Worm

by wildbow

  “Warp it how?” I asked.

  “Reshape it,” he said. He was still half-walking, half-jogging, but he stretched a white-gloved hand out four feet, touching a sign. His hand smeared against it as though it were more liquid than solid, coloring it the same white as his glove. The sign oozed back into the wall, virtually disappearing, and Annex removed his hand, slowly reeling in the extended flesh. The sign remained where it was, compressed against the wall, the surface flat.

  “Okay,” I said, making a mental note. “Okay, good.”

  “While in there, I’m about as tough as whatever it is I’m controlling,” he added.

  “Alright. Golem?”

  Golem had to stop running to demonstrate. He dropped to one knee and plunged a hand into the street.

  Ahead of us, there was a crash, a grinding noise. A hand made of pavement was reaching out of the ground, five feet long from the base of the wrist to the tip of the middle finger. The fingers seemed to move in slow motion as the hand pushed against stopped cars that were sort of in our way, shoving them to one side of the road.

  The hand submerged back into the road as he withdrew his own hand from the street.

  “Okay,” I said. There’s synergy with Annex. Maybe Tecton too. “Anything I need to know? Limitations?”

  “Whatever I use my hand on, has to match the exit point, pretty much. Asphalt for asphalt, metal for metal, wood for wood.”

  I nodded.

  “Bigger the thing I’m making, slower it comes out, slower it moves when I try to use my fingers.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Lots more, but mainly I can only use my hands, arms, feet and legs. My face, but that’s not too useful.”

  Cuff made a small noise as something crashed in the distance.

  “Cuff?” I asked. She didn’t reply.

  “Cuff!” Tecton raised his voice. It seemed to wake her up.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Your powers. Explain.”

  She shook her head, “Um. The, uh—”

  When she didn’t pull herself together enough to reply, Tecton set a heavily armored hand on her shoulder, “She’s a metallokinetic. Shape and move metal, short-range, including the stuff she’s wearing. Some enhanced strength and durability, too.”

  “Yeah,” Cuff said, her voice quiet. “Not half as cool as those guys.”

  “It’s good,” I said. I noted how she’d paired up with Grace. Did Cuff’s presence have anything to do with the fact that Grace was wearing PRT-issue chainmail? They didn’t give me the vibe that they were a pair in any friendship or romantic sense, but they were two bruisers, two girls in a group of mostly boys, and they were sticking together. That seemed to be enough.

  I was going to say something more, but a crash and the rumble of something falling down nearby stalled that train of thoughts.

  “Oh fuck,” Cuff said under her breath, as lightning struck close by. She was panting, and I suspected it wasn’t the exertion. “Oh hell. Why did I wear a costume made of metal? I’m a walking lightning rod.”

  “You’ve got a regulation suit between the metal and your skin, right?” Tecton asked. “If it’s a type three or type four—”

  “No suit,” Cuff said. She tapped the metal at her collarbone, “Strongest if metal’s in direct contact with my skin. Got a layer that’s almost liquid between this and me.”

  “You didn’t think to change?” he asked.

  “I didn’t think,” she said, her voice quiet, harboring a tremor.

  Why the hell did she come, if she was going to be like this?

  “Fuck,” Wanton said. “You are a lightning rod.”

  “I don’t think you’re any safer or worse off than anyone else,” I said, trying to inject a note of confidence into the discussion. I raised myself a step off the ground to get a better view of what lay ahead. The ground was shaking, a steady, perpetual tremor. “His lightning doesn’t follow regular channels. We’re all lightning rods to him.”

  Cuff didn’t respond. I glanced down to see her frowning.

  “Not reassuring,” Wanton said.

  “It’s the truth,” I said. “We accept it, take it in stride and use it. Can we change that fact? Or use it to our benefit?”

  “He’ll zap us to death with one hit, even if we protect ourselves,” Wanton said. “Yeah. There’s a benefit there.”

  These guys aren’t the Undersiders. Different strengths, different weaknesses. The Undersiders were good at approaching things from an oblique angle, at catching people off guard, being reckless, even borderline fatalistic. They had been more experienced than I was when I joined. It was the other way around here. Even Tecton, the oldest member of the group, the official leader, had less experience than I did.

  I didn’t know them well enough to be able to guess what they brought to the fight. I considered the various powers as I flew from point to point, scouting with eyes and careful use of my swarm. Didn’t want to let any of the mobile ones get burned up.

  The swarm included fruit flies, mosquitoes, cockroaches and house flies, identical or almost identical to the ones back home. Surprising. There were some smaller varieties of cockroach, nearly as numerous as the cockroaches in the peak of Brockton Bay’s worst months, some larger varieties of mosquito, flies I identified as the botflies that had come up in my research, and crickets.

  No game changers, but I hadn’t expected any. The spiders were badass here, at least. The silk wasn’t so good, but even so, big spiders.

  The Wards, their powers, how to use them? I thought. If I went by the PRT classifications, Tecton was a tinker with shaker capabilities. Wanton was a breaker, someone who altered themselves or their relation to the world by some characteristic of his power, becoming a shaker effect, a telekinetic storm. Annex was the same, only he became a living spacial distortion effect, a living application of Vista’s power. Golem, no doubt a shaker. That left Cuff and Grace. I wasn’t sure how to peg Cuff, until I saw her in action, but she and Grace were both melee fighters in a fashion.

  Of the six of them, four were shakers in some respect. The classification included forcefields, effects like Grue’s, and powers that reshaped the battlefield, like Vista’s.

  I’d been doing my reading on the PRT’s terminology, among other things.

  “Battlefield control,” I said. “You guys have battlefield control.”

  “Lots,” Tecton said. “Aimed for it.”

  I gave him a curious look, but this wasn’t the time for explanations. I glanced at each of them in turn, so nobody would feel ignored, “We could try to slow him down, but I’m not sure that’s going to do much. Instead, we’re going to meet up with the Undersiders. I think there has to be something we can do with them. Citrine, maybe Grue. They’re versatile, and I’ve worked with them. In the meantime, we’re doing damage control. Seeing what we can do to keep Behemoth—”

  Another lightning strike made the ground shake. Cuff shrieked, and I grit my teeth. We barely had two seconds of reprieve between flashes of lightning. They lanced down from the dark clouds of smoke overhead, more red than yellow, and the thunder seemed more intense than it should be. That wasn’t the worrisome part. Behemoth was periodically hitting us with something bigger. Bolts of lightning big enough to erase a small house from the landscape.

  “—We’re going to do what we can to keep him from murdering people,” I completed my thought, belatedly.

  “Right,” Tecton said.

  “You know about earthquakes and architecture, Tecton?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What can we do about the shockwaves, or whatever else he’s been doing to make the ground shake?”

  “I have ideas. Not perfect, won’t hold for long, but ideas.”

  “Good. And we were talking about lightning rods,” I said.

  “You said they don’t matter.”

  “The drones Dragon used redirected his lightning. Golem? How big can you go? Optimal conditions?”

 
; “Depends on the amount of space at the destination. I’d need a big piece of solid material, and I’d need time.”

  “We’ll find an opportunity then,” I said. “We’ll figure out a way to make this work.”

  The crash of something being knocked or thrown through a building half a block away nearly made me jump out of my skin. The others had ducked for cover, too late to have mattered if it had been real danger.

  “Keep moving,” I ordered.

  “Three of us are in heavy armor,” Tecton said. “You can’t really run in armor like mine.”

  “I get it,” I said, even as I knew the Undersiders were getting further away. “Do the best you can.”

  Mobility and transportations were problems. I wondered if there were ways to fix that. Even if we found Rachel and the others, I doubted we could put Tecton on a dog. I couldn’t remember which, but I sort of recalled that Wanton or Grace had been a little shy of the dogs, too, so that option was out.

  But if we could make this work…

  Most people had evacuated at this point, with only a handful of stragglers occasionally passing us, giving us wary looks.

  I drew arrows in the air to direct the remaining civilians away from the stampede of people, putting them on a general route where smoke didn’t seem to be heavy, and where I hadn’t been able to see or sense any fire.

  Other heroes were joining the fray. I saw Eidolon pass overhead, surrounded by what looked like a shimmer of heat in the air. A forcefield? Something else entirely? If there were more with him, I couldn’t see them through the smoke.

  I resumed my recon, continuing to expand the swarm that was keeping me company. My range was extensive, now, with a radius of maybe one thousand, eight hundred feet. That extended a fraction further as I zig-zagged over the area, picking up more bugs on the fringes and bringing them to me.

  I stopped when I saw a short crane, three or four stories tall. I turned around to meet the others, perching on the corner of a rooftop. I pointed the way with ambient bugs, “Tecton, this way. Take a shortcut, right through the building. I don’t want to lose any time if we can help it.”

  “Right,” he said.

  It took only a minute for them to reach the crane.

  “We’ve got two people who can distort metal,” I said. “Annex and Cuff. Maybe Wanton can help too. Tear it down. We’re making our lightning rod.”

  “You sure?” Tecton asked. “Because this makes a pretty good lightning rod on its own.”

  I glanced nervously over in the direction where the smoke and lightning flashes were most intense. If he shot us, right here, right now, and turned the crane into a tesla tower, this might be my dumbest move yet. I perched on the corner of a building, where I still had a measure of cover, and watched the battle in the distance. I could see Legend’s lasers through the smoke, hundreds at a time, radiating out from one central point, from Legend himself, and then turning sharply in the air to strike Behemoth.

  Behemoth was using flame, which was some small reassurance, and he was occupied with the two remaining members of the Triumvirate.

  “Yeah. Do it.”

  Both Annex and his costume merged into the base of the tower, and gradually climbed up to the point where the upper part still stood. He could only ‘annex’ part of the object at one time, it seemed. No surrounding a whole building. He set about breaking the bonds, and the crane’s arm began to bend. Cuff caught one end of it, then began heaving it towards the tower’s base. The other half snapped off, and Annex helped guide it down, sliding it against the crane’s shaft.

  It was costing us time, this project. I felt impatient, was worried it wouldn’t work, and these would be wasted minutes we could be doing something else.

  But they were making it happen, putting the pieces of our project together. Cuff was walking around the crane’s base, effectively melting the metal, or reshaping it so it formed a flattened blob. Annex tore the rest apart, so Cuff had more material to work with.

  When Cuff was done, Annex slipped down to the blob and flattened it out further.

  “A little thicker,” Golem said.

  Annex ‘swam’ around the blob’s perimeter, shifting more material towards the center. Cuff drew a blob of metal out of the pad and shaped it into a disk for Golem.

  “A lot of synergy in this team,” I commented.

  “Sort of aimed for that,” Tecton said. “They took everyone willing to leave Chicago, to support other cities that lost more members, offered incentives to the rookies if they were willing to move to another city. Your-parents-can-afford-not-to-work-for-a-year kind of incentives. I drafted these guys because I thought their powers would work well together.”

  “Drafted?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I mean, most teams are lucky if they get a few members with a good interaction, with some more on the fringes that they have to work around and fit into the mix. We had a good setup with Raymancer, before he got too sick to move. A strong, versatile ranged attacker with the rest of us situated to protect him, right?”

  I nodded.

  “After seeing the Undersiders at work, I started to think we need to be less mix-and-match. Form teams with specific goals in mind. New York sort of does that.”

  “I know they have a team of ‘lancers’. Forward vanguard, fast moving.”

  “Exactly, and they’re also considered one of the better teams. Maybe we all need to do that. Except New York can do it because they’ve got a lot of capes. Rest of us are making do. Other team leaders are going for versatility, to cover every base. I say fuck that. We build around a concept, a game plan. Once I decided on that, I went out of my way to ask for Annex, even though another team had already picked him up. Made my argument, Chevalier gave the A-okay.”

  “And where do I fit in? Defiant said you were the one team that seemed interested in including me. I guess I sort of fit into a shaker category, in a roundabout way.”

  “That, and we’ve fought on the same side. I saw what you managed with Clockblocker’s power and yours. You stopped Alexandria, too, and all that other stuff we were warned not to bring up.”

  I tilted my head to indicate mild confusion.

  “They didn’t want us to mention how you’ve kicked ass as a villain. Way Revel explained it, they wanted to see if you’d boast about it, to see just how badly you wanted a leadership role, where you’d get frustrated and how you’d act.”

  I frowned behind my mask, but I didn’t comment.

  “Anyways, the problem with this team going this route, focusing on the one thing, is we’re very weak against certain approaches, strong against others. We need a certain kind of leader for that, and I know you pulled it off with the Undersiders.”

  “I hope I can live up to that kind of expectation,” I said.

  “I know it’s lame of me, that it might look like I’m trying something experimental and setting you up to take the fall if it fails—”

  “No,” I told him. “I don’t get that vibe.”

  The ground tremored. I worried briefly that the construction would tip, but it didn’t. How long would it stand tall once it was at its full height?

  “Good,” he said. “Because that’s not what I’m doing.”

  I was watching the others work, The pad of metal was about twenty feet across, now. A circular disk with a flat surface on the top. “Okay. I think I can play ball, if that’s the case. It’s good. I like your line of thinking, about the team.”

  He offered me a ‘heh’ before answering, “Of course. I’m a pro when it comes to putting stuff together.”

  “Putting buildings together,” Wanton chimed in, forming back into his real body. Dust billowed around his feet.

  “That’s my power, but I’m not limited to that,” Tecton said. “You guys don’t need any help?”

  “Save your juice.”

  Golem started to put his hand into the plate of metal he’d been given, then hesitated, “I won’t be able to move my hand once it appears, if I go thi
s big. What shape should my hand be?”

  “Middle finger extended,” Grace suggested. “A big ‘fuck you’ to the Endbringer.”

  “That’d look bad for the PRT,” Tecton told her.

  “Tell them it’s the most efficient form,” she said, with a shrug. “Have to make it as tall as possible.”

  “No,” Tecton said. “Index finger would work nearly as well, and New Delhi might take offense at a metal statue of an obscene gesture in the middle the disaster area.”

  “A ‘v’,” Cuff suggested, making the gesture with her index and middle fingers. Her voice was shaky, her confidence rock bottom. “For victory. Almost as good.”

  “A ‘v’ for victory,” Tecton answered. “Good. Thank you, Cuff.”

  That’s really lame, I thought, but I held my tongue. Too easy to become the bad guy, here, and it was a resolution to the stupid, petty argument, giving us the chance to move on.

  Cuff smiled a little in response to the praise, though, then winced as Grace punched her in the arm. I heard Grace mutter, “Spoilsport.”

  Cuff’s smile returned to her face a moment later.

  And maybe it’s good for Cuff, to have something constructive to offer. She looked a touch more confident, smiling nervously as she followed Grace. Cuff didn’t seem like she was growing numb to the sounds or vibrations of the destruction Behemoth was inflicting on us.

  Golem started to push his hands into the plate. The gauntlet’s fingertips were already emerging, a mirror-replica to Golem’s own gauntlet. A hand half as wide as a house, slowly rising from the platform.

  Annex dove into the ground, and circled the platform, binding it to the street. He disappeared beneath the ground, then emerged a few seconds later, pulling his cloak tight around himself. “Reinforcing, so it doesn’t fall over on us. Also, brought a spike of metal into the ground.”

  “I can help,” Golem said. He reached his other hand into the ground, and a smaller hand fashioned out of pavement lurched out of the ground to rest against the base of the arm. He withdrew his hand, leaving the pavement hand in place, then repeated the process, until six arms were supporting the spire. “Not sure how well that works as it grows.”