by John McCrae
“And he still has his hostages,” Grue said.
“Fuck it,” I groaned, then I coughed more.
“You need a hospital,” Grue told me.
I shook my head, then regretted it. I felt dizzy. Vaguely nauseous. It was as though simply stopping and letting the adrenaline kick down a notch was letting symptoms emerge. ”Can’t. Not now.”
“You’re nearly dead on your feet.”
“I’ll manage,” I said. I turned my eyes to the place I’d been lying while Imp stood over me. ”What if I was dead?”
“Hm?”
“Calvert doesn’t have a way to know how this turned out. Do you have phone service?”
Grue reached for his phone, but Imp had hers out first. ”Sure.”
“He cut my phone off. I threw it away in case it could be used to track me, or in case it was how he was getting a hold on me with that teleportation device. If he suspected you, wouldn’t he do the same, limit your options?”
“So you think he thinks maybe something happened. Or he’s waiting to see if we bought his ruse.”
“He knows I was in the area. I attacked his men trying to save you guys. He had gunmen and explosives teams ready to wipe you off the map if you caught on to what that impostor was doing. So what happens if you call him and tell him you killed me?”
“He asks us to meet him at one of those secure locations you mentioned, and we can’t refuse without revealing that we know what he tried to pull. And destroying that box might have clued him in anyways.”
“Fuck,” I muttered.
“When the other Skitter disappeared with the girl, how did she do it? Exactly.”
“Teleporting,” I said. ”Threw the first flashbang, teleported out, leaving rubble and another flashbang behind.”
“Mm,” he said, “Okay.”
“Why are you so curious about that?”
“Just thinking something through. Give me a second to think.” He pointed at me, “Make sure you’re taking deep breaths in the meantime. Even if it hurts.”
I nodded and did as he asked. For a little while, I ignored my bugs and focused on tallying the damage I’d sustained. My breath wheezed and rattled, my chest hurt every time it or something attached to it moved, and my eyes stung when I opened them. Not that there was any point.
Grue was pacing, breathing hard, while Imp and Bitch stood by. It was a bit of a reversal of the norm. I could sense Bitch scratching around Bastard’s ears, her fingernails digging in deep to get past the areas with armor and bony spikes. Imp was on the other side of the room, leaning against one of the wooden pillars and watching her brother.
“I’m calling him,” Grue announced, still panting a bit. Before any of us could protest, he said, “Quiet.”
I closed my mouth.
He put the phone on speaker. I could hear it ring.
Funny how something so mundane as the ring of a phone could sound so ominous and eerie, given the context of a situation.
“Grue,” It was Calvert’s voice. ”What-”
When Grue spoke, his words were growls, barks. ”You better not have had anything to do with this, or I swear, this is over. We’re done, gone.”
I could virtually hear Calvert switching mental gears to try to adapt to this. ”Slow down and then explain. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Skitter attacked us and then she used your technology to leave the scene. I know you wanted to keep that girl, but going so far as to fucking turn on us-”
“Grue,” Calvert’s voice was hard, firm, “Slow down. It doesn’t make sense that I’d arrange things that way. Why go through the motions of giving my pet to Skitter, only to… you haven’t fully explained what happened. You said she attacked you? Are you sure?”
“Pretty fucking sure, Coil. She shot Rachel and then turned on me. Imp disarmed her. Then she teleported away using the same device you described to us an hour ago.”
“I… I see. Is Rachel all right? And who else was with you, my driver? You’re all unharmed?”
“Your driver went ahead. No, we’re all fine, except for Skitter.”
“You said she teleported away.”
“She didn’t get more than two blocks away. We chased her down and stopped her.”
My eyes widened a bit. I could imagine Calvert’s next words before he spoke them, was already moving.
“Show me. Send a picture through the phone.”
I shifted position so I lay in the depression that Bastard’s front paws had made in the swarm box. It was a scene I had to stage in seconds, using dragonflies and wasps to carry hairs across my mask, moving my hand so my wrist bent at an awkward angle where the metal folded. The final touch was bringing all the bugs from around the swarm box to carpet me and the floor.
Not a half second after I finished, I heard the digitized camera sound.
“I see. That’s quite unfortunate. Where’s Dinah?”
You know where Dinah is.
“I don’t know,” Grue said. ”I’m far more interested in hearing how Skitter managed to use your technology to do this.”
“You’re sure?”
“I saw it with my own two eyes,” Grue said. ”She threw a flashbang, but light and darkness don’t affect me the way they do others. You know that much.”
Grue was lying, adding an element Calvert wasn’t aware of, to throw him off track. Good.
“I didn’t, believe it or not,” Calvert said. ”And I don’t know how she would have gotten access to the controls. One moment. I’ll have to call you right back.”
My swarm felt Grue stiffen. He raised his voice, “Don’t hang up on me!”
The speaker phone buzzed with the dial tone.
We stared at each other. Or the others stared and I used my swarm sense to observe. As a group, we were still and quiet for long seconds, the dial tone still blaring.
Grue hit the button.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Being aggressive, keeping him on his heels. If he’s constantly defending himself, he won’t be able to turn things back on us.”
“Except he hung up. He’s going to think through his options and give you an excuse when he’s ready.”
“I didn’t think he’d hang up.”
I frowned. I was thinking back to the meeting I’d had with the school, when my dad had been with me and we’d accused the trio of bullying. Both Emma’s dad and the school had played their little power games.
“It’s a tactic,” I said. ”He regains control of the situation by being the one who can call back, and it helps establish the idea of him being an authority figure.”
“Damn,” he said. ”Sorry. It made sense in my head, but I didn’t think it through, I’m tired. Didn’t sleep last night. I figured it was better to call sooner than later.”
“It’s okay. Maybe call him back?”
He didn’t get a chance. The phone rang.
“This wasn’t the kind of response I wanted, Coil,” Grue growled into the phone, the second he’d answered.
I heard the beep as he switched it to speaker phone. Calvert was already talking. ”- have sequestered Regent in my custody, out of concern that he controlled Victor to have the young man hack into my systems.”
“You and I both know that Victor didn’t have that kind of access, and we didn’t know about your teleportation technology until an hour ago.”
“I fear Skitter may have known, and I’m simply covering my bases. Once we’ve verified what happened and that Regent wasn’t complicit, I’ll release him. You can understand where I’m wanting to be careful, given this turn of events.”
“I don’t understand anything, Coil,” I heard a tremor of emotion in Grue’s voice. ”I liked Skitter, and she’s dead. The use of the teleporter says you’re complicit. I want to look you in the eye and believe you weren’t a part of this.”
“We’ll sort this matter out. If you’ll come to my headquarters, we can discuss this.”
�
��No. Not your headquarters. Not with the possibility you pulled this shit on us. We’ll meet somewhere else. Somewhere open.”
There was a pause. ”As you wish. Name a location.”
Grue, this time, was the one caught off guard. Calvert’s response was fast, and Grue clearly didn’t have an area in mind.
A place where we’d be able to set up faster than Calvert, ideally open, not riddled with attack routes and vantage points for his soldiers…
I thought of a spot, and the air caught in my throat as I suppressed a small noise. I almost coughed. I drew the word in the air with my bugs.
“The market, north end,” Grue said, reading it. ”You know it?”
“I do. It’s shut down at present.”
“Right. You come with only one small squad of soldiers, bring Tattletale and Regent.”
“If-” Calvert started.
Grue hung up on him. He looked at me, “Authority, right?”
“Right,” I said. But all I could hear was the emotion in his voice when he’d been talking about the idea that I’d been dead. Pretending. Grue wasn’t a guy who showed his emotions, he didn’t strike me as an actor. Hearing that had affected me more than I thought it would. I didn’t want to ask if it was because he really cared or if it was because he’d tapped into something else, some vulnerability that his recent trauma had left open to him.
I coughed lightly. ”The market’s a good spot. His people were at the south end of town. It’ll take him a bit to get there, so he won’t be able to stage any kind of ambush.”
“It works. But if we’re meeting him, what are you doing?”
“Staying nearby,” I said. ”I’ll wait in the wings. In the meantime, we should see if we can get our hands on something that we could have Bastard maul to the point that it looks like my mutilated remains.”
“There a butcher still in service anywhere?” Grue asked.
“We’ll figure something out,” I replied.
■
The market was almost empty, an expanse of asphalt devoid of cars, surrounded by tall grass. There were still faint marks where the treads and scoops of bulldozers had pushed the dirt and debris to the far side of the lot. Only a few stalls were standing, but the displays were empty.
I felt exposed, naked. I was wearing only my old costume and the built-in makeshift skirt to cover me where the fire had eaten away at the leggings. My utility compartment was the one that had been damaged during our altercation with the Nine, holding the bare essentials, while my new mask and the upper half of my remade costume were presently being worn by the fake we’d made. The sacrifice of the costume hurt, and the process of putting the fake together hadn’t been pretty.
The head, upper body and arms were simply taken from a child’s mannequin we’d salvaged from the inside of a store display and stuffed into the top of my costume. To get the meat for the torn midsection, I’d had to use my bugs to root out and kill a raccoon from the bins of a dumpster. I’d cut it open and tied the entrails to the base of the mannequin’s torso with my spiders. A wig that vaguely matched my own hair was simply bound to the head. We soaked the body, the wig in particular, with the blood of the dead raccoon.
Bentley’s tail wagged as he carried the thing delicately in his heavy jaws, one arm and a bloody mess of hair dangling from the left side of his mouth, raccoon intestines hanging out the other.
I headed into the tall grass and hunkered down. Volumes of insects and arachnids that I’d picked up during our trek to the market settled around me, hidden at the base of the grass.
Adrenaline kept me awake, despite the fatigue that I was experiencing. It had been an intense few days, an intense few weeks, with minimal chance to rest. My body was probably struggling to heal, and draining what little reserves I had remaining. Still, I wasn’t about to doze off.
Calvert arrived after ten or fifteen minutes, pulling up with one armored van. All in all, he had only four soldiers with him. He walked within twenty feet of me as he crossed the tall grass. I was aware of his footsteps crushing my bugs as he passed over the swarm.
Oblivious, he approached Grue, Imp, Bitch and the dogs.
“Ah. You brought Skitter. It seems there’s little doubt she’s dead. A terrible shame.”
“No kidding,” Imp said.
“I’d suggest my man look over the body, verify that it was her, but I suppose there’s no point trying.”
“Bentley wouldn’t let you get that close to his treat,” Bitch said.
Bentley growled, as if he understood the words and wanted to make it absolutely clear.
“Don’t talk about her like that,” Grue said. ”Calling her a treat?”
“She betrayed us,” Imp said. ”Why do you care?”
“Enough,” Calvert said, his voice hard. ”Enough bickering. My time is valuable, and I’m not willing to waste it on entertaining this ruse.”
I didn’t have many bugs deployed on my allies or on Calvert, but I could still feel the others tense in surprise.
“Yes, I know. I commend you for trying, I might have believed you, but I do have other resources on hand.”
“Then-” Grue started.
“Ah, bup bup,” Calvert raised a hand, “I was talking. As I was saying, I have other resources available. I have a small cadre of supervillains, a small group of heroes, all the resources of the PRT and PRT computer systems, and all of their tools.”
He snapped his fingers, and soldiers began to teleport down to the edges of the market. Most were positioned so that the Undersiders would have to run off the edge of the pavement, over the grass and into the water if they wanted to get away. Surrounding a target while holding guns only promised to get people shot. The effect, as it was, was good enough.
The Travelers teleported in behind Calvert, followed by Chariot, Circus, Über and Leet, and a few of his lieutenants. People in suits. One held a laptop while the other typed on it.
Every gun, tinker made or otherwise, was pointed at my teammates.
Another gun pressed against the back of my head. Soldiers had teleported in behind me.
I felt despair sweep through me. No. Too many. Didn’t think he could teleport this many in.
The gun barrel prodded me, and I stood. I walked with the gun pressed between my shoulderblades, just above the spot where my utility compartment hung.
“Skitter. How nice of you to join us.”
“Cut the fake civility,” I said. ”Where are our teammates?”
“Regent and Tattletale are safe and locked up, rest assured. I must say, I’m quite disappointed. I really had hoped this would work out, and the loss of the Undersiders sets me back by weeks or months in the grand scheme of my plan. Imp, you can cease trying to run. My men have cameras on you,” Calvert gestured toward the laptop.
Imp moved her mask to spit on the ground, just to my right. It was a bit of a shock to find her standing there.
“Farewell, Under-”
“Wait.” I said. Raising my voice made me cough.
“I don’t see any point to waiting.”
I hurried to recover and speak before he could give the order. ”Dead man’s switch.”
Calvert sighed. ”Ah. You are irritating, you know? On more than one occasion, I know, you’ve argued for the sake of the greater good. I’ve viewed the recordings the PRT has of your appearances at major events and I’ve come to know you fairly well. It’s rather hypocritical that you’re now working so hard to fight against the greater good.”
“Against your rule.”
“Essentially so. If you simply would have died quietly, the Undersiders wouldn’t have been stirred to rebellion, I could have established a peace we haven’t seen since the day Scion arrived and everyone involved here could have walked away happier and healthier. Your friends included.”
“Tattletale excepted,” I responded.
“Tattletale excepted, I admit. Too dangerous to be left unchecked. A shame. Now, you were saying?”
“I
arranged a dead man’s switch. Kind of. Unless one of my subordinates receives a message from me every twenty minutes, she’ll mass-send emails to everyone important and even a few unimportant people.”
“Detailing the true nature of Thomas Calvert, I suspect?”
“Yeah.”
“I hate to break it to you, dear Skitter, but this isn’t enough leverage for me to let you walk away.”
I turned my head in the direction of my teammates. With my power, I noted their presence. Grue, Imp, Bitch, her dog.
“None of us?” I asked.
“No. I’m more confident in my ability to handle the chaos that any email creates than I am in my ability to get you and your teammates under my thumb again.”
“Okay,” I said. I could feel sweat running cold down the back of my neck. ”Then I have a few questions, and a couple of requests. Satisfy that, and I can disable the dead man’s switch.”
“The requests first, if you please.”
“Dinah goes free when you’re done. You don’t keep her forever.”
“Agreed.”
“My dad, you don’t touch him.”
“I haven’t and I won’t have reason to.”
“And you take care of Rachel’s dogs.”
Calvert nodded, but I could sense his patience was running out.
“You do what you can to stop Jack from doing what he can to end the world. If you have capes at your disposal, you give them some job related to that. To stopping it.”
“Fine. Is that it?”
“If none of us here get to live, at least promise Tattletale gets to.”
“Fine. That can be arranged.”
“I’ll need to see her, to verify she’s okay. I get that you can’t prove you haven’t gone after my dad in retaliation for earlier, but you can bring her here.”
Calvert nodded at Chariot, who pressed a button on his wrist.
Tattletale appeared in a flash of light, arms bound behind her, legs shackled. She wore headgear that had her blindfolded and gagged. I couldn’t quite tell, but it looked like the ears were plugged too.
“Satisfied?” Calvert asked.
“No. It could be a body double, like you arranged for me. I’d like to confirm with her.”