Worm

by wildbow

  I maintained the course. I didn’t slow down.

  Instead, I tried to shout out a heads up. He has enhanced hearing.

  “Lung.”

  My voice wasn’t as loud as I’d hoped, and I was drowned out by another shower of dust and debris.

  The only reason I didn’t hit him hard enough to break one of our necks was that he stopped to grab two fingers in the midst of our surroundings, tensing to throw himself forward.

  I landed two feet in front of him, twisting myself around to avoid letting my arm hit the ground directly. The vibration shuddered through my entire body and increased the pain a hundredfold anyways.

  I was left barely able to breathe, writhing on the ground, my arm crushed between my thighs and my stomach, because squeezing it and applying pressure like I was proved a fraction less painful than letting it move on its own.

  And Lung loomed over me.

  “Ah—” I managed, before I found myself huffing out the remainder of my breath.

  “I have no reason to help you,” Lung growled the words, nearly inaudible with the sounds in the distance. His voice was altered with his transformation, slurred.

  I couldn’t muster a response, slurred, audible or otherwise.

  “I think you have lost a lot of blood. You will slip into a state of shock, Skitter. Your body will betray you. You will piss and shit yourself. Your emotions will escape your control and you will experience a kind of terror that you might think is not possible.”

  I grit my teeth. I knew Rachel had stopped nearby, but Huntress was acting agitated, and Rachel couldn’t get control. A part of me wanted to draw the connections, interpret why Huntress was pacing like she was, and I found it harder than it should be.

  “I dislike the idea of being a follower, little Skitter,” Lung rumbled. “I maintain a territory, always. I bring my enemies low, and I am feared and respected, always. I enjoy the things I enjoy, drinking, food, fucking women. Never being fully out of control. You understand?”

  This is my fate, I thought, a little deliriously. I die getting monologued to by a supervillain.

  “A man told me that in Go, it is deemed more worthy, more honorable, more respectable, if you can accept the fight as lost and surrender. If you are right, if it is at the right moment. I came with you because I knew I would not beat him in another fight. Here, there is something I can do. But I do not follow you, I do not give up that control. I would say partners, but I would be lying.”

  I did what I could to meet his eyes. I still had Defiant’s knife in my hand. I deactivated the blur and let it fall. Then I reached over to my elbow and used all of my strength to raise my injured arm.

  It flopped like a spaghetti noodle, the bones simply not there, pulverized.

  Lung took my arm in one claw, gripping it hard. My back arched, my chest expanding as I drew in a ragged breath. I held in the scream that I so badly wanted to utter.

  “I fight him because it is my nature. He would sunder me without thinking. He humiliates me, destroys any place I would call territory, and would deny me the things I enjoy. Good food, some drink, fucking. I will not bow, understand? I will not ever lose.”

  My vision was swimming. I wasn’t even sure if I was maintaining eye contact, now.

  He squeezed a little more. I refused to scream, but I had to utter something. I settled for a low groan, an extended grunt, strangled.

  “You cannot hold yourself straight. You are weak enough that to be alongside you would bring me lower than I stand now. You understand?”

  Like Grey Boy, turning on Jack because Jack failed and showed a degree of weakness.

  “Skitter,” Rachel’s voice sounded. “Problem?”

  She’d come. She wasn’t positioned to see my hand.

  “Go,” Lung growled. “Tell her you need help.”

  I drew an ‘x’ in Rachel’s way, with the handful of bugs I had on hand, barring her path.

  “You came to me. None of the others. Not Bitch, not your heroes, not even the men and women from Cauldron. You want my assistance. Ask me for it, show me your weakness.”

  Cauterize the limb, I thought. It wouldn’t fix anything, but there was no way to stem the blood loss from the damage that extended across the limb. Any tourniquet capable of cutting off the blood flow would make the limb fall off anyways, and then I’d still have blood loss.

  At best, if I were to ask him, he’d be gone. The not-partnership would be over the second I admitted my weakness. At worst, he’d kill me.

  I didn’t have enough wind to say much.

  “I’ll kill you,” I gasped out the words.

  He didn’t react, except to squeeze the arm harder. Again, my back arched. I writhed, gritting my teeth.

  “With a trick? Deception? By asking for help?”

  I shook my head.

  He reached down and picked up the disintegration knife. “With this?”

  I shook my head again, and immediately regretted not having spoken instead. My vision swam. I had to fight to keep my eyes on his.

  He didn’t follow up with another question.

  Come on, I thought. Can’t hold eye contact.

  “Mm,” he grunted.

  “Burn it,” I said. “If you’re angry…”

  I had to stop to get my breath.

  “Angry?” he asked.

  “Me beating you… twice… then enjoy burning me… but fuck… fucking burn it off.”

  There was a long pause.

  He lit his hand on fire. My mangled arm went up in flames.

  I broke eye contact. I might have screamed. I wasn’t sure.

  * * *

  Only a minute, judging by the way things had moved. Darkness had swept over my vision, I’d blacked out for a moment.

  Arm gone, stump burned black. I was draped on Huntress’s back, behind Rachel. Canary was slumped over in front of her.

  My entire body hurt in a steady, consistent way that suggested it wasn’t injury, but the aftermath of the other trauma. It was very possible my body was flooded with whatever neurotransmitters told it I was in pain.

  I wasn’t up to fighting my way to an upright position. It might even be dangerous.

  I’d started with a good number of bugs, but they’d been whittled down. I had only a few thousand, now.

  The ceiling had stopped falling down on us, at least for the moment, but the groaning and creaking continued.

  It’s the creature in here. Scion’s counterpart. He’s pushing against the walls of the structure. It might even be why the walls distorted and why the door wouldn’t open.

  Huntress slowed, then came to a stop. Bastard nearly sliced my face open with one of the spikes on his shoulder as he approached and stopped at Rachel and Huntress’s left.

  Rachel was looking around.

  “They ran,” Lung said. “There is nothing stopping them from retreating the way we came. Scion is occupied.”

  “Stairwell collapsed,” Rachel said.

  “I am strong, I could fight through it. The dogs are strong as well. Or we climb through a hole in the ceiling. There is nothing left here.”

  I began reorganizing my bugs. Less need to keep them on the ceiling. And I needed to find Scion, find the others and keep some here to give myself a stronger voice.

  “No,” I said, using the swarm to speak. I could barely hear myself.

  Lung turned his head. Rachel did too.

  Good hearing.

  “You’re awake,” Rachel said. “Fucking tell me, did he—”

  “He did good,” I said.

  She fell silent.

  “The others are here, and you don’t need to climb through the hole in the ceiling. You can climb over the rubble in the stairwell and still stand upright.”

  “Mm,” Lung made a noncommittal grunt.

  I continued speaking with the swarm, drawing an arrow in front of Rachel. “The others.”

  She whistled, goading Huntress forward. Bastard and Lung followed.

  Ha
rd to manage the swarm, given the number of intervening obstacles. There was so much here. All an extension of the new entity.

  This is the well. This is what Scion looks like, when we see beyond the image on the surface. This is the sheer amount of flesh we need to destroy, when we do manage to get past his defenses.

  But if that was the case, where was this entity’s other body?

  We reunited with the others.

  “Ah, here we go,” the Number Man said. He’d been joined by Golem’s group, and they remained under the shelter.

  “Holy shit,” Golem said. “Weaver. Your hand.”

  He said it like I wasn’t aware.

  But I didn’t respond. My focus was on the swarm.

  They’d found Scion.

  He was floating opposite another figure. A sexless human shape, with hair that was disproportionately long for its body, hanging beneath the point where one foot dangled in the air. The figure was incomplete, fractals extending from portions of its back, of arms and one leg.

  Two things hit me at the same time.

  One of those things was that the odd, pattern-like kaleidoscopes of flesh and whatever else weren’t terminus points, but points where the limbs passed into another dimension.

  The well was far deeper than I’d thought. There was so much more to the entities than we were seeing here.

  The other thought was that this was the other body. It was the second entity’s body, the part he would have shown us.

  “Scion’s counterpart?” I asked. “It was putting together a human body.”

  “We saw it,” Golem said. “Before the Number Man signaled us.”

  Rachel helped me down. Alexandria stepped forward to give me a hand. Together, they eased me down.

  The creaking increased, a sudden shift. Dust showered down from every crack in the complex.

  “I feel like a traitor for saying it,” Imp said. “But looking at this, hearing all we’ve heard, I’m sorta starting to agree with the Doctor. Abstract solutions are looking a hell of a lot better.”

  “We need to leave,” I said, still using the swarm.

  “All this trouble to get here,” Imp said. “And then we go? Madness!”

  “No,” I responded.

  “I was joking.”

  “No. We came for answers. This is it. We had answers. Now we just needed to get in a position where we could use them. Get them to Tattletale, to other thinkers.”

  “And Scion?”

  “Scion’s occupied,” I said.

  Scion was cupping the face of his counterpart. The figure, no doubt grey skinned as the body parts that made up this area, was slack jawed.

  He looked for futures where he’d find his counterpart, I thought. This was one of them… just not what he wanted or expected. Probably not even something he thought was possible.

  “…Not so easy to leave,” the Number Man was saying. “The structure has shifted, rotated. It’s designed to, corkscrewing down over time and with any degree of force or movement. It ensures the integrity of the panic room function, and it would have confused some of the first powerful non-Cauldron teleporters we were aware of. The route you used to enter no longer leads into whatever corridor or entry point you used to break through. We’d have to dig anew. Even with the Siberian, it’s time consuming.”

  “This seems less than wise,” Lung growled. “Burying yourself.”

  “Frankly,” the Number Man said, “We expected that if we had to lock ourselves in down here, we wouldn’t need to leave.”

  “We should still go,” Golem said. “And we should take something. Chevalier made a weapon out of Behemoth and the Simurgh’s parts. Maybe we can do something with this?”

  “It’s human flesh,” the Number Man said. “Or close enough to be of little difference. There are powers contained within select areas, like threads of ore in a rock, and naturally there are some structural changes that set it apart from humans. The thing was experimenting before settling on a body for itself.”

  “You don’t have a name for it?” Cuff asked.

  “I was only recently made aware it existed,” the Number Man said. “The Doctor played things close to the vest. I’d be open to suggestions.”

  “Fuckster,” Imp offered.

  “It’s not even a living thing anymore,” Golem said. “It’s more like a place, a garden or something.”

  “Amusing you say that,” the Number Man said. “We had a discussion with Lisette, the woman who proposed she could control him, and she said that the original name was Zion. He named himself after a place as well. We have theories on why—”

  Lung growled, interrupting. “I don’t—”

  Scion moved, abrupt.

  “Silence,” I ordered, cutting Lung off in turn.

  Scion’s hand glowed as he reached down to his counterpart’s neck.

  He carved through his counterpart’s flesh, severing the head.

  “He’s killing it.”

  “It’s already dead,” the Number Man said.

  “He’s killing it deader,” I said.

  “Granted,” the Number Man said. He sighed. “There’s nothing left in it. She took powers it had probably planned to give to others, distilled them. Then she dug in other places, and she took powers it needed to subsist. It died and went still.”

  “What the hell did she do before that?” Imp asked. “Have tea parties with it?”

  Scion gripped the corpse, then rose into the air.

  Everything moved in response. The entire room, shifting. Every part dragging towards one central point. Flesh disappeared into the patterns that hung in the air, patterns shifted, and parts emerged from others. Pulled into invisible mouse holes and portals, pulled out of others.

  “Fuck,” the Number Man said.

  I shifted position a little, reaching out to grab the healthy flesh closest to the burned stump, squeezing, as if I could make it hurt less.

  “Fuck?” Imp asked.

  “The structure isn’t going to hold. Even with the reinforcements she put in… no.”

  “So?” Rachel asked.

  “When the walls break,” the Number Man said, “one million, seven hundred and thirty thousand tonnes of steel are going to drop on our heads.”

  “Can we go out the sides?” Golem suggested.

  “Protected by the same water that’s below us and to the sides, for the corkscrew operation. Slow going at best, we get obliterated by pressurized water.”

  I stared down at the ground. My burn hurt so much I felt nauseous. I also felt lightheaded. Probably a side effect of blood loss.

  “The Siberian,” I said. “Protection effect.”

  “Can only protect a handful of us, less if you intend to move after things collapse. Two hands, perhaps two feet, one behind.”

  Only five.

  Five wasn’t enough.

  Scion had his hand raised over his head, the other entity held above, with masses of its flesh trailing beneath them. My bugs told me the ceiling was arching slightly. I could see where the ceiling met one wall, how a crack was forming along the edge.

  “Ceiling falling,” I said. I moved my arm to point, and I only wound up moving my stump, suppressing my reaction to the pain so I wouldn’t provoke Lung.

  Golem reached into the side of his suit. A hand began emerging.

  Too slow. A full third of the ceiling over this room looked ready to collapse, and it was big enough and close enough to wipe us out.

  Alexandria flew forward. She caught the shelf of steel, concrete and granite.

  Buying time, even as the slab continued to crack and break down where the stress of her holding it warred with the sheer weight and lack of support in other spaces.

  Golem’s hand propped it up, fingers curling around the edge to secure it.

  I still wasn’t thinking straight.

  What’s he doing?

  “Cuff, find me a piece of metal to use,” Golem said. “The bigger the better. And I’m talking big.�
�

  “The column?” she asked.

  “It broke up some, right? Find me the closest, biggest piece.”

  Cuff nodded. “Lung, Siberian, help us.”

  Golem looked back at me.

  “Go,” I said.

  He went without another word.

  I was left sitting where I was, with injured case fifty-threes, with an unconscious Canary who’d apparently had a hand crushed, and a conscious, mostly unharmed Rachel and Imp. We stared up at Scion.

  “Well,” Imp said.

  He used his golden light to burn the other. It coursed through the tissues, through the entirety of the thing. An ocean of experimental features, of flesh and body parts.

  “Well,” Imp said, again.

  I could almost sense a feeling radiating from Scion.

  A hard emotion to name, if not a hard emotion to place. I’d experienced it well enough. Many had.

  He was lashing out, destroying the remains, out of bewilderment, sadness, despair, anger, confusion. All of it unfiltered. The same emotion a child might experience with their first loss. What a child would feel when they lost something irretrievable for the first time, when something was stolen from them and they hadn’t prepared themselves for the possibility on any level.

  It was what one felt as a child if they lost their dog, their home, their innocence.

  Their mother.

  “It’s like when I lost Rollo, Brutus or Judas,” Rachel said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “When my bro…” Imp said, trailing off.

  How do you even articulate that? When he was broken?

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Fucking good,” Imp said. “I hope it sucks for him.”

  Together, we stared. We watched Scion burn his partner. Putting a torch to the garden. Alexandria flew overhead to join the others, helping.

  He dropped the remains, and they spooled out of some other dimension that the ‘garden’ had spilled out into.

  Golem began creating the hand. The entire room shook as fingertips emerged. Each a small building unto itself. Cupping over, a protective barrier.

  Nothing that would hold out against the kind of weight the Number Man had been talking about.