Worm

by John McCrae

  None of the heroes replied. I couldn’t bring myself to speak, couldn’t think of a single thing to say that would be remotely diplomatic, in the midst of this.

  “We do need all the help we can get,” Exalt said, not taking his eyes off the group. ”You want to make amends?”

  The English-speaking one translated for the others. I fidgeted nervously. How many minutes, now? Why hadn’t I asked for more time?

  “Shì de!” one cried out.

  “Shì de!” the group called out in unison.

  “That’s a yes,” Exalt said. He was already turning, taking flight.

  Twenty Yàngbǎn members. Exalt. A dazed Revel. Dispatch. The Chicago Wards. The Undersiders. Citrine. Me.

  The sum total of our defensive line.

  And Behemoth was getting too close. A hundred and fifty feet? A hundred and twenty? He was swiftly approaching the hundred-foot mark we’d been warned about, where he could close the distance with a single leap.

  There were so few heroes capable of holding him back. He was covering ground at twice or thrice the speed he had been earlier, and the Undersiders didn’t have the means to know. They were on the ground, blinded by the ambient smoke and the dust of the hundreds of buildings that had fallen across the city.

  “Run,” my bugs communicated. But nobody responded, nobody reacted. Too much ambient noise.

  Run, they spelled out words, shaping letters with their bodies. Too much smoke.

  I bit them, stung them, and that spurred them into motion. Maybe too late.

  He wasn’t even a full city block away from them. Only a few half-destroyed buildings stood between him and the Undersiders. They were still sorting themselves out, getting mounted on the dogs for a retreat, but it was too little.

  Behemoth leaped. Not the monumental leap he’d used early in the fight, but a leap nonetheless. He landed in the midst of a building, knocking much of it over, and the impact was enough to bounce Citrine off one dog, to knock Tecton over.

  The Endbringer had closed half the distance. A mere twenty feet separated them from his kill aura, if that.

  I landed beside Citrine, helping her up, using my legs and the antigrav to try and help her onto the dog’s back. She kicked her heels the second she was seated, shouted an order I couldn’t make out.

  The dog, scared, growled and held its ground against Behemoth.

  “Rachel!” I screamed the word. ”Call him!”

  She whistled, sharp, and it seemed to break the spell. The dog lurched around and ran, nearly knocking me to the ground.

  The Yàngbǎn were landing in the Undersiders’ midst, joining the fray. I could feel my power swell, my range increasing by one block, two…

  I could sense the underground complex, where Phir Sē was. He swatted absently at the bugs that had been left behind, uncontrolled in my absence.

  “Wait,” I communicated to him. ”Almost.”

  Either we’d manage this in the next few minutes, or we’d be dead and it wouldn’t matter.

  I called the bugs, leaving only enough to speak to Phir Sē.

  The Yàngbǎn opened fire with lasers, and erected forcefields to ward against the lightning bolts. Golem’s hands rose, faster with the Yàngbǎn’s help, but too slow to make a substantial difference. Tecton’s walls, similarly, couldn’t rise high enough to block Behemoth’s line of sight. The power boost would increase his tinker abilities, but it wouldn’t empower the results of his technology.

  Citrine’s power intensified in the depth of the yellow-gold light, in size. Grace shimmered, Cuff was better armored, Annex covering more ground.

  Why couldn’t the Yàngbǎn have helped like this sooner? From the very start of the fight? Damn people. Damn them all, for their idiocy and selfishness and their small-mindedness.

  This wasn’t enough.

  Behemoth reached out, and lightning plowed through our ranks, left to right. The Yàngbǎn forcefields fell in the lightning’s wake, and Tecton was struck from his bike. Cuff was too far back, unprotected, dropped in an instant. I ducked low, covering my head, as it crashed against a quadruple-layer of forcefields the Yàngbǎn had provided. One of them was knocked prone as the last forcefield shattered.

  A stray Yàngbǎn member, too far to the right, was knocked to the ground. She started to struggle to her feet, then collapsed a second later.

  Revel flew to the injured Wards, but didn’t have the strength to stand. Instead, she raised her lantern, ready for the next strike.

  The Yàngbǎn hadn’t even raised their forcefields again when he hit us with lightning once more.

  Revel absorbed the initial impact, sucking it into her lantern.

  I wasn’t close enough to benefit. I saw the lightning twist in the air as Behemoth swept his hand out to one side, striking another two Yàngbǎn members, just out of the lantern’s reach.

  Dispatch appeared next to me and other Yàngbǎn members, and in an instant, everything went still, quiet. My ears roared with a high pitched whine. My breath sounded too noisy, my heart beat so fast I couldn’t even see straight.

  Like Clockblocker’s power extended a temporal protection, almost impossible to break, Dispatch’s power seemed to do the same, even if he was effectively achieving the opposite, accelerating us with the outside world moving at a snail’s pace.

  The effect ended just as Behemoth moved on to other targets. Another Yàngbǎn member was struck down.

  And, inexplicably, he continued his lightning strike, carrying over to the far end of the street.

  There was a yelp, and I could see Imp, all at once, sheltered by a wall that was shrinking in size with every second the blast continued. She held the Yàngbǎn member who’d strayed too far away from our main group in her arms.

  He’d seen her. Sensed her. And now, behind a wall no more than three feet high, she had nowhere to run.

  I pushed past Yàngbǎn members, unstrapping my flight pack, tearing at the parts that fed down to my gloves, to get it off. If I could get it to her…

  I couldn’t. I stopped, the pack in my hands. The lightning would break the thing before it could carry her away.

  If Grue’s alive, he won’t be able to forgive us for letting her die.

  Citrine drew a yellow glow around Imp, and the lightning fizzled as it passed the perimeter.

  The Endbringer switched to fire, and it passed through. It seemed to halve in intensity, but that was enough. I could hear Imp scream in alarm and fear.

  He advanced a step, and the fresh angle afforded her even less cover. His kill aura… if he simply ran forward a few steps, he’d murder us all in seconds.

  But Golem’s hands held his legs. One had sunk deep into a pit, hands of pavement gripping the knee, melting at the close contact, even as others rose to reinforce. The other leg was raised, but held in much the same fashion.

  Imp screamed again as he directed another wave of flame her way. It was a scream of pain this time.

  Foil shot him, but he didn’t turn away from Imp and the Yàngbǎn member. Instead, one hand stretched out, casting flame towards her. The cloth goats blocked it, and were promptly set aflame. He maintained two columns of flame from his hands, one directed at Imp, one at Foil and Parian.

  Revel launched a mess of spheres at his chest, and the surviving Yàngbǎn followed up with lasers. Behemoth simply maintained the assault, almost uncaring as the lasers and disintegration spheres ate into his torso. Negligible damage, in the grand scheme of things.

  “Fuck it,” Regent said, his voice almost inaudible. He was looking at Imp.

  “Regent,” I said. When he rose to his feet, I raised my voice, “Regent!”

  “Hey Shitcrumb!” Regent hollered, backing away from cover. ”Easy-”

  Behemoth dropped the flame attack. I could see Yàngbǎn members raising forcefields as he reached out, casting a bolt of lightning in Regent’s direction. The forcefields did nothing, not even softening the blow in any measurable way.

  Regent was snuffed
out, dead.

  A small sound escaped my mouth.

  But there was no time to react. Reeling, grieving, it would cost us. He’d done what he did for a reason. The antigrav on the flight pack kicked in, I waited until it started to drag me, then let it go. It skidded across the gap, across the road, to Imp. She caught it, and I controlled the motion of it to drag her away.

  “Retreat!” I called out, and my voice was strangely ragged. ”Citrine, cover! We need forcefields too!”

  And Exalt. We needed whatever power he could bring to the fore.

  Eidolon landed between us and Behemoth.

  He said something I couldn’t make out, then raised his hands.

  A forcefield, taller than Behemoth, separated us. For seconds, Behemoth was muted. He swiped his claws at the forcefield, fell short. He couldn’t advance, with the way Tecton and Golem had him held with one leg buried up to the knee, couldn’t reach far enough to touch the forcefield.

  One claw dashed a hand of asphalt to pieces. Golem started to raise another to replace it, but Behemoth torched it, turning it to a liquid or a glass. Something flat, shiny.

  We pulled ourselves together. I changed Imp’s direction, brought her to us. She let go, and the thing careened dangerously, striking the ground a little too hard.

  She crouched by Regent, touched his throat.

  She shouted something. A string of swear words, insults aimed at Regent.

  “Come on!” I screamed the words at her. It took me a second to get the flight pack going again. I steered it, like a fish on dry land, towards her, as Rachel hauled me up onto a dog’s back.

  “Weaver,” Phir Sē said, almost half a mile away, still in the room with the monitors, “If he advances any closer to me, I won’t have any option but to strike.

  “Wait,” my bugs communicated.

  Reluctantly, Imp reached for the flight pack, hugged it to her chest. Not the best option, given the options I had for controlling it. Still, it was a way to get her moving towards us.

  Some heroes were pelting Behemoth from another direction. So little, in terms of effect, but it was a distraction.

  We needed to regroup. Needed to form some kind of plan, however haphazard.

  Fuck it. Foil had the facemask… who else? Citrine and Foil… the back of the head of the dog they rode. Dispatch wore a helmet… but I could use bugs to draw an arrow on the ground. That left Annex, where the hell was he? My bugs couldn’t sense him.

  My eyes could. In the midst of the smoke, I saw the bike Tecton rode was lighter than the rest. Annex was inside it.

  I pointed them in the same direction I’d sent the others.

  We converged on the same point.

  “Dispatch!” I called out. ”Huddle!”

  He reached the midst of our group, and his power surrounded us.

  Silence, stillness. The buzz of my power at the periphery of my consciousness was a fraction of what it might otherwise be, limited to the bugs that crawled in the recesses of my costume. There was only the press of bodies, two dogs and all of the rest of us in an area smaller than my jail cell.

  I tried to speak, and emotion caught my voice. It threw me, as if it didn’t match how I felt, didn’t match the composure I felt like I had.

  Nobody cut in, nobody used the silence to venture an opinion.

  When I did speak, I did it with care, shaping each word, speaking slowly, so I wouldn’t embarrass myself again. ”How long?”

  “This?” Dispatch asked. His voice was low, grim. ”This many people? Those dogs? Four minutes. Maybe two, if we’re all breathing this hard. Once we run out of air, I gotta cut it out.”

  I nodded.

  Think, think.

  “Sorry about your pal,” Tecton said.

  I shook my head. A denial? He was important to me, but… what, then? Was I wanting to focus on the situation?

  “Not now,” I said, sounding angrier than I meant to. ”Need a plan.”

  “A plan?” Dispatch asked. ”We run. We pray.”

  “Last I heard, Scion was nowhere near,” Foil said. ”Nobody to pray to.”

  “Not funny,” Dispatch said. ”This isn’t the time to fuck around on the subject of God.”

  I shook my head again. Plans. Options. I had an idea, half-formed in my head, and I couldn’t bring it to the fore. Some missing element.

  “Rachel. You wanted revenge on that motherfucker?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “Leviathan killed my dogs.”

  “Behemoth killed your friend,” Tecton added.

  “And Leviathan killed my dogs,” Rachel said. ”They both pay.”

  “They both pay,” I agreed. ”What the hell’s Exalt’s power?”

  “Aerokinesis and telekinesis,” Dispatch answered me. ”But he spends a charge, takes a day or days to build it up again.”

  Which explained why he hadn’t helped. Fuck.

  “Eidolon’s power… he chooses what powers he gets?”

  “He gets the powers he needs,” Dispatch said. ”He can be receptive to new ones, hold tighter to ones he wants to keep, but that’s it.”

  I nodded. He was at the mercy of his passenger, it seemed.

  I glanced to my right. ”Foil. Can you use your power on just the tip of an arrow?”

  “Yeah. But why would you want me to? Fucks up the trajectory.”

  “Just thinking,” I said.

  “You have a plan,” Rachel said. There was a measure of smugness in her voice. No, I was reading her wrong. Satisfaction?

  “Maybe, yeah,” I said. I glanced at the space outside the bubble. The people were moving at a glacial pace, heads turned our way. Eidolon flew in the sky above. ”We need to hurt Behemoth, and hurt him badly enough that he gets distracted. Then I signal Phir Sē, and hopefully we aren’t vaporized in the wake of all that.”

  “Explain,” Dispatch said.

  “Each of us has a role to play,” I said. ”Timing’s essential. So’s luck…”

  ■

  The bubble burst, and we moved into action. Behemoth had barely advanced from his position. The others were still running. We’d earned ourselves two minutes to think, to plan and discuss.

  I’d gathered countless bugs through my journey across the city. I’d briefly lost track of them when I was teleported away from Phir Sē, but they were still there. Relatively few had died, even from the start, their lives thrown away to test the boundaries of fires or gushing water, or shielding people from the roar.

  A lot of bugs, held in reserve.

  “Golem!” I called out. ”Metal hands. Doesn’t matter how big. Find a way.”

  He glanced at me, still jogging away from the Endbringer. Still, he managed to find a shop with a metal shutter at the doorway. He plunged his hand inside it, and hands appeared in various places across the street. A large one from a rickshaw, another from a car’s engine block, small ones from the metal grilles covering windows.

  Half of my bugs gathered. Another half began chewing through power lines. The transformers here were nightmares, tangled messes, and had an abundance of wires.

  Each of the others was carrying out their tasks, their roles. Rachel had a chain stretched between two dogs, and was attaching the chain from one dog’s harness to it to extend the thing further. Annex stretched it further, extending it so each link was nearly two feet long, thin. Citrine was tinting the area between us and Behemoth.

  Dispatch called to Eidolon, and the ex-Triumvirate member descended. Dispatch contained them.

  Eidolon needed time, and he needed to hear the details of our plan. Dispatch would give him both.

  In the distance, Behemoth pushed his way through the forcefield, shattering it. We had a minute, if that.

  I waited impatiently as the others tended to the chain.

  Dispatch’s effect ended. He and Eidolon relocated to the other end of the street, Dispatch took a second to catch his breath, and then he used his power on Eidolon again.

  Come on, come on, I thought. This c
ould go awry with one lucky shot from Behemoth.

  “Yangban!” I shouted, no doubt mispronouncing the title. ”Forcefields! Protect the teams!”

  Lightning crashed against the forcefields only moments after they went up. Some diverted to the metal hands.

  And my swarm started to arrive. Millions of insects, bearing power lines that they were still stripping of insulation, hauling the wire itself, bearing the ones who bore the wire in turn, or hauling on silk that was attached to the wire.

  I’d hoped to drape it over the hands, to wrap it around. I was forced to attach it to the base of the hands instead. Too heavy to move otherwise. Conductive hands, conductive wire.

  “Go!” Foil shouted.

  The dogs moved. Bitch rode one, hollered commands to get them to stay apart. The chain stretched taut between them, long, thin.

  I saw Dispatch’s effect end. Eidolon took flight, following.

  “This’ll work?” Imp asked. Her voice sounded more hollow than Grue’s did when he used his power. I jumped a little to hear her suddenly speaking beside me.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Because if this is revenge for Regent, it has to work.”

  “It’s for him if it works,” I said.

  “Mm,” Imp said. ”I’ll kill you if it doesn’t, then.”

  “We’re all screwed if it doesn’t,” I said.

  “Mm,” she said, and she didn’t say anything else.

  The Endbringer lashed out with a mess of lightning. It caught one dog before it disappeared behind cover. The dog slowed, but it recovered and found its pace, redoubled its efforts to catch up, as Rachel continued to shout commands to keep the chain taut.

  Behemoth used fire, instead, targeting Rachel, and Citrine’s power dampened the effects. That was her role in this.

  It was just a question of whether it would run out prematurely, if the dogs would get far enough.

  He clapped, and a shockwave tore through the area. Rachel was already directing the dogs; they moved so there was cover, buildings between them and Behemoth. The chain, imbued by Foil’s ability to shear through anything, cut through the buildings as though there was nothing there.