Worm

by wildbow

  “Having tinkers against Noelle is probably our safest bet,” Tattletale said.

  “Because she won’t copy their gear,” I said.

  Tattletale nodded.

  “Good. Thank you, by the way, for sharing,” Grue spoke to the Wards. Tecton nodded. Our groups had reached the door that led into the stairwell. There were officers handing out armbands, and the elevator was in use, forcing us to wait as people got their armbands and hurried downstairs.

  “You need our info?”

  “No,” Grace said. Her voice was hard. “We know who you are.”

  Imp cackled, “We’re famous!”

  I hung back a second as one officer held an armband and my armor compartment out to me. I gripped it, but he didn’t let go.

  He wanted to play it that way?

  I let my bugs drift away from my armor to surround it. He acted as if I’d set it on fire, letting go and backing away. I handed it to Tattletale as we passed through the door to the stairs, then strapped on my armband. I spoke into it, “Skitter.”

  How had things gone with Leviathan? My username would appear. I held my armband to Tattletale, and she pressed a button.

  “No trackers hidden in your stuff,” she said. “Want help putting this on?”

  “Please. When we’re at the bottom.”

  We were at the tail end of the group, and consequently we were the last ones out the door. The dogs were already mostly grown, and we paused as Bitch increased Bentley’s size to the point that we could ride him.

  “We have too many people and not enough dogs,” Grue commented.

  “We’ll drive,” Tecton said. “Just need to requisition a van.”

  “I’ll ride,” I said. “Rachel?”

  She nodded. She was up first, and she gave me a hand in getting up. I had to fight coughing for a minute.

  “Assault’s going to try to screw us over, if we cross paths,” Tattletale said.

  “I suspected,” I answered.

  “And if this goes south, they will come after us. The bit Miss Militia said about Battery? That loses its cachet when people start to feel like the people of this city would be better protected if they turned us in than if we were helping. We’re going to have to stay on top of this. Turn around, I’ll help strap on your armor.”

  I nodded and turned around. I moved my bugs out of the way as she fiddled with the straps, threading them through the appropriate areas. I blinked a few times, looking towards the nearest light source to try to gauge if my vision was any better. No improvement. Short of a thorough check by an ophthalmologist, I wouldn’t find out if I’d regain my sight, or how much I’d recover if I did.

  Everything I’d been through, and I got the long-term injury as a civilian.

  Within two minutes, the Wards had pulled a containment van up beside us, with Tecton behind the wheel and Raymancer sitting in the passenger-side window, holding the headrest of the chair inside to help maintain his position. The back popped open, and Imp, Regent, Tattletale and Grue climbed in.

  Ballistic as our first stop. Then Parian.

  I winced at the pain in my side as Bentley started running. And maybe collect Atlas while we’re in this area of town.

  Tattletale was right. This situation being classified as a level-A situation instead of a class-S situation wasn’t doing us any favors. I just had to note how things were different from Leviathan’s attack. There were no air raid sirens. People weren’t being evacuated.

  Helicopters flew overhead. I could hear them, even if my bugs didn’t reach that high. I knew Miss Militia had assigned us capes, for the inevitable event of Noelle sniffing us out and coming after us. I didn’t sense them on the ground, so I could only assume they were in the air.

  Was it better that people weren’t being evacuated? They weren’t on the streets, in the line of fire if the psycho-Vistas or Noelle came after them. It meant we didn’t need to deal with unpowered clones.

  But it also meant that there were that many more people here if things went south.

  There was a potential kill order on our heads, and there were innumerable heroes in the city who had reason to throw us to the wolves, or to Noelle if they thought the situation called for it. The stakes were higher, and there was a lot more room to fail. Noelle just needed one lucky maneuver to go from class-A to class-S threat in moments, and we weren’t getting half the backup this situation deserved.

  Not to mention that I was worn out. Physically, emotionally, I felt like I’d been pushed to the limit, wrung out and then pushed to the limit all over again, and that was just dealing with Coil and rescuing Dinah in the past twenty-four hours. If I got into the past few months, or how the very way I thought had changed—

  I felt a touch dizzy just thinking about it.

  No. It wasn’t dizziness. My surroundings real ly were off kilter. The buildings around us and ahead of us were stretching and shifting en-masse.

  “Trouble!” I informed Bitch. I used my bugs to notify the others in the containment van: Vistas.

  I had to sweep my bugs over the area before I could find any of them. One was perched on a rooftop, one block ahead. She wasn’t in costume.

  It had been dumb of me to expect them to be in costume. I hadn’t even considered it, but Noelle wouldn’t spit out anything but the people themselves. The bugs noted the hardness of her face, more like a mask than flesh, her angular, almost artificial chin, and the thin hair on top of her head.

  The others… too many places to check… I found another, three blocks over, making a beeline towards us. Noelle had ordered them to space out, to catch us if we crossed her perimeter.

  Bastard yelped to my left, skidded to a stop. Rachel seemed to read something in his response, because she pulled Bentley to a hard left, veering straight into the van’s path.

  She was going to hit it? I had to adjust my grip, lifting my leg out of the way before she could follow through and have Bentley bodycheck the vehicle. I sensed Raymancer dropping from the window to his seat as the dog hit, only an inch away from serious injury. The van turned and skidded to a stop, and I fell, rolling.

  A block ahead of us, a building toppled. I ducked my head low and covered it as dust and debris rolled past us as a thick cloud. The building wouldn’t have hit us, but the debris and dust might have left us incapacitated long enough for the Vistas to act.

  We’d ground to a halt, and sure enough, the pseudo-Vista on the rooftop was slowly starting to work on the buildings around us, thinning walls and twisting supports. She was spreading out the work and laying the groundwork for future collapses, I realized. The second psycho-Vista, busy trying to close the distance by folding the space between us and her and stepping across the shortened distances, was raising the street between two buildings, creating a steep incline that even Bitch’s dogs would struggle to climb, cutting off one avenue of retreat.

  And I was aware of a third one. The tall Vista Grue had described. She’d stretched like taffy, her bones curving to the point that each was more a crescent than straight. Narrow, so thin it felt like she’d break, with a face twisted into a perpetual, distorted scream, she was picking her way through the rubble of the fallen building. Her power was twisting the largest pieces of rubble around her until they were wisps, chunks of concrete slowly corkscrewing in space until they were nothing more than dust.

  Three of them.

  And Noelle nowhere to be seen. Not in my power’s range of four-ish city blocks. She’d be going for the others. For Ballistic, or Parian. These troops were only to slow us down, buy her time to make another move, find another set of powers.

  Fuck me. Noelle was employing the same basic tactics I did: sensing the opposition, strategically deploying the offensive troops, acting as the heavy hitter and problem solver in the center of the chaos her minions generated, working towards complementary or wholly different goals than the ‘swarm’.

  Worse, she was better at it than I was. She was faster, her senses reached further, and the i
ndividual at the center of her army was a nightmarish force unto herself.

  We couldn’t afford to get caught fighting. Not while Noelle hit our other allies.

  Still flat on the ground, I choked back the next spell of coughs and touched the button on my armband, “We need reinforcements, fast.”

  Queen 18.6

  “Help is on the way,” Miss Militia’s voice came over the armband.

  “Three Vistas,” I said. “And Noelle is probably north of our location, going after—”

  “Skitter!” Tattletale shouted, interrupting me, “lose it!”

  “What?”

  “The armband! Toss it!”

  I pulled at the straps. As I gathered bugs onto the armband to get a better sense of what I needed to do with the straps, I could tell that the entire thing was swelling, distorting. I could hear the screen crack.

  I pulled it free and threw it, simultaneously climbing to my feet and scrambling away.

  “Grue! Cover it!” Tattletale shouted. “Use your power on anything that one breaks down!”

  Grue threw out a stream of darkness, then dissolved the darkness that wasn’t covering the area where the armband had been. Without the ability to see, I had only my bugs’ senses to go by, but I could track where he’d laid down the darkness by the way the air seemed thicker.

  From Tattletale’s words, I’d expected an explosion, but it simply twisted away into wisps of thick smoke.

  “It’s radioactive,” Tattletale intoned. “Everything she’s dissolving like that.”

  “Unless I cover it?” Grue asked.

  “Unless you cover it. Should cancel out the effects. But you did want me to let you know when I’m making an educated guess. This is one of them.” Tattletale said. “I hope I’m right. We could win this fight and still wind up dying in a hospital bed a few years from now, because we got too close as that stuff dissolved.”

  Oh shit.

  “Doesn’t matter, does it?” Regent said. “World’s ending in a few years anyways.”

  “Let’s avoid the extreme radiation poisoning,” I said. “Regardless of whether the world’s ending or not.”

  The other Undersiders and the Chicago Wards were out of the van, and we were collectively backing away from the nega-Vistas. More specifically, we were retreating from the one who was creating the radioactive dust.

  The first one I’d noticed was still on the rooftop, spreading out her efforts, thinning walls and twisting supports. Her progress was slow, but I was willing to bet that half of the city block would be collapsing onto us in a matter of minutes. If not sooner. If I had to guess, her power operated in a different manner than the original Vista’s. It affected a wider area, it was slower, and she didn’t seem to be suffering for our presence.

  The bugs that I was sending her way were having a hard time approaching. They kept veering around so they flew clockwise around her instead of straight. I had only a few bugs attacking her, but the same effect that I’d seen with her face had hardened her skin and there weren’t many places left to attack. Her mouth was little more than a lipless slit across the lower half of her face, firmly closed, and only the smallest bugs could get at her eyes. She barely flinched at the bites and stings my swarm was delivering.

  Meagre as my efforts were, they still should have left her blind, filling her eye sockets with ants and no-see-ums, but her power was still steadily working on the buildings around us. Another peculiarity of her abilities? The ability to sense the layout of whatever structures she was affecting? Did that extend to sensing us?

  The second one had arrived, creating footholds and handholds to ascend the section of road she’d raised into a vertical wall, twelve feet high. She was now perched on top, crouching. In the time that it had taken me to lose the armband, she had started to work on cutting off our best avenue of retreat. The road we’d traveled on to get here was raising behind us, bulging upward into a similar barrier. As far as I could tell, her powers were most in line with the regular Vista, and she seemed to be reacting most to the bites and stings. I wished that would make me feel more confident about these circumstances.

  That left the freakishly tall one. The Vista with limbs that zig-zagged, who was apparently turning matter into radioactive dust. She’d climbed past the wreckage of the fallen building and now stood on solid ground again, facing us.

  “We off the radioactive one first?” Tecton suggested.

  “No,” I said. I used my bugs to draw an arrow in the air. “Priority’s the one on the roof, over there.”

  “There’s a third one?” he asked.

  Apparently he hadn’t caught my message to Miss Militia.

  “She’s going to bring down more buildings if we don’t take her fast,” I said.

  “Raymancer,” Tecton ordered, “handle it.”

  Raymancer stood like he had before, feet together, one arm extended. I didn’t sense any energy blast or ray from his hand. The Vista didn’t act as though she’d been shot either.

  “She bends light!?” Wanton asked.

  “She’s bending space,” Tattletale said. “You won’t get a straight shot.”

  “Don’t need one,” Raymancer said. His second shot left a shallow crater in the Vista’s chest. She sprawled onto the roof, hands pressed to the injury.

  The thinning of the walls didn’t stop.

  “How the fuck does that work?” Regent asked. “The laser didn’t even—”

  “She’s still alive!” I called out, interrupting him. There was a small explosion as Raymancer directed a shot at the Radioactive Vista and missed. I could sense how the barrier behind us abruptly stopped growing and how the space to one side of her warped to let her evade more easily.

  “Vista to our three o’clock is assisting her!” I said.

  “Grace!” Tecton shouted. “Leaving rooftop to you! Launch!”

  Grace leaped toward him, onto the back of one outstretched hand. She had no trouble maintaining her balance as she placed the other foot on the back of his other gauntlet.

  She bent her knees, and extended them to jump in the same instant the piledriver attachments on the gauntlets extended with explosive force.

  Most of the bugs I’d placed on her were torn free by the force of the wind ripping past her, as she turned into a human projectile. She had to have used her selective invincibility to augment her feet and legs so they weren’t annihilated by the piledrivers, and she would be using her enhanced agility to ensure she stuck the landing.

  Except the landing wasn’t going to happen as planned. If I’d understood what they’d planned, I would have warned her. Her trajectory shifted as she ran into the rooftop-Vista’s power. Grace fell short of reaching the rooftop. Very short. She hit the ground with both feet together, arms spread, and left a shallow crater around her impact site, a half-block away from the building. Grace was running toward her target a heartbeat later, unhurt.

  Some of the flying capes that had been assigned to watch over us were targeting the Vista on the rooftop, and I saw that as excuse enough to focus on other, more immediate problems.

  Rachel and her dogs went for the Vista to our right, with Regent doing what he could to hamper their target’s movement, forcing her to use her power to maintain the distance from the beasts.

  Which left the rest of us to face off against the radioactive one.

  “One on the rooftop’s occupied,” I said. “Now we can fight her.”

  She extended her hand toward us, and the ground between us and her bulged, as though a cartoon mole had crawled beneath the pavement. Raymancer fired at her, clearly hoping to distract her, but each shot missed by a fair margin.

  My bugs were covering every inch of her skin, and I had them biting and tearing at her flesh. Her skin was hard, gnarled, and calloused, but I did the damage where I could at the elbows, knees and neck, drawing blood. I tried to tell myself that she was a monster, a mockery of a real person, and she was too dangerous to be allowed to live. With that kind of
unhinged mental state, and her ability to irradiate people… I grit my teeth. No choice.

  Grue finished covering the bulging ground with darkness. Tall-Vista didn’t react. Her hand was still pointed at us.

  “It’s a feint!” Tattletale shouted. She spun around. “There!”

  My swarm moved in the direction Tattletale was looking. I found the bulge, a basketball-sized blister on the side of the containment van, felt it erupting a mere foot from Raymancer’s head a half-second before Grue’s darkness covered it.

  Too late. Raymancer stumbled, coughing.

  Grue turned and extended a hand toward the tall Vista. With my swarm spread out around her, I could sense miniscule explosions appearing all around her, see the flashes of light with the bugs’ distorted vision. The individual detonations weren’t much larger than golf balls, and even the direct impacts weren’t enough to kill my larger bugs.

  “How the fuck do you use Raymancer’s power?” Grue asked.

  “You copy powers?” Wanton asked.

  “Thought you guys read up on us,” Tattletale quipped. “Grue, focus the beams with the lenses. The beam appears from the center, so line them up to refine the beam into something more effective.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve only got the one lens there.”

  Lenses? My bugs weren’t sensing anything.

  Wanton was closing the distance, now that the other Vista was distracted trying to avoid Bentley and Bastard, still hobbled by Regent’s power. As he got halfway to her, the ground around her began to distort and twist into curls. Wanton disintegrated as he entered the area.

  For a heartbeat, I thought she’d used her power on him. When the debris, dust and chunks of building began stirring and orbiting a central point that continued his general trajectory, I realized it was his power.

  Wanton didn’t hesitate as radioactive dust exploded around and inside his new body. If anything, it proved an advantage, as the dust provided more material to work with and the damage to the street let him pull up chunks of pavement. He closed the distance to our opponent and began thrashing her. One of her arms snapped and dangled as one large chunk struck her.