Worm

by wildbow

  For just an instant, my feet left the ground. I landed, but I landed with one foot on Rachel’s calf. I fell.

  Too much like fighting Contessa. Everything winding up positioned just right. Damn it.

  On my back, I was vulnerable, but Golem was covering me. This kid with the dress clothes was slippery, efficient, but the way his movements played out… maybe not quite on Contessa’s level. Contessa would have found a way to attack and defend at the same time, instead of being stuck evading Golem’s power.

  I tried to haul air into my lungs and coughed instead. If they killed us before we got far enough…

  Stupid, all of this, so stupid.

  “Stop,” I spoke through my swarm.

  The kid drew knives from his pockets. Small knives, with blades no longer than a finger.

  Still confident, still sure of his victory.

  A connection formed in my head. I knew, in an instant. Harbinger.

  Cauldron had collected some of the remaining clones from Jack’s army.

  The Number Man used to be in the Slaughterhouse Nine?

  No, couldn’t get distracted. I was up against a kid with an analysis power that was off the charts, he’d dodge whatever I threw at him.

  I used my pepper spray again. This time, I aimed at the two boys who had Bastard pinned. Opponents who couldn’t dodge, not without giving up an advantage. They moved out of the way, and in the process they let Bastard climb to his feet. He was half-again as large as he had been, a ridge of stegosaurus spikes along his spine, more spikes and barbs framing his face. He growled, and it wasn’t a dog sound. It wasn’t a wolf sound either.

  Bringing two more of the kids into the fight, but now I had Bastard for backup.

  Up until Alexandria-Pretender grabbed Huntress and hurled her at us. Me, Golem, Rachel, and Bastard were slammed into the far wall by Huntress’s bulk.

  Lung was still growing, still changing, and his throat was broad enough now that she couldn’t do more than dig her fingertips into the front of it, but he still couldn’t break free of her grasp.

  He opted for a second option, leveling a hand at the Doctor, Manton, the Number Man and the crowd of boys. Fire erupted forth. A half-second’s worth, before Alexandria threw him down and kicked him full-force into the wall beside us.

  No use. The Siberian had saved them with her ability to grant her own invulnerability effect. Thankfully. If he’d torched them, all of this would have been for nothing.

  Had to account for Lung’s behavior. Keep it in mind. He had a kind of pride, and it had nearly fucked us on two occasions so far.

  “We’re—” I started to speak.

  But Lung roared, drowning me out as he pulled free of Alexandria’s grasp. Not breaking her grip, but rending his own throat, tearing jugular and vein, windpipe even, in his furious attempt to get free.

  Alexandria turned as Lung fell into a fighting stance. Less a martial artist’s stance than an animal, low to the ground, chest heaving to pull air through the gushing wound in his throat, a glare leveled at his opponent.

  “Stop!” Imp called out.

  It took me a second to place her. Behind the Doctor, a knife pressed against the Doctor’s throat. She pulled the Doctor back, away from Siberian. “If any of you move, I cut. This is—”

  The Number Man fired something from hip level. A spark marked the bullet’s contact point at the mouth of the hole we’d come through. The weapon flew from Imp’s hand.

  “—pointless,” Imp finished.

  The Siberian crossed the distance, then stopped beside the Doctor. She put a hand on the Doctor’s shoulder.

  More fighting. I clenched my fists. Stupid.

  “Scion’s here,” I said, taking advantage of the momentary pause in the fighting.

  Two and a half words to cut through the tension. I could see the change in the Doctor’s demeanor, the Number Man, even the Manton clone. One of the most powerful groups in the world, in every sense of the word, in raw powers, in political power, influence, knowledge, and they were spooked.

  I hadn’t wanted to win, only to buy a chance to talk. Now this was it, and I had to get them to listen. Simpler was better. Straight to the point.

  “We don’t have reason to trust you,” the Doctor said. “We’ve interacted, Weaver, I have a level of respect for you, but that doesn’t extend to equal measures of trust. You’re dangerous, and I can’t rule out that this is an assassination attempt.”

  Translation: pure denial. You don’t want to believe me.

  “He’s upstairs and he’s coming now,” I said.

  “That—” the Doctor started. She paused, as if reflecting, taking in the implications, then shook her head a little. “That doesn’t change anything. I still can’t take your word for gospel.”

  That sounded less like pure denial and more like outright suspicion. A step forward, I was pretty sure.

  The whole structure rattled. I felt things sway a touch.

  The Doctor looked up, then looked down at me, her gaze level, eyes narrowed slightly. It was the first time I’d seen her with her hair down, rather than pinned up with chopsticks or some ornate pin.

  “I don’t know what to say, except that things are pretty fucking dire,” I said. “Satyr’s dead, for one thing.”

  Alexandria flinched as though I’d slapped her and she had felt it.

  I looked at her. “His team, dead. The prisoners you guys had on the second, third and fourth floors, all dead or dying as we speak. Read my expression, use Alexandria’s power, tell me I’m wrong.”

  When Alexandria replied, the voice wasn’t quite Alexandria’s. “I’m afraid I haven’t had the chance to study that in depth to the degree she did.”

  “It’s fine,” the Doctor said. “I’m willing to believe it, if this is an assassination attempt, I’ll take the risk.”

  “If it was an assassination attempt,” Imp said, appearing at the far end of the room, “I’d have offed you.”

  The Doctor glanced her way. “And you are?”

  Imp sighed.

  “We’ll make our way downstairs,” the Doctor decided. “William, please rotate the column while our… guests pick themselves up.”

  Manton approached a computer terminal set into the wall and began typing.

  Pick ourselves up. As if they hadn’t just bludgeoned their way through us.

  Manton’s work at the computer produced results. The swaying feeling I’d experienced a moment ago hit me again. Everything I could see was still, but for people trying to catch their balance, but my non-parahuman senses told me we were moving.

  It faded. Rachel ordered her dogs to stand, and the pile of us got ourselves sorted out. Lung was just at the midway point between human and monster, covered head to toe in overlapping metal scales, his neck a little too long, his shoulders too broad, had a claw pressed to the bleeding throat wound. By all rights, he should have been dead, but regeneration and an inhuman constitution went a long way.

  Huntress got out of the way, and I made my way to my feet. I could feel the dull pain where bruises would emerge. If I lived that long.

  There was another rumble, and a feeling like I was swaying, my sense of balance not quite right. Not Manton, so it had to be Scion. Had the steel column moved a fraction? Had it been intentional on Scion’s part, or a result of the action upstairs?

  The Number Man gave Cuff a hand in standing, and she began folding up the metal around her neck, repairing the armor. She withdrew the wickedly sharp spikes at the knee and the base of her wrist, where she’d been shaping weapons in case she needed to fight her way free of his grip.

  He only smiled, tapping one spike with his pen before it slipped into her costume. Cuff’s expression, where her lower face was visible beneath the layered visor she wore, wasn’t the slightest bit amused.

  The boys with suits tended to the three prisoners and the two wounded. Alexandria tore off a thick metal table leg and wound it to bind Gully’s hands behind her back, before hois
ting the unconscious case fifty-three up, carrying her.

  “I’m sorry,” the Number Man said, to Rachel. “For the behavior of my clones. They’re inaccurate, based on hearsay and speculation more than fact. I was more polite, back then, more efficient.”

  Rachel just gave him a funny look and shrugged her way past him.

  I was tense. It wasn’t just the fight we’d left behind. Here, we had answers available, but so little time.

  I held out my hands. Floret’s crystal with my knife inside dropped from the hole in the ceiling.

  The Doctor typed a code into a keypad at the end of the room, and the Siberian opened the door beside it, turning a wheel to unlock it, then pushing the thick metal door open with a disconcerting ease. Clone or not, she was still the Siberian in power.

  With the door now open, we were faced with a corridor, wide enough for my group to walk side by side, the Doctor’s group leading the way in front of us. Vials lined the walls around us, set into an arrangement of metal wires that kept them lined up, multiple vials of the same color lined up beside another arrangement of vials. Except nearly every vial was empty. There was only glass, no fluid inside. Where fluid did exist, the light filtered through and cast dark blotches of color on the gray walls behind.

  But if I counted them, if I used my bugs to note the ones that had contents…

  One or two hundred, maybe, with fluid still inside.

  “Our stock,” the Doctor said. “Nearly depleted. We gave the formulas out for free, in hopes of turning out parahumans that could do damage to Scion. We retained only the volatile ones.”

  “Volatile can be good,” I said. My eyes noted the sheer number of vials. Tens of thousands, even, virtually covering the walls on either side of us.

  “Volatile can kill three quarters of the people who ingest it,” the Doctor said. “Or generate case fifty-threes we can’t use.”

  “Right,” I said. “Nevermind, then.”

  Each was marked with a combination of letters and numbers, and a title. I read the names of the ones that still had fluid inside.

  Abel. Abbatoir. Access. Ace. Aegis. Air. Alchemy. Alias. Alpha. Amaze…

  “So many,” a voice said.

  The ball with Sveta inside.

  “Quite a few,” the Doctor said.

  “All tested on people?” Sveta asked.

  “Yes,” the Doctor said.

  “I remember, you know,” Sveta said. “I dream of home. I was a fisherman’s daughter. There were these beautiful little huts with flat roofs, orange clay brick against gray mountains, with green-blue grass and ocean. It was cramped, and I had to share space with my family, my siblings… but I was okay with it. There weren’t any boys my age to marry, and I didn’t want to move to another town to look for a husband, so I just stayed by myself. I’d draw, and there was a peace in it. I still like to draw, I find it helps me relax… but it’s hard because my tendrils break the brushes and pencils. And then I don’t feel relaxed anymore.”

  “We’ve caused you difficulties,” the Doctor said, not even looking at Sveta. She walked quickly, her eyes roving over the rows and columns of vials.

  “I can’t remember my mother tongue, Doctor. I can’t remember my daddy’s face, or my mommy, or either of my brothers. I’ve just got the faces I see in dreams. Every morning I was in the asylum, I would wake up and I scramble to draw something, to put words in a diary, and I’m so excited and panicked and desperate I’d break things.”

  The Doctor wasn’t reacting.

  “I know I used to draw, but I can’t find the style I used to draw in. I dream about the night you took me, you know.”

  “Not me, surely. I sent others.”

  “You sent people like me to take me. Case fifty-threes. Branded. Abominations. Demons. There’s names for us all over the world. It was storming, I was delirious, and they came, they grabbed me, and I all I could think was that the old stories were true, and I said something I can’t remember. You took me to a lab and you unraveled me with that drug of yours, and then you dropped me in the middle of nowhere, with just enough memories to know that I should be human.”

  “We gave you a second chance.”

  “I didn’t ask for one.”

  “It’s very possible your town stood to be destroyed by a storm—”

  “If you’d asked, I would’ve wanted to weather it.”

  “Or by plague, starvation. It could be the cause for your delirium.”

  “I would’ve stuck it out. You’re not listening to me, Doctor.” A flare of anger. The ball bucked with the movement inside.

  “There are more immediate problems to focus on,” the Doctor said. “I understand where you’re coming from, but this isn’t the time to play ‘what if’.”

  “I’m not playing,” Sveta said, and the anger was gone, just as fast as it had appeared. “I’m—I’m telling you that if you’d asked, at any point along the way, I’d probably have told you I’d rather be dead. I’d rather be dead than live this new life you gave me, where I spent years killing people by accident, unable to sleep, killing stray animals for food because my body decides when I eat, not my mind…”

  “I understand,” the Doctor replied. She sounded a little impatient. “Then damn me. Curse me. Tell me I will go to hell for what I did. At the end of this, I will face any and all punishment that I’m due, alive or dead. For now, we see our way through this.”

  “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to get off with… words and sentiment. Gully told me she’d break down in tears all the time, because moving her arms, being strong enough to break things, it reminded her of what she is, every time she did anything. Her power reminded her, being constantly aware of the ground around her. Weld… he told me once that he felt like he was going crazy. All he had was music. It was the only human thing he could enjoy, because he couldn’t taste. He couldn’t feel, even when I squeezed him hard enough to dig into him. And Gentle Giant—”

  “Are you going to run down the entire list?” The Doctor asked. Her voice was a little harder. “Do you want an apology? You said you don’t want words. Would a gesture do? Should I take a scalpel to my face? Carve myself up so I could experience what you have?”

  “It wouldn’t even be a fraction of what any of us have experienced,” Sveta bit out the words. “Because you’d have had the choice, Doctor. The choice to do that to yourself. Because we’re all going to die when Scion comes down here and you would live minutes like that, instead of years.”

  “Then what do you want from me?” the Doctor asked, and the hardness in her voice had become anger.

  The structure rumbled.

  The rumble was followed by a heavy crash. With my bugs, I could tell it was in the room we’d just vacated. A virtual waterfall of debris, of metal slag and concrete.

  There was no order, no signal, but we broke into a run.

  “I want my name, Doctor,” Sveta said. She wasn’t running, so her voice was level, free of panting or anything of the sort. “Not even my old name, from before you wiped my memory. Tell me the name you gave me, after you sent me to the fourth floor. Because you do that for the ones you think are worth studying, right? Or tell me the name I took after you released me into the wild, as some kind of smokescreen for Scion. It starts with ‘S’, if that helps.”

  No response.

  We should be strategizing, I thought.

  But I didn’t interject.

  “You wipe our memories when you send us down to the third floor, Shamrock told us, so I just had a number for a while. Tell me you remember my number, even. Tell me that what you did to me had some merit, that you did all this for some purpose, and turning me into a killer with a triple-digit body count mattered enough for you to remember!”

  The Doctor huffed out the words, panting as she ran, “You can’t have any successes without failures. There was nothing of use in your case, nothing memorable but your durability, but it was one formula we could rule out.”

  “Th
at’s not good enough!”

  The Number Man spoke, “He—”

  “Not you!” Sveta hissed. “You remember, probably, but—”

  “He’s here,” the Number Man said, talking over her.

  We stopped, turning.

  A golden light at the entrance to the corridor. A figure stood in the middle of it, darker in contrast to the light surrounding it.

  Scion.

  He advanced on foot. One step, then another.

  His eyes moved to the vials.

  He touched one, gentle, almost inquisitive.

  “Oh fuckballs,” Imp whispered the word.

  We backed away, slowly.

  Scion reached out and cupped his hands around the vial. I could see fragments of the wire that held the vial upright falling to the ground, glowing gold where his power had burned through the edges.

  He cupped the vial in his hands, staring down at it.

  “What are they?” Golem asked. “The vials?”

  “Powers,” the Number Man said, unhelpfully.

  Scion stared, his eyes roving over the rows of vials. He reached out for a patch of empty vials, without any color behind them, but he didn’t touch them.

  Sensing the traces of what they’d once contained, maybe?

  Nowhere to go. Gully might have been able to dig an escape route, but she had a hole in her shoulder I could have put my arm through, and she wasn’t conscious, let alone coherent. Either the impact with Cuff or the fight with the Doctor’s people had disabled her.

  She’d been with the group that had tried to lynch the Doctor, so maybe taking her out of action had been a preventative measure.

  The Doormaker, none of it worked.

  “Doctor,” I said. “You don’t have powers, right?”

  “I don’t,” the Doctor said. “But I have a corona pollentia.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “You have the potential for power?”

  “I do. I could theoretically trigger. If someone has the potential and takes the dose, there is a higher chance of deviation.”

  “But you were fine with doing it to others,” Sveta murmured.

  “Natural powers tend to fall more in line with the subject’s nature,” the Doctor said, ignoring Sveta. “Complimentary to their personality, their needs, and so on. Better to leave that door open, in case it comes down to it, or to retain the ability to take a vial at a crucial juncture.”