Worm

by wildbow

  The man with the beard was Gavel. Cell block leader. A vigilante who had gone after families, particularly spouses and children, all so he could break his enemies before his namesake weapon could. He’d been notorious in the days before the three strike rule or even the code. Even with that, people had lost patience with his ‘mission’ when a villain had threatened to detonate a small bomb, and Gavel had called a bluff that wasn’t a bluff. Gavel had walked away. Many, many others hadn’t.

  A woman ventured forth. Her hair was long, her features matronly. She wore a prison uniform that had been cut apart and pieced together into heavier cargo pants and a jacket. Lustrum. Part-celebrity, part-antihero, she’d gathered a following of college-aged feminists, building up an almost religious fervor, before giving the fateful orders that turned things violent, pushing her thousands of followers to humiliate men, often violently. Things soon escalated to the point that more fanatical followers were emasculating and murdering men, even carving up followers who weren’t playing along.

  My mom had, in her graduate school days, been a part of one of Lustrum’s groups. She’d backed out around the time things turned violent. I’d heard her wonder out loud, to Lacey, my dad’s coworker, whether Lustrum had intended for things to get as bad as they had.

  But they had. A lot of people had suffered.

  Weird to think about, that my mom had been in the midst of this, and here we were, the loop closing.

  A woman, thin, with her hair cut short, with swooping, platinum-blond ‘feathering’ at the sides, to the point that I couldn’t tell if it was just messy or styled that way. Her eyes were the sort that looked like they were usually half closed, her features pointed. She moved with a strange kind of fluidity, as if she had twice the usual number of joints, limbs like spaghetti noodles. They weren’t. It was Crane The Harmonious. Crane for short.

  The records of her arrest were spotty, suggesting things had been redacted or hidden, no doubt to protect her ‘children’ that had gone on to careers in the Wards or Protectorate. She’d collected children with powers and raised them to be her soldiers.

  She walked into the crowd, and came face to face with a hero, twenty or so years old, wearing a robe.

  She stood on the very tips of her toes to raise herself up enough to kiss him on the forehead. The kiss was prolonged to a point that it went past weird. The next portal was already opening by the time she lowered herself and stood with her back to her old subject’s chest.

  Acidbath. Copkiller and capekiller, he’d used his power to horrifically scar innumerable opponents and girlfriends. His blond hair wasn’t the grass-green of his mugshots anymore, and he had circles under his eyes. He took one step away from the portal, then sat on the ledge in front of the crowd, searching for something, then settling into a stare when he found it.

  I looked, and I saw a man, not in costume but in a suit, standing and staring at Acidbath, with an expression as though he was going to cry at any moment. But he didn’t avert his eyes.

  String Theory and Lab Rat stepped out of the same portal. String Theory was short, shorter with her slouch, and petite, her dark hair tied back into a braid, her lips pulled back into a wide expression halfway between a grin and a smile. With her glasses, it made me think of a frog, or a small lizard. Lab Rat was the opposite, the last person one might expect to be a tinker. He had a mouth full of teeth that were screaming for braces, all crammed towards the very front of his mouth, overlapping and sticking out of lower gums. He had a mop of hair and heavy brows, was tall and broad shouldered, and had a bit of a belly.

  String Theory had made her tinker devices and then auctioned away ‘safeties’. Not uses of the weapon or offering targets, but only guarantees that the owner of a ‘safety’ wouldn’t be one of her randomly selected targets. The targets had ranged from gas stations in Indonesia to a filled football stadium in Cardiff.

  As one could imagine, there had been a high demand for her arrest.

  Lab Rat, conversely, had worked in secret, developing formulas that could transform people into monsters. He had used formulas on the homeless, then when the local homeless ran out, started picking off individuals that were isolated, out for jogs in the early morning or new visitors to his town. It wasn’t clear just what he was searching for, in developing the formulas. What I found myself wondering was whether he’d been testing his work on his test subjects before using them on himself, or if it was the other way around.

  Both ideas were weird, almost inexplicable.

  Galvanate appeared. He’d been one of a number of players that had supplanted the local organized crime in the early-to-mid-nineties. A mafia enforcer with powers who had decided he had what it took to be a boss. He’d done well, rendering entire squads of his soldiers effectively invincible, simultaneously capable of electrocuting someone to death with a touch.

  Nothing short of Alexandria or an Endbringer would stand up to Scion’s sustained laser beam for even a heartbeat, but there was hope that Galvanate would render some people capable of surviving a glancing blow.

  Black Kaze. A Japanese urban legend that had turned out to be too real. Word was she’d snapped after Kyushu was destroyed. Except she’d remained lucid throughout trials, calm, patient. Nobody knew her real body count, but conservative estimates put it in the tens of thousands. She’d roamed the remains of the landscape, killing survivors, killing rescuers, boarding the ships that approached too close to the ruined area and killing the crews, and rendering a widespread area devoid of life.

  And with that reputation, she was only an exceedingly ordinary looking Japanese woman in prison sweats, her hair tied back into a ponytail. The fingers of her right hand clutched and grasped as if she expected to find something there, missed, and then reached again.

  They’d apparently talked to her and considered her okay to go out and interact with the world at large.

  I watched as Masamune stepped away from Defiant and the Guild members to approach Black Kaze.

  They stood there for a moment, inside each other’s personal space, still but for the reflexive opening and closing of Black Kaze’s hand.

  Masamune returned to the cluster of Guild, and Black Kaze followed, directly behind him, head bowed a little.

  Ingenue, not quite the pixie I’d seen in her mug shot, eight years later. She’d been wide-eyed and cute before. Now she was an attractive woman, but not quite someone who could have starred as the girl next door in a teen movie.

  Hopefully she had changed in her habits, as well. She’d partnered herself with three male capes, heroes. They had gone to the Birdcage, and records suggested they hadn’t survived more than a day after her return. When the fourth partner had used his power to poison a town’s water supply, killing nearly a thousand people, people started wondering about the common denominator—the girlfriend. The fourth had gone to therapy, and Ingenue had made her way to the Birdcage.

  She extended a hand, pointing a painted nail, and swept her hand over the crowd. She settled on her target.

  Her walk was a practiced one, with a swaying of the hips, an unhurried pace. She approached Chevalier, then wrapped her arms around him, raising one leg off the ground. Chevalier, for his part, didn’t move a muscle.

  Marquis was next to arrive. His brown hair and beard were just now starting to get strands of gray in them, wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.

  He’d been one of the scary bastards of Brockton Bay well before the Undersiders were even on the map. A guy who could go toe to toe with a full squad of Empire Eighty-Eight and walk away. He’d been successful enough to pay for hirelings and ruthless enough to execute them for failures. His path to the Birdcage had been very similar to the path that had almost taken me there; so many violations of the law that the three strikes rule had been left well behind him by the time the good guys finally won.

  He didn’t look quite so intense as his mug shot. He seemed calmer.

  Even sorrowful.

  He approached the crowd, and he stop
ped in front of a woman I recognized but couldn’t place.

  In the moment she slapped him, I drew the connection.

  Lady Photon. Sarah Pelham.

  Flashbang and Brandish were with her, looking just as grim.

  All around them, people were tensed for a fight.

  That stopped when Marquis nodded solemnly. He murmured a few words, then walked away, standing on the same ledge that Acidbath had perched on, a little to the right of Lab Rat and String Theory.

  Teacher emerged, and I searched the crowd for Saint.

  Absent.

  Teacher was a mundane looking man. If one were to put a argyle sweater and khakis on him and put him in a classroom, he would have looked well at home. He had a receding hairline, with curly hair that had been cut short-ish.

  Crimes: conspiracy to assassinate the Vice President of the United States. Successful. Conspiracy to assassinate the Prime Minister of England. Successful. He picked big targets, took his time and was successful. Setting up his pawns and giving them the low level thinker powers they needed for observation and information gathering, for getting glimpses of the future or intuitively knowing how to hack or decrypt, or for knowing the weaknesses of their enemies and how best to hurt them.

  Followers that remained absolutely loyal as long as they had the granted powers.

  Saint had wanted him more than he had wanted to retain his control over Dragon’s power. Why?

  Because having Teacher free would give Saint the capacity to regain control of that power and to use it at its full capacity?

  It didn’t matter. We’d win this first and then we’d deal with that. Whatever Teacher was capable of, it couldn’t be worse than Scion.

  In a manner typical for royalty, Glaistig Uaine was fashionably late. The Faerie Queen.

  Just like String Theory’s terror campaign had driven people to desperation in their attempts to stop her from her scheduled sprees of destruction, Glaistig Uaine had drawn entire flocks of capes down on her head, by virtue of her habit of finding, killing and claiming the ‘spirits’ of capes.

  Thing was, they’d sent multiple teams after her, and they’d failed. Thirty two capes killed and claimed.

  So they sent more after her. Again, they failed. Of the fifty who were forced into a retreat, thirteen were killed and claimed.

  When that wasn’t enough, they hit her with everything, only for her to surrender.

  She walked into the Birdcage of her own will.

  Now they’d let her out.

  The cell block leaders. They’d held their own, maintained their territories, and had been okayed to stick around by the thinkers. That double-check didn’t have as much weight as it should have, given how this one group alone had no less than three ways to screw with thinkers.

  But they were firepower.

  We had roughly forty-five minutes to half an hour before we’d take our first shot at Scion. Try as much as we could while risking as little as possible. These guys would be assets at best. Cannon fodder at worst.

  Other prisoners were arriving. Dozens. Some seemed to be subordinate to the cell block leaders. Others, they didn’t look like they had a place to go. I watched Lustrum beckon to a girl with yellow feathers in her hair, and the girl didn’t budge.

  I saw Lung step forth, in the company of several capes. He stopped, taking in a deep breath, then exhaled with a volume I could hear. He was shirtless, and didn’t move to cover himself up, even with the cold. His eyes roved over the crowd, and settled momentarily on me, on Rachel, and Grue.

  Then Panacea stepped out.

  She was different, her wild brown curls tied back into a plait, her face thinner, with more pronounced cheekbones. She wore a camisole, with her prison jacket tied around her waist. Tattoos marked the length of her arms. A sun held a position of prominence on her right arm, a heart with a sword on the left.

  The simple tattoos, symbols and ideas got denser as they got closer to her hands, and a vibrant red ink marked the space between the individual black and white images.

  Blood on her hands.

  I was very aware of how the common prisoners around her stepped away when she stepped forward.

  Very aware of how Lung spoke to her, casually, his voice a low bass rumble as she scanned the crowd. Her eyes locked onto the members of New Wave. Her mom and dad.

  Brandish advanced, wrapping her arms around Panacea.

  Panacea received the hug in a stiff way. Her eyes were downcast.

  As if to distract herself, she raised her eyes, scanning the crowd. Her eyes fixed on me, on Rachel, Grue and Imp.

  I saw a momentary look of puzzlement cross her face as she looked at Sophia standing off to one side, then back to me.

  She mouthed a word. I didn’t hear it over the murmurs of the crowd, the discussions.

  What?

  Then her eyes fell on someone else. On Bonesaw.

  Bonesaw raised her hand in a short wave.

  This time I heard Panacea.

  “Fuck me.”

  Extinction 27.4

  The last portal closed. The Birdcage had been emptied of everyone that could reasonably be let free, and probably a handful that shouldn’t.

  We’d deal with that later.

  “No faces present that shouldn’t be?” Chevalier asked. Ingenue was standing beside him.

  “Every person on the list has a corresponding face in the crowd,” Defiant said. “Going by the facial recognition program.”

  Chevalier nodded. “With respect, I’d like to ask everyone who isn’t participating in the upcoming confrontation to please leave. The others, your enemies, your teammates, friends or family, they need to focus on stopping Scion.”

  Crowds had body language and attitudes much as individuals did. Though they were mingled with the capes in the area, the people who’d arrived to see the people leaving the Birdcage were easy to pick out. They shifted position, as if Chevalier’s request had a physical force to it, a wind pushing at them. Then they planted their heels. Hesitation, out of love or out of hatred.

  But the portals opened, leading to different worlds.

  “Bet, New York!” someone announced, as a portal opened. “Bet, Red Fist HQ! Gimel, New Brockton settlement!”

  More portals opened as locations were announced.

  The bystanders began filing away as their destinations were called out. I was surprised to see New Wave among them. Brandish said something to Panacea, squeezed her hand, and then turned to leave.

  Had they retired? Given up on fighting? Or was this simply a fight on a scale they weren’t prepared or able to participate in?

  “I’m going to go,” Rachel said.

  “Yep,” Imp said. “No use for us here.”

  I looked at them.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Me as well,” Grue said. “Cozen—”

  “No,” I said.

  He stopped, tilting his head at a funny angle, as if he could get a better understanding of me by viewing me from a skewed perspective.

  “You’re not useless. I get if you don’t have the courage, but your power, there’s potential. Even if it doesn’t work, that tells us a lot.”

  He folded his arms. “If you say so.”

  I nodded.

  “Okay,” he said.

  He stepped back as Rachel and Imp made their way to Gimel.

  Parian and Foil hugged, and then Parian passed through, leaving Foil behind.

  Sophia turned to go as well, very casually avoiding eye contact with me. She didn’t want me to raise an issue, so she was slinking away.

  I drew bugs from the other side of the portal together, then whispered a message to her. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  She turned, but the people behind her were pushing forward. She couldn’t exactly turn back to retort.

  The portals closed.

  “Forty-five minutes,” Chevalier announced. “We’ve got Defiant and Tattletale at systems, managing Dragon’s A.I. and running the data.
They are your resource, the people you go to if you need something, be it information or materials.”

  I glanced at the Azazel. Tattletale was sitting on the ramp, while Defiant stood at the end, near Chevalier. Tattletale would process the data, picking up the essential details, while Defiant would handle the lion’s share of the code.

  “They should be able to accommodate all requests, so don’t be shy. Keep them updated on everything, the plans, the weapons, the possible applications of your powers. They’ll categorize and prioritize your plans and we’ll relay that information to people with the ability to put that into a plan.”

  To Cauldron, I thought.

  “Forty five minutes isn’t a very long time,” Lab Rat commented. His voice was a rasp.

  “No. But Defiant has been mapping Scion’s route with his analysis engines, and Scion is somewhat predictable. He’s spent the last few hours veering between extremes, choosing different kinds of targets. He strikes a major population center, then scales down to strike a select target. Individuals, a subcategory of the population like adults or capes, or properties. Right now he’s in one of those lulls. We expect that, in forty-five minutes, he’ll move on to a bigger target again. With luck, this attack will serve to distract him and buy us time to finish evacuating.”

  “He’s tough,” Defiant said. “You know that. He took on Behemoth with minimal effort. This is an attempt to see if we can find his limit, any weak spot, weapons that work. If we can, we expand, extrapolate. Keep that in mind and prepare accordingly.”

  “Alright! Let’s move!” Chevalier announced. “First up, a door to the New York sub-office!”

  The portal began to open. Chevalier continued, “If you don’t have access to costumes or weapons, we’ll outfit you here. Defiant and Tattletale will direct you to other locations for other goods.”

  I watched as a bulk of the forces began to head through the gate to the New York location. Chevalier and Revel stood by the portal, watching the various capes as they made their way through.

  I, too, hung back, watching. I could get a fresh costume and a spare flight pack easily enough. I wanted to know what the others were doing. The people who were hanging back.