Grue looked over the five people who would be Bitch’s henchmen, nodded.
“Tattletale, I’ve set up quarters near Lord Street, in one of the ABB’s old locations. I assume your teammates will want to be in contact, and this area is both accessible, and it can reach any other area readily. The area is already furnished with computers, and you’ll find staff there, people who are capable at gathering information, be it from media, computers or the streets. You’ll also find a small force of mercenaries that I’ve assigned to you, so you can act on that information where you see fit.”
“Cool.”
“Skitter, I have set up quarters near the south end of the Boardwalk. Reconstruction and repair work is still ongoing there, but if you will be patient, it may well be one of the more lucrative locations when things are up and running again.”
I nodded. That wouldn’t be far from my old home, close to our old hideout. Did that mean something? Did he know who I was, or had Tattletale suggested it? I felt uneasy about that.
“Regent, Grue, Imp and Skitter, I realize I have not detailed any employees to you to begin with. I leave it to you to start this task for yourself, to decide what you need and how you intend to operate. Once you have decided this for yourselves, let me know, and I will endeavor to help you fill in the blanks in your individual operations.
“As you leave, you’ll receive emails on the locations of your individual headquarters. For the time being, all I require from you, for now, is that you establish order and assume some measure of control over your territories.”
There were nods all around.
“Your payment for tonight’s job will be in your accounts shortly, with a bonus for the obstacles you faced. Any questions? Any topics you would like to raise for discussion?”
“A few questions, but I figure I’ll see what’s up with this new role we’re taking,” Grue replied, “Then I’ll ask them.”
“Good.”
“I’ve got something I’d like to talk to you about,” I spoke, augmenting my voice with the swarm’s noises to mask it. “In private.”
“Yes. That’s fine, I was hoping to have a private conversation with you anyways. Anyone? Anything else before we part ways?”
Nobody had anything further to say. Grue and the others turned to leave, and the crowd around Coil followed them soon after. One of Bitch’s henchmen – Barker, was it? – leered at me as he passed, dug his hand into his groin in some sort of scratch or a lewd gesture.
Lovely. He’d get along great with Bitch.
When the group had left the room, I could hear noises downstairs, as they moved about the house. Or maybe it was Grue, checking his new place. I was left alone with Coil and Dinah.
I wasn’t sure I liked that our group was being split up like this. The timing seemed bad. I’d sort of been hoping I could repair the divide, and that would be hard if we were each in our own territories, doing our own things.
I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.
“I heard about the incident at the hospital, following the Endbringer attack.”
I nodded.
“Tattletale told me that you know I was fully informed about your true nature.”
“Yeah.”
“Did she explain how?”
I shook my head. She’d told me about his power in confidence.
“Well, I suppose I may share that detail at some point in the future. You understand my desire to keep certain things private?”
“Yeah, no. I get it. It makes sense, it’s smart.”
“Mmm,” he murmured. He turned to his pet, stroked her head like one might with a dog or a cat. She stared down at her dress, picked at a thread that was sticking out, stretching it out long. The thread snapped, and she let it drift from her hand to the ground. Then she started picking at another. Coil interrupted my observations, “So. You wished to discuss something?”
“Yeah. I’ve made a decision.”
“Do tell.”
“Before, back in the limousine, you asked me what I wanted out of all this, what I desired from my deal with you.”
“Yes.”
“I asked you to fix the city, you told me you planned on doing that anyways, that I should ask for something else.”
“And you’ve decided.”
“Yeah,” I took a deep breath. “Dinah. Your… pet.”
“You want me to release her. I’m afraid-”
I hurried to cut him off, “No.”
He stopped, tilted his head slightly.
I swallowed, felt an ugly feeling in my gut, “I know she’s invaluable to you. I know how useful her talent is, and the lengths you went to in getting ahold of them. I don’t like it, but I get it.”
He didn’t respond. He just stared at me, his mask lacking eye holes, just black cloth stretched over eye sockets.
“I… All I’m asking is that you let her go when you’ve done it. When you take this city, when you succeed in your plan, you release her to go home to her family. If you do that, I’ll work for you. I’ll try harder than anyone, to get this city under your control, and then I’ll work for you for as long as you’ll have me, afterward.”
“I’m afraid, Skitter, that this deal doesn’t quite balance out. I intend no offense, but my initial impression is that my pet is far more valuable to me than you are.”
No. My heart sank.
“But I can accept it,” he spoke. “Provided you prove to me that your talents are worth losing hers. I admit, the active assistance you can provide might prove more useful when the city is firmly in my grasp, when I have less to be concerned about in terms of day-to-day operations.”
I nodded, numbly.
“Anything else?”
I shook my head, then turned to leave, wordlessly.
When I went downstairs, Tattletale and Regent were already gone. Maybe they were checking out their new places. Grue and Imp were in the ‘living room’, opening crates of stuff to see the supplies they had available.
I wasn’t up to talking to them, or explaining the recent conversation.
Leaving the building without a word, I sloshed through the water. I realized my fists were clenched, and my glove was sticking to itself, thanks to the residual containment foam. Annoying. I wondered if I could scrub it off.
When I peeled my fingers away from the glove, I realized my hand was shaking.
I took a deep breath, to calm my nerves. I could do this. Whatever I had to do, I was going to help that girl.
10.x (Interlude; Alec)
“I’m letting you go,” Regent lied.
He made Shadow Stalker drop to all fours on the ground and forced a grunt from her mouth. With the same ease as he moved his own body, he made her load her bolt and spin to point her crossbow at him. There was no danger of her shooting him; he was fully in control from start to finish.
He could feel her striving and straining to move her finger, to pull the trigger and plant an arrow just above his collarbone. Every iota of her willpower must have been focused on the task.
“There’s a catch,” he spoke. “My power? Once I’ve figured someone out? It’s a lot easier to control them, after. Any time you come near me, I can do this. I can use my power and retake control in the blink of an eye.”
He had her raise her crossbow and point it at her temple.
“Next time I get control? I’m keeping you for a full day. Maybe two, if I feel like pulling an all-nighter. And here’s the funny part,” there was no humor in his voice, “I’m going to do it even if I’m in civilian clothes, if my power tells me you’re in range. You won’t even know when it’s coming. You’re now a liability to the Wards, and you won’t ever know when or where I’m going to get control again…
“Unless you leave. Skip town. Join another team.”
He had her nod, stiffly, awkwardly. He felt her rising heartbeat, the slight increase in her breathing, which he managed, controlled. Her muscles clenched, an involuntary reaction just beyond the scope of his
control. She’d realized what he was doing. Rather, she knew what he wasn’t doing.
He wasn’t letting her go.
“Now let’s walk you off to the other end of the city before I release you. I don’t think you’re quite stupid enough to try and follow us, but I think my teammates would be more comfortable if they were sure.” He rolled his eyes.
That said, he turned her around, activated her power and walked her through the door.
Regent looked at the others, shrugged. “Good enough?”
Using the shadow form, she could cover a lot of ground very quickly. For long minutes, he exercised her power, the ability to be as light as a feather, enjoyed it. He even liked the running, too, when he turned off her power and just legged it. This girl was in good shape. He could tell she exercised regularly, that she ran on a regular basis. Running was almost effortless, and it felt good, even with the aches and pains of the recent brawl. Months or years of practice had fine tuned her body.
Fighting had been much the same way, but it had been even better. Her muscle memory had been so primed for punching, kicking, takedowns and evading that he’d almost been able to let her go on autopilot, let her body handle things on its own.
Not that he could, really. But it had been easy. He loved that sort of thing. Maximum reward for minimum effort.
That same philosophy of minimizing the work he had to put in, sticking to what he enjoyed and the things that interested him, it was an advantage here. Brian, Lisa and Taylor had their own dynamic. They were friends. He considered Brian a friend, but it was more along the lines of someone he could play video games with, talk about movies. It wasn’t much different from if they were coworkers or roommates. He smiled at the thought. They kind of were, when it came down to it.
Regent knew he was a background character, for the most part. He played along, he didn’t make waves, he didn’t stand out. He wasn’t close to any of the others.
He was cool with that. In fact, it suited him perfectly.
He was cool with it because it meant that when they were all heading out to meet Coil, nobody noticed that he was distracted, or that he wasn’t joining in the conversation. His control got worse as the distance between himself and his puppets widened, which meant he had to devote more focus to Shadow Stalker and the act of keeping her movements fluid. He ran into the same issues when he controlled more people, and there was the irritating side effect that his own coordination, speech and fluidity of movement all suffered to the same extent that his ‘puppets’ did. Were he to open his own mouth now and speak to Brian or Taylor, he might stutter or slur his words. It was almost more trouble than it was worth.
Almost. He was surprised to realize how much he’d missed this. It was like a high, a whole other set of emotions, of physical sensations. Real life, just being Alec, only Alec? It paled in comparison. It was dull.
He wondered sometimes if dealing with his father had messed up something inside him.
He could remember being young, maybe eight or so, fighting with two of his sisters over the fact that he’d wanted to watch the music channel and they wanted to watch some craptastic stop motion cartoon. They’d outnumbered him two to one, and he’d known he would lose the argument. So he’d thrown a tantrum, started screaming.
The entire atmosphere in the house had changed in a second. His sisters went from argumentative to conciliatory in an instant, changed the channel to the music, tried to give him the remote. One of father’s ‘girls’ came in and tried to quiet him down. When he hadn’t, she’d clamped a hand over his mouth.
It hadn’t been enough. Dear Old Dad had come marching out of the master bedroom. Nikos Vasil. Heartbreaker. Tall, wearing only boxer briefs, with a muscled, lanky physique, long hair plastered to his head with sweat. Father had taken two or three seconds to assess the situation before using his power on Alec, his two sisters and the ‘girl’ with a hand over Alec’s mouth. He hit each of them with stark terror. The kind of fear you experienced when you were claustrophobic and you woke up in a coffin six feet underground.
Then father had gone back into the bedroom and slammed the door behind him.
It had been around summer when that happened, Alec mused. He didn’t have many ways to tell time, back then, since he hadn’t gone to school, and the days kind of passed. Still, it had been hot, he remembered. Between that summer and Christmas, Alec hadn’t opened his mouth to speak once.
That was only one of a dozen or so experiences that came to mind. So yeah, maybe father had broken something in the process. Maybe it had been the emotional equivalent of staring into the sun for far too long, too many times, being left almost half blind.
Or maybe it was his own power. He could be two, three or four people at the same time, feeling what they felt. By the time he was a teenager, he’d experienced every kind of drug, in someone else’s body, had slept with himself as various boys and girls. How was being just ordinary Alec supposed to compare?
Shadow Stalker wasn’t emotionally dulled. Her emotions were rich, uninhibited. She was passionate in her emotions: angry, judgemental. Even the negative feelings were something he could savor in their own way. He wasn’t really experiencing them – it was more of a very involved spectator role. Her fear was thrilling in the same way a fantastic scary movie was, with the detail and the immersion cranked up to eleven.
He leaped straight up into the air, then activated the shadow state. When she was as high as she would get, he had her grip her cloak in her hands and use it to guide her descent so she could land atop the roof of the gas station. He stopped, stretched her arms. She was breathing hard, but not as much as his Alec-self would be after even half as much running. He could feel the endorphins being pumped into her body from the hard exercise, and he was all the more aware of it because he had his other body to compare to. She was an athlete.
He ran her hands down her chest, felt her breasts, the muscles of her stomach. Stretching once more, he clenched her hands, felt the muscles in her arms flex. He felt her shudder in revulsion.
“Almost forgot you were in there,” he murmured, barely loud enough for her to catch. Not that it mattered. She was as aware of the movements of her mouth as he was. He could mouth the words and she would probably understand. He smirked for her benefit as much as his own.
“So. Bet you’re wondering what’s up,” he commented. “Funny thing about having this control over you, I can feel your emotions, your body’s reactions. Like a really, really good polygraph test. I wasn’t even half done saying my piece back there when I caught on to the fact that you were too pissed and too angry to back down and walk away. There’s no way you’re going to leave town if I let you go, right?”
He felt her struggle to open her mouth and respond. He could have let her, by giving her some limited control over her own movements, but he didn’t.
“Right. So I’m taking it upon myself to ensure this all goes smoothly. My teammates have other shit to worry about, and I’m kind of enjoying flexing my powers. So I’m dealing with this situation myself. You and I? We’re going to go another route.”
He fished in her belt and pockets and began withdrawing the contents. He tossed the things he couldn’t use over the edge of the roof. Billfold, spare cartridges for the crossbow, a small knife, spare strings for the crossbows, bandages, keys and a Wards ID card fell to the ground by the side of the gas station, in and near an overflowing dumpster. There were plastic cuffs in the belt, but he couldn’t be bothered to fish out every last one and throw them all away. At the right hip, he found two cell phones. Success.
One of the phones looked years out of date. The screen was scuffed so badly it was barely readable, and the plastic cover for the plug slot at the bottom was missing. The other was a touch screen smart phone. He didn’t recognize the make or the model, and the interface when he turned it on and touched the screen was unfamiliar. Special issue from the Wards? Whatever. Not important.
The smart phone was password protected. That wa
s more Lisa’s thing, but he did have one trick up his sleeve. Holding her fingers above the keypad, he let them follow through with the most natural feeling sequence of numbers, ingrained into the mind-body connection through the habitual repetition of a sequence of movements over weeks or months. Muscle memory.
It took two tries. The first felt slightly off at the end. The second was spot on, and was rewarded with a vibration of the phone and a menu.
“Contacts,” he murmured, pressing a button, “Weld, Clockblocker, Vista, Flechette, Kid Win… boring. Nothing I can work with, here.” Director Piggot? No. Some potential there, maybe, but she was probably on top of this body-snatching situation. Fully informed.
He scrolled down. Beyond the contacts that had been pinned to the top of the list, there was a short list of contacts that were sorted in order of who had been contacted most recently. At the top of the list was an ‘Emma Barnes’.
He checked the other, older phone. No password. A quick examination showed it was her civilian phone.
“Taking this out on patrol? Is that stupidity or arrogance? What if you lost it?” He shook his head, then offered her a dramatic gasp, “What if it got into the wrong hands?” Her voice was far better for the gasp than his own was. He couldn’t help but chuckle after hearing it.
This Emma girl was listed in both of the phones. Now he had a strong suspicion as to who it was. A quick read of the received texts gave away Shadow Stalker’s name, but he already knew that. Taylor had let it slip, before.
Her pulse was pounding now, and he could feel a growing sense of… what was that? Outrage? She was pissed at the invasion of privacy.
He tried a giggle on for size, to see if he could, and to see if it irritated her. It worked on both counts.
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