Worm

by wildbow

  I couldn’t quite remember how she even knew I was coming. I hadn’t controlled her recently, and her power wasn’t fresh in my mind.

  It was with a measure of trepidation that I met up with them, the portal creator and clairvoyant following me.

  Eerie, to be in such a large city with no people around us.

  I could imagine how things would be if humanity was eliminated. All of these ruined cities moldering, slowly crumbling…

  W-why did I find it com— comf— why did it re-re-reassure me?

  Dangerous, to think that way.

  I was a tent in a strong wind, and the stakes were coming loose. Only one or two remained. Depending on the direction the wind was blowing when they were gone, someone could get hurt.

  A tent surrounded by bugs. Like this was a shitty camping trip. I smiled a little at the thought, a broken giggle slipping through my lips.

  N-no. St-stay c-ccentered.

  The slur in my own thoughts made a chill run down across my back. I pressed my hand to my head, as if I could physically shift things back into place, or keep them from coming apart.

  Again, that soft voice I couldn’t place, something to help me keep moving onward, a human sound when abstracts were becoming all too real.

  I realized the others were near, riding a dog. The ones riding the stuffed lizard-Endbringer had stopped at the midway point, no doubt keeping watch.

  The girl at the front flashed me a grin, raising a hand in a gesture I couldn’t quite grasp.

  She spoke, and I assumed it was a greeting.

  I couldn’t respond. Didn’t know how. We were separated by a gulf.

  She spoke as she spread her arms, raising her shoulders in an exaggerated set of movements. Like talking louder to a person who didn’t speak the language. What was the fucking point?

  She pointed at me, then in the direction of the crowd, then made the same movement.

  The giant monsters are losing to Scion, I thought. He’s coming, soon.

  I took her cue and started walking forward. She hopped off the dog, scrambling to get in my way, barring my path, her arms spread.

  I stopped.

  Her expression was stark, rigid, wide eyed. Her arms spread, she repeated the gesture a third time, arms and shoulders rising, then falling.

  When I didn’t respond, she spoke, her head cocked a little to one side.

  I could hear the voice again.

  Another person appeared twenty or so feet to my left, startling me. My bugs moved, creating a barrier.

  No. She was a familiar face, so to speak. A gray mask, horned, with mischievous eyes, a mouth hidden by a scarf or cowl she’d piled around her shoulders. She was the source of the voice. She’d been with me, keeping me company.

  Tears came unbidden to my eyes.

  The blonde girl touched her cheek, pitching her voice high at the end. A question?

  The girl with the horned mask responded, gesturing in my direction.

  I adjusted the Clairvoyant’s grip, then touched my cheek. I was bleeding. I had a gouge at the corner of my mouth, and my finger came away with blood on it.

  Oh, I’d scratched myself, earlier. I hadn’t realized. Hadn’t meant to.

  My hand shook as I stared down at it.

  Alone, but not alone. Isolated, but not isolated.

  I needed to move, to go on. Damn the consequences, damn whatever could happen to me. If I could just get him to—

  The dog girl spoke from her seat on the giant, monstrous dog’s back. Not a sentence, but a single word, clearly spoken to get my attention.

  I raised my head to meet her eyes. Her hair was shaggy, her gaze intense behind the mop of brown-red hair.

  She held my gaze, silent, for long seconds.

  Then she reached down, grabbing a loop of chain that was strapped to the dog’s back. She reared back until it looked like she was going to fall off, then heaved it forward.

  It didn’t fly that far, but it landed partway between us, closer to her than to me.

  I advanced, and the entire group collectively backed away. Only the girl with the horns, behind me, advanced a little.

  I reached down, the Clairvoyant’s hand on my arm, and I grabbed the chain.

  I gave the chain to Doormaker. He gripped it, and then he parted from me.

  It’s the ones I was dismissing entirely that are most important, I thought.

  I backed away, and she began reeling in the chain. I walked him forward until he was out of my range, in their company instead of mine.

  The dog girl didn’t break eye contact. She was watching me carefully.

  She pointed at me, then at the sky.

  No, not the sky, at bugs.

  Me… bugs?

  Herself, then the dog.

  Then at the portal man… and, very slowly, taking her time, she pointed a door, as if unsure.

  What did she mean?

  Our respective powers? Power?

  She was asking about his power?

  I didn’t know about his power. But it wasn’t important. I didn’t care about his power. It was secondary. If they could fix it, it would help, but I doubted I’d be able to take control of people so easily. Not a second time.

  No. I touched my hand to my mouth, then to my forehead.

  I gestured towards him, then repeated the combination.

  I drew a line with my bugs, pointing towards the crowd.

  P-p-please on-unddersttand.

  The girl with the red-brown hair was nodding slowly.

  She started to speak, but the blonde cut her off. The blonde sounded annoyed, hurt, a little upset, but not in a bad way. When she looked at me, her eyes were kind. She brought the portal man to her and hooked one of her arms through his.

  She understood, I was almost positive. She cared, and I was positive. That annoyance, that hurt, it was only because she wanted to be the one who understood me and communicated with me, even in this rudimentary way.

  I wasn’t the only one who’d seen everything unfold. The portal man had been there, linked to the Clairvoyant through me. He’d watched what I’d watched. They could find a way to communicate with him, and they could get clues out of him, answers.

  In the other Earth, the winged Endbringer fell from high above, her innumerable wings broken, ruined and bent. She reached skyward, as if clutching for Scion, high above, and then the hand crumbled.

  The rest of her followed suit.

  The others were too broken to fight.

  S-ssionns c-comminng.

  I was losing the ability to think in concrete words. Needed— Needed to get myself in a position where I could fight.

  I took a step forward, and the others reacted. This time, the auburn-haired girl had her dog move out of the way, off to one side. The blonde didn’t move.

  In the distance, the faerie girl turned her head. She’d noticed me move, somehow.

  Why?

  I knew what I was doing. It was dangerous, yes, but so was Scion.

  I almost stepped forward to control her, to move her out of the way myself. Then I remembered that she was my anchor. One of the few I had remaining.

  What did I wind up as, if she was my only anchor? If I could so readily envision myself as the bug-obsessed freak, lurking in dark places, what did I become with her?

  Something close to human, at least?

  She’d saved me, in a way. I couldn’t remember how, but I remembered that much.

  I couldn’t touch her. I didn’t even dare.

  She gestured with the… phone. She started talking. Not communicating in basics, but taking a shotgun approach, not stopping, trying everything, in the hopes that something got through.

  Scion stepped through into another world. I’d covered our retreat in a fashion, but he was finding his way.

  The moment he left Earth Gimel, the Simurgh scattered the mixed sand and dirt she’d gathered above her, then climbed to her feet, gun in hand. The pieces of the fake body she’d formed of the materials
at hand broke apart as they fell free. She waited, recuperating.

  It took seconds before he appeared in our world. The chaos was immediate. People running, people moving forward to fight.

  Glaistig Uaine cast one glance my way, then joined the fight.

  It was time.

  I picked up my phone, then used my bugs to carry it to her. She gave me a strange look I couldn’t interpret.

  The bugs moved the string, and it tapped against her phone.

  She typed something on my phone. I brought it back to me.

  I didn’t understand the characters, but it looked like she’d done what I wanted. The phone was set up to call her, when I needed to call her.

  I could only hope that she understood when I started calling her. She’d been reluctant to help before, hadn’t she? And now, when everything was on the line…

  I trusted her.

  A noise made everyone’s heads turn. The man in gold and black armor had fired his weapon, and it had clipped a building.

  Dust from the toppled building filled the street.

  I moved. I could see where my blonde friend was, where the others were. I slipped by her in the chaos.

  Ittt’sss ttimmme. My own voice was a buzz in my head, a medley of discordant sounds only barely resembling words.

  Time to fight, gathering my forces. Not an army this time.

  I broke into a run, best as I was able. Where my own feet failed me, my flight pack kept me aloft.

  I could see everyone, even in the dust. The clairvoyant let me see as if I was looking from every perspective, everywhere. It was easy to collect the first few I encountered.

  The girl with the mangled hand and her partner, riding the stuffed lizard.

  A sharp right. Moving around the perimeter of the flight. The faerie was busy fighting, but if she saw an opportunity, there was a good chance she’d kill me.

  There were others, but I was having trouble keeping track. I knew them by their powers. Brutes, hanging back. Tough enough to weather most fights, but barely capable of holding up against Scion.

  That took a special kind of toughness.

  A woman covered in a skin of forcefields, protecting people with massive shards of forcefield.

  I passed them, making a beeline for someone else, flying over the cloud of dust, trying to see people. She’d been doing rescue before, getting people to where they could be helped.

  Now… now she was a tool I needed if I was going to win this. We climbed onto the stuffed lizard’s back. I bound the Clairvoyant’s hand to mine, mindful of the damage that had been done last time.

  The stuffed animal climbed up the side of a ruined building. With the Clairvoyant’s hand and feet and my own flight pack, we dismounted when we reached an opening large enough to hop through.

  The girl with the ruined hand shifted position, slumping over. They climbed up to the highest point they could reach, and then the girl who controlled the stuffed humanoid lizard called out, incoherent.

  I couldn’t get her to talk properly.

  So I had her wail instead, a frantic sound that was justifiable in how little sense it made.

  A girl with flying armor and bright yellow hair descended, ready to help the apparently wounded girl.

  When she got close enough to touch them, she fell within my power’s range.

  I brought her to me, the movements shaky and unfamiliar. Easier on autopilot, but I didn’t have time to wait for her to drift my way. Movements of the feet controlled movement direction and altitude. I brought her to me.

  Then I made her sing.

  Th-thin-think ab-abbboutt cc-courrrage. Aabbout m-mmovving fforrwarrd.

  I could only hope the song conveyed the right meaning, the right impulse.

  I pressed the biggest blue button to call my teammate with the number she’d set into the phone.

  It shifted to a video call. I saw her on the other side.

  How to even explain? To convey the next step?

  I used my bugs to illustrate. A mass at the center, pulses traveling to other nodes. To every other node.

  She said something.

  A minute passed.

  Something hit the ground hard enough that the building swayed. Not merely a shaking, but a side-to-side wobble that suggested that anything harder might see the entire thing tip over.

  And the song began playing, echoing, through three other phones in my immediate vicinity. Two held by the ones who’d been on the stuffed animal, and a third—

  I was distracted before I could look for the source. My clairvoyance told me there wasn’t anyone nearby.

  All through the battlefield, Protectorate members and Wards had phones playing the song. It gave them strength, courage at a moment they felt weak.

  A woman I recognized from Brockton Bay threw the phone aside, then shot it with a shotgun, before changing the gun to something else and opening fire on Scion. It took the man in gold and black armor a second to get a chance to do the same. One of his underlings, a cape who was named after a siege weapon, took his boss’ lead.

  It served as something to urge people onward, to focus them on one target. But those three, or those two were savvy enough to know something could be up.

  We moved. The armored girl with yellow hair helping to hold the Clairvoyant while I descended to the ground with my flight pack.

  The movements of the other two weren’t coordinated well with my own movements. They rode the stuffed animal as it leaped to the next building, but momentarily passed out of my control.

  They didn’t turn on me, didn’t shoot me. They carried onward, and I adjusted my course to put them in my range again.

  I got the one-horned woman who glittered with forcefields, then changed direction.

  The next group was harder. They had advance warning we were coming, shared by a brown haired girl who wore a black dress and no mask.

  I felt a pang of emotion. I couldn’t even put a name to it.

  The girl rattled off words, numbers, in response to questions asked by a woman with body armor and a bristling ponytail. Monstrous capes moved to flank her, protecting her.

  Every second counted.

  Couldn’t give the precog a chance to get hard numbers. With every moment that passed, every loping movement of the stuffed lizard that followed beneath me, the pair exchanged question and answer.

  I was a threat. I was being reduced to numbers. Success, failure. Nothing more.

  Which was all this really was. Only I was focused on success and failure on a much bigger scale than this confrontation.

  The forcefield woman sandwiched each of us between two forcefields, then willed them forwards. We left the stuffed lizard behind.

  Three more questions, rapid fire. One word each, names. The woman with the mask only heard the first syllable of each response before moving on to the next.

  She gave a command, an order, and a red haired woman in a black skintight outfit turned, aiming her gun at a wall.

  The bullet ricocheted off the wall and flew right through our group. My forcefield woman went down, and the crystals we were riding fractured, coming apart enough that we fell to the ground.

  Only the string tying me to the Clairvoyant kept us together.

  A fat, bald man stepped forward, blocking my way with his body. A young man with orange skin, a tail and bright pink hair did the same.

  But the young precog said something, and stepped forward as they parted to give her room.

  She spoke, one word. My name. I was pretty sure. What was my name? did it start with a ‘T’ sound? An ‘S’? A ‘W’?

  An ‘M’?

  “Murrruuh-hurrrrrrrrh,” I managed. I slowly pulled myself to my feet, my movements jerky, shaky. Worse than it had been yet.

  Y-youuu ss-set mme onnnnn th-thi-this roadddd. Y-youuu oh-owe mme thhhhhisss. Ddd-dohnn’t gg-get-t innn myy w-wayyy n-noww.

  Scion toppled a building. Capes erected barriers to protect a whole squad, over a hundred capes, but the bu
ilding disintegrated on impact, rubble pouring off the barrier like water off a roof, crushing the people who didn’t have adequate shelter.

  She didn’t move, staring at me.

  I had the Clairvoyant reach into my belt. She withdrew a scrap of paper.

  My bugs carried it to the young precog.

  An I.O.U., if there ever was one.

  She stared down at the two and a half words, then crumpled it. Her head hung.

  Before any of the others could stop her, she stepped forward, into my range.

  I pushed her out, the movement forceful enough she stumbled a bit. The fat one caught her.

  I pointed.

  The group parted, giving me a view of their other members.

  In the distance, Scion was struck, knocked into a building. The work of the man with the giant sword. The faerie readied to follow up, then hesitated.

  She flew my way instead.

  No time for grace or decorum.

  The woman with the forcefield scales used her power. Another sandwich of crystalline fields, the more secure way to hold someone, and she hauled the reality-warper out of the other group, into my range. Another forcefield caught a boy with glowing hair.

  The remainder dropped into fighting stances, a gun was trained on me—

  And the precog cried out. One word. Negation.

  They stopped in their tracks.

  I turned to go, my recruits in hand. The faerie girl was coming.

  I didn’t fight. I had the key components. The trick was to set everything in motion.

  I accessed the power of the reality warper. The girl who got more powerful as she lost touch with the world, who could fashion her own realities, then bring them into our world.

  I had her create a door, then I used her partner’s help to smash it.

  A freestanding hole in reality. The reality warper used her power to pick a world.

  I wasn’t too picky. The instant I was through, I had them make two more.

  Then two more.

  I protected them all with forcefields.

  I didn’t have the portal man, but I did have this as a means of traveling sideways, like Scion could travel in this direction that wasn’t up or down, left, right, forward or back.

  It didn’t let me cross all the way into other continents. Movement was analogous.