by John McCrae
“I see,” I said.
She shifted her weight. She had a different presence, now. Something she’d no doubt picked up in prison. Not posturing. Simply more comfortable in her shoes. She asked, “Did you need something? There’s a reason you came.”
“I was going to say we’re mobilizing. Dealing with some threats. Trying to get as many big guns on board as we can, starting with the ones who weren’t on the platform. I was thinking we could use you.”
“I see,” she said. “I’m not particularly interested in being used.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know, but it’s still meaningful that the word came up, isn’t it?”
“No,” I said. “No it isn’t.”
She glanced back towards her dad. Two more people who might have been capes had approached him, while he sat next to the man he was healing.
“I can’t stop Scion,” Panacea said. “I probably couldn’t even touch him, if I wanted to get that close, and if I did, I don’t think I’d accomplish a thing.”
“Maybe not,” I said.
“Do you think you’re going to stop him with giant dogs? With bugs? People tried and they failed. This is what’s left. Finding places where humans used to live and moving in, if we’re lucky. Starting over from scratch if we aren’t. Ensuring that the population is spread out enough, but not so spread out they won’t be able to repopulate. Dividing all of humanity into groups of six hundred to a thousand people, dropping them off in the middle of nowhere.”
“It won’t work,” Tattletale said. “Scion moves too fast, and there’s not that many places to hide, in the grand scheme of things.”
“Every time you open your mouth,” Panacea said. She sounded as if she was going to say something else, but she didn’t.
“You’re one of the strongest capes out there,” I said. “We need you on our side.”
“You’ll have me,” Panacea said. “But not on the front lines.”
I sighed.
A deep rumble sounded. An animal noise, almost.
I turned to look, and I saw Spruce, the tidy man, standing beside Lung and Bonesaw. The noise had been Lung, an odd sound to come from him when he was still, to all appearances, in his human state. A tall Asian man, muscular, riddled with tattoos. New ones had been added since the first day I’d seen him. More eastern-style dragons. His hair was longer, and there was scruff on his cheeks and chin.
Bonesaw wasn’t dressed up like a little girl. Her hair wasn’t in ringlets. She wore gray sweats.
Rachel growled a little, under her breath, an eerie parallel to Lung.
Lung stepped forward, and he pushed Bonesaw, who stumbled a little.
“It’s not nice to push,” she said.
“Don’t be cutesy,” he growled. “We’ve warned you before.”
“Okay, fine then. Stop fucking pushing me. Tell me where you want me, and I’ll walk there.”
He pointed towards us.
They closed the distance until Bonesaw was next to Panacea. Lung placed a hand on top of her head and gripped her, arresting her forward momentum.
She lashed out, twisting around and slapping at his wrist with one hand.
“Don’t do that,” she said.
“Someone’s short-tempered,” Imp observed. She hadn’t yet donned her mask, though she had it with her. Her eyes were narrowed.
“I’ve had no sleep,” Bonesaw said. “Big sis here took out all the good bits I’d stored inside myself, and she didn’t turn off the pain. I feel too light. I feel weird. Can’t sit still, not that they ever let me.”
“First tier parahuman problems,” Imp said. Her tone wasn’t as humorous in nature as the words.
“And they keep getting on my case,” Bonesaw said, apparently oblivious. She directed her attention to Panacea and Lung. “Trust me, I haven’t butchered you all yet, I’m not going to in the future. You can stop testing me.”
“I remember when you were cuddly,” Tattletale said. “You were so happy and fluffy and you had a good attitude. You were a complete and total monster, and nobody in their right mind would cuddle you, but you were adorable. Now look at you.”
Bonesaw scowled, but I wasn’t paying attention to that. Tattletale had used the past tense. You were a complete monster. Referring to the past, or an observation on a deeper level?
“She is why I can’t leave,” Panacea said. “I’m the only one that can double-check her work. If we’re both here, you’ve got two stellar healers on the back lines. If I leave, you’ve got a healer with minimal combat experience on the front line and a defused bomb with nobody that’s capable of knowing if it’s reactivated.”
I couldn’t really argue that.
Well, I could, but not very well.
“There’s another way to deal with that sort of situation,” Imp said. “Get rid of the fucking bomb.”
“We will,” Panacea said. “If she gives us an excuse. Any excuse at all. But she gets one chance.”
“When you’re talking about a bomb, that’s all it needs,” Imp said. “Then you wind up carved up, your insides decorating the walls of a room.”
“Your metaphors…” Tattletale mumbled. “Well, that almost worked.”
Bonesaw raised an eyebrow. “You sound upset, but I don’t remember doing that to you.”
“My brother,” Imp growled the word.
“Oh,” Bonesaw said. She glanced to her left, then down to the floor, a frown crossing her face. “Right. I’m remembering now. Shit. That was one of the bad ones. Not one of the bad bad ones, but bad.”
“Kind of, yeah,” Imp said, not easing up in the slightest.
“I’m sorry,” Bonesaw said, still looking at the floor. “I won’t say I’ll make amends, because there’s no way I can even come close. I don’t know what to say, except that I’m sorry. No excuses. But I’m going to do what I can to make things better, and maybe I get a hundredth of the way, in the end.”
“He had a second trigger event,” Tattletale said. “And killed Burnscar. In case that helps you place him.”
“I said I remember,” Bonesaw said, sounding irritated. She glared at Tattletale.
“Sure,” Tattletale replied, quiet enough she could barely be heard.
I stared at Bonesaw, watching her expression shift in fractions. Her eyes moved, as if she were watching a scene, or recalling a memory in great detail.
“You’re fighting?” Lung asked, interrupting my thoughts.
“We’re fighting,” I said, shifting my attention to him.
“Who?”
“Everyone who gets in our way,” Rachel interjected.
“What she said,” I added.
Lung stared at me, and I held his gaze. For someone as brutal and vicious as he was in the heat of battle, Lung had cold eyes.
He’d be thinking about his losses to me. I’d used venomous bugs to rot away his junkular area, and I’d dosed him with hallucinogenic blood before gouging out his eyes.
It was odd, but those slights probably mattered less than the real offense I’d dealt him.
I’d taken over the city. He’d tried and failed, I’d succeeded.
Given my understanding of Lung, I suspected that was something far more unforgivable.
“Fighting Scion, Endbringers, the Yàngbǎn…” Tattletale said. She placed an emphasis on the last.
Odd. I would have reversed it. Emphasized the biggest threats.
“Yes,” Lung said. “No need to manipulate me, Tattletale. If you want me to join the fight, you only have to ask.”
Tattletale had a funny look on her face, fleeting. She turned my way, one eyebrow raised, questioning.
I nodded.
“Good,” Lung said. “Let me collect my mask. I will be back.”
He left.
“Doorway,” Tattletale said. “Um…?”
“To Shadow Stalker,” I said.
The portal began to open. It was nighttime on the other side.
Tattleta
le gave me a funny look.
“What?”
“I brought up the Yàngbǎn because I figured he’d be ticked they attacked this spot. I’m getting credit for brilliant insights I didn’t have. Not even in a fun way. That’s going to bug me.”
I shrugged. “Take what we can get?”
She nodded.
While we’d exchanged words, Panacea had sent Bonesaw off with Spruce.
“Thank you again, Panacea,” I said. “For putting me back together.”
She opened her mouth to speak, then seemed to reconsider. She pointed at the portal. I nodded, and followed her as we strode through. Tattletale and Imp remained in the hospital lobby, and the portal remained open. Rachel followed us through, but seemed to sense that we wanted a private discussion and wandered off a short distance.
Panacea and I walked out onto a shelf of rubble that had once been the midpoint of a bridge.
“I’m not a fighter,” she said. “I hope you understand.”
“I do,” I said. “But I’m kind of hoping that, in the end, we aren’t left with only the people who ‘aren’t fighters’ on the battlefield, who’ve realized they have no choice but to change their minds. It’d be pretty tragic if we got that far and someone like you clued into the fact that you could have helped. It would be somehow fitting, too, if that’s how humanity went extinct.”
“It would be just as tragic if we rushed headlong into a fight, and threw away a life in the process, only to realize in retrospect it was someone vital,” she said.
I nodded.
“Good luck. Don’t turn your back on Lung.”
“I won’t. I’m pretty good when it comes to keeping an eye on people,” I said. I called bugs to my hand, as if to illustrate.
“Then I really hope you succeed in the fights that come. We’re kind of counting on you.”
“Likewise,” I said. “I mean, I hope you achieve whatever you’re striving to do here.”
She glanced back towards the portal, which glowed from the ambient light of the room on the other side. “Second chances.”
“Hm?”
“Together, we’re giving second chances to monsters who don’t deserve them.”
“Yourself included?” I asked.
She nodded.
“I’m not sure I get it,” I told her. I could see Shadow Stalker land to perch on an outcropping of steel reinforcement, a distance away, watching us. “I mean, I do get the second chances thing, not deserving it. But…”
I trailed off. I couldn’t articulate it well enough.
“When you’re in that position, sometimes the only people willing to extend those second chances to you are the people who need them.”
“I understand,” I said. “You know, if you’d joined the Undersiders back then, we could have given you that.”
“You could have. I’m not sure I could have taken it.”
“Right,” I answered. “Yeah.”
“Not all of us are like that, though,” she said. “Lung isn’t, as far as I can tell, but maybe you’ll see it if you look for it. Or maybe you’ll get burned to a crisp by Lung the second an enemy distracts you and you forget to watch him.”
I nodded.
“He’s not someone who builds or rebuilds. He’s someone who destroys.”
Something in that phrase struck a chord in me. I knew the right answer, right away.
“We just need to point him in the right direction, then,” I said.
“Best of luck with that,” Panacea said.
She’d had her hands clasped, and as she extended a hand to shake, I could feel the bugs come to life, fluttering free of the space between her palms.
Relay bugs. Twenty.
I checked, investigating their internal makeup. They could breed.
Even with that gift, even with the fact that she’d never done anything to me, I couldn’t help but think of the incoherent mess of details I’d seen in the records. The pictures that catalogued the event that had preceded her voluntary admission to the Birdcage. I saw her outstretched hand and hesitated for a fraction of a second. From the expression on her face, I knew she had noticed.
Second chances.
I shook her hand, drawing the relay bugs to me and stashing them in my belt. “Thank you.”
She nodded, then exited the portal as the others made their way through to my side. Lung and the Undersiders. I had my back turned to them as I looked at Shadow Stalker. She remained perched on that twist of bent girders and bars from the collapsed bridge, her cloak flapping around her.
“I remember this one,” Lung rumbled. “She shot me with arrows. It did not hurt that much. She is a weakling. Why are we wasting our time with her?”
And so the struggles for dominance in the group begin.
“I’ll take weak,” I said. “I’m just… working with known quantities.”
The flapping of the cloak quieted as she shifted into a shadow state. The wind was passing through it, instead of pushing against it.
Shadow Stalker leaped down, floated.
Soundlessly, she landed right in front of me, remaining in the shadow state.
“Hoping you’ve changed your mind,” I said. Hoping you’ve seen the devastation, and that it’s reached some human part of you that cares. “That you’re interested in fighting.”
She didn’t budge, didn’t respond.
“It also means bashing some skulls,” I said. “She been behaving, Tattletale?”
“Mostly.”
“Then she’s probably itching for a good fight,” I said, not breaking eye contact with Shadow Stalker. “What do you say? You want to knock a few heads? Break some jaws?”
She shifted to her physical state. “I’m not that easy to bait.”
I shrugged, waiting.
“Search and rescue is garbage,” she said, sounding annoyed. “Nobody left, but there’s no place to go if I don’t want to do it, either.”
“You could go home,” I said. “Find your family, settle down, put the crossbow away for good.”
“Capes don’t retire,” Shadow Stalker said. “Doesn’t work. We die in battle or we lose our minds, one or the other.”
I thought of my passenger, how it had reflexively sought out violence in the past. How others had done the same. Die in battle.
Then I thought of Grue. Was Shadow Stalker right? Would the retirement just fail to take?
I sighed. “So? What’s your call?”
“I’ll come. Sure. I kind of want to see what you’ve made of yourself.”
She had wanted to claim the credit for my becoming what I’d become. It grated, because it wasn’t entirely wrong. It wasn’t true in the sense she believed it was true, but she had given me my powers.
“Fine,” I said.
She cracked her knuckles. “So, who’s first?”
“Need to talk that over with Defiant,” I said. “We can do it over the comms, for the sake of expediency.”
“Okay,” she said. She sounded a little pleased with herself. “Whatever. I’m game.”
“Doorway, please,” I said, to nobody in particular. “Dragonfly interior.”
The portal opened.
I extended a hand, inviting the group to enter.
Lung shouldered his way past Rachel to be the first one inside. Bastard huffed out a half-bark, then growled.
Much like Panacea had said about Bonesaw, it wasn’t about having them as allies. Having them be part of the group, it meant they weren’t on the opposing side. They weren’t wreaking havoc as neutral parties.
That alone was good.
But if they turned out to be destructive forces we could control…
The half-thought I’d had during my goodbye to Panacea fell into place.
A plan.
I stepped through the portal to board the Dragonfly.
■
“You lunatic!” Shadow growled the word.
I was silent. The clouds above and landscape below were a blur, the indi
vidual details impossible to make out with our speed.
“Doing this with me? With Lung? I could almost understand that,” Shadow Stalker growled. “But your friends?”
“Don’t care,” Tattletale said. “We’ve always been the sort to go for the long odds. You have to do what your enemy won’t predict.”
“Damn straight,” Imp said. “Credo I live by.”
“Mount Olympus, now credo?” Tattletale asked. “It’s the Heartbroken, isn’t it? They’re warping you into… this.”
“Leave me alone, seriously.”
“What you’re saying doesn’t make sense!” Shadow Stalker snarled. “Not here, not like this!“
“It actually makes the most sense,” Tattletale said. “But that’s a different story altogether. One that needs some explanation.”
“Ten minutes before we hit our target,” I said. We’d taken the path through the Brockton Bay portal. Cauldron’s doorways weren’t big enough for a vehicle like this.
“Ten minutes should be enough,” Tattletale said. “Let me get this loaded on the laptop. Easier to show than tell.”
“Right,” I said. My eyes didn’t leave the navigation screens.
“I’ll kill you,” Shadow Stalker threatened. “Turn this fucking ship around.”
She moved, reaching for a crossbow bolt. I reacted, half-rising from my seat, drawing my swarm out-
But Lung moved faster, shoving Shadow Stalker against the side of the ship.
Shadow Stalker went ghostly, brandishing the bolt like a dagger as she passed through Lung.
Rachel gripped a length of wire that extended from the laptop, holding it out like a garrotte. As Lung had done, she moved to pin Shadow Stalker against the wall of the Dragonfly. Shadow Stalker returned to a normal state just in time to avoid being electrocuted.
Bastard growled, snapping at her hand, and the bolt clattered to the floor.
“You’re okay with this?” she asked.
“Yes,” Lung rumbled, by way of response. “This might be best.”
“Fuck you, Hebert! Pulling this shit only after you got me on board? You’re all lunatics!”
I sighed.
Tattletale sat down on the arm of my pilot’s seat, setting one foot down beside my thigh on the seat’s edge. “There’s stuff you need to know. I told you before, you said you wanted to be blissfully ignorant until the last minute.”