Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  “The restrictions stand,” I agreed. I explained for the benefit of the others. “We treat this as a Simurgh situation. Control feedback, control exposure. Anyone and everyone that potentially comes in contact with Jack could be a factor in Dinah’s end of the world scenario. Powerful individuals are especially important in this. The more powerful they are, the more important it is to minimize or prevent contact.”

  “Um. I probably sound dumb as I ask this,” Imp said, raising a hand as if she were asking a question in class, “But what about the nearly-three-hundred lunatic psycho people with crazy powers that he’s threatening to unleash on the world?”

  “We’ll deal with them,” I said. “With your okay, Chevalier?”

  He fell silent.

  “Chevalier, I thought-”

  “Yes. You proposed your strike squad. You’ve shown their ability to deal with different situations. Fine. But I’m assigning two tertiary squads to you.”

  “Chicago and Brockton Bay teams.”

  “I was going to say-”

  “They’re teams I’m familiar with,” I said. “Please.”

  He fell silent again.

  “Work with me here, and if we’re all standing at the end, I’m yours. Whatever you want to use me for, however, it doesn’t matter. If this blows over and the end of the world doesn’t happen, like some think it won’t, then the deal stands.”

  “I’ll get in contact with Miss Militia and Crucible.”

  “If it’s alright, can we have Clockblocker take control of the Wards for this excursion?”

  “Whatever you need,” Chevalier said. “You realize we’re pinning a lot on you?”

  “On Golem more than me,” I said. “We’re going to cheat our way through this, bend every rule, but it all hinges on Golem being able to hold his own.”

  “Jack’s going to try to set Golem up with a long chain of lose-lose situations,” Tattletale said. “Force him to either let the innocents die and maintain the chase, or let Jack pull away. We already got one big advantage by getting to this tape as fast as we did. Let’s not show our hand. Dragon’s on the line. We’ve got Dragon’s Teeth and Azazel models moving to the front.“

  “Close in the net, then act decisively,” I said. “Coordinated strikes. If the Thanda are willing, a meteor strike in the right time and place could do wonders.”

  There were nods of agreement from around the group.

  Golem turned around and walked away.

  “Golem,” I said.

  He was already halfway down the stairs. He used the panels at his waist to form an even footpath, with hands turned at right angles, positioned where he could put his feet on them.

  “Golem!” I called out. I handed my phone to Grue, then hurried after him.

  He stopped as he set his foot on the first outstretched hand of pavement, but he didn’t turn around. His voice was low, barely a whisper. “Stop, Taylor. Leave me alone. Please.”

  “You’re running?”

  “I’m… no. I’m definitely in. I have to be, don’t I?”

  “But?”

  “But this is a lot to take in. Jack, he talked to me about ripples. About stuff extending outward, the lives that are affected.”

  “I remember. You told me that.”

  “Right here, in this dinky little ski resort, he murdered a few hundred people, just as a warm up. How many people on the periphery of it all are affected? How many people across America, across the world, know people in Killington? Or know the people who know people in this town?”

  “You can’t think about things on that scale.”

  “I have to. Jack does, and I have to understand him. If I don’t pay attention to it, if I ignore it all, pursuing only the end result, the target, then I’m acting like my dad. Kind of. Either way, I lose.”

  “You care about the people who died, and you’re thinking about them that way for a good reason. That’s not putting you on a path to being like either of them.”

  “But that kind of consideration, letting it really sink in, it eats away at you, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t it?”

  “It should,” I said.

  “There’s a reason we go numb, and I get that, but I don’t want to go down that road, not so quickly. Not knowing just how easy it would be to revel in it, or to stop caring about the dead. I’m there, and I’m…”

  “What?”

  The stoic face on his helm stared down at the ground.

  “Theo?”

  “I hear you guys talking about it, and you’re right there, in your element. This is something that you’ve been working on for a long time, and there’s almost an excitement to you. Like you’ve been in a kind of stasis for the entire time I’ve known you, and only now are you really coming back to life.”

  “It’s not like that,” I said.

  “No. I mean, I’m not blaming you, or saying you’re a bad person. You’re good at this, at taking a challenge head on, finding workarounds, manipulating the system to our advantage. You’re doing it for good reasons, to help, to stop bad people. I saw glimmers of that excitement, of the real Weaver, while you were dealing with our bosses, and making connections, offering deals to the bad guys you thought you could bring to our side. But I’ve spent a long time thinking about Jack and watching old footage of him, and figuring out my enemy, my nemesis, and it’s like… that’s you.”

  “Me.”

  “You’re his nemesis, Weaver. I’m the reason he’s here, the reason these people died like this. But you’re his counterpart, his mirror. You’ve got that same excitement Jack has, you think along the same lines, in strategy and counter-strategy. You thrive on conflict, just like he does. And I… I’m not like that.”

  I couldn’t muster a response.

  “So right now? You should go back. Forget I said this, because it’s… I’m regretting opening my mouth already. Work on formatting the strategies you already worked out to fit around the rules of Jack’s game, because that’s a good thing. It’s what we need. But let me have half an hour or an hour or however long I need to myself. Until we stop waiting and stop letting Jack think we haven’t found the tape yet. Let me take a moment and think about these people.”

  “You’re not to blame for them,” I said. “The Nine would have killed anyways.”

  “I know. I get that. But I played a part in the sequence of events, and maybe these people wouldn’t have been the ones to die if I hadn’t made that wager with Jack… and I guess I think everyone else that cares has better things to do. You trained me, the others trained me. I- I guess I’m as ready as I could ever be. I’ll fight when the time comes, wade through the gauntlet he sets in his wake and I’ll succeed or fail. But I’m not a strategist, and these people need someone to mourn them. Let me be useful in my own way, right here, right now.”

  I opened my mouth to voice a reply, then shut it.

  A moment passed, and Golem set about walking on the hands he’d raised from the ground, just two or so feet above the bodies and the streets that were painted with blood.

  I stood where I was, watching as he steadily made his way to the safe zone I’d drawn out on the ground. He stopped only to gesture for Tecton and Grace not to follow, then walked on, out of sight.

  It’s not that I don’t care, I thought. But-

  But what?

  I couldn’t articulate my thoughts.

  But… we need a strategist, we need a plan, before all hell breaks loose, I thought. Developing that, coming up with answers, fighting, it’s going to do a lot more good in the long run than compassion all on its own.

  I looked down at Nice Guy, at the foot of the stairs, a fleshy mess that was slowly dissolving into the acid pile, which only spread and served as more acid to melt flesh. I realized I was still holding my knife, from the time of the brief skirmish. I sheathed it.

  Then, as Golem had told me to, I pushed him, the dead, the maimed and the lost out of mind and turned back to the core group, to offer my services, to coordinate a
nd administrate.

  26.02

  It started at the center of town, a rolling plume of fire, sparks and smoke that seemed to almost lurch skyward, in fits and starts. Each set of charges that went off pushed the flame up through the smoke of the ones that had come before.

  Then the charges around the perimeter of the city went off, each focused inward. The rolling mass of fire and superheated air at the center of the city shot through the cloud cover, and the entire sky turned colors. Reds, oranges and yellows, interlaced with the gray and near-black shadows of the smoke.

  Killington was officially gone, the buildings leveled, the bodies and bloodstains scoured from the earth. Families wouldn’t get to put their loved ones to rest the way they wanted, but that was on the Nine, not on us. There was no safe way to recover the bodies, to ensure that there weren’t any traps or time delayed tricks in each and every one of the corpses. It also meant Breed’s minions were torched before they reached an adult stage.

  The area would be marked off for a duration after this, in case there were any heat-resistant bacteria or the like. Cheap, prefabricated walls would seal in the area, and roads would be put in to allow people to make detours.

  Quarantine, I thought. Every step of the way, we had to be on guard.

  It was time to move on. I looked to the book in my lap, turned down the corner of the page to mark it, and then stood, stretching. It was a nice spot, a long porch just outside a cabin, one that was probably rented out at a premium price during the skiing months. Far enough away to be safe, high enough to serve as a vantage point while letting me reach to the necessary areas with my bugs.

  The entire porch was layered with pieces of paper, organized into rows and columns with some overlap. The edge of each paper was weighed down by a mass of bugs, almost insufficient as the hot air from the quarantine measure blew past us. Millipedes that had been moving across the various pages remained still, striving only to stay in place.

  The moment the wind died down, I bid the bugs to shift position, carrying the pages to me, sorting them into the appropriate order.

  I bent down and began collecting the pieces of paper. I could feel the raised bumps on the pages as I brushed them free of specks of dirt and leaves. Each set of bumps corresponded with a letter or punctuation mark, which had been printed over the dots in thick, bold, letters.

  I gathered the pages into file folders, then clipped them shut, stacking them on the patio chair. I made my way to the patio table, bending down to collect the pages as they made their way to me. The writing on these was different; the letters were drawn in thick, bold strokes, fat, almost as if I’d drawn them in marker. My notes: thoughts, things that needed clarification, ideas.

  At the patio table, I took hold of a beetle and used its pincers to pick some petals out of the shallow bowl, grabbed the caterpillar I’d been using as a brush, then tossed the two bugs over the porch’s railing. I tipped the ink from the bowl back into a small jar, then screwed it tight, sliding it into a pocket at the small of my back.

  I was still getting organized when Defiant appeared, ascending the stairs on the far end of the porch.

  “Quite a view,” he commented.

  I looked at the resort town. The fire hadn’t yet gone out. It was flattening out, scouring everything from the area.

  Almost everything. One or two things would remain. Probably until well after the sun went out.

  “Pyrotechnical’s stuff?” I asked, distracting myself.

  “And some of Dragon’s. Are you ready to go?”

  “I’m ready,” I said. I picked up the files, then passed them around behind me, where the arms of my flight pack pinned them in place. I was left with only the book to hold.

  He walked beside me as we made our way down to where the craft had landed. His suit had been augmented and altered, and he now stood a foot and a half taller than he had when I’d first met him. Broad ‘toes’ on either side of his boots helped stabilize him, while his gloves ended in clawed gauntlets that extended a little beyond where his hands should be. His spear was longer, and both ends of the weapon were heavy with the devices he’d loaded into it.

  On his forearms, shoulders and knees there were panels that were like narrow shields, each three or four feet long, each marked with designs like a dragon’s wings, or with a dragon’s face engraved on the front, mouth open, with red lights glowing from within. Wings on his back served less to let him fly and more to accentuate his movements, a more complex, bulkier system than I had with my flight pack. Then again, I was only a hundred and thirty pounds at five feet, ten inches in height, and Defiant must have weighed six hundred pounds, with all that armor.

  I’d seen him fight Endbringers in that suit, seen how he could move as fast as anyone who wasn’t a speedster, turning his spinning weapon and those shield-like extensions on his armor into a whirling flurry of nano-thorns, cutting through seventy to eighty percent of the Endbringer’s flesh before they reached material too dense to penetrate.

  Which was when he’d use his other weapons.

  I envied him a little, that he could take the fight to the enemy like that. We were similar, on a lot of levels, but we differed on that front. On a good day or otherwise, I’d never be able to truly fight an Endbringer. I had to depend on others. The best I could do was coordinate.

  “The moment you or one of your teams lets something slip, this falls apart.”

  “I won’t fuck up.”

  “You will. Or someone working under you will. You’re good, but we can’t account for every contingency. Something’s going to go wrong at some point. The later that occurs, the better.”

  “Yeah,” I responded.

  “Every minute that passes is a minute where we can gather information, close in on Jack and figure things out. We’ve got a lot of good minds and good eyes working on this, but there are a lot of bases to cover. We let Golem get close, mop up everything we can and contain everything else, and then we take Jack down.”

  I nodded. “But we don’t want to stand back and wait when people could be hurt, or when every second that passes is a second that Jack could be making contact with that critical person. Causing a certain trigger event, saying the wrong thing to the wrong individual…”

  “There’s a balance. I trust you’ll find it.”

  “I hope I can,” I said.

  We’d interacted less and less in recent months, and those interactions had been short and to the point by necessity. It didn’t hurt that the two of us weren’t terribly social people. We didn’t revel in small talk. We could be adroit when circumstances forced our hands, but we could also stumble, say things in a way that was just a little off, or give the wrong impression.

  I liked that we had a professional relationship, that we didn’t have other stuff getting in the way. No pleases and thank yous. We both knew what was at stake, we were on the same page, and we were doing what we felt we had to in order to get the necessary shit done.

  “I spoke with Alcott,” he said.

  I drew in a breath, then sighed. “What does she say?”

  “The numbers haven’t changed dramatically. The window’s closed, but not considerably, which suggests a lot of things.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Ninety-three point eight percent chance the world ends,” Defiant said.

  Up from Eighty three point four percent. That’s not considerable?

  “She’s done us the favor of plotting the changes in the numbers over time. When things stabilized for a considerable length of time, she scaled down from noting the numbers twice a day to noting them once. Eighty-three point four percent, as of the beginning of the crisis in Brockton Bay, the Nine’s attempt to test and recruit new members.”

  “I remember,” I said.

  “Eighty-eight point six percent after they escaped the city. It was quite possibly our best opportunity at killing Jack, and we missed it.”

  I frowned.

  “With each destination the Nine
reached after Brockton Bay, the numbers shifted, and not for the better. Half a percent here, two percent there.”

  “Chances where someone could have theoretically killed him but didn’t.”

  Defiant nodded. “We ran things by the thinkers, and that’s the general consensus. Low chances, but he had the Siberian with him up until the fight in Boston.“

  The same fight where Dragon and Defiant had taken on the Nine, and the Siberian had been killed.

  “We had one opportunity there. That failure is on me.”

  He turned his head slightly, then amended his statement. “On us.”

  I didn’t disagree. Denying that would mean denying my own responsibility in failing to kill Jack in Brockton Bay.

  “Ninety-three point eight,” Defiant repeated, for emphasis.

  “Six point two percent chance we’ll pull this off,” I said.

  “It remains tied to him. If we kill him in the next ninety hours, the chances vastly, vastly improve. Depending on how we kill him, it could mean reducing things to a mere twenty-two percent chance or a one percent chance.”

  I nodded, making a mental note. “Theoretically, if we nuked the northeast corner of America…”

  “Only a sixty percent chance of working, with some decimal points that Dragon’s urging me to include as I speak, and a high chance we set things in motion anyways. Twenty eight or so.”

  He asked Dinah, I thought to myself. The same question I had in mind, give or take.

  There were clues there. “A nuke won’t kill him for sure. Bomb shelter?”

  “Possible. Or he’s keeping Siberian close at hand.”

  “And whatever role he plays… he greases the wheels, he doesn’t guarantee it. You’re saying there’s a chance things get set off even if he dies. If that doesn’t happen, then there’s some point in the future, roughly fourteen years from now, where things get set off anyways.”

  Defiant nodded.

  “Every time I think about it, I can’t help but think it’s a trigger event,” I said. “Someone getting a power that finally breaks something essential, or a power without the limits that keep other powers in check. But I don’t want to think along those lines if it keeps me from seeing the obvious.”