by John McCrae
His voice was quiet, a mumble, “When some’dy helps you out, what d’you say?”
“Thank you!” the toddler chirped.
The woman only scowled. I saw Rachel out of the corner of one eye, watching.
The man made his way past the kitchen, nearly running into the darker-skinned girl who was already cooking, past Barker and Biter, before finding a place to sit with his child.
Despite his size, his presence, the man with the child didn’t make eye contact with anyone. Almost flinched at it, even in the face of a hundred-pound girl.
Mentally disabled? Developmentally delayed? Or had he suffered a trauma?
Between the way the girl had been so overjoyed at the slightest praise, and this man’s attitude, I was wondering if maybe Rachel’s people were somehow just as damaged as she was.
“There’s one possibility,” I said to Rachel. “A role you could play in this. You don’t have to. Just putting it out there.”
“What’s that?”
“The portal, it sounds like it’s going to be a thing. There’s a whole world out there with nobody around. People will be settling there, establishing a society. I’m imagining there’ll be something of a society popping up around the portal, a mirror city to Brockton Bay. But there’ll be pioneers as well. People striking out on their own. And some of the Undersider’s enemies are going to try to slip through, control things on the other side.”
“And?”
“If you’re willing, maybe you could serve as an aide to the Undersiders, but you patrol for trouble, track down troublemakers and fugitives. That could be your territory, more than just the fringes of this city.”
She frowned.
“It’s just an idea.”
“It’d be hard to feed my dogs.”
“Manageable,” I said. “Tattletale aims to control one of the fleets that brings supplies to the other side. We don’t know how restrictive the government will be with the portal, or where ownership will lie, but… I don’t imagine getting dog food to you will be a problem. And as the area gets settled, maybe you could supply trained dogs to pioneers or hunters looking to capitalize on the area.”
She didn’t reply, focusing on her adoring dogs, instead. Two hands, no less than twenty ears to scratch in her reach.
“Think about it,” I said.
“Mm,” she grunted.
The man was playing with his daughter, who was squealing and reaching out to pet the dogs who were standing by, almost protective.
“They’re okay?” I asked. “The dogs won’t hurt the kid?”
“None of the dogs at this shelter,” Rachel said. “Picked them carefully.”
I was a little stunned at that. To give that much thought to something like that… it wasn’t in her character.
“Why?” I asked.
“You said I should think about what people need from dogs. If I’m going to find them homes, the dogs need to be able to live with families.”
I nodded. There were more questions I wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to spoil the quiet relief I felt at hearing her say that.
We sat for ten more minutes before Bitch rose and began playing with dogs. She incorporated training into the play, dividing dogs into teams and having them fetch in shifts, among other things. I stood, joining her, and she handed me a ball.
There wasn’t much more conversation beyond that. Most of the talking was reserved for the dogs.
Time passed quickly enough that I was surprised that Rachel’s henchperson announced that the food was ready. Not everyone collected some. Barker and Biter held off. The vet had her hands full. Rachel loaded up a plate with two burgers and a pile of grilled vegetables. I took about half the portions she did.
It wasn’t very good, but the kid seemed so pleased with herself that I couldn’t say anything to that effect. Rachel didn’t seem to care, nor did the big man and his daughter.
“Thank you,” the toddler piped up, sing-song, when she was done eating the bits of crumbled up hamburger and bun.
Rachel, for her part, only stood to grab a soda. She mussed up the cook’s hair on the way back, as if she were petting a dog.
…Not quite a leadership style I might have suggested, but the kid looked happy.
I finished what I could, considered throwing the rest to the dogs, then decided it was best not to risk angering Rachel.
It was late at night, now, but I didn’t return to my lair. We tended to the dogs, grooming them, cleaning their ears and brushing their teeth. Certain dogs were due pills, and Rachel saw to it that they got the pills.
It was an endless sequence of those little tasks I’d always found frustrating. Cleaning up, doing jobs that would only be undone by the next day, if not within minutes. I’d always found them frustrating, found it tolerable only now that I could delegate bugs to many of them.
Rachel reveled in it. It seemed to calm her, center her.
The others found their way to their beds, or made their way out the front door to head back to wherever they lived. Many dogs retreated to the kennels that were set out for each of them, and Rachel took the time to lock them in.
The night was creeping on, and I wasn’t leaving. I knew why, didn’t want to admit it to myself.
Exhaustion overtook me eventually, though I would have been hard pressed to say exactly when.
I woke in the middle of the evening, found myself slumped on a couch with a crick in my neck, a blanket over me.
Rachel was on another couch, and the blue-eyed girl, the cook, was lying beside her, her back pressed to Rachel’s front.
I stood, stretched, winced at the knot at the muscle where my neck met my shoulder. The movement seemed to stir Rachel. She started to extricate herself from behind the girl.
“Don’t let me disturb you,” I murmured, keeping my voice quiet enough that it wouldn’t disturb anyone.
She shifted position, keeping herself propped up, “You leaving?”
I frowned, “Yeah.”
“Okay.” She settled back down, and the kid curled up against her. Kid. The teenager was probably older than Aisha or Vista. I couldn’t help but see her as younger, because there was something about her that screamed ‘lost’.
Maybe that was the role that Rachel filled, here. Forming a screwed up, antisocial family with those who had nobody else. Damaged people.
I was okay with that. I could believe that, even if she didn’t heal them or help them get better in any explicit way, she wouldn’t make them worse.
I felt like I should say something more, but I was tired, my thoughts increasingly occupied by greater matters. “Bye.”
“Bye,” she said.
I headed to the door. I was already gathering bugs to me, just to ensure I had a safe walk back. A walk home in the dark would be nice. Time to think.
“Thanks.”
I stopped in my tracks, looked back.
Rachel had her head down against the armrest of the couch. I couldn’t see her through the other girl’s head.
But it had been her voice.
I revised my opinion. Maybe they could heal each other, in their own ways.
It helped, as I stepped outside and started my long, quiet trek home. I was riddled with doubts, with countless worries, but knowing that Rachel was in a better place was a light in the darkness.
I had let two days pass since my conversation with Miss Militia. Dealt with the Teeth. They weren’t all gone. Hemorrhagia had slipped away, as had Reaver, and there were rank and file troops. Parian still had some cleaning up to do, at the very least, but the Teeth weren’t the presence they had been.
Now I had to face everything I’d been dreading. I’d spent time here because I was procrastinating. Putting off the inevitable. I couldn’t put it off any longer: if I didn’t bring myself to do it soon, it would only get harder to bring myself to do it.
Tomorrow morning, I thought. I face off with Tagg and the rest of the PRT.
21.07
I eas
ed the door closed, then paused to let my eyes adjust.
Every window had the blinds closed and curtains shut over it. The room was dusty, and needle-thin rays of light caught the flurries of specks, making them glow.
I grew aware of my surroundings, distinguishing dark gray shapes from an oppressive darkness. A desk sat in the middle of the room, shaped like a ‘c’, with a cushy computer chair in the middle. Four monitors were arranged at even intervals across the desk. Beyond them, three widescreen televisions were mounted on tripods. The walls and open spaces beyond the televisions, in turn, were filled with bulletin boards and whiteboards.
I glanced at my phone. The last text I’d received was still displayed on the main screen:
the nearest keyboard to entrance. don’ wander and don’t turn monitor on. type WQtksDH2.
I followed the instructions, making my way to the desk, carefully angling my body so I wouldn’t touch any of the bulletin boards, and so that I didn’t bump anything with the loose fabric of my running pants or my backpack. I didn’t want to risk using my bugs to check for obstacles, so I was forced to rely on my eyes alone, in this near-total darkness.
I found the keyboard, found the little nibs on the ‘f’ and ‘j’ keys so I could center my hand, and very carefully typed out the password.
A series of barely-audible ‘beeps’ sounded throughout the room. What had I just disabled? Claymores?
Did I really want to know?
Free of whatever safeguards that had been set in place, I turned on the monitor. The faint glow lit up one half of the room, casting light on Tattletale’s costume in one corner, and the heavy metal door leading to her bedroom.
I found a dimmer switch on the wall and turned the lights up just enough that I could see. The details on the bulletin boards became clear. They were color coded by subject, but there were threads connecting elements, pieces of yarn tacked into place or held in spots with magnets.
I approached the nearest boards. The set furthest to the left were each headed ‘Cauldron’, with subheadings, and had either green construction paper or words in green marker. The board closest to me had photos of various capes, organized into forty rows and twenty-five columns, headed ‘Cauldron, unconfirmed’. One-and-a-half inch by one inch images of various masks, their names penned in underneath. Here and there, portraits were missing, presumably where Tattletale had found better spots for them.
So many capes. It was startling really, and I was suspicious it was incomplete. Was she planning on expanding that?
The upper half had sections marked for ‘likely’ and ‘confirmed’. Many of the ‘likely’ capes had a series of letters and numbers by their name, five digits long: reference numbers.
There were only three ‘confirmed’ capes on the board. Capes that had been more or less verified, through a combination of admission and Tattletale’s powers: Eidolon, Alexandria, Legend.
Lines were drawn on the construction paper behind them, pointing to one portrait-sized rectangle of paper at the top, as though indicating a hierarchy. It was blank, and the ‘name’ at the very bottom was only ‘Cauldron?’.
The back of the same bulletin board had ‘confirmed trigger’ capes and ‘Case 53′. Each ‘trigger’ cape had a trigger event marked in pen below the name, along with the same series of letters and numbers by their name: Jadeite: Post-brainwashing dissonance HSPuT. Gethsemane: Lost family in war H2UXa. Skitter: Bullying 9Zw3t.
The rest of the Undersiders were on that section of the board as well, but the trigger events had been left off. Chances were good that she didn’t want prying eyes to dig up details, while my information was presumably public knowledge.
I walked across her setup, my hand trailing across the index cards and pictures as I walked, as though I could take in the information through touch.
Lengths of yarn connected the ‘Cauldron’ board to the PRT board, which was a whiteboard, magnets affixing index cards to specific areas. A black piece of yarn extended from Alexandria on the ‘Cauldron’ board to the recently retired Chief Director on the ‘PRT’ board. Black for a direct connection? Yellow yarn extended from the Cauldron board to index cards regarding PRT funds.
The whiteboard held scrawlings of notes, musings and possibilities, some half-erased. Degree of involvement with Cauldron? Funding: is PRT siphoning official funds to pay for powers? Agenda?
It wasn’t reassuring. The number of questions, the idea that the PRT might be far larger than I’d conceived.
I moved on to boards of a different color. The red bulletin boards and whiteboards with red writing: Brockton Bay. Potential threats: the Teeth, Red Handed, Heartbreaker, Lost Garden, Adepts, the Orchard, The Fallen.
Each was labeled with a code, much like the trigger events had been, and a letter-number combination after that.
It took me only a minute to find what they were referring to. Things were organized beyond the initial veneer of chaos. A small bookshelf, knee-high, held file folders with the same letter-number pairings as I saw on the bulletin board. I picked one out at random.
Adepts. Self professed magic users. One page of information, listing names and powers. Another page with the PRT’s information on them: a series of codes and symbols I didn’t quite follow, numbers inside colored circles, squares and diamonds. From what I could gather, they had a low threat level, moderate crime rate, moderate ‘engagement’ level, low activity level. Led by Epoch, a time traveler.
Fun. I didn’t even want to think about the headaches that power would cause.
I put the folder away carefully, picked out another. Lost Garden. High threat level, low crime rate, low engagement level and moderate activity level. Leader, Barrow. A powerful shaker, similar to Labyrinth, only rather more single-minded in what he did. He couldn’t leave the altered area he created around him, only extending it slowly to an area while letting it fade behind him, an effect described as ‘a depression’ with overgrowth extending into the surrounding neighborhood. Tattletale’s own notes in the file suggested he was making slow but steady progress towards Brockton Bay, and that he had been since the portal appeared.
I flipped through the rest of the file. What kind of people gravitated towards someone like that? Apparently a lot of very young parahumans, boys and girls around Aisha’s age, had gathered around the middle-aged Barrow. A little creepy, when I imagined that collection of capes and the resulting dynamic.
I put the folder away, returned to the boards. Brockton Bay had several more. Money. Planning. Property acquisition priorities. Property sales. A whiteboard with the word ‘door’ written in red, circled and underlined several times, surrounded by question marks.
Who would own the portal?
A single blue-lettered whiteboard with pale blue index cards. At the very top was the title, in bold black letters: Powers: Source.
I looked at the index cards that were fixed onto the board with magnets. There were no real answers there. Only questions and theorizing. It was Tattletale’s stream of consciousness distilled.
the whole? pieces of greater puzzle but don’t know what shape it takes. place person thing or something less concrete? what are powers? Mirror/extrapolation a consideration? is there link between there and here?
why? power distribution aimless simple chaotic. mistake? something go wrong? is this only part of something greater? scheme or something more base?
why trigger events? why go to trouble? Connection to the source? tied to something primal or some scheme? simple or complicated?
what is deviation between cauldron and typical trigger? was there leak to water supply from cauldron? Parasite? look into epidemiology. prob not. get someone’s story about process for getting powers from Cauldron for hints.
Who has answers? if not thinkers then capes with closer connection to passenger? PRT? Cauldron? S9? other gov’ts? what channels can I use to get these answers? theft, coercion money goodwill barter? have to set a value for an answer before raising idea with coil Skitter
/> I frowned and stepped away.
The last board, far right, was backed by black construction paper. At the top, printed on white index cards in bold black letters: ‘End of the World’.
The board was disturbingly empty. Jack’s picture was in the upper left corner with pieces of paper arranged below it, tracking everything that he’d done since he left the city. Each piece of paper had names of known entities he’d interacted with in any direct fashion. Sites the Nine had attacked, a string of small towns as they progressed in a zig-zagging fashion away from Brockton Bay.
Capes recruited to the group, capes slain.
The other three-quarters of that board were almost entirely clear, but for one index card in the upper-right:
limits to Dinah ability: can’t see accurately points of interaction with power immune capes, precogs, situ change Thinkers. Limited sight past points of interaction. these are ‘stoppers’
Hartford: No known stoppers in area.
Enfield: No known stoppers in area.
Chicopee: No known stoppers in area.
Southbridge: No known stoppers in area.
Boston, Charlestown Area: Yes stoppers, no direct interaction b/w any stoppers and Nine. call to dble check with Still. no interaction
Toybox: No known stoppers.
It made a lot of sense. Tracking Jack’s trail of destruction from the point he’d left the city, finding the point where Dinah couldn’t or shouldn’t be able to see, using them to narrow down possibilities.
But the expanse of black on that board was daunting, considering everything that was at stake.
I made my way to the desk, set my backpack down on the ground, and took a seat in Tattletale’s chair. I pressed the power buttons for each of the other monitors, and they flickered on. Checking the drawers, I found a remote, and turned each television on in turn.
Two televisions dedicated to news, one to business, each on mute, with captions spelling out the words as the reporters spoke.
The password I’d entered had apparently logged me into the computers as a guest. I kicked off my shoes and set my feet on the desk, as I’d seen Tattletale do, slipping into her shoes for a moment.