by wildbow
* * *
Some of the others departed early. Others were readied to depart soon after arrival. Still others, this one included, were to wait.
They were one, they were all. A collective, a single entity, a trillion times a trillion entities. Each with a function in the whole, each with a role in the cycles, each with an individual identity.
As one, they traveled. The distance was immeasurable, the passage of time impossible to convey. There was no standard, for there were realms they had traveled where time and space operated on different levels.
For all, their own kind was the only standard, the only thing that remained relatively static through the cycles. When they met their own kind they shared with each other. When a new cycle was carried out, everything of the parent was borne by their spawn.
And the collective moved toward their destination. They operated as a whole to decipher it, to pick apart the permutations, see the futures and the possibilities.
But for this one entity, which existed as part of the whole, there was a target within that destination. When it came time for this one to depart, it would seek out a particular individual, and it would bond with that individual. This one would fragment itself if others met the criteria; if there was time and opportunity enough then it would move to better candidates, younger or more able ones with a greater ability to affect the cycle. This one would wait until the time was right, and then it would activate, come into the identity and role that had been ingrained into its being.
All to serve this cycle.
With the help of the collective, this one could see its objective. A single living being. This one encoded that being, the time and place in its very makeup. It would be ready.
* * *
Noelle’s eyes went wide.
It wasn’t me.
Whatever her body was, the intelligence and purpose that lurked inside her other half, whatever these powers were. It had all gone to the wrong person.
Gone to the wrong person, askew from the beginning, then twisted further by her own psychological issues, messed up by the fact that she’d only taken half a dose.
The realization and the confusion that came with the vision were compounded as she stared at her surroundings.
Her minions surrounded her: two copies of Trickster; a skinny girl with long dark hair, covering herself with her arms and a carpeting of rodents, Skitter; a Grue; a Regent; two blondes who would be copies of the girl in white; four of the civilians, and one she didn’t recognize as any of the civilians she’d absorbed. The tinker. Eight of them in all.
Her flesh was knitting together. Wounds as bad as the ones before, and worse ones. Eidolon had apparently wanted to spare her captives, because the electricity had only affected her, her flesh as it surrounded her bones. He had selected that power with their safety in mind.
And there he was, in front of her. Eidolon, on his knees, covered in bile and blood.
“Why?” he asked, in an eerie, distorted voice.
You want to know why I did this? Where would I start? Why would I even tell you, when you tried to kill me, kill Trickster?
She was breathing too hard to respond, even with her nearly bottomless stamina.
“Why isn’t it working?” he asked.
“I…” she had to stop for breath, “I don’t care. Whatever it is.”
“I was supposed to get stronger, and there’s nothing. Nothing at all to reach for.”
She turned, saw Trickster on his hands and knees, covered in the fluids of her vomit.
You weren’t supposed to hurt him.
You were supposed to give me a nice vision, for that matter, she thought.
“Why?” Eidolon asked.
“I don’t care,” she said, again. She took a deep breath before speaking again, though there was little point, when it was this entire body that was so drained. “I… it’s your choice. We continue this fight, and my creatures run, they do whatever damage they can, and it’s weeks before you find every last one… or you let me go.”
Eidolon struggled to his feet. “Let you go?”
“Three Undersiders down. Three to go. Then I give myself up. Deal stands.”
“What’s to say you keep that promise?”
“Nothing. But you don’t have another choice, do you?”
Eidolon didn’t respond.
“I’ll even let you call in reinforcements,” she offered.
“Your knight in shining armor took it,” Eidolon spoke. “The wristband I use for communications.”
Noelle turned to Trickster, and he extended one hand, holding out one of the wristband displays. Noelle took it.
Her Skitter was watching, looking concerned.
“Don’t fucking look at me,” Noelle spat the words at her minion.
Her Skitter turned her eyes to the ground.
“Trickster said you thrived on this kind of impossible fight. Prove it. Or die horribly. I don’t care.”
Her Skitter looked up and smiled, lopsided. Half the girl’s face was paralyzed, Noelle realized. She wondered if the real Skitter had spaces between each of her teeth like that, or the gnarled twist of a nose.
Noelle turned back to Eidolon, waited for his decision.
“Okay,” he intoned. She gave him a curt nod.
Tentatively, Eidolon slid the armband into place and pressed a button. “Requesting reinforcements to my location. In bad shape, need to mop up some clones.”
Her Regent said something she couldn’t make out. He talked as though his tongue was too large for his mouth. He had more muscle than fit on his frame, stretching his skin almost comically tight. It was easy to believe the problem extended to the inside of his mouth.
“And they let me pass uncontested,” she said.
He spoke into the armband again. “Do not engage target Echidna.”
“Understood,” a woman’s voice came from the armband.
“Echidna?” Noelle asked.
“One of the PRT members coined it,” Eidolon said. He was eyeing her minions warily. “Said he had a three year old girl called Noelle, didn’t want to associate her with something like you.”
“What was his last name?”
Eidolon gave her a wary look. “Meinhardt.”
“Okay,” Noelle said.
Then she turned to run, leaving Trickster behind.
* * *
Her nose led her to the remaining Undersiders.
Back home, insofar as she had one. The same place where she’d been kept contained for weeks. Coil’s headquarters.
Surfacing from her dream, she’d temporarily supplanted the killer instinct that was demanding Eidolon’s head. Now that she was closer, her thoughts were afire with thoughts of revenge, and that killer instinct was welling up again. The idea that she’d maybe had the chance to get back to normal, that her friends had maybe been close to going home, and the Undersiders had taken all that away, it made her want to scream. To inflict punishments worse than death on them.
Her vision from before lingered. The entity. The thing that was taking her over, that had made her a monster, it had an identity, now. She wouldn’t say it had a face, but it was no longer a vague malevolent force, now.
Part of her felt sympathetic for it, because this thing that shared her body had been wronged by some nebulous circumstance. In that, at least, they were kindred.
Another part of her was just bewildered. The memory it had shared with her was so vast, it changed everything, had left her feeling like her problems here were so small, so miniscule. Even this, this fight, her revenge, in a way it felt artificial, false.
It’s not my world, she thought. It’s almost like a game. Killing characters in some false, barbaric setting.
If she felt like she was more in sync with it, now, did that mean she’d lost ground in her perpetual war with the entity, her other half? So much ground lost, so fast, in the heat of this battle?
She shook her head. Focus.
The tunnels that Coil h
ad used to move his trucks in and out of the base had been collapsed, and it had been recent. She could smell the smoke from the explosives. She spat out a Vista, then another, and another, until she had one that could give her a way in, shrinking the rubble and expanding the corridor.
In her restlessness, unable to shake the idea that her sanity was slipping away moment by moment, she pushed her way through the last length of the rubble, absorbing it into herself and spitting it out behind her, moving through it as though she were a thick fluid; even her bones dissolved when needed. The only thing that slowed her down were the capes she’d stored within herself. Each of the three Undersiders, the tinker, and the girl in white. She used her strength to wedge gaps sufficient to squeeze the individual organs through.
She brute-forced her way through the last few feet of the barrier, and paced her way into the interior, the ground shaking with her footfalls. The vault door was still open, crumpled, and the entire interior was lit only by red emergency lights.
Tattletale was on the metal walkway, hands gripping the railing. Bitch was on the ground, with no less than seven dogs around her, each of varying size.
Noelle could smell the Protectorate and Wards members moving towards her location. She was put in mind of the memory her entity had granted her only a little while ago, of the night her team had passed the qualifiers for nationals. She’d passed the point of no return, and now the enemy forces were collapsing in on her.
She smiled a little. She would almost thank Tattletale for this, if she wasn’t so eager to rend the girl limb from limb, to wipe the smile from her face and hear her screams. All that aside, Noelle hadn’t felt more like herself in a long time, and she had these circumstances to thank.
The difference between this scenario and that one, really, was that the reinforcements were minutes away. This fight wouldn’t last that long.
“Well then,” Tattletale grinned. Her tightening grip on the railing betrayed the emotion she was trying to hide. “Come on. Do your worst.”
Scourge 19.1
The school’s bell tolled, oddly deep, with an echo that continued, unending. I couldn’t see it through the cloudy haze that consumed my vision, but I felt as though the lockers were straining against their hinges in keeping with the rhythm. The same went for the floor tiles, and the hundreds of footfalls of the students milling around me. A pounding rhythm.
I couldn’t keep my footing. I was blind, still, but that wasn’t the source of the problem. It seemed vaguely familiar, the way every impact seemed designed to hit me where it hurt, to knock me off-balance and leave me in a state where I was spending too much time reeling and staggering to push back or find safety.
Someone tall shoved past me, and his bag caught on my nose. It tore at the skin between the nostrils, and I could feel warm blood fountaining from the wound. I staggered, bending over with my hands to my face, and someone walked straight into me, as though they didn’t know I was there. My head hit a locker and I fell. Someone stepped on my hand as their vague shape walked by, and I could hear something break, could feel it break. The pain dashed all rational thought from my mind.
I screamed, brought my hand to my chest, cradling it. I was tougher than that, wasn’t I? I wasn’t made of glass, to have bone fracture or—
“You’re so pathetic, Taylor,” Emma intoned.
No. Not now. Not like this.
I could hear Madison tittering. Sophia was silent, and her presence was all the more ominous for it. I’d done something reprehensible to her. I couldn’t recall what it was, but I knew she was here for retaliation.
They struck me, and I fell. Emma and Madison took turns kicking me, and every effort I made to defend myself fell short. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know how to fight, or that I was blind. It was somehow worse, as though every effort I made were being actively punished.
I’d reach out with my good hand to grab one of them and pull them off their feet, and my elbow would get stepped on, forcing it to bend the wrong way. I tried to push myself to a standing position, only for someone to kick me in the back, slamming my chest and face into the tile, hard.
I tried to speak and a kick caught me in the throat.
And all around me, there was the steady rhythm of footsteps and the bell’s echo.
The point was clear. I was supposed to give up. I really should have given up.
If I wasn’t able to do something on my own, maybe a weapon? Some tool? My thoughts were confused and disordered, but I searched through them, as if I could remember if I’d stashed some tool or weapon on my person.
No, something else, I was supposed to have another weapon, though my instinct told me it wasn’t anywhere I could reach, and that was normal. I searched for it—
* * *
The scene was visible through a thousand times a thousand eyes, the colors strangely muted in favor of texture, the images blurring except where they moved, when they became oddly sharp.
Tattletale managed to leap back from the metal walkway as Noelle lunged and caught on the fixture. As Noelle fell, her claws scraping gouges into the concrete walls, the walkway was pulled free. Tattletale had put herself in one of the rooms that extended off the walkway. Coil’s room. There was a doorway to nowhere between herself and Noelle, surrounded by concrete walls that were two or three feet thick at their narrowest point.
Most of the construction of this place had taken place after Coil had found out about Noelle. He’d known there was the possibility that she would go rogue.
Tattletale stepped up to the doorway, drew her gun, and fired, gunning down a Grue that had been vomited out. Blood spattered and he went limp.
* * *
—and I couldn’t find anything. I was unarmed here.
One kick caught me in between the eyebrows, and my head exploded with pain.
That spooked me. I had to protect my head. If I suffered another concussion…
That was the breaking point. My brain was more important than whatever else I was trying to protect. Anything else was fixable. I stopped fighting back, tucking battered legs against my bruised upper body, drawing my hands around my head.
Immediately, the assault stopped being an attempt to break me and destroy my every effort to stand up for myself. It became something more tolerable, with periodic kicks and stomps instead. The accompanying shame and humiliation was almost nostalgic. Horrible, but familiar.
Then Sophia stepped close, and I felt something sliding beneath my hands and arms, settling around my neck. A noose. She used it to lift me, choking, off the ground.
Madison opened the locker, and the rancid smell of it wafted around me. I would have gagged if I could breathe.
Sophia shoved me inside, planting one foot between my shoulder blades as she hauled back on the rope. My unbroken fingers scrabbled for purchase, found only trash and cotton that tore when I tried to grab it. Bugs bit at my flesh and there was nothing I could do to stop them.
Bugs? There was something I thought I should know, something—
* * *
The bugs observed as Tattletale pulled the pin from a grenade. She waited while it sat in her hand. It was dangerous and reckless to ‘cook’ a grenade like they did in the movies, but then again, this was Tattletale. It fit with her nature, and if anyone knew how long the fuse really was, it was her. She tossed it down to where Noelle lurked below.
The grenade detonated just before it made contact, billowing with smoke and radiating enough heat to kill the bugs that were finding their way into the underground base. Other bugs could see the shifting radiance of the flames.
Tattletale shouted, “Rachel! Now!”
* * *
—that eluded me, like the water that escaped the ever-thirsty Tantalus.
As I scrabbled for purchase, the contents of the locker shifted, falling and collapsing against me, pressing tight against my body, smelling like old blood and rancid flesh.
My heart skipped a few beats and I felt as though my blood was tur
ning to sludge in my veins, slowing down. My thoughts dissolved into a slush of memories, speeding through my life in choppy, fragmented, distorted images. I felt momentarily disembodied, as though the line between myself and my surroundings, my mind and my feelings were all blended in together.
When it pulled back, I could finally breathe. I let out a deep, shuddering breath. I could breathe. I could think again.
I heard the sound of blades rasping against one another, the ringing of steel building with each repetition of the sound. I blinked, and the blind haze lifted as though I’d only had tears in my eyes.
Mannequin stood in the center of the room. He had four arms, each ending in three-foot blades, and was sharpening each weapon against the others without pause.
Around him, the factory. Machinery churned, pumps and pistons and levers moved, and furnaces glowed to cast long shadows, casting Mannequin in a crimson light. The people from my territory were there too, along with Sierra, Charlotte, Lisa, Brian, Rachel, my dad, and my teachers. Each of them fought to hide in the shadows and the corners, but there wasn’t enough room.
I carefully assessed the tools I had at my disposal. My gun, my knife, my baton. In a more general sense, there were my bugs. I called for them—
* * *
Tattletale jerked toward the doorway, stopped as one arm stretched behind her with a clink. She’d handcuffed herself to a length of chain, fastening that chain to a rubber-sheathed cluster of wires at the far end of the room. Tattletale’s free hand gripped her gun, pointed it at something narrow… The bugs who were touching the object in question were being absorbed, dying. It was one of Noelle’s tongues, wrapped around Tattletale’s waist.
The gunshot went off, severing the tongue, and the chain went slack. Tattletale dropped to her knees, pressing her gun hand to her shoulder.
The three largest dogs attacked. Bitch sent three, and the result was predictable. Noelle absorbed them as they made contact, though each dog was nearly a third of her own size. Her flesh stretched thin around the mass of each dog, then stretched thinner as they started to swell in size.
