Worm

by wildbow

  As heavily as I was breathing, back in my lair, my swarm-people didn’t show any sign. I focused the whole of my attention on them, as if I could remove my consciousness from my real body.

  “Any problems?” I asked Charlotte, once I’d recovered enough to pay attention. Glancing at my shoulder, I could see Brooks making an incision in the skin of my shoulder. He’d managed to open the tear in my costume. I hadn’t been paying attention to how. I deliberately looked away as Brooks tried to forge a path to the inside of my shoulder socket.

  “Not sure,” Charlotte said. “Have a look.”

  It was Parian. I’d been so focused on my shoulder, the three-dimensional web-blueprint and my swarm-selves that I hadn’t noticed her getting out of the truck.

  “You didn’t leave,” I said, when she’d joined Charlotte and my swarm-clone.

  “I didn’t think the money would be real,” she responded.

  “Of course it was.”

  “It’s… it was a lot of money. Very generous. But we were talking about it, and split between us, it’s not enough to give everyone all the care they need. I told them to go ahead, that I didn’t need a share.”

  “Sorry. I was worried it wouldn’t be enough,” I said. “Are you saying you want more money? I might have to say no. There’s a limit to what I can spare.”

  “No! No.” She hugged her arms to her body, looking around at the people who were working. “Just… I thought maybe I should hear you out.”

  “Okay,” I responded.

  “Except it’s not really you?”

  My clone shook her head.

  “Can I talk with the real you?”

  “I’m in my lair, and I’m preoccupied. You’ll understand if I don’t reveal the location, given who your friends are?”

  “Yeah,” she said. She was still looking around, watching as a group moved by, pushing wheelbarrows of burned wood. “I… I was telling myself that there was no point to taking your offer, that I could use my power and make more money legitimately. But that’s not true at all, is it?”

  “Walk with me?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  I led the way through my territory with my clone as I talked. “Crime does pay. I made the offer to you because I thought it would be the best way to get your Dolltown residents the money they needed to get their old lives back. Or get as close to their old lives as possible.”

  “I kind of hate you,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “You’re making it out like I’m a bad person because I won’t betray Flechette and my own moral code to help them.”

  “I don’t blame you for your decision. I don’t think any less of you.”

  “But you wouldn’t make the choice I’m making.”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “And you’ve done more to help my people than I have.”

  “You’ve protected them to the best of your ability through this city’s darkest hours.”

  “You really think we’re past that? The bad days?”

  “Yes.”

  I winced as the grinding resumed, this time inside my shoulder socket. A makeshift rigging inside the cavity caught the metal shavings, while Bryce held the tube to suction the metal shavings out. So far, no assassination attempts. Good.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Parian admitted. “This is… seeing it makes me wish I’d done something like it.”

  “I’m not going to push you towards one choice or another.”

  “I know. You made that clear when you gave me the money with no strings attached.”

  “Look,” I said. “I know Flechette was saying my perspective is warped, but I think the system… you know, society, it’s like a series of rules and expectations that we established under some general expectations. But recent events have made it pretty clear that those expectations, those assumptions, they might not apply.”

  “Because of us? Capes?”

  “Yeah. At the end of the day, barring some extreme examples like powerful dictators, there’s always the fact that any bad person who doesn’t have powers can be killed with a gun, a knife, or even a good punch in the right place. That’s not the case with us parahumans. The balance of power is pretty damned off-kilter. Things aren’t fair.”

  “Are you making that imbalance better or worse?”

  “I’m… addressing the problem. I’m saying there’s no point to trying to hold on to the old status quo when it’s based on a foundation that no longer exists.”

  “So you’re going to take over the city.”

  “Yes. Because at least for right now, I can give these people what they need.”

  I moved my clone’s ‘head’ and followed a group of kids who were running away from my lair, carrying six-packs of water bottles.

  “And later?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We walked in silence, past a bonfire where scrap wood was being burned. Brooks and Bryce, meanwhile, set to shoving my arm back into its socket. All of the ambient pain disappeared in an instant.

  Parian needed the money, she needed the assurance that she could help the people she’d failed. I understood that.

  “I can offer you one last compromise,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I can’t guarantee it’ll work, I can’t say if anyone else will accept the proposal, and I don’t know what’s going to happen long-term, but we don’t have to call you a member of our team. We don’t have to call you a villain.”

  “But I’d take territory for myself anyways?”

  “Yes.”

  “Others would call me a villain, just because I wasn’t fighting you guys. They’d know I was cooperating with you.”

  “Not necessarily. Maybe the people in charge, the Protectorate and Wards, maybe they’d understand it, but the people on the ground level wouldn’t.”

  “The media would out me.”

  “I think we control the media. Or enough to throw some doubt into the mix. The rules are pretty simple. You take territory, you hold it, and you ensure that there’s no crime or parahumans operating there without your consent.”

  “And Flechette—”

  “I don’t know her. I can’t say how she’ll react, but maybe if you explain nicely, maybe if you frame it right, you could convince her it’s for the greater good. So long as she convinced the other heroes to leave your territory alone, let you enforce the law there all by yourself, you wouldn’t have to fight them.”

  “And if she didn’t—”

  “That’s up to her. Or you.”

  She stared around my territory. It wasn’t pretty, there was still devastation everywhere, but things were getting better. It was maybe the only place in the city where things were improving as fast as they were. We weren’t taking two steps forward and one step back. It was all forward momentum. Not even a week had passed, admittedly, but it was progress. And it was apparent.

  “I don’t think I could accept if Flechette doesn’t agree.”

  “Okay.” The alternative was unspoken. If she does…

  “I hate you,” Parian said, and it was answer enough.

  Brooks was finishing stitching up the incision in my shoulder. I already had two pieces of scrap spider silk at the ready—one to cover the hole in my costume and another to serve as a sling until my shoulder was stronger. If I adjusted my cape, I could cover the arm so the injury wasn’t too obvious. I stood from the chair and stretched, then reached for my cell phone.

  “I can live with that,” I told her, speaking through my swarm-clone. I clicked through my contact list and called the man who was plotting to kill me.

  Interlude 15 (Donation Bonus #3)

  August 20th, 1986

  She was being poisoned by people with smiles on their faces.

  She hated those smiles. Fake. Pretending to be happy, pretending to be cheerful. But she’d spent enough time here to know that her friends and family would be crying the second they thought they were out of earshot. The stranger
s had a weariness that spoke to the inevitable. The older they were, the more reality seemed to weigh on them.

  Somewhere along the line, they had stopped telling her that the chemotherapy would make her better. The smiles had become even more strained. There was more emphasis on making her comfortable. Less explanation of what was going on.

  So when her mother came in to check on her, bringing the mug of heated chicken broth, she pretended to be asleep. She hated herself for it, but she couldn’t stand the lies, the fakeness.

  If it wouldn’t have given her away, she would have winced as her mother sat down by her bedside. It meant she might be staying a while.

  “Becca,” her mother murmured from behind her. “You awake?”

  She didn’t respond, keeping her breathing steady. She tried to breathe through her nose, so the sores that filled her mouth wouldn’t sing with pain at the contact with the air.

  Her mother ran one hand over her head. Her hair was mostly gone, and the contact was uncomfortable to the point that it was almost painful.

  “You’ve been so brave,” her mom whispered, so quiet she was barely audible.

  I’m not brave. Not at all. I’m terrified. I’m so frustrated I could scream. But she couldn’t. Everyone had painted her as being so courageous, so noble and peaceful in the face of the months of treatment. But it was a facade, and she’d passed the point of no return. It was too late to break composure, too late to stop making bad jokes, faking smiles of her own. She couldn’t complain or use her mother’s shoulder to cry on because everyone would fall apart if she did.

  She was their support.

  “My little superhero,” her mother said. Rebecca could feel her mother’s hand on her bare scalp once more. She wanted to slap that hand away, yell at her mother. Don’t you know that hurts? Everything hurts.

  “You’ve been trying so hard. You deserve better.”

  And just like that, from the tone and the word choice, Rebecca knew she was dying.

  She felt a mixture of emotions. Relief, in a way. It would mean the chemotherapy could stop; she could stop hurting. There was anger too. Always some anger. Why couldn’t her mother just tell her? When would they get up the courage to deliver that news?

  Apparently not tonight. Rebecca heard the scrape of the chair moving as her mother stood, the muffled footsteps as she retreated down the hall.

  Tears had been harder to come by since the chemo had started. Most days, her eyes were red and itchy, her vision blurry, too dry to cry. But it seemed this occasion deserved them. For a long time, she lay on her side, staring out the window at the cityscape of Los Angeles, tears running sideways down her face, across the bridge of her nose and down to her ear, soaking her pillow.

  There was a sign that caught her eye, because it was so bright a yellow against its immediate background of blues and dusky purples. The classic logo of a fast food restaurant.

  It struck her that she would probably never get to eat there again, never get a special kids meal with the dinky plastic toy that was meant for kids ten years younger than her. She’d never forget about the toy afterward, letting it clutter the top of her dresser along with the other colorful trinkets and keepsakes.

  She’d never get to read the third book of the Maggie Holt series, or see the movie they were making of the first book.

  She’d never have a real boyfriend.

  It was dumb, but those stupid trivial things hit her harder than the idea that she’d never see her family, her friends or her cats again. The steady tears became sobs, and her breath hitched, making her entire chest seize in pain. The involuntary clenching of her empty stomach was twice as bad, and she started to think she might need to throw up. Or dry heave. Experience told her that would be worst of all.

  She’d started moaning without realizing it, quiet and drawn out, trying to replace those painful lurching sobs with something else.

  “Do you need morphine?”

  The gentle voice startled her, interrupting both the moans and the sobs. Morphine wouldn’t help the most basic, terrifying, inevitable reality she faced. She shook her head.

  There was a whispering.

  “I’m going to increase the drip just a little, Rebecca Costa-Brown.”

  “Who?” Rebecca stirred, turning around to see who was speaking. A black woman with long hair in a doctor’s get-up was messing with the IV bag. But… no name tag. And there was a teenage girl with pale skin and dark hair standing behind her, wearing knee-high socks, a black pleated skirt and white dress shirt. “You’re not one of my doctors.”

  “No, Rebecca. Not yet,” the woman replied.

  Quietly, Rebecca asked, “Are you one of the doctors that takes care of people that are dying?”

  The woman walked around to the end of the bed. The teenager stayed where she was. Rebecca gave the girl a nervous look. She was staring, her expression placid, hands at her side.

  “Who are you, then?”

  “Shh. Lower your voice. It would be a shame if the nurses happened to come by and eject me.”

  “So…” Rebecca started, making a conscious effort to speak more quietly, “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  “No,” the woman replied.

  Rebecca closed her mouth. She could feel the effect of the morphine. If nothing else, it was helping ease the uncomfortable sensation where her stomach had been cramping, her skin feeling raw against the stiff hospital sheets. She didn’t know what to say, so she fell silent instead.

  “To answer your question, I’m a doctor, but not one that works in this hospital. I’m more of a researcher and scholar than anything else. And I came to make you an offer.”

  “Shouldn’t my mom be here for this?” My mother makes all of the decisions.

  “Normally yes, when dealing with a minor. But this is a private deal. Just for you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’ve heard about the superheroes? On the television?”

  “Yeah. There’s, like, a bunch. Twenty or something?”

  “No less than fifty, now. They’re appearing all over the world, with thousands upon thousands estimated to appear by the turn of the millennium. I confess I have something of a hand in that. Which is why I’m here.”

  “You… make superheroes appear?” Rebecca could feel herself getting foggy with the morphine.

  “I make superheroes, but it’s not easy. The risks are high. The files?”

  The teenager on the other side of the bed stepped forward, pulling off her backpack. She reached in and withdrew a file folder.

  The woman moved the wheeled, adjustable bed-desk that still held the chicken broth Rebecca’s mother had brought. She moved the plastic container and put the file folder down. Opening it, she spread out the glossy photographs that were contained within, until six images sat side by side.

  A man with gnarled skin like the wood of a tree. A woman with tentacles everywhere. A beetle-man. A boy with skin that seemed to be melting like wax. A burned husk of a body. A little girl without eyes, only flat expanses of skin where they should be.

  “Right now, in the early stages of my project, only one in seven succeed. Two of those seven die.” The woman tapped the pictures of the burned body and the boy with melted skin. “Four experience unfortunate physical changes.”

  “They’re monsters.”

  “Yes. Yes they are. But of those seven, statistically there’s one who experiences no major physical changes, who gains powers. All anyone has to do is drink one of my formulas.”

  Rebecca nodded. Her eyes flickered over the photographs.

  “And I’ve stumbled on a little side-benefit, Rebecca. I mix those potions a certain way, and it not only helps reduce the severity of any physical changes, but it also has a restorative effect. The body heals. Sometimes just a little. Sometimes a great deal. I think we could heal you.”

  “Heal me?”

  “I’m not asking for money. Only that you take this leap of faith with me and help me bui
ld something. I know the risks are great, I wouldn’t normally ask someone to face them, but I suspect you don’t have much left to lose.”

  Rebecca extended a hand to touch the photos, but it was herself she looked at. Her fingers so bony, her skin mottled yellow with bruising around the knuckles. I’m already a monster.

  She tapped the photo. “If… if it was just this? If you were offering to save my life and make me one of those monsters? I’d still accept.”

  * * *

  August 21st, 1986

  “I think we can mark this as a success,” the Doctor spoke.

  Rebecca opened her eyes. She’d seen something fragmented but profound, but it slipped away as fast as she could think to recollect it. She staggered to her feet, wobbled. The girl in the school uniform caught her before she could fall.

  “I’m not a monster?”

  “No. In fact, I don’t know if it could have gone better.”

  Rebecca extended one arm. Her skin was a healthy pink, her hand thin but not so emaciated as it had been.

  “I’m better?”

  “I would guess so. In truth, I’m not sure how the regeneration affected the cancer, it might even have exacerbated the symptoms. For the time being, however, you seem to be well.”

  “I feel really light.”

  “That’s promising.”

  Rebecca allowed herself a smile, letting go of the girl’s hand. She could stand under her own power. Everything around her appeared sharp. She hadn’t realized how bad her vision had become.

  Even her mind seemed to be operating like a well oiled machine. Had the drugs and poison made her stupid?

  No. She’d never been like this. It was like her brain had been a bicycle and now it was a Ferarri. Even as her eyes flicked over the interior of the warehouse, she could tell she was processing faster, taking in details and sorting them better, as if her thoughts were no longer limited to the confines of her skull.

  “What can I do?”

  “I’ve yet to start categorizing the results. For the time being, I’m playing a game of battleship, creating what I can and logging the results. I hope to find the patterns and the factors at play, given time.”