by John McCrae
“That’s not fair,” Emma said.
“Emma,” the principal said, “What you did was monumentally stupid and dangerous.”
Again, that surreal feeling. This would be the point that I woke up to find I was still buried in Echidna, experiencing some warped reflection of past events, only in a more pleasant vein. Or maybe this scene twisted around and I’d realize I was in some modified agnosia fog and everyone around me was a member of the Nine.
Principal Howell continued, “You there, your name?”
“Terry,” the boy in the sleeveless t-shirt said.
“Did you bring a weapon to school today?”
“No.”
“Have you been in a fight, in the last few weeks?”
“A few.”
“Okay. And you, miss?”
“Sheila, and yeah. Brought a weapon.”
“Do you have it on you?”
Sheila reached into a back pocket and withdrew a keychain. A piece of metal dangled from the end, a bar that could be gripped, and two spikes that stuck out in front. It was like brass knuckles, but not quite. The same principle applied.
“Thank you. If you could hand them to Collins, I’d appreciate it.”
Sheila gave Collins a wary look.
“Or you could step outside,” Howell suggested.
“Yeah,” Sheila replied. “I’ll do that.”
She turned on her heel and stepped out of the office.
“And you? Your name?”
She was looking at me. I responded, “Taylor Hebert.”
“Were you armed?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“She handed over her weapon without a fuss,” Collins said. “Cheap knife, basic sheath.”
“And, if pushed, if you’d had it, would you have used it?” the principal asked.
I hesitated.
“You won’t get in trouble if you say yes. Be honest.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Define ‘pushed’.”
“Nevermind. Have you used it?”
“That one? No.”
“But you have used a knife?”
I nodded, reluctant. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the walls were going to close in around me, screwing me over.
“I hope you’re getting my point,” the woman said, turning back to Emma.
“You’re saying they could have hurt me,” Emma replied, sullen.
“Would have, in some cases. This isn’t the city you’re used to, nor the same students.”
“It’s fine,” Emma said.
“We’ll see. Just putting you into the computer. Emma… what was it?”
“Barnes,” I supplied. “E-S at the end.”
She typed on the computer keyboard to her right. “And Taylor… Hubert?”
“Hebert. E-B-E.”
More typing. “Hebert. Just give me a second to pull records… damn. Fancy new school, you’d think they’d give us better equipment.”
She hit the power button. The computer took a minute to reboot.
Long seconds passed. Nobody spoke.
The screen flared back to life.
“Hm,” she murmured.
“What is it?” Collins asked.
“A number of past incidents. And we got the emails from Winslow High School, I did a search for their names, and there’s one that post-dates the Endbringer attack. It’s apparently a series of text messages between an Emma Barnes and Sophia Hess. There’s a great deal of discussion of the ongoing bullying campaign against Taylor here.”
I glanced at Emma. She’d gone pale.
A final ‘fuck-you’ from Sophia? Guess she wasn’t a friend after all.
The principal looked me square in the eye. “Would you like to press charges?”
I couldn’t even think straight, hearing that, it was so out of tune with my expectations.
No. I was still seated on the hard plastic chair, Emma to my immediate left. This was reality.
This was everything I’d wanted, as far as the Emma situation: to enjoy a small victory, to see her house of cards come tumbling down. To actually get to press charges? To see justice?
“No,” I said. Emma’s head snapped to face my direction with enough speed that I thought she might have given herself whiplash.
“Why not?” Principal Howell asked.
Because I’m a supervillain, and I don’t want the scrutiny. Because her dad’s a lawyer with connections, and it won’t work…
“Because she’s not worth the trouble,” I gave her the first answer that I could think of that wouldn’t cause any more problems. Time spent on this is time I can’t devote to my territory. I don’t want more conflict. Not with all the other issues surrounding this.
“The school can take action against her without your consent,” she said.
“Feel free. I want to be done with her, that’s all.”
“Very well. Emma? I’ll see you again in September.”
“September?”
“The summer classes we’re offering are very much a privilege. Now, I’m sure you’ve faced your share of stresses in having to relocate twice in a short span of time, but I’m not inclined to extend the same leniency to you that I’m extending to those who’ve been through so much more.”
I suspected Emma was at least as stunned as I was.
“When you return, we can discuss whether you’ll repeat the tenth grade, and whether you’ll repeat it here. I’ll have had time to review the emails and past records…”
She tapped a few keys on the keyboard, then frowned. “…What was I saying? Right. Given the possibility that Taylor might choose to attend in the future, and even just the basics I’m reading here, it may not be conscionable to let you attend as well.”
“This is ridiculous. My dad’s a lawyer. There’s no way he’ll let this happen.”
“Then I expect we’ll have a great many discussions in the future. Collins? Would you please take her to the front? I’d like a word with Ms. Hebert.”
“Will do.”
Maybe not a delusion. A trap? Head games from Accord? Or was she an Ambassador, trying to curry favor? I wasn’t sure what every member of the Fallen or the Teeth could do. Could one be a shapeshifter? Something else?
The door shut behind Collins, leaving the principal and I alone in the room.
“Satisfactory?” she asked me.
“What?”
“Is this end result satisfactory? If you were holding back because you were afraid your membership among the Undersiders might come to light, rest assured I can be discreet.”
She did know something.
“I- I’m not sure I understand.”
“It doesn’t matter. I got the impression you didn’t want to be treated any differently.”
“Who are you?”
“A vice principal in well over her head,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “I didn’t see it firsthand, but I’ve felt the effects of this… long series of disasters. My predecessor made it through, past an Endbringer attack, past food shortages and disease, past the roving gangs, the thugs and looters, past the Slaughterhouse Nine, an amnesia fog and a takeover of the city. So many things. And at the end of it all, just when things started to get better, he couldn’t adjust. He got in a fight, was punched in the head, and died soon after of an embolism.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Seventeen years working together. He was like a brother. I told myself I would keep the peace. Someone gave me a list of names, and I recognized your name on that list. So perhaps I support certain students and keep an eye on the ones who would inevitably cause trouble anyways.”
Tattletale. She arranged this.
“I’m not confirming or denying that I am such a student-”
“Of course.”
“-but why? What do you get out of it?”
“Peace. It’s an ugly road to travel to get there, but it’s peace. I lost one good friend and boss to the crises here, I won’t lose anyone else. Particularl
y not my students.”
Why did she have to tell me? I would have been content to be ignorant here. This was a perversion of justice. The fact that it was perverted in my favor didn’t matter.
“Treat me like you would anyone else,” I said.
“I will.”
I couldn’t quite believe her. If she was currying favor with Tattletale, helping to solidify Tattletale’s hold and perhaps feeding Tattletale information on more troublesome gang members, I wasn’t sure I could trust her to stay impartial here.
I’d won, so to speak, but this small revelation had taken the justice out of it.
“I’m going to go,” I said.
“I need you to fill out some paperwork, so everything’s organized for Emma’s suspension. Are you a student?”
“No.”
“Are you intending to be a student?”
“No.”
“Okay. Then I’ll have you fill out a form as a visitor. Let me reboot my system again, print what you need, you can fill out one short page, and I’ll manage the rest.”
I was about to protest, to give some excuse and go, but the phone rang. She picked up and pressed one hand over the mouthpiece. “Wait at the front, a secretary will bring it to you.”
I couldn’t refuse without intruding on the conversation. I stepped outside.
Emma was at the front, too, slouched in a chair with Collins standing beside her. No doubt she’d had a secretary let her call her dad, or would as soon as the opportunity came up.
I stood at the opposite end of the room.
I felt numb. A little disgusted with how things had turned out, that the only reason this system seemed to be working was because it was already corrupt to a fundamental level. I could still feel some of the anger and irritation from the argument with Emma, the thrill of adrenaline…
I raised a hand to adjust my glasses and found my fingers were shaking. I was trembling, and I couldn’t identify why. None of the emotions I could single out would account for this kind of response. Even all put together, they shouldn’t have gotten me halfway here.
I had a lump in my throat, and I felt like I might cry, and I wasn’t sad. Was I happy? Scared? Relieved? I couldn’t sort anything out in the jumble.
Was my emotional makeup that fucked up?
I found a chair and fell into it, rather than sitting. I focused on deep breaths, on using my power to contact my bugs and detach myself from things.
“Hebert? Taylor Hebert?” A secretary was calling out for me.
I stood and made my way to the front, where I got the paper, already attached to a clipboard.
Some had already been automatically filled in, and there was a header asking me to double-check the details. My name, my age and grade, the address…
I stopped.
Address: 911 Incoming St.
Alt Address: 9191 Escape Ave.
I looked up in the direction of the principal’s office. She was standing at the window, staring at me, a phone pressed to her ear.
She mouthed a word at me. ‘Run’.
Someone knows I’m Skitter.
20.04
From the moment Charlotte had sent her text, I’d been bracing myself for the worst case scenario. I’d resolved the situation with Greg, and I’d had just enough time to let my guard down before things started falling apart for real.
A guard stopped me in my tracks before I was three steps out of the office, arresting me mid-stride by setting his hands on my shoulders.
I resisted the urge to fight him. I wasn’t sure I could, without a weapon, my armor or powers, and it threatened to make the situation worse. He peered down at me, but I averted my eyes, staring down at the ground so he couldn’t get a straight look at my face.
“No running, kid,” he said.
He let me go, and I resisted the urge to breathe a sigh of relief.
My thoughts were a mess, a jumble of half-finished thoughts, ten times worse than it had been earlier in the day. Somehow, in the midst of it, I managed to establish a few priorities. Slip out, get rid of evidence, assess the threat, and then address it.
I walked slower. I had the papers I’d removed from the clipboard, and I started tearing them up as soon as the guard had disappeared through the doors of the office.
On a more strategic level, I drew on a share of the handful of bugs in the school to get a sense of my surroundings. I’d be letting people know Skitter was present, if they noticed the odd movements of the flies and ants, but I had good reason to believe someone already knew.
Either the people after me were the good guys, and it didn’t matter if I clued them in, or it was one of my other enemies, and the heroes showing up could be a good thing.
Arcadia High consisted of two longer buildings joined by a third, joining them to form something like a capital ‘H’. The main office, where I was, and all the other administrative and staff-related facilities seemed to be located around the center. The only exits from this immediate area would open into an open space where I would be surrounded by walls lined with windows, all looking down at me. Worse, the doors all had the heavy horizontal bars that suggested they were emergency exits, and an alarm would sound if I used them.
Assuming I had someone after me, I couldn’t afford to put myself in that position.
That left me two options. I could head into the building to my left, which featured four stories of classrooms, the cafeteria and a gymnasium, with a door that led to the student parking lot at the front of the school, or I could head right, into a building that was much the same, though longer, with an auditorium and the front doors of the school in close proximity to one another, and quite a few more classrooms.
I headed for the front door, to my right, depositing the scraps of paper in a trashcan on my way. I moved as fast as I could without drawing undue attention, discreetly placing bugs on all of the guards I could find.
I stopped in my tracks as my bugs made contact with two other individuals. Adamant and Sere were in the company of two guards, moving from the front door to the intersection immediately in front of me.
Making a sharp right, I headed for the stairwell, ducking away before they could advance far enough ahead to get a glimpse of me. I’d worried they were making a beeline straight for me, but they stopped at the junction where the two hallways met. I was already reaching the hallway below. The guidance counselor’s office and staff meeting rooms sat behind floor-to-ceiling windows with the same glass that the exterior windows had: hexagon-shaped cells blending near-seamlessly into one another. Looking straight at it, I couldn’t tell the difference, but the light caught each cell differently if I viewed it at certain angles, making them stand out. Measures against Shatterbird?
Behind one of the windows, I could see two guidance counsellors sitting in a circle with a dozen students. Nobody, not even the guard who was standing on the other side of the glass door, gave me more than a glance.
The exterior windows of the building were all securely closed. The building was cool despite being a greenhouse of sorts, but it made getting my bugs into the building a difficult matter, and that left me with a relatively small swarm. I gauged the number of bugs I could spare, and situated the less mobile bugs on doors and at the points where the walls met the floor or ceiling. I might have preferred a denser collection, to map out my surroundings, but it gave me a sketchy mental picture of how the hallways were laid out.
A small cloud of flies was only now reaching the front office, slipping inside as a student opened the door, navigating between legs and feet to make their way to the principal’s office.
Listening in required conscious thought, but I’d been working on training my brain to follow human speech with the insects’ alien hearing. It was easier, the more I had nearby, but I’d have to make do.
“…fight on my campus…” she spoke into the phone.
I had some information now, for as long as she was on the phone. Not much, and it required me to divert some focus to tran
slating, but it was something.
“…of my students are …ly sensitive … to … them feel unsafe…”
It was an unfamiliar school, and while I had a basic sense of the layout, particularly on the exterior, the interior was something of a hurdle. The hallway I was on ended in short staircases at either end, each of which led up to the main hallways of the larger buildings. I made my way towards the one furthest from Sere and Adamant.
“…if that’s an order… yes… fine…”
The principal hung up the phone, placing it on her desk. She didn’t act right away. I quickened my pace.
The bugs I had on her pant legs informed me that she was swiveling around. I had to think about the layout of her office before it clicked. The computer.
I was at the top of the stairs, the door that led to the parking lot at my left, when the signal went through. Every single guard in the building reacted in the same moment, as did Adamant and Sere. Some withdrew things from their pockets -phones, I could guess-, while others were already kicking into action.
It wasn’t just the guards. The bugs I had on classroom doors informed me of some students slipping out of class. Two students, both boys.
My enemy was the Protectorate, or someone with strong connections in the Protectorate. Nobody else would be able to pull this.
Guards stepped into the building and shut the doors behind them. The heavy, mechanical sound of the doors locking echoed down the hall around me; the doors leading outside were all being sealed shut.
The gate at the front of the school was closed, and a guard was heading for the chain-link barrier at the edge of the parking lot as well.
Could I run? Maybe. Fight my way past the guards? It was possible. I could cloak myself in bugs, use my limited repertoire to disguise myself, to disable and/or distract them while fighting my way outside. Could I get to the end of the parking lot in time? That, too, wasn’t impossible.
All together? With barely a hundred bugs available? I wasn’t so sure. Any fight took time, it involved a risk to myself, and I wasn’t wearing my costume. If any of the guards had a weapon they’d confiscated or if one of the capes in the area caught up with me, I’d be more than screwed.