Worm

by John McCrae

  Emma jumped to mind. She’d been my best friend once, as I was friends with Grue. She’d also flipped on me, turned hostile, and used private thoughts and feelings I’d shared with her to attack me.

  I took a deep breath. ”That wasn’t why we came to help you. And it wasn’t just me making the call.”

  “Really? Because I remember you were the one who stopped Ballistic from putting me out of my misery.”

  I clenched my fists. Any resolve I’d had to remain calm was gone. ”I would have done the same thing for Bitch! Or Lisa, or Alec, even! Are you seriously telling me you wish I’d let you die? You’re alive now! It worked out!”

  “Because we got lucky! Christ, you always do this!”

  Using my power, I checked on the others. One of the dogs had perked its head up at the shouting, but nobody else had roused. I didn’t take my eyes off Brian, though. The look in his eyes was scary. Angrier than I’d seen him. I’d unconsciously defaulted to the same defenses I’d used against Bitch: Eye contact, pushing back when pushed.

  I deliberately lowered my voice. ”Always do what?”

  “You’re smarter than average, so you count on your ability to think up solutions on the fly, you throw yourself into these reckless situations, push and vote for the risky plans because you know that’s a situation where you thrive, where you offer the most to the group. Every step of the way, you do it. Pushing the all-out assault on the Wards at the bank, charging in to fight Lung after taking on Oni Lee, the fundraiser, confronting Purity, attacking Leviathan with zero backup, the attack on the Wards’ HQ-”

  “Stop,” I said. I was getting flashbacks to my conversations with Armsmaster, now.

  “You say you’re not manipulative, that your undercover operation was pure in motive, but you are. You throw yourself into those situations solo, or you join in on whatever fucked up plan the others come up with, and you do it because it makes you useful, because you know we’d struggle without you, you’re making us dependent on you.”

  I swallowed past the lump in my throat. ”That’s not- not what I’m doing. Every step of the way, I had other reasons. Strategies, or there were people I needed to help-”

  “Maybe Bitch was right about you all along.”

  “That’s not fair.” This isn’t him. He’s still reeling from what Bonesaw did to him.

  That excuse did little to shake my worries that this was what he really thought. Was this the stuff he was holding back, every day he was with me.

  “What’s not fair is that I’m the one who’s tried to keep things sensible, to keep this group sane, and when push comes to shove, when I go with the majority because things won’t go smoothly if I don’t, I’m the one who gets captured and tortured. Your plan!”

  “Don’t.”

  “Are you going to tell me I’m wrong?”

  “It- it wasn’t fair. You’re right. But I don’t deserve all of the blame here. I volunteered to be the person Trickster swapped out.”

  “Knowing there was no way you could, with your injury. So you let me.” He stared at me with an intensity that I couldn’t meet. I broke eye contact, looking down at my gloved hands, which were clutched together in my lap, fingers tangled. ”Tell me, Taylor. If you don’t deserve blame, who does?”

  The Nine. Bonesaw. But I could hardly say that. Not after seeing his reaction when I’d casually brought up the Nine before. However intent he seemed to be on hurting me, I wasn’t going to retaliate in kind.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said, to my silence.

  I looked up at the ceiling, blinking to get the tears out of my eyes. ”Okay.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll own up to it. My fault. The blame is at least partially mine. Maybe mostly mine. I’ve been reckless, and others have suffered for it. Dinah, my dad, Bitch, the people in my territory. You. Maybe I am toxic. Maybe me and my motivations, my issues, are causing everyone misery. I can leave the team if you want. Give me the word, and I’ll leave.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Christ,” he said. ”I’m not telling you to leave. I’m just-”

  “You’re making it clear I should. And you’re probably right.“

  “I’m frustrated, and I went too far. That’s not what I’m trying to say.”

  “Sure sounds like it.”

  I stood up and turned away. I didn’t want to see that look in his eyes.

  I tugged my armor into position and made sure I had everything I needed. It wouldn’t do to get ambushed and killed as I left. My modified costume was heavier than my old one had been, and between that and the blanket, and this place’s lack of air conditioning, I was sweating. My hair was stuck to the back of my neck.

  He wasn’t saying anything.

  “I’m going to go. Half my territory burned to the ground, my people need some attention. If you decide everyone’s better off with me gone, just pass on the word. I won’t make a fuss, I won’t say you wanted me gone. I’ll just make an excuse and leave.”

  I drew some bugs around my lower face and eyes as a makeshift mask. My real mask was still in tatters. I noted that the modifications I’d made were no longer necessary. I wondered if I would go back to skintight leggings.

  It’d be good to get back to my people. To check on them, and ensure they were okay. Maybe they’d be better off without me. If Tattletale or Regent took over the-

  “Stop,” he said, cutting off my train of thought.

  Didn’t need to hear more of his accusations, his condemnations. I ignored him and headed for the front door.

  “Please.”

  His tone had changed. I stopped walking.

  “I’ve never really said anything like this to anyone,” he said. ”But I’m scared. I’m more powerful now, but I feel more insecure than ever.”

  How was I supposed to respond to that? A part of me wanted to sympathize, to hug him and tell him it was okay. Another part of me was angry, wanted to slap him, scream at him, because he was still focused on himself, himself, himself, after he’d just attacked me. I understood why he’d done it, but that didn’t make his barbs hurt any less.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. ”I’m on edge. I’m spooked. I can’t calm down. I shouldn’t have said what I did.”

  “And you can’t stop thinking? I feel like that, all the time, and I have for a while.”

  “They had Aisha. So much of what I’ve done, I’ve done because I wanted to support her. Make up for the fact that I wasn’t there when she needed it, before. Only we’re putting her in more danger, and she doesn’t respect me enough to let me keep her out of danger.”

  I turned around.

  “And as long as I’m being honest and upfront,” he said, “I was thinking about you when I had my trigger event.”

  I swallowed.

  “I won’t lie and say I’ve suddenly realized I’m in love with you. I don’t really know what I feel, so I can only comment on what I think. I can say I respect you on a lot of levels, even if I can’t figure you out.”

  “Sure as hell didn’t sound like you respected me thirty seconds ago.”

  “I worry about you. You throw yourself into these situations like you don’t care if you die, like you’ve got nothing to stick around for except for those people you insist on protecting. Dinah, the people from your territory. People you barely know, if at all. And then you actually make it out okay, so you do it again, only more so. Riskier stuff.”

  I folded my arms. This was uncomfortably close to what he’d been saying before.

  “I start thinking about how I’m supposed to protect you, get you to stop, get you to focus on a goal that’s actually attainable, because you’re so capable that you could be amazing if you stopped acting suicidal. Then I get pissed at myself and I get pissed at you, because I can’t figure you out, and you move forward so fast that I can’t keep up. I let my guard drop for one evening to focus on other things, and then I find out you’d gotten in a fight with Mannequin.”

 
“It’s not your job to look after me. If you want to get on my case because I’m putting you and the others at risk, that’s fine. It’s your right to yell at me for that. But don’t make me feel bad because you can’t be the macho guy, protecting me.”

  “That’s not-” he stopped. ”No. I’m trying to say I think about you more than I should.”

  I looked away. I might have asked whether he thought about me more than he should because he cared, or because I was a fuck up. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer, either way.

  “Stay? When I asked you to keep me company, I was being genuine. Rather not be alone with my thoughts.”

  I sighed. ”I could do with some tea. I could make you some coffee if you wanted.”

  He shook his head. ”Jumpy enough already.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  I headed into the kitchen, put a kettle on and began digging around for teabags. It wasn’t easy, when I was half-blind.

  Once I had the teabags and a mug set, I got my cell phone out.

  “Cranston here,” the woman on the end of the line replied. ”What can I do for you, Skitter?”

  Cranston was the woman Coil had assigned to me, as he’d assigned employees to the others, so he wasn’t personally dealing with each of us when he had other things to focus on.

  “Need glasses. Coil has the prescription on file from when he got me my contacts.”

  “I’ll have them for you by morning. Anything else?”

  “No- wait. Yeah. Can you pass on a message to the PHQ?”

  “Coil has contact information. Hookwolf’s contingent exchanged contact details with the other teams, including the PHQ.”

  “No. I mean, without going through Coil’s channels. I need to give them a message from me.”

  “That can be arranged. I have a pen and paper, if you’d like me to take dictation.”

  “Tell them Burnscar’s dead and Bonesaw’s missing a pair of hands for at least a little while. Four and a half members left. If they were being honest about waiting for the right moment to strike, this is probably a good one.”

  “Mm hmm.”

  “We can give them the location of the Nine if they’re interested.”

  “Should I give them your contact information?”

  “They have enough tinkers that I’d be worried about them tracking me down. No. If they want to get in touch, I’ll leave it to them to figure it out. Not going out of my way.”

  “Alright.”

  “And one last thing. Tell them ‘thanks for the help’.”

  “I’ll get the message to them promptly.”

  I hung up.

  I returned to Brian with a mug of tea for myself and a glass of water for him. The television was on, and he sat in the middle of the couch. He patted at one cushion. With the way he was positioned, there was no way for me to sit a distance from him.

  At the same time, when I did sit, he didn’t reach out to touch me, to put a hand on my shoulder, or any of that. We watched terrible late night TV with the volume so low we could barely hear it, not talking, not making body contact, barely even looking at each other.

  He’d confessed feelings for me, after a fashion; I had a special place in his thoughts, even if he didn’t know what that meant, exactly. We were sharing personal parts of ourselves we’d never let others see. We even cared about each other.

  I just hadn’t wanted it like this.

  13.x (Interlude; Piggot)

  It’s like the world’s gone mad, and I’m the only sane person left.

  Director Emily Piggot finished the last of her coffee and paused to survey the enormity of the task that lay ahead of her. The scale of it could be measured in paperwork. Piles of it. Sometimes two feet high, the stacks of paper were arranged in rows and columns on every available surface, including the top of her coffee maker and the floor around her desk. There were stacks of stapled pages, each topped with a weight to protect it from the gusts and breezes that flowed through the open window frames.

  She couldn’t help but notice the way that the pages at the bottom of the pile were neatly organized, tidy, everything in line. The newer pages, the ones at the top, were the sloppy ones. Pages were slightly out of alignment, some dog-eared or stained.

  The same progression could be measured in the print. The older pages were typed, printed as forms with everything in its place. Abruptly, it all shifted to handwriting. Shatterbird’s destruction of everything glass and everything with a silicon-based chip inside. Computer screens and computers. The handwriting, too, grew less tidy as the rise of the piles marked the passage of time. On occasion, it would improve for a day or two, when her captains and sergeants complained about illegible handwriting, but it inevitably slipped back into disarray.

  A strong metaphor, Emily Piggot thought. Every part of it said something about the current circumstances.

  The shift from uniform typed words to countless styles of handwriting, it said something about the innumerable voices, the break down of the cohesive, ordered whole. What resulted were hundreds, thousands of self-interested voices. One in five condemned her, two in five pleaded with her for assistance in some form, and the remainder simply expected her to perform her duties as a cog in the machine.

  She looked over the sheer volumes of paper around her office. The PRT handled cases where parahumans were involved, and these days, it seemed like everything and everyone was touched in some way by the heroes, villains and monsters of Brockton Bay. Every time the other precincts had the slightest excuse, they would claim that it was the PRT’s responsibility. If they had no excuse at all, they would claim it a joint responsibility. Until she read over the cases in question and either signed off on them or refused them, the job was in her hands. As far as the ones passing the buck were concerned, it was out of their hands.

  The first real intrusion on the average citizen’s life had been the bombings instigated by the ABB. Frightening, but it had been easy for the average person to believe they wouldn’t be one of the victims, to shrug it off as the same background noise of heroes and villains that they’d experienced for much of their lives. Now, between Leviathan, Shatterbird, the fighting and the formation of territories, everyone had reason to worry and give serious thought to who they needed to support and how they were going to protect themselves.

  Just as the parahumans had invaded the lives of those in the city, the paperwork seemed to dominate Emily’s life. It crept onto the walls, onto bulletin boards and whiteboards. Notes on the local players, timelines, messages and maps.

  Insurmountable. Too much work for one woman to handle. She delegated where she could, but too much of the responsibility was hers and hers alone. The humans outnumbered parahumans by eight-thousand to one, give or take, in urban areas. Outside of the more densely populated areas, it dropped to a more manageable one to twenty-six-thousand ratio. But here in Brockton Bay, many had evacuated. Few places in the world, if any, sported the imbalanced proportion that Brockton Bay now featured. What was it now? One parahuman to every two thousand people? One parahuman to every five hundred people? Each parahuman represented their respective interests. She represented everyone else’s. The people without powers.

  The whole nation was watching. People across America ate their TV dinners while they watched the news, seeing footage of the slaughters in downtown Brockton Bay, white sheets draped over piles of bodies. The before and after shots of areas devastated by Shatterbird. Flooded streets. Fundraising efforts were launched, many succeeding, while yet others leveraged the situation to cheat the sympathetic out of money. The world waited to see if Brockton Bay would become another Switzerland, another Japan, another region that simply couldn’t recover. Ground lost to the Endbringers in their relentless campaign of attrition against humanity.

  So very few of them knew it, but they were counting on her.

  She heaved herself out of her chair and made her way to the coffee machine to refill her mug.

  “Director?”
r />   She turned to see Kid Win standing in the doorway. He looked intimidated.

  “Yes?”

  He raised the laptop he carried in his hands. ”The guys in CS asked me to bring this to you.”

  She shook her head, refusing the offer, “For now, every computer that comes in is supposed to be used for setting up the consoles and communications.”

  “They’re done. Or almost done, for communications. They expect to be up and running in two hours, but they have all the computers they need.”

  “Good. Access to the central database is up?”

  “Everything except the highest security feeds.”

  Disappointing. “I’ll make do, I suppose. Thank you.”

  Kid Win seemed almost relieved to hand her the laptop. It meant he could get out of her presence sooner. He was turning to leave the instant the laptop was out of his hands.

  “Wait.”

  She could see his shoulders drop, slightly, in the same way a dog’s tail drooped when ashamed or expecting reprimand. Emily Piggot wasn’t good with kids, or even young adults. She knew it. Outside of the time she had played with dolls as a small child, she’d never entertained the notion of being a mother. She didn’t even like kids. It was the rare youth that she actually respected, now, and those few tended to be the ones who saw her firm leadership and respected her, first. Now she was in charge of some of the most powerful children in the city.

  “The next patrol shift is in…” She turned to find the clock, “Twenty minutes?”

  “Twenty minutes, yeah. Vista, with Clockblocker babysitting. Weld and Flechette are out right now, patrolling separately.”

  “Postpone the next patrol, and tell Weld and Flechette to take it easy, but to be ready to report at a moment’s notice. With the consoles up, we’ll be ready to act. Pass on word to Miss Militia as well. I believe she’s taking the next patrol shift.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  The laptop would do little to help in her war against the paperwork until she had access to a printer. PRT divisions and precincts in neighboring cities were all too willing to send along staff and officers to assist, but her firm requests for the fundamentals -for computers, printers, satellite hookups, electricians and IT teams- were ignored all too often.