Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  I saw the first crack spread on my side of the wall.

  Better yet, Marquis was getting closer. One or two more reluctant steps our way, and-

  -And I never got to find out if I’d be able to leverage his power. Lung stepped into the hallway, and he filled it with fire.

  Canary was armored, though her hair was set on fire where it flowed beneath the helmet. Marquis, too, was armored. Neither was positioned to be turned into a crisp.

  But the fire drowned out the singing. The fire stopped, and Canary could hear Marquis’ footsteps as he ran, hands pressed to where his ears were covered by his helmet.

  I had Canary punch through the wall. She reached through the wall and grabbed me by the straps of my flight pack, hauling me through.

  The doorway was closing. Canary, it seemed, was being left behind.

  I had her throw me, and I used my flight pack to get extra speed.

  I slid through the doorway two seconds before it was too narrow to pass through. I lay there, the group staring down at me.

  “Coohugggah,” I mumbled, with more than a little anger in my voice, as I slowly made my way to my feet. Nobody offered me a hand, but that was my choice, not theirs.

  My stump of an arm was throbbing, and the rest of me felt alien. My movements weren’t all my own choice, with the passenger apparently doing something to help me manage.

  I looked through the other portal, beside us. Gimel.

  I left the others alone, not controlling them. When Spruce was in my way, I pushed him aside with physical strength.

  I’m fighting, I thought. I’m fighting Scion. Somehow.

  I could see myself through their eyes. Each image was slightly distorted, just different enough to be uncanny and out of sync. I had more awareness of myself through them than I had with my own eyes.

  I stepped into the damaged fast food restaurant, and over the rubble at the front where one attack or another had clipped the building. As I made my way to the front, the others behind me found themselves out of my reach, free to move of their own volition again.

  Free to attack me if they wanted.

  Marquis, Panacea, Bonesaw… not so dangerous.

  Lung? No. If he was going to kill me, he’d let me know just before he did it.

  Spruce? Cinderhands? They were maybe the type to attack me, because of pride and the fact that I’d momentarily seized control of them.

  Tattletale was freed. She dashed forward, hopping over rubble and debris to get closer to me. She stopped three or four paces from me.

  A fraction more than sixteen feet away.

  But she didn’t say a word.

  Scion was there. Tearing through people with a ferocity, this time. People were scrambling for cover that did so very little against Scion, trying to erect defenses, hiding and fleeing.

  Had we already lost?

  A collection of capes, many carrying wounded, headed our way. Rachel, Imp and Bastard were among them.

  I moved to the side, but I failed to anticipate their path. I’d expected them to head into the sandwich-place-turned-hospital, but they moved straight towards me.

  I backed away, taking flight, while Tattletale rushed forward, her footfalls tracing a curved path around a bubble that only she seemed to be conscious of. She stopped in their way, arms outstretched, shouting, “Go around! Dangerous power!”

  Most of them listened. Only one, looking over his shoulder at Scion, stumbled past Tattletale, into my range. I was looking for it this time, and I could feel his being snap into my mind’s eye. He froze in place.

  No sooner did I have control than Tattletale grabbed the guy by the back of the collar and hauled him out.

  “The fuck?” Imp asked.

  Tattletale let the guy go, and he fled.

  I couldn’t reply, so I focused on gathering my bugs. No use dismissing a resource that had once been vital.

  “Someone volunteered herself for noninvasive brain surgery from the lunatic with a sister complex. Or, just as likely, she asked the lunatic psychopath for invasive brain surgery and the other lunatic stepped in. Now Skitter’s broken.”

  “That didn’t look broken,” Imp said. “That guy…”

  “Hrrrrrn,” I said.

  “Hrrrrn,” Imp replied, nodding sagely. “Now I understand.”

  “She can’t talk,” Rachel said, more a statement than a question.

  I shook my head. Can’t move as fast or as well as before…

  I belatedly realized that Rachel had hopped off of Bastard. She reached her hand forward, as if feeling her way.

  I backed away, but she stepped forward faster.

  A conception of Rachel’s entire being bloomed in my consciousness.

  I made her step back away.

  “Mm,” Rachel grunted.

  “Why the fuck would you do that?” Tattletale asked.

  Because she trusts me far too much, I thought.

  “She’s smarter than I am,” Rachel said. “Let her do what she needs to.”

  I shook my head, backing away with my flight pack.

  Controlling Rachel wouldn’t achieve anything. I wouldn’t get any special knowledge of her whistles or commands, or her instinctive understanding of the dogs.

  But I needed to do something.

  Marquis and the others were approaching, on guard, looking tense.

  I was a wild card, now, something they couldn’t wholly trust. A little unhinged, a little unpredictable, and my power would be more dangerous and debilitating in their minds than it was useful.

  “You’re going?” Tattletale asked, almost realizing it before I had.

  I nodded.

  “Good luck,” she said. “You know where to find us.”

  I nodded again, taking to the air with my damaged flight pack, but it was with a heavy heart.

  I’d told myself, not so long ago, that I’d know the route to victory when I saw it. I had an idea of what I needed to do now.

  Maybe it was good I couldn’t speak, because I would’ve said the words if I’d had the ability, and we’d sworn not to. I had to think it instead, and this way, they didn’t need to hear it.

  Goodbye, Undersiders.

  30.02

  We were broken, routed.

  When had it happened? When had we reached that critical juncture? Had one specific act or moment marked the point where the rank and file capes had stopped fighting and started merely trying to survive?

  Morale was failing, and had failed long ago. A good fifth of our fighting force here was made up of Nilbog’s creatures and Dragon’s suits, which self-repaired and kludged together with the remains of other damaged suits to return to the field again and again. That was with the reinforcements that were coming through Doormaker’s portals.

  Chevalier and Ingenue, the other Birdcage leaders and other teams were trying to gather into a defending force. Issue was, there wasn’t really a way to defend. Scion held the keys to all things power related, and any attack that didn’t penetrate a particular defense needed only to be tweaked, adjusted with a moment’s thought. Following that, it passed through forcefields, armor and time distortions like they weren’t even there.

  The same was true in terms of our ability to attack. I had a sense of Scion’s scale, because I’d seen his partner, and I’d gotten a glimpse of the sheer mass of the partner from how much had flowed through into our world as Scion had moved it. I could assume they were roughly equivalent in size, and that meant we were trying to tear through landmass of raw matter, and we were doing it a few handfuls at a time.

  I could look at how durable the partner entity’s flesh had been when Rachel and Lung had been tearing through it, extrapolate to the attacks we’d seen here. We weren’t doing nearly enough, especially if he was compartmentalizing the damage and keeping himself from losing more than a certain amount at a time.

  To top it all off, anything we found that worked only worked for a short time. Either the user died, or Scion adapted his defenses to becom
e immune to it.

  I knew this. A good number of us knew some of it, especially the ones who’d attended the meetings with the major players.

  But for a large number of people on the battlefield, this wasn’t all common knowledge.

  For the others on the ground, this was a man with golden skin who didn’t seem to be bothered in the slightest by the vast majority of what we were throwing at him. At best, he seemed annoyed, by effects as massive as the ones String Theory and Gavel had dished out. At best, we gave him pause for a moment. He was toying with us in a way that made it clear he was holding back, yet it didn’t take away from the horror of his actions.

  It was impacting morale, instilling a kind of hopelessness, and that hopelessness was a big part of why things were falling apart before my eyes.

  I saw him generate a beam so thin I couldn’t make out anything but the glow around it, tracing it through a group. It cut into throats, arms, legs and chests. The wounded capes fell, all together.

  Blood welled out from the cuts the beam had made in their flesh. The damage wasn’t lethal, not yet, but it was bad enough that death was likely. Even inevitable. I saw a trace of golden light on the skin around the wound. The damage was spreading. It wasn’t the sort of injury a medic would be able to handle.

  Sixteen capes in all, left to feel their hot blood flow free, their lives seeping away. Not everyone Scion had targeted was in such bad shape. One had dodged, pulling a teammate out of the way. Another three or four had survived the attack by toughness alone, with armor and powers protecting them.

  Scion moved, advancing on them. One sphere of golden light, turning one of these hyper-tough capes into ash. And then he was in their midst, hitting them with physical blows, tearing them to pieces, each hit harder, faster and more gruesome than the last. A sweep of his arm and a cape with stone armor was torn in two.

  Two or three seconds and he’d taken nineteen capes out of action, wounding several more. But the real effect was on others, on capes who were now giving up, trying to get away from this slaughter.

  He advanced on the two who remained, and it was Chevalier who got in the way, slamming his cannonblade down, twenty feet long and eight feet high, a physical barrier in Scion’s way.

  Scion raised one glowing hand, not even slowing as he advanced towards his intended targets. The sword, to Scion, was little more than tissue paper.

  Which made it all the more surprising, to him and to me both, when he stopped, his hand touching the barrier and failing to tear through it.

  Chevalier drew the sword back, then cleaved Scion. The sword passed through the golden man’s shoulder, ribcage, and out his waist, cutting into the earth.

  Bisected.

  Chevalier remained where he was, hands on the handle of the weapon, making eye contact with Scion. Ingenue was only a short distance behind him, looking more like she was dressed up to go to a club than to be on a battlefield, with a little leather jacket and a dress with the slit up one side, her hair draped over half of her face.

  Just the same as we’d seen with the Siberian. The damage was there, but Scion was holding himself together.

  Scion withdrew himself from the sword. Chevalier slashed again, slamming Scion into the earth, then used a sweep of the sword to vault himself back.

  Scion’s a ghost, it’s a mask.

  And whatever Tattletale says about him being human at his core, human on the surface or whatever else, he’s a natural disaster, not an individual.

  A force of nature. Impossible to control or prevent. The words crossed my mind, and they were my words, but they weren’t my thoughts.

  Reminding me of the bad old days, Passenger? I thought to myself. My bugs continued to gather around me. A familiar and comfortable presence, considering everything that was happening.

  I’m not giving up! My voice, sounding so far away, even in my own head, so young.

  Damn straight.

  Chevalier blocked Scion’s beam with his sword, then moved the blade, pulling the trigger. The cannonball hit Scion, and knocked the golden man back.

  Capes were taking the opportunity to flee.

  I knew what I had to do, here. Even with a myopic, skewed perspective. I could guess what the ultimate price was going to be.

  Maybe a good part of myself was a monster. Maybe a part of me was still that girl who had very nearly gone on a rampage in her school, still that girl who would have been an angry, frustrated, aimless c-list villain, a footnote in a footnote in the grand scheme of things, forgotten by nearly everyone once the media frenzy had died down.

  The hell am I supposed to do!? The memory was so clear I could almost hear my own voice. Had that anger ever really gone away?

  The world didn’t fucking make sense. People didn’t make sense. I’d been railing against it from the beginning.

  I dropped to the ground, cutting one of the boosters to the flight pack. I didn’t position my legs right, and I folded, landing on my knees and hands instead of on both feet.

  I felt a spark of fear, then another. Capes stopped in their tracks, and the ones behind them crashed into them, driving them forward, some toppling onto a disc a tinker was riding. Seven people, now inside my range.

  I could get a sense of their powers.

  The disc the cape was riding was a tinker device, hovering over the ground with a constant stream of air that sent dust billowing in low rolling clouds around the edges. A woman rode the platform, garbed in a green, flowing kimono-style dress, surrounded by some sort of tinker-derived cyborg bonsai trees on raised sections of varying height.

  I began to find my feet, using both my hands and the flight pack to get myself upright.

  I could feel the tree-girl’s fear, the fact that she was cornered. It was echoed across each of the seven who’d stumbled into my power’s radius, and it invoked memories. Different memories for each of them. For her, it called Leviathan to mind. Me running, being struck from behind. There was one case that reminded me of being with my dad in the room, wracked with shame and helplessness, a complete and total lack of direction. Another that, inexplicably, brought up the scene with Dragon and Defiant in the Arcadia High cafeteria. A sense of injustice, mingled with surrender.

  For another, for two others, it brought up Mannequin, but they were different scenes. Being in the empty factory with the innocents at the edges, a building rage, and being there when he’d attacked my territory the second time, after we’d saved Amy.

  In both of those cases, it was the same kind of rage I’d just been thinking about. To these two, I was the freak of nature standing in their way.

  I was broken, and I’d bitten off more input than I could chew. The passenger was tapping into the experiences it had shared with me, because that was the only way it could convey the signals I was getting from them.

  Which wasn’t what I needed. It was the wrong inputs. What I needed was to decipher their powers. The tinker with the trees… I could sense things about her that weren’t tapping into memories I understood. Something mental that I couldn’t relate to, out of my reach.

  I ordered them to turn. When they moved, they lurched. Unfamiliar proportions, different degrees of athleticism. Like my adjustment to my new arm and legs.

  Could I get used to moving them like I’d gotten used to the new limbs?

  Laughter disturbed me from my thoughts.

  “Human shields?” A man asked, almost unintelligible with his coarse accent. “I love it! I was ganna shoot the bloody idjits in the backs, you’re ‘lowed to do that, ‘miright? But some cunt might get the wrong idea.”

  When I turned my head, all but one my minions turned their heads as well. My fault. I’d wanted the extra sensory input, and I’d instinctually tried to take it in with a share of my ‘swarm’.

  It was Acidbath. One of the Birdcage’s cell block leaders. He had the stylings of a rock musician or punk rocker who’d spent a little too much time doing drugs and not enough time playing his instrument. Worn around the
edges, a little too full of himself. He’d been a bit player in the real world, caught up in his vices, yet had managed to take over and rule a cell block for three years after being sent to the Birdcage.

  He was still smirking, laughing a little, as he looked between me and Scion’s ongoing fight with Chevalier. He danced a little from foot to foot, tensing just a bit every time Scion moved. Not out of fear.

  “This is better,” he said. “They wanna run and leave us assholes to do the fighting, you can say otherwise. Pin ‘em up and let Scion knock ‘em down.”

  No. They aren’t meat shields.

  But I couldn’t tell Acidbath that. I couldn’t answer him because I couldn’t communicate.

  It galled me that he thought I’d use them as cannon fodder. Not least because he was right. Partially right, but that didn’t make it much better.

  I’d compared myself to some pretty horrible individuals in the past, but Acidbath was something else. He was low, barely above dirt. He’d scalded his own brother with acid, and had gone after girlfriends and girls who had rejected him. The attacks hadn’t been lethal, but had melted flesh and the fat or muscular tissues beneath. I’d seen the pictures of the aftermath when I’d browsed his files, after the scar tissue had formed.

  I couldn’t think of worse ways to hurt someone, and he’d done it in impulsive acts of retaliation.

  If I was going to be a monster, I’d at least try to be smart about it, constructive. To have a plan.

  I set my new minions into action. I couldn’t get too caught up in the details. Their powers were a part of them like the venom was a part of a spider or centipede, or web a part of the spiders I controlled. I had to take it in without getting caught up in analyzing it, trusting the passenger to handle the essential details on autopilot.

  As my new minions rejoined the battle, I felt the tinker tap into that power that had previously been out of reach. I got a glimpse of how she operated, the world she saw; a distorted world much like I’d seen when I tried to look through my bug’s eyes. The trees were primed and loaded like guns. Tinker-herbalism, only it wasn’t very medicinal at all.