Worm

by John McCrae

  The other guards were alternately herding the civilians out of the area or forming a wall to keep them from watching.

  “Hey!” Clockblocker said. “That’s enough. I got this.”

  The shouting stopped. There was only the noise of the guards on the far ends of the room, giving orders to tourists and staff members, taking charge of the situation and escorting people out.

  I had to twist my head to look up at Clockblocker. For his part, he stared down at me, his expression hidden by the featureless white pane of his mask.

  “This is a trick,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “But not the way you’re thinking.”

  He didn’t respond to that.

  “Do you need me to take a different position?” I asked.

  “Once upon a time, I would have had something clever to say in response to that,” he said, quiet.

  “What?”

  “Nevermind. Kneel, with your arms behind you.”

  I moved slowly, so I wouldn’t provoke any rash actions from the uniforms, climbing to my knees, then extending my arms behind me.

  He reached out and touched the top of my head.

  What felt like an instant later, my arms were weighed down. Clockblocker was behind me, his hand on the heavy metal restraints to keep them from slamming into my tailbone. Everyone else in the lobby had moved. The Wards filled the area, along with the members of the Protectorate, new and old. Flechette was only a short distance away, while Miss Militia stood just beside Clockblocker. Even heroes that had presumably been on patrol were back, along with more PRT members than I’d counted in the building when I’d surrendered.

  Tagg was there too, flanked by two PRT uniforms and one man who was wearing a suit, rather than a uniform. The deputy director?

  I’d lost control of my bugs while I’d been timed out. In many cases, it wasn’t a problem. Still, I’d lost the ability to track most of those who were present, as mosquitoes, flies and ants went about their merry way.

  “Stand,” Miss Militia told me.

  I tried to stand, but found more restraints on my ankles. They were connected to the massive metal handcuffs I wore, which only made an awkward setup worse.

  “Clockblocker,” Miss Militia said. She reached under one of my arms. Clockblocker took her cue and did the same. Together, they hauled me to my feet. They stayed beside me, holding my arms, as they led me past all of the gathered heroes and PRT officers. All people I’d hurt, people I’d humiliated.

  I had no friends here.

  Director Tagg was lighting up a cigarette, despite the prominent ‘no smoking’ signs nearby. As I passed, he gave me a hard stare, heavily lined eyes glaring beneath thick black eyebrows, his face otherwise expressionless. He pointed, and a PRT uniform joined our group.

  Miss Militia handed me off to Triumph, and he helped Clockblocker lead me through the corridor to the PRT elevator. The doors whisked shut, sealing the four of us inside.

  Damn, these handcuffs were uncomfortable. They had to be a design meant for the heavy hitters, for capes who could rend steel with their bare hands. Was it spite that made them use these cuffs?

  They weren’t reading me my rights. Was there a reason? I might have asked, but I didn’t want to show ignorance. Better to be confident, to act as if I knew exactly what was going on.

  Above us, Tagg extinguished his cigarette, barely touched, fished in a nearby trashcan for a soda can, and dropped the butt inside before disposing of it.

  I couldn’t quite make out his words. Not enough bugs in position. “- now. PRT-”

  All of the capes mobilized, joining Tagg and his immediate underlings in entering the stairwell. The PRT moved as well, but in a wholly different direction. They were taking defensive positions, leaders barking out orders.

  I couldn’t be absolutely sure, given how little I knew about guns, but I was pretty sure the PRT was packing more in the way of lethal weapons than they had been on my last visit.

  The elevator stopped, so gently I might have missed it if my bugs didn’t give me perspective on a larger scale. We stepped out into a brightly lit hallway.

  “This is an E-type containment cell. Countermeasures include containment foam and these beauties,” Triumph said.

  Beauties?

  He was pointing up. I followed the direction and looked. Spheres the size of beach balls, chrome, with small windows on the bottom. Familiar.

  “Touch the door, make too much noise or use your power, and the room gets flooded with an electric charge,” Triumph explained. “Calculated so it’s only a little less powerful than it’d need to be to do permanent damage. Push it any further and the room is flooded with containment foam. The same measures are packed into this whole hallway.”

  Ah. They were the same devices that had been loaded into the drones that one of Dragon’s suits had deployed.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t plan on escaping.”

  “What are you planning?” Clockblocker asked.

  “Don’t engage her,” Triumph said. He brought us to a stop by one metal door. There was a letter etched on the surface of the metal, a large ‘E’, and smaller codes in boxes beside it. M-21, CC-2, Bat-4

  He tapped his phone against the wall, and two sets of metal doors slid open. Very similar to the elevator. Same design?

  Thick walls, I noted. The walls that framed the door were a foot and a half deep. It somehow made the small cell a little more claustrophobic. It was daunting as it was, six feet by six feet, with sheet metal laid out over the floor and walls, welded together where they joined, with openings cut in where necessary. There was a vent above me, pumping in a constant flow of fresh air, a little too cold, and another vent beneath the bed, blocked off by a grid of metal bars that extended between the bed and the floor.

  The bed itself featured a mattress no thicker than my hand, covered in plastic and laid out on an arrangement of metal strips that wove into one another. The ‘toilet’ wasn’t a toilet at all, but looked to be a urinal, horizontal and sunken into the ground, a shallow chrome basin with a drain and three thick buttons where it met the wall. On the opposite wall, a television was set into the wall, protected by a clear pane. I didn’t see controls or anything resembling a remote.

  Above me, another one of those beachball-sized orbs was embedded into the ceiling. Ominous.

  Everything was sealed and reinforced twice over. Everything but the vents, but they were too small to crawl through. Was this the kind of cell they put Lung in? With all the metal and the relatively meager amounts of cloth, I didn’t imagine even his pyrokinesis would do much, unless he’d grown considerably.

  I turned around to look at my three escorts, and noted that Clockblocker and Triumph had backed off. It was just the PRT uniform, now.

  I felt a moment’s trepidation. Was this the point where the PRT officer beat me within an inch of my life, while everyone else turned a blind eye?

  “Kit, and one bundle,” the PRT told Clockblocker. I was surprised to note that it was a woman’s voice, behind the featureless helmet. The junior hero hurried off to the end of the hall opposite the elevator. She wrenched me around until my back was to her, then bent down to remove the leg restraints. Triumph stared at me, arms folded, while she did it, the threat implicit. She removed my hand restraints as well, then handed the gear to the hero.

  The officer stepped into the cell with me, and the door shut behind her. “Clothes off.”

  Oh. Worse than a beating, then.

  I tried to tell myself to stay calm, to not be embarrassed. This was a combination of procedure and psychology. They wanted me off guard, feeling vulnerable. In the time Clockblocker had me on pause, Tagg had likely outlined orders to this extent.

  I kicked off my shoes, removed my top and running pants, folded them, and set them aside. There were no shelves, so I left them in one corner of the room.

  The PRT officer undid the neat folding, rifling through pockets for something, anything, then left my
clothes in a heap.

  Once I had my underwear off, she checked it, then gave me my next order. “Glasses.”

  I removed my glasses and handed them over. She turned them over in her hands, twisted and manhandled them until I worried the frames would snap.

  “Shower. Rinse off until I say stop.”

  I gave her a quizzical look, and she pointed.

  I crossed the room to investigate. Above the toilet, there was an opening in the wall, about four feet above the ground.

  “Three buttons,” the uniform said. “Flush, sink and shower. Squat to use the bathroom, get on all fours or squat to shower. If the screen flashes yellow and beeps, that means cameras are going on and someone’s got something to say to you. You’ll have six seconds to finish your business and cover up. Screen flashes red, beeps twice, it means door’s opening. Again, six seconds to cover up.”

  A little inhumane, I thought. Would that be more psychological pressure? Regular visits? Interrupting my sleep? Unreliable privacy?

  “Rinse,” she repeated.

  Maybe Tagg wants me to snap and attack her, I mused.

  But I did as she’d asked. The spray was lukewarm, and the stream was directed into the toilet, using the same drain, which made it awkward to get underneath without actually crouching in the toilet itself. That was only compounded by the fact that the vent was still blasting in cool air, chilling the parts of me that weren’t immediately under the stream.

  I grit my teeth, told myself that Lung had probably dealt with it, wedging his six-foot-plus frame beneath the stream. It would have been worse for him, being larger, blind, missing something between the legs. Except he maybe hadn’t had a guard in the room with him. Too dangerous.

  For an instant, I wished I had enough of a reputation that this woman wouldn’t be there, watching me.

  The door opened partway, while I stood there dripping. She was kind enough to block the opening with her body, so I didn’t flash the two young heroes.

  She threw a bundle onto the bed. A towel? Clothes?

  I started to move towards it and she barked out, “Stop.”

  Apparently I wasn’t allowed to dress. She had more things in her hands. A tool kit. She fished out a set of sterile gloves. “Allergies?”

  “I’m allergic to bee stings,” I said, trying to inject some levity into the proceedings. I couldn’t see her expression.

  Damn it. I was wet, beaded with moisture, my hair clinging to my scalp, and doing my best not to shiver as I cursed the cold air that flooded the room. I used my fingers and fingernails to comb my hair back away from my face.

  “Latex allergy?”

  “No,” I said, “And I was joking about the bee stings.”

  Not even a recognition of the joke. “Are you on any medications?”

  “No.”

  “Birth control?”

  “No.” Condoms, I thought.

  “Two ways we can do this. You cooperate, takes five to ten minutes to do a full search. You fail to cooperate, if you fight me, bite or struggle, I step outside and we turn on the countermeasure, and then do a search while you’re incapacitated.”

  Her head lifted fractionally, as if she was glancing up at the electricity-dispensing orb above.

  “I’ll cooperate,” I said.

  Oh, how glad I was, that I could focus my power elsewhere, distract myself.

  Tagg had arranged everyone in a conference room upstairs. The heroes, suits and uniforms I presumed were key members of the PRT, and one or two more, who sat a distance away from the Director and his people.

  “Plans,” Tagg said, “Go.”

  “We bring Defiant and Dragon in,” Miss Militia said. “They ship her to another PRT office where we can hold her until a trial.”

  “Sensible,” Tagg said, “Except we expose ourselves to attack while …ing her.”

  “We’re vulnerable to attack here,” Miss Militia said.

  “We can’t act until we know what she’s doing,” another cape said. A woman with a high collar. Dovetail. “What’s her plan?”

  There was a silence.

  “Thoughts, Miss Militia?” Tagg asked.

  “She’s… intelligent. In every case we’ve crossed paths with her, she’s proved resourceful. She was confident and self-assured when she turned herself in. Whatever this maneuver is, it was calculated.”

  “Mrs. Yamada?” Tagg asked one of the people in suits at the far end of the table.

  “I’ve read up on her, studied the records you have of her, talked to the students that knew her best, for better or worse. Greg Veder, Emma Barnes, Sophia Hess, Madison Clements… her teachers, her father… I’m not so convinced.”

  “You disagree with Miss Militia?”

  “I can’t say for sure without talking to the girl, but actual surrender isn’t impossible, given my understanding of her.”

  “I’m not saying she’s not surrendering,” Miss Militia said. “I’m saying she’s plotting something. The two things aren’t mutually exclusive.”

  “She could be attempting to bring down the PRT,” Assault said. “Do it from within. With the charges we have lined up against her, she can request a jury trial. She uses that as a platform to dish out dirty secrets. Confidential data on Armsmaster, details from records they stole from the database, the Echidna event and the fallout therein…”

  “Given how that’s gone,” Dovetail said, “She’d be digging her own grave. We all thought the details would leak, but Cauldron’s cleanup is efficient. Anyone who tries to leak details gets… censored.”

  “Killed,” Adamant clarified. “Or disappeared.”

  “It would be unfortunate if she were killed in our custody,” Tagg said. “She’d be safer in the Birdcage.”

  “With the public support she has within the city?” Miss Militia asked. “Good luck getting her there without a fair trial. There’s going to be a lot of eyes on this.”

  “So she’s forcing our hand,” Tagg said. “The question is why.”

  “To oust you,” Miss Militia said.

  “Revenge?” Tagg asked.

  “I don’t know, but I had a conversation with her a few days ago, and she said she had something in mind that she could use against you. I didn’t know what it was before now.”

  “I see,” Tagg said, rubbing his chin.

  Back in the cell, I sighed. I could see the uniform flinch in reaction. She had her fingers in my mouth, feeling beneath my tongue and around the base of my gums. When I didn’t bite like she’d feared, she finished and removed her fingers from my mouth. She removed the gloves, where they joined the first pair she’d donned.

  Miss Militia had told Tagg. I wasn’t surprised; she gave me the impression of someone who followed the letter of the law. As willing as she’d been to open negotiations, she would still do what it took to keep her job and maintain the peace.

  I was maybe a little disappointed. I hadn’t demanded she keep it a secret, and it wasn’t liable to change anything, but it made for a small breach of faith.

  The PRT officer finished off the search by combing my hair with a metal comb that I suspected was sharpened at the points to double as a wood saw. It felt like it, at least. The combing wasn’t done to look tidy, but to search my hair for any foreign matter or tools. I was just glad they hadn’t decided to shave it all off. I wouldn’t have put it past them.

  “Towel is in the bag,” the PRT officer said. She shook a plastic bag to open it, then began putting my clothes inside, leaving me only the underwear.

  I opened the drawstring bag, which was missing a drawstring, then sorted out the contents. A thin towel, a single sheet so thin it was translucent, a pillow and pillowcase that looked to be the same fabric as the mattress, folded double, half the size of a normal pillow. There were prison sweats, black, with the word ‘Villain’ printed across the shoulders and down the right leg in white, with a white t-shirt with the same word in black. There was a small kit with a rubbery, flexible thimble-toothbrush
that fit over one finger and a small tube of toothpaste, three tampons with soap, three cardboard applicators, and three pads.

  Not that it mattered. I’d been under enough stress the past few months that I’d missed my periods entirely. I might have panicked, if the timing of it had been different. I was safe. Ninety-nine point nine percent sure I was safe.

  She waited until I had quickly toweled dry, put the underwear and prison sweats on, then handed me my glasses and opened the door. I caught a glimpse of Triumph and Clockblocker before she blocked my line of sight.

  “Sit tight, princess,” she said.

  The door whisked shut, leaving me confined in a space so narrow that I could lay down and touch two opposing walls with toe and outstretched hand. Only the ceiling was out of reach.

  I adjusted the sweats, leaving the front open, headed to the bed, laid down the pillow and stretched out.

  “…Alcott girl,” Tagg was saying. “Is she here?”

  “On her way,” the deputy director answered.

  “Then I think it’s time to settle on a game plan,” the Director said. “I’m Skitter’s target, or one of them. …ssination?”

  “Coercion,” Miss Militia said.

  “I see. Her power extends to the remainder of this building, even now, am I right?”

  “Arthropodokinesis, arthropodovoyance,” the Deputy Director said. “She’s on record as a master eight, thinker one. The thinker classification is key here: ex-Director Piggot noted Skitter can see through her bugs’ eyes.”

  “Can she lipread?” Tagg asked.

  “No idea,” the Deputy Director replied.

  “I said it before,” Miss Militia said. Her voice was a fraction quieter than before, but I couldn’t read her tone with the bugs’ hearing. “She’s resourceful. I’d assume she took the time to learn, if it would expand her capabilities.”

  Director Tagg nodded slowly, then rubbed his chin again. The movement of his wrist against his armrest nearly killed the bug I had in between his dress shirt and jacket. “Agreed. I already informed each of my officers to treat her as though she had a two point classification in every category, or two points higher in cases where she’s already received scores. Brute two, mover two… all the way down the list. It won’t do to underestimate her. Let’s anticipate that she’s put herself in this position to have full access to the building by way of her power. Until further notice, staff aren’t to access any confidential files, we don’t speak on any private matters while within her reach, capes are to remain masked at all times while on the premises, and we’ll devote all remaining resources to preparing for any conflict.”