by John McCrae
“Any particular thoughts on how things should be arranged?” Grue asked.
“Some, as far as our group is concerned. But I’d have to talk to the others about it before I put any ideas out there.”
“Do the Ambassadors fit into that image of the future?” Citrine asked.
“It depends on Accord,” I said. “You know him better than I do. Is he stable?”
“No. Not in the sense you mean.”
My heart sank.
“But you can trust him.”
“I suppose we’ll have to,” I said, not feeling much better. “Do me a favor, sound him out on what limits he’d set in terms of bringing others on board. Other teams, other groups. Individuals. We should set standards, hard rules for people in the city and people in our alliance. I’m not going to mince words. His response to this is a big factor in how all this plays out.”
“Including his presence in this hypothetical future you’re envisioning,” Citrine said.
I shrugged. “You say we can trust him. I’d like to believe you, and I will, until I have a reason not to.”
“That’s all we can ask for,” Citrine said.
“Is that it? You wanted to meet to address the recruitment of your five members?”
“No. Here.”
She handed me the folder, and my arm sagged with the weight of it. I approached Grue and stood next to him as I paged through it.
It was a three-hundred page treatise, complete with binding at the spine and a gray cover printed with the simple words ‘Brockton Bay: Crime and Public Safety’. I handed Grue the folder and the dossiers on the five recruits to the Ambassadors, keeping the tome. I paged through it, holding it so Grue could read alongside me.
It was less an essay than a technical manual. A step-by-step guide to bringing the city in order. Size eight font, bolded and centered headings, annotations, continually referring to other sections. It was readable, though, almost seductive in how it made it all sound so possible. The language was simple, clear, and unambiguous, as though it were outlining little more than how to build a bookshelf, without more than the occasional diagram. There were branching paths, too, clearly outlined, detailing the routes to be taken if something didn’t work out. I could only assume that the bulk of the text was Accord’s accounting of all the various possibilities.
No murder, nothing totalitarian. Not at a glance. It was merely a very involved analysis on Brockton Bay, the various criminal elements, the various players and how things could be brought into alignment.
“I’ll read it,” I said, “And I’ll make sure Tattletale gives it a thorough looking-over.”
“Okay,” Citrine said. “Don’t worry about giving him a response. He already knows. Nobody ever accepts the proposals.”
“We’ll give it a serious look,” I stressed. “Who knows? Tattletale might get a kick out of being able to debate the finer points of the plan with Accord.”
Citrine arched an eyebrow.
“I’ll tell her to play nice,” I said.
“Then I suppose those are the key points covered. Thank you,” Citrine said. “If there’s nothing else?”
“Nothing springs to mind,” I told her.
She offered me a curt nod, then headed for the stairwell. Grue and I stayed put.
The pair of us stood on the rooftop, just out of sight of anyone on the ground. The portal-tower loomed a short distance away, taller than the surrounding buildings, rippling slightly as the wind pulled at the upper areas where there were only the tent and metal framework.
“So much talk of the future,” Grue said, “And no guarantee there’ll be one.”
“There will,” I said. “With everything else Dinah said, we know there’ll be some kind of future. It might not be a pretty one, but people will survive. We’ll slip away to other dimensions, the best of us will persist, and we’ll slowly make our way back to where we are now, but we’ll survive. Or maybe, with all the powers out there, we’ll find a way around this, and it doesn’t come to pass.”
“And we establish some kind of stability in Brockton Bay? Bring Accord’s plan to fruition?”
I didn’t have an answer to that. I looked down at the book.
“You’re skeptical?”
“Skeptical,” I said. “Ever notice how every power gets turned to violent ends? Even the people with powers that could benefit humanity wind up losing it? Accord, Sphere, there’s Parian on the smallest end of the scale…”
“And you think there’s some ugly twist to this.”
“Accord works out some scenario where it’s possible to establish peace in Brockton Bay by exerting pressure in the right areas, promoting the right people, and allocating resources in the right way, but it turns out like a wish from a malevolent genie. It turns ugly, or there’s some loophole. I think Tattletale should look at it. That’s all. We need to be very careful.”
“You’re obsessing over what Tagg said,” Grue said.
“I’m trying to see everything through the perspective of what they’ll be in a year or two from now, and maybe what they’ll become ten years from now, if we’re lucky enough to get that far. What form will the team take? How will the team run, and how will personalities change as time passes and we get more comfortable with where we stand?”
“There’s time to figure this out,” Grue said.
I frowned. “Not as much as you might be thinking. Not nearly enough time. The Undersiders need to solidify a hold on the city, become a fixture. It’s impossible to do that by scrambling here and there and struggling to defeat each enemy that crosses our paths. We needed a reason for the crazier and more reckless enemies to think twice before interfering with us.”
“People like the Slaughterhouse Nine, the Teeth.”
“And the Merchants, Lung and Bakuda. All of them are very different kinds of villain, with a different sort of momentum. The Merchants weren’t ever going to maintain a consistent hold on a territory. It was less a question of whether they’d hold an area for years and more a question of the damage they’d do in the meantime.”
“You may be underestimating what they could have become.”
“Maybe,” I admitted. “I get that the Merchants had the benefit of being the right people in the right place at the right time, but they didn’t really have any sense of self-preservation. There’s going to be others like them. I’m not underestimating that. There are teams who exist only because they earned attention through luck or circumstance, and those are the teams that have to throw themselves at the biggest targets available. They have to prove their worth to the world at large, or they collapse in on themselves. Brockton Bay and the Undersiders are going to remain a target for guys like that if we can’t create a big enough deterrent.”
Grue folded his arms.
“And here’s the thing, there are ones like the Slaughterhouse Nine, too.”
I could see him react. His arms dropped to his side, darkness trailing after them. He seemed to realize he’d reacted, that he had nothing to do with his hands, and shifted his weight with his feet instead, leaving them dangling.
“Sorry,” I said.
He shook his head. After a second, he prompted me, “The Slaughterhouse Nine.”
“There’s the monsters who were drawn to the city because it was vulnerable, because others were already paying attention to it, or because it was different in a way that appealed to their warped sensibilities. We have to account for all these different people who are going to want to come after us and our city, and each demands a different response. Can the Undersiders be boring enough to not be a desirable target to take down, scary enough to drive away the troublemakers, and still have the cold efficiency needed to take out ones like the Nine?”
“It’s not impossible. We’re on our way there.”
“Except there’s a whole other set of checks and balances in terms of the authorities. Need to play along to a certain degree, cooperate, but also need to convey the right image.”
/> “A lot on your plate. Are you going to be able to manage?”
I hesitated.
“What?”
“When I phoned you,” I said, “I wanted to talk about some things. Two things.”
“And you wanted to talk in person,” he said.
“In person,” I agreed. “Um. I guess I’m thinking about things in the same way Accord does. Looking toward the future, accounting for the possibilities, simplifying. If something happens to me-”
“Skitter,” Grue said.
“We know something goes down in two years. You know we live a high-risk lifestyle. We’re going to have enemies, I’ll be risking my life. I’m- I guess what I’m trying to get at is that there’s no guarantee I’ll always be here. I need to know if you think you’d be up to taking over. Becoming leader again.”
“I couldn’t do what you do,” he said.
“What’s the alternative? Tattletale has her hands full with just the management side of things. Imp? Regent? Rachel? That’s a disaster waiting to happen. Do you really want the team to work for Accord?”
“I don’t see it happening.”
“No. I’m just… let’s look at what happens in the future. If you had to take over, could you?”
“No,” he admitted.
“Okay,” I said.
We stood there for a while. I reached out and took his hand, my fingers knitting between his, the oily darkness slithering against my bare arm. We stared up at the portal-tower, backed by an increasingly overcast sky. So much depended on it, but we wouldn’t hear the verdict for a little while yet.
“I raised the idea of you maybe getting therapy,” I said. “I could use it too, to be honest.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Do you think, maybe, if you were in a better head space, you could handle the leadership thing better?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”
“Would you be willing to try? I don’t want to guilt you into it, but it’d give me a lot of peace of mind, knowing that you’d be there to keep things going.”
“I’d be willing to try,” he murmured, his voice a hollow echo from within his darkness. “But why are you being so fatalistic?”
“I don’t think I’m being fatalistic,” I said. “But… but maybe I sort of lost one half of my life. I lost Taylor, not so long ago. So I’m thinking about what happens if the other half were to disappear, too, and that’s in conjunction with my focus on the future, on the team…”
I trailed off. It sounded feeble, but he didn’t call me on it.
“Regent and Imp,” I said, stopping when he turned his head my way.
A heavyhanded way of changing the subject.
“What about them?”
“They’re together,” I said. “I don’t know if it’s romantic, but… they’re together.”
“I’m aware,” he said.
“It’s a problem.”
“It is,” he agreed. “But there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Rein them in?” I suggested.
“How? Aisha bucks at rules and restrictions. She’d use her power and run before I could talk to her more seriously. She was always one for flight more than fighting. Fitting that she got that power. Infuriating.”
“Then talk to Regent.”
“Not much better. He’s never one to face confrontation, but he handles it differently. He doesn’t run, he evades. He’d say or do whatever it took to stop me lecturing him, stop me from threatening him, and he’d go right back to what he was doing, in a different way, a different angle, so I’m less likely to catch on. And if I angered him, or upset him, he’d make me answer for it somehow.”
“I don’t think I’ve really seen him angry or upset.”
“You don’t,” Grue said. “Because he doesn’t show it. I don’t think he even fully realizes it, that he feels that way. But his jokes get a bit more barbed, he pushes back a little harder when pushed. He makes dealing with him annoying or toxic in a thousand small ways, until you can’t continue to press him. Then he uses that, goes right back to doing what he wanted to do. It’s not worth the trouble. They’re friends. I don’t like it, but I can live with it.”
“He controlled her.”
Grue let go of my hand, stepped away so he was facing me. “What?”
“He controlled her. She let him, because she thought it would be interesting. It made a difference in us winning against Valefor, yesterday, but… I thought you should know.”
Grue didn’t respond. He folded his arms, so I at least knew he hadn’t gone catatonic.
“Maybe they’re not romantic now,” I said, “But who knows where they’ll be a few years from now? Their trust is born of mutually assured destruction, because neither can absolutely control the other, but it’s still trust. It could go places.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Grue said, and there was a hint of a growl in his echoing voice.
There was a distant rumble of thunder. Surprising, given the amount of blue to the very north and south. A summer storm?
Rain started to patter down around us.
In wordless agreement, we ventured to the staircase and into the building, to take shelter from the weather.
I reached up to my face to take my glasses off, ready to wipe them free of moisture, before realizing that I wasn’t wearing them. I let my hand drop.
Grue was looking at me, his expression hidden by his mask. I felt momentarily embarrassed, then let the feeling drop away.
I reached up and pulled his mask off. He let the darkness start to dissipate, his face half-hidden behind a veil of wisp-thin darkness, almost as if he weren’t even aware I’d removed the mask. He seemed pensive.
“Sorry to be a downer,” I said. “Bearer of bad news.”
“It’s not that,” he said. “You’ve been looking forward. That’s good. Except I’m wondering… where are we, in the future? Suppose we made it through the end of the world. Are we together in ten years? Do we have kids? Are we married? Are we together, king and queen of Brockton Bay? Have we retired? Can you imagine a scenario like that? Like any of that?”
I was caught off guard by the question. I could visualize it. Us in some mansion, little kids running around. Just outside the window, Brockton Bay as it could be, swelled with industry and life and vigor and development, nourished by that portal and all the promise the portal held. Inside our home, a mess, not so different from the mess that I’d seen on first walking into the loft. A good mess, the kind of mess that came from life and living. I could imagine Grue blanketing me in darkness to drown out the screaming, to give us a momentary privacy so he could hold me, kiss me.
Yes, I thought. Yes. Please, yes.
But I couldn’t bring myself to voice the thought aloud.
“Me either,” Grue said, his voice quiet, in response to an answer I hadn’t expressed with anything but my expression and body language.
I couldn’t lie and say that the mental picture, the fantasy, was a real possibility. I couldn’t see it unfolding the same way I could see a thriving Brockton Bay secured with equal measures of fear and fairness.
It had been busy, hard and violent, with too much to do. It was too easy to see how things could continue down that road.
Was it possible that this relationship could become something? Yes.
Likely? No.
“Shit,” he said. He must have seen something in my expression. “I should have kept my mouth shut.”
“No,” I replied, shaking my head. I put his mask aside on a workbench, along with the booklet Citrine had given us, reached out and plucked the folder and papers from Grue’s hands, putting them aside as well.
Taking his hands in my own, I stepped close, pressing my body against his. The bugs under my dress moved away from the points of contact so they wouldn’t get squished, flying down and out of the way or crawling down my bare legs, making me very, very aware of the bare skin of my legs.
He was cool, between the moi
sture-beaded fabric of his costume and the darkness, but if I pressed hard against, him, I could feel the warmth of his body where the darkness didn’t sit between us. I slowly, carefully drew his hands up so his arms were around my shoulders, arranging them. When I was done, I wrapped my arms around his neck, felt him adjust his hold on me.
“Skitter- Taylor.”
I had to crane my head up to kiss the tip of his chin.
It had been a fantasy. Two damaged, lonely people clinging to each other for warmth in a dark time. He’d needed a rock, I’d needed warmth and gentleness.
“There’s no regrets?” I asked him. “About us, together?”
“No,” he said, and his face was less than an inch from mine, his breath as warm as his power was cool. I felt his chest rise and fall as it pressed against me. “It was right.”
It was right. Then.
“Then let’s make this one place where we don’t have to give any thought to the future,” I murmured. “Focus on the present.”
He lowered his head and kissed me with surprising tenderness.
I hated to do it, but I broke the kiss, pulled away a fraction. I murmured, “Besides the usual precautions.”
“Mm,” he murmured his agreement, an inarticulate, wordless sound that vibrated through his body and mine.
21.05
The rain had softened to a light drizzle by the time we finished.
My sundress was lying on the floor, a little worse for wear where I’d thrown it to the ground and used it to sweep much of the grit, plaster and sawdust from the spot where we’d laid down. I shook it, then called my swarm, let my bugs crawl up my body to sweep and brush my skin clean. The bugs made their way up the sides and back of my neck to my hair, then weaved through it as a mass, their bodies and mandibles helping to set it in order. Others progressed down my arms, making their way to the dress, doing much the same with the fabric.
I was just about finished when I caught Brian staring at me.
I raised an eyebrow, and he smiled a little, shook his head, turned his attention to his costume.
I pulled the sundress over my head, and it was my chance to take a look at Brian. He had only the leggings of his costume on, and was working one arm into the sleeve, his chest bare behind the ‘v’ of the unzipped upper body. The way his muscles shifted fluidly beneath his skin, the lines of his body… I felt an ache that wasn’t heartbreak. A pang of loss on a baser level.