked.

  How could I even explain that I was working towards stopping or mitigating the degree of the world ending, when I wasn’t allowed to mention the fact? Or that we were systematically targeting the most problematic villains, when I didn’t want anyone to see the show and hear the battle plan outlined for them?

  “Wanton has been poking fun at Weaver about how she doesn’t go out or maintain any hobbies,” Tecton explained. “Which isn’t entirely fair. My apologies to Weaver bringing this up, but it’s not a secret that she’s on house arrest. She’s on probation, and so she’s limited in what she can do.”

  Koffi seized on the topic. “You had a pretty colorful life as a villain, Weaver. We’ve seen the cell phone video of you in the cafeteria of your high school, opposite Dragon and Defiant.”

  I felt simultaneously glad that the conversation was moving and horrified that I was the subject. I blamed Wanton.

  Still, I said, “Clockblocker too. I wasn’t actually attending school, though. It was a couple of unlucky circumstances that put me there, and… yeah. At that point in time, I’d wanted to focus on taking care of my part of the city.”

  “That’s interesting, isn’t it?” O asked. “You were a criminal overlord. How were you even qualified for that?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” I said. I was more nervous now, half-convinced I was damning myself further with every sentence. I’d inevitably come off too harsh and ‘dark’ for the civilians who were watching and too soft for any villains who happened to see. Damn it. “Taking the territory and being a villain were independent things. Related, but different. It was after Leviathan attacked, food, water, shelter and safety were hard to come by. It was a way to help. If I’d been a solo hero then, I’d have done much the same thing. I’d have been gen
tler, but yeah.”

  With less money to spend, I thought. I’d avoided mentioning I was an undercover, aspiring hero when I’d started out. That had never worked out for me, and only complicated things.

  “And Alexandria? I think everyone’s curious about your thoughts there. You were shocked, in the video, when she made a reappearance.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not her. I’m… I’m not happy, obviously, to see her up there. It’s an ugly reminder of what happened. But to have another person fighting Endbringers? I’m okay with that part of it.”

  “A long, bumpy road, and it’s brought you here,” O said.

  “With the Chicago Wards,” I said, in a vain hope to turn the conversation away from me.

  She took my cue. “New costumes, a new group. Behemoth is defeated and it looks like the Endbringers might have reverted to the schedule they had pre-2002. An attack every four to five months.”

  “Yes,” Tecton said. “Everything’s new. There’re a lot of changes going on.”

  “Are you excited?” Jo asked.

  Oh man, was I ever starting to dislike her.

  “I’m really excited,” Tecton said.

  The response caught me off guard. Was he lying for the sake of appearances or was it honest? How could someone be excited when the end of the world was nigh? Did he not believe it was coming?

  Whatever the answer was, I felt oddly disappointed in him.

  Cuff shifted in her seat, and metal scraped against the metal of the chair’s footrest with a high-pitched noise. She whispered, “Sorry.“

  O leaned forward. “It’s fine. Let’s hear from some of the others. Wanton, your thoughts? Are the changes good?”

  “The changes are good. I give Weaver a hard time, but she really kept us alive.”

  “She did, by the looks of what happened in that video,” O said.

  Bringing the conversation back to me. Again.

  “Grace?” she asked. “Thoughts on your team member?”

  “If you told me way back on the first time we met that I’d come to respect her, I’d have been surprised.”

  Jo looked at me. “Does that bother you?”

  “No. I respected and liked the Chicago Wards right off the bat, but I don’t blame them if there was any suspicion,” I said.

  “Pretty generous.”

  “If anything, I was pretty amazed by how they all pulled together in New Delhi. Three of them were new, two hadn’t even been in a real fight before, and they went up against Behemoth?”

  Cuff was perched on the edge of her seat, doing her best not to move and make things squeak again. She had the ability to liquefy the metal touching her skin, which would have eliminated the problem, but the act would have ruined the look of it. Part of that stiffness was anticipation, like a child who hadn’t done their homework, sitting at their desk and dreading the moment where the teacher called on them. A stark contrast to her excitement earlier. Had the screech knocked her off cloud nine?

  “Cuff,” Koffi said. “What do you think? We saw the video, and you were pretty scared at the start, there.”

  “Terrified.”

  “You got injured? We didn’t get to hear how.”

  “A burn,” Cuff said, smiling a little. “I recuperated in a few days.”

  A lie. She still hadn’t fully recuperated today, eight months after the fact. She might never.

  “I love to ask this question,” Jo said. “What’s it like, being a superhero?”

  She loved that question?

  “It feels weird to think of myself as a hero,” Cuff said. “I’m… I don’t think I’ll ever be one of the big heroes. I’m not a cape at heart. Fighting isn’t in my personality, and I got powers like this.”

  “Cuff is a girly-girl,” Wanton commented. “Her bunk at the Wards headquarters has pink sheets and rainbows and there’s a unicorn picture on the-”

  Cuff leaned around me to mock-punch him. “I’m not that bad!”

  “You’re bad, though.”

  Tecton raised a hand to cover Wanton’s mouth. “I’m thrilled to have her on the team. She hasn’t disappointed me yet.”

  Cuff smiled at him. “Thank you.“

  I wasn’t sure I’d have been able to say the same about Cuff, but my standards might have been higher. She’d always done the job, but there was a reticence to her that wasn’t going away. Three months ago, in our first real conflict outside of fighting Behemoth, she’d needed a push to carry out an offensive. Four days ago, in Milwaukee, she’d needed that same coaxing.

  Cuff was competent. She had her strengths, and was stellar in some narrow cases. At the same time, I still worried if a moment’s hesitation on her part would get one of us hurt somewhere down the road.

  She was talking, happy to be in the limelight, stage fright forgotten. “I was saying what it’s like being a hero. It’s overwhelming. It’s something that eats into every part of your life even if you want to limit it to four hours a day, four times a week. If you don’t train and exercise then you fall behind. If you don’t read the briefings on the bad guys, then you look stupid when you do run into them and have to ask someone.”

  “I certainly hope you’re not getting into serious fights,” Koffi said.

  “Um,” Cuff said. Stage fright back in full force. She’d touched on something that would get her a slap on the hand from the PRT, and now she didn’t have her footing.

  I was trying to think of a way to rescue her when Tecton said, “Fights happen. We’re actively trying to avoid direct confrontation, but we patrol and we practice our abilities so we can handle ourselves in the real crisis situations. Many of our members patrol with other capes so they can get experience while having someone to rely on in case of an emergency.”

  All true, but he was omitting the fact that we were actively seeking out indirect confrontation. It was an admirable spot of double-speak, simultaneously reinforcing the atmosphere we were hoping to establish. Heroes are safe. Everything is under control.

  “I kind of like those times,” Annex said. “You get to hang out with the local powerhouses, hear what they have to say, learn from them. I had a brief stay in a few other teams, but the one thing I really like about Chicago is that everyone is okay with me asking questions, and I have a lot.”

  “Who’s your favorite cape to hang out with?” Jo asked.

  “Shuffle. Our powers work well together, if we’re careful not to let them interfere.”

  “And Golem? I can almost guess. When Campanile appeared in the evening news, he had some promising words to say about the Protectorate’s newest member. When we asked him who the most promising new recruit in the Wards was, he named you.”

  “Ah,” Golem said. “Yeah.”

  “Do you think you can live up to that?”

  “I hope I can,” Golem said.

  The conversation was faltering. I thought of what Glenn had said. Showing some of the bonds between team members. If I had one with anyone, it was with Golem. The running, the shared perspective on the end of the world, the fact that we were both Brockton Bay natives…

  “Everything Tecton has been saying about Cuff is true for Golem,” I said. “If he’s getting praise from the heroes, he deserves it. He’s a classic hero at heart.”

  “A classic hero?” Koffi asked.

  “He’s like Tecton. Grace and Annex are too, to a lesser degree. He’s genuinely good-natured and kind. When everything starts falling apart, he’s still there, naturally courageous.”

  “I like how I’m omitted from that list,” Wanton said. “Only person who hasn’t been praised so far.”

  “I think you’re awesome,” Jo said, smiling. The audience cooed.

  “Golem’s steadfast,” I said. “He’s working out, he’s studying hard for both regular school and cape stuff. And with all of that going on, he’s still generous enough to help me out with my stuff. Like Tecton said, I’m limited in where I can go and when, and Golem helps with that.”

  The
running, primarily, but not wholly that. He’d walked with me to the mall once or twice. I didn’t want to share details, though, in case people decided to try to find us while we were out, with Golem not in costume.

  “Do relationships develop in this environment?” O asked. “Anything besides friendship?”

  “If you’re talking about Weaver and me, then no,” Golem said. “We’re friends.”

  “Friends,” I asserted.

  “You had a thing going on with Grue,” Wanton chimed in.

  “And this is the third time you’ve turned the conversation awkwardly back to me,” I retorted.

  He gave me a sheepish grin.

  “A tender moment on the battlefield,” O said. “I think a lot of people were surprised.”

  It was a personal moment, I thought. If I harbored any ill will towards Glenn, it was for that. He’d deleted sound or video where it gave up identifying details, like the nature of Cuff’s injury. He hadn’t erased the scene with the woman in the suit, but the reception hadn’t held up that deep underground, so there was no need. He’d also been kind enough to erase the scene where Imp had promised to get revenge on Heartbreaker. The villain hadn’t been notified of her plan.

  But all of the bonding, the closeness, leaving interactions with Rachel open for hundreds of millions of people to speculate on? That was scummy.

  Necessary on a level, but still scummy.

  I hadn’t replied to his statement. I almost wanted to let the silence linger awkwardly, just to nettle them and drive home that it wasn’t their business.

  Jo didn’t give me the chance. “You talked about Tecton and Golem as naturally heroic people. What about you?”

  Man, her questions irritated me. Asking questions where they already knew the answer or where the answer was so immaterial… Who watched this kind of garbage?

  Why was I being forced to support it by my presence?

  “I was a villain for three months,” I said. “Maybe I’d like to think I was a little bit heroic as a villain, and I’m a little bit villainous as a hero. But I’m working on that last part.”