Worm

by wildbow

“You’re saying it’s predestined,” Justin said.

  “Some scholars say it’s predestined. I don’t. Um. Other theories… there’s intelligent intervention.”

  “Phrase it in American fucking English,” Justin said.

  “There’s no need for rudeness,” Peter said. He adjusted his glasses and frowned at Justin.

  “Please phrase it in American fucking English,” Justin clarified.

  “Please explain,” Kayden said, shooting Justin a look.

  “It means there’s someone or something that’s deciding who gets powers and when. There’s subtheories… Aesthetic analogue, where they’re saying the powers tend to relate to the trigger event somehow, so obviously someone’s doing it on purpose. Uh. Intelligent powers, where they say the powers are sentient and they’re making the call on their own. Ties into other areas of study, and it’s a favorite of mine. There’s the—”

  “This isn’t helping us,” Justin cut in.

  “Quiet. Everything helps,” Kayden said.

  “We’re short on time.”

  Peter gave him a funny look. “Look, I’m not fully understanding what you’re getting at. It’s great that people are interested in this stuff, but this notion you have that, because your son wants powers, you’re somehow going to give him a trigger event? That’s a little freaky, it’s not really possible. And, uh, it’s borderline abuse, if not actual abuse.”

  “It’s a complicated situation,” Kayden said. “What else can you tell us about trigger events? Beyond theories?”

  “The manner of trigger event seems to impact the powers. That’s frosh level stuff. Physical pain, physical danger; physical powers. Mental pain, mental crisis? Mentally-driven powers.”

  Justin frowned. And being the brother of a dying, half-blind, deaf retard of a girl who got all the attention? All of the gifts, the money? Being made to get surgery for her sake, give up years of my lifespan so she might live? Getting caught pulling the plug, only for it to do little more than set alarms going?

  Was his power really a mental power? He’d always considered it more physical.

  He looked at Kayden, studied her concerned expression.

  Peter was still talking, responding to something Kayden had said. “Drugs tend to create conditional powers. It’s not hard and fast, but you get situations where the power is directly linked to one’s physical, mental or emotional state. We think it’s because the power works off a template it builds as the powers first manifest. If someone is riding an emotional high as they trigger, their powers will always be looking for a similarly excited state to operate at peak efficiency, often an emotion or drugs. When people were caught trying to fabricate trigger events, sometimes they were intending to use this so the subject would be more easily controlled.”

  “I wonder if lack of food and water could create similarly conditional powers,” Kayden commented.

  “I’m… are you talking about starving him?” Peter’s eyes were wide now.

  “Not at all. I’m… speculating.”

  Justin could follow her train of thought. He’d heard the story through the Empire’s grapevine, once. A sixteen year old girl, driving for the first time, down a side road, getting in an accident where her car rolled off the road, out of sight of anyone passing by. Trapped… starving, dying of thirst.

  Getting powers that fed off and required other resources. Light.

  He glanced at her, and she offered him a curt nod. Without speaking, they’d come to a mutual agreement that this ‘Peter’ knew what he was talking about.

  “What’s the impact of being the child of a parahuman?” she asked.

  “Um. I love that you’re interested, and yeah, I wasn’t really doing anything, but maybe if you have this many questions, you should take a class?”

  “He’s the son of a parahuman,” Kayden said, pointing at Theo.

  Cat’s out of the bag now.

  “No kidding? Wow. Who?”

  “Kaiser,” Kayden said.

  Peter’s eyes widened as he looked at Theo. Then something seemed to click, and he looked up at Kayden and Justin with a note of alarm in his expression.

  “Yeah,” Justin said. “Smart man, and you’re only figuring it out now?”

  “I saw the stuff on the news. Thought I recognized you. Purity and…”

  “Crusader. So maybe now you understand we’re serious. And how we’re not interested in taking a class,” Justin said.

  “If he’s Kaiser’s son, and Kaiser’s Allfather’s son… he’s third generation.”

  “And he doesn’t have powers,” Kayden said. “It’s crucial that we fix that.”

  “I… I don’t really know. It’s supposed to be ten times easier to get powers if you’re second generation. But we don’t have research on third generations yet. It’s only pretty recently that we had the first third-generation cape on record. The baby in Toronto.”

  “Didn’t hear about that,” Kayden said. She frowned. “A baby?”

  Peter’s eyes fell on Aster. “Oh. Wow. Is she third generation too?”

  “Pay attention,” Justin said.

  “The… yeah. Each successive generation seems to produce younger capes, by lowering the barrier to entry, the severity of the requisite trigger event.”

  “So why haven’t I triggered?” Theo asked.

  “I don’t know. There’s a lot we don’t know. Maybe… maybe you don’t have powers.”

  “I have to.”

  “It’s a question of luck.”

  “You don’t understand. If I don’t get powers, a lot of people will die.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Justin said. “Give us all the information you have. Every way you’ve heard about people trying to trigger, and how well they worked.”

  “That’s a six month lecture series unto itself!”

  “Talk fast,” Justin said.

  “Um. There’s meditation. Either to tap into your deeper psyche or to tear down the walls between yourself and your worst fears. There’s theories that the powers themselves are intelligent, and they’re worked into the host’s head, before or after the trigger event. Sometimes the meditation’s related to that, but it’s usually people trying to have a second trigger event.”

  “That’s not relevant to the boy, is it?” Justin asked.

  “The research is related! There’s a lot of research into second trigger events because it’s a lot easier to find willing parahumans than it is to find potential parahumans. The methods that people try tend to be similar, too. It’s just… a lot of the time, they fail for opposite reasons.”

  “Opposite?” Kayden asked.

  “It’s not confirmed, it’s just an idea, but the idea the powers are sentient? Well, either the second trigger event opens up communication, frees the powers to act on their own more, or if you don’t buy that stuff, it breaks down the mental barriers between the altered part of the brain that controls the powers and the part that doesn’t. At least, that’s going by the patterns we’ve seen. Except… well, we think sometimes the reason people can’t have a second trigger event is because they’ve already had one. You can’t really distinguish a single trigger event from having two in quick succession.”

  “Like a multiple orgasm,” Justin commented. Kayden glared at him.

  “More or less. There’s more parallels than that, but yeah.”

  “Crusader is right, this isn’t helping him,” Kayden said.

  “What kind of trigger events did Kaiser and Allfather have?”

  Kayden and Justin exchanged glances.

  “No idea,” Kayden said, frowning.

  Peter frowned. “That would have helped. At least we know they both had similar powers. Allfather could conjure iron weapons from the air immediately around himself, send them flying. Kaiser could call metal out of any solid surface. Both are the kind of powers you’d see from almost purely mental trauma. If the trend continues…”

  He trailed o
ff, leaving the sentence hanging. Theo would probably require mental trauma to trigger.

  “Hard to imagine Kaiser having mental trauma. He seemed so confident,” Kayden said.

  “His dad was Allfather. Not so hard to imagine,” Justin replied, absently. He thought of the college girls and stepped over to the window, curious if he’d be able to make out any from this high up. He froze.

  “Kayden,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Cops. And containment vans.”

  “Someone made us?” Kayden asked.

  “And saw us enter the building,” Justin finished. “They’re surrounding us on the ground.”

  “Shit!” Kayden swore.

  Aster whimpered, then started crying.

  Didn’t you tell me to watch my language in front of Aster? Justin thought.

  Theo was sitting in a swivel chair, hands clasped in his lap, his eyes watching Kayden, waiting for her cue.

  Justin noted the tension of Theo’s grip, the way he seemed to retreat into himself. The fat little boy who was nothing like Kaiser. Maybe he hadn’t inherited powers at all because he wasn’t his father’s son. If his mother had cheated on Kaiser, gave birth to this pudgy blob, it would explain why he didn’t have powers. It would mean he wasn’t a second generation cape, let alone a third.

  “Hmm.” Justin watched more PRT vans arrive. They were spreading out, clearly anticipating Kayden’s artillery-level attacks, and they had the damn foam-bead nets they used for dealing with fliers. “Theo, who’s your mom?”

  “Heith.”

  Justin sighed. Heith was Fenja and Menja’s cousin and guardian, Kaiser’s first wife, killed in a turf war with the Teeth, back in the old days of Brockton Bay. She has powers after all.

  Somehow, all of this would be easier if he could believe that Theo was illegitimate.

  “Crusader,” Kayden said, “can you stall them? We have more questions.”

  He nodded, shut his eyes, and drew on his power.

  It was as simple as stepping forward while staying in the same place. A ghostly phantom appeared, followed by another, and another. One headed for the elevator shaft, while the other headed for the stairwell. He directed the remainder to sink through the floor.

  “What else can you tell us? Something we can use,” Kayden said.

  “If the authorities are here, I don’t know if I should say.”

  “You should,” Justin said. “Because we’ll hurt you if you don’t.”

  “Don’t,” Theo said.

  Justin gave the boy his best dispassionate look.

  “He’s been helpful,” Theo said.

  “He hasn’t solved your problem,” Justin said. He was dimly aware of his other selves engaging with the enemy as they moved into the building. One fought them in the stairwell, immune to any strike or bullet, yet fully capable of pushing a man down the stairs, into the people behind him, fully capable of strangling a man.

  Peter shifted positions nervously. His voice rose in pitch as he spoke, “I don’t know what you want. I can’t give you an answer because there aren’t any!”

  “Think,” Justin suggested.

  “You expect me to do in five minutes what the best scholars in the world haven’t figured out in thirty years?”

  “Well put,” Justin said. More clones were still splitting off, breaking away from himself to sink through the floor. Some had moved beyond the building to attack the men who were manning the turrets on top of the van. With luck, he and Kayden would be free to fly to safety with the children.

  “This… this is insane! What am I supposed to tell you? I’ve outlined some of the best theories we have!”

  “If it helps,” Justin said, leaning towards Peter, “I’m going to kill you if I don’t leave here satisfied. Think about that.”

  “Kayden,” Theo said, “you’re not going to let him, are you?”

  “Crusader,” Kayden said. “Is that really necessary?”

  “I can’t even think straight under this pressure!” Peter cried.

  “I imagine you feel very similar to someone about to have a trigger event,” Justin said. “Maybe that will inspire something or fill in the blanks for some half-baked idea you had once.”

  “I don’t… There’s isolation.”

  “An isolation chamber?” Justin asked.

  Peter shook his head. “No. More basic. It’s a common trend. People who have trigger events, they don’t usually have a good support system. Their family, their friends, they tend to fail them, or be the cause of the problem. I… I wrote a paper a while back about how Masters tend to have loneliness as part of their trigger events, and how maybe that was why Masters tend to be villains. Because you need support and social pressure to be more of a good guy. My professor then, the guy who I work for now, Dr. Wysocki, he tore me to pieces. Too many other parahumans have it as part of their history. Isolation. It wasn’t enough to suggest a correlation. He said you could call it a common theme for nearly all of the trigger events out there.”

  Justin was in the middle of creating another ethereal copy of himself when he stopped. It snapped back into place. He thought back to something earlier in the day.

  “Kayden, let’s go.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve got our answer. Let’s go.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Justin nodded.

  “To the roof?” she asked.

  “As fast as you can move with the baby.”

  Kayden rose into the air, her hair and eyes lighting up.

  “Come on, Theo,” Justin said. “I’ll carry you.”

  He spawned a ghostly replica as Kayden left the office. Theo hesitated as the replica got closer.

  “What’s wrong?” Justin asked.

  “What he just said… You’re going to leave me. Isolate me.”

  “Yeah,” Justin said. His ghost-self lunged, and Theo threw himself back with such force that he fell over in the chair. The ghost was on him in a second, pinning him down to the floor with one hand around his throat.

  “Don’t. You heard what he said. If you force it, it won’t happen,” Theo protested, his voice barely above a wheeze with the hold the ghost had on his neck.

  “I’m willing to take that chance. In the worst case scenario, you’re their problem, not ours. The heroes can look after you and figure out what to do with you.”

  “Justin! Crusader!” Theo managed a strangled scream, but Justin was already in the doorway, not even pausing or hesitating at his words. “It won’t work if you try to make it happen!”

  Justin left Theo behind, stepped into the stairwell, noting a gap between the stairs that was big enough to fly between. He created a clone and left it overlapping his body, using its flight to lift himself into the air.

  Kayden hadn’t flown for safety yet. She was waiting on the rooftop, Aster writhing in the harness, screaming bitterly.

  “Fly,” he said.

  “Where’s Theo?”

  “Would you believe me if I said he was coming?”

  He could see her expression shift in time with the realization. “You didn’t.”

  “I did. And you won’t go back for him.”

  “Like hell I won’t. He saved Aster when Jack was going to kill her, he might have saved me in the process. I owe him—”

  “—And we’re paying him back by leaving him.”

  “No. No, we aren’t.”

  “He’s one of our own, kind of. I get that. But… he was never going to help the cause.”

  “The cause,” Kayden spat the word.

  “Purifying the world, cutting out the rot, becoming a symbol of better things. It’s not him.”

  “He’s my stepson.”

  “And isn’t that the problem? Remember this morning, at breakfast? He was worried he wouldn’t get powers. That he wouldn’t be able to stop Jack. And how did you respond? You reassured him. You told him we’d fight the Nine if he couldn’t.”

  Kayden only glared, eyes
shining with painful brightness.

  “When you said that, part of me, I thought we didn’t fight the Nine then, how could we two years from now? Theo said it outright. He’s sharper than he looks sometimes. Sharper than he acts. But here’s the thing, at the same time, a part of me felt like I’d realized something, and it took me until now to get it sorted in my head.”

  “What?”

  “You’re reassuring him, when that’s the last thing we want. When there’s a crisis, he looks to you. The most basic requirement for a trigger event is you get to a point where you can’t go anywhere. Pushed to your limit and then pushed further. He can’t get there so long as we’re there as a safety net. As a support system.”

  “So we’re supposed to abandon him?”

  “We just did,” Crusader said. “The authorities are just getting to the ninth floor now, my clones are letting ’em by. By the time we got there, they’d have him secured, and they’d be ready to spray us with that foam.”

  “You could use your power, disable them without any risk.”

  “I could. But I won’t.”

  Kayden flared with light, and for a second, he thought she was going to shoot him.

  The blast of solid light didn’t come.

  Justin sighed, “He’ll be hurt, he’ll be pissed, and he’ll be alone. They’ll quiz him on us, get every detail they can, and if I know him at all, it’ll tear him up, because he might not like us, but we’re the closest thing he’s got to family…”

  Kayden glanced toward the door.

  “…And that’s the best thing we can do for him right now,” he finished.

  “I never was the mom he needed,” Kayden said.

  “Well, it’s too late now.”

  She walked over to the roof’s edge, peered down. “Any net launchers?”

  “Nobody to aim them now. Everyone’s fighting my doubles.”

  She glanced back toward the door, absently cooed for Aster to stop crying.

  There was a flash of light. By the time it cleared away, she was merely a glinting speck in the distance.

  He glanced at the door, then flew after her.

  Up to you and you alone now, boy, he thought.

  Queen 18.5

  The television screen went dark.

  Transmission over. Damage done.