Amy swallowed, looking at the woman.
“The other, I’m trying to figure out a name. The one on the bottom was Carnal. Healer, tough, and healed more by bathing himself in blood. Thought he had a place on our team, failed the tests. The one on the top was Prophet. Convinced he was Jesus reborn. What do you call a mix of people like that? I’ve got a name in mind, but I can’t quite figure it out.”
“I don’t know.”
“So you’re bad at names too?” Bonesaw grinned. “I’m thinking something like shrine, temple… but one with multiple floors. Um.”
“Pagoda?”
“Pagoda! Yes!” Bonesaw skipped over to her creation, wrapped her arms around one of his, “Pagoda! That’s your name, now!”
None of the three monsters moved or reacted. Each stared dumbly forward, Murder Rat drooling, the others appearing to be in a daze.
“That’s good!” Bonesaw smiled at Amy, “I knew we’d make a good team!”
“Team?” What could she say or do to escape? Failing that, was there anything she could use to kill herself, so Bonesaw couldn’t get her hands on them, turn them into something like those things? In the worst case scenario, she could use her power on Mark before finishing herself off.
Except she wasn’t sure it would matter. Amy was incapable, but there was nothing saying Bonesaw couldn’t raise the recently dead.
“Yes, team! I want you to be my teammate!” Bonesaw was almost gushing.
“I don’t-” Amy stopped herself, “Why?”
“Because I always wanted a big sister,” Bonesaw replied, as if that was answer enough.
Amy blinked. Sister. She thought of Victoria. “I make a pretty shitty sister.”
“Language!” Bonesaw admonished, with surprising fierceness.
“I’m sorry. I- I’m not a very good sister, I don’t think.”
“You could learn.”
“I’ve tried, but… I’ve only gotten worse at it as time passed.”
Bonesaw pouted a little. “But think of the stuff we could do together. I do the kludge, the big stuff, you smooth it over. Imagine how Murder Rat would look without the scars and staples.”
Amy looked at the onetime heroine, tried to picture it. It wasn’t any better. Worse, if anything.
“That’s only the beginning. Can you even imagine the things we could make? There’s no upper limit.”
There was a beep from the answering machine. It began playing a message. “Amy, pick up! We’re looking at dealing with Hellhound, and there’s injured. Call Aunt Sarah or Uncle Neil over to look after dad and get over to the-”
The message cut off, and there was the sound of a clatter, a distant barking sound.
“I don’t think I have it in me to do stuff like that,” Amy said. If nothing else, I can’t disappoint Victoria any further.
“Oh. Oh!” Bonesaw smiled. “That’s okay. We can work through that.”
“I- I don’t think we really can.”
“No, really,” Bonesaw said. Then she snapped her fingers.
Hack Job flickered into existence just in front of Amy, and there was little she could do to escape. She cried out as the man’s massive hand smashed her down onto her back, a few feet from Mark.
Mark struggled to stand, but Murder Rat darted across the room to light atop the back of the couch and press one of her three-foot long claws against his throat.
Amy was pinned. She tried to use her power on Hack Job through the contact he was making with her chest and neck, only to find it wasn’t available. She couldn’t sense his body, the blood flowing in his veins, or any of that. Even her own skin felt quiet, where she normally felt the pinprick sensations of innumerable, microscopic airborne lifeforms touching her. She’d barely even realized that was happening until it stopped.
“Jack’s taken me on as his protegé. Teaching me the finer points of being an artist. What he’s been saying is that I’m too focused on the external. Skin, bone, flesh, bodies, the stuff we see and hear. He’s told me to practice with the internal, and this seems like a great time to do that.”
“Internal?” Amy replied.
“It’s easy to break people’s bodies. Easy to scar them and hurt them that way. But the true art is what you do inside their heads. Do you have a breaking point, Amy? Maybe if we find your limits and push past them, you’ll find yourself in a place where you’ll want to join us.” A wide smile spread across Bonesaw’s face as she settled into a cross-legged position on the floor, facing Amy.
“I- no. Please.”
“You’re a healer, but you can do so much more. Why don’t you go out in costume?”
Amy didn’t respond. There was no right answer here.
“Are you afraid to hurt someone? That could be our first exercise.”
Amy shook her head.
“Murder rat, come here. Hack Job, back off.”
Hack Job let go of her, and she tried to scramble away, but Murder Rat pounced on her, pressing her down against the ground. The woman smelled rank, like a homeless person.
“So here’s the lesson,” Bonesaw said, “Hurt her, take her apart. If you go easy on her, or if you leave her in a state where she can move, she’ll cut you, and then she’ll cut a body part off that man on the couch there.”
Murder Rat placed a blade against her cheek, scraped it down toward her chin, as if giving Amy a close shave.
She reached up and touched the woman’s chest. Without Hack Job touching her, her power was coming back quickly. She felt Murder Rat’s biology snap into her consciousness, until she could see every cell, every fluid, every part of the woman. The two women. She could see Bonesaw’s work, the integration of body parts, the transfusions of bone marrow from one woman to the other, the viruses with modified DNA inside them, skewing the balances and configurations until she couldn’t tell for sure where one woman started and the other began.
She could also see the metal frames inside the woman, interlacing with the largest bones of her skeletal system, the needles in her spine and brain. Bonesaw’s control system. There was something around the heart, too. Metal, with lots of needles pointing inward. She was rigged to die if the control frame was ever disabled. The woman, no, the women, were awake in there. One and a half brains contained in a synthetic fluid in her skull.
She targeted the ligaments at the woman’s shoulders and hips. Cutting them was easier than putting the things back together again. Dissolve the cells, break them down.
The woman collapsed onto a heap on top of her.
“Excellent! Pick her up, H.J.”
Hack Job picked up the limp Murder Rat, put her down a short distance away from Amy. Bonesaw walked over to her creation and propped up Murder Rat so she had a view of the scene.
“I’m surprised you didn’t kill her. The healer, letting someone suffer like that. Or are you against mercy killing?”
Again, there was no answer she could give that wouldn’t worsen her situation.
“Or are you against killing in general? We can work on that.”
“Please. No.”
“Pagoda. Your turn.”
Pagoda approached with an awkward lurch, and Amy managed to stand and run. She got halfway to the front door before Hack Job materialized in front of her, barring her way. He pushed her, and she fell. Pagoda lurched over to her and pressed her down.
“I use my creations to collect material for other work. It’s a circle, using them to get material for more creations. Having the Nine was essential to get things started, and to help get things going again if a hero managed to put down a few, but now I’m in good shape. I stick around because they’re mostly fans, and they’re kind of family. I want you in my family, Amy Dallon.”
“Please.”
“Now, I’m willing to make sacrifices to see that happen. Same thing as with Murder Rat. You don’t stop Pagoda, I’ll have him hurt the man on the couch.”
Amy used her power on Pagoda, felt his body, much the same as Murder Rat’s in s
o many respects, though the metal frame with the needles in his spine was different. She reached for the ligaments at his shoulders and hips, separated them.
The first had grown back before she’d started on the third.
“He heals,” Bonesaw informed her. “Two regenerators in one. There’s only one good way to stop him. Try again.”
Pain. She inflicted pain on Pagoda. No reaction. She’d have to reach into his brain to make it so he really felt pain again. She tried atrophying his muscles, with no luck. Anything she did was undone nearly as fast as she could inflict it.
“Five seconds,” Bonesaw announced. “Four.”
Sending signals to his arms to get him to move. No. The metal frame overrode anything she could do with her power to control him.
“Three.”
Amy used the only option available to her. She disconnected him from the metal frame that Bonesaw used to control her subjects. She could sense it as the metal shifted into motion around his heart. Not needles, as there had been for Murder Rat, but small canisters of fluid.
“Two… one… zero point five… Ah, there we go.”
Pagoda lurched backward and broke contact with Amy, her power no longer giving her an insight into what was happening with him. He sat down, using one hand to prop himself up. A moment later he slumped over, his eyes shutting. His breathing stopped.
“A chemical trigger for something I already put in his DNA, when I was patching his regeneration abilities together. Reverses the regeneration so it does the opposite, starting with the heart.”
Amy looked at her hand. She’d just taken a life. A mercy, most probably, but she’d killed. Something she had promised herself she would never do.
She shivered. It had been so easy. Was this what it was like for her father? Had she just taken one more step toward being like him?
“Ready to join?” Bonesaw asked, looking for all the world like a puppy when her master had the leash out, ready for a walk. Eager, brimming with excitement.
“No,” Amy said. “There’s no way.”
“Why? Whatever’s holding you back, we can fix it. Or we can break it, depending.”
“It’s not- don’t you understand? I don’t want to hurt people.”
“But we can change that! We’re not so different. You know as well as I do that anything about anyone can be changed if you work hard enough.”
“Then why don’t you change? You could be good.”
“I like the other members of the Nine. And I couldn’t make anything really amazing if I was following rules. I want to make something even more amazing than Hack Job, Murder Rat or Pagoda. Something you and I could only make together. Can you imagine it? You could use your power, and then we could make one superperson out of a hundred capes, and all of the powers would be full strength because you helped and we could use it to stop one of the Endbringers, and the whole world would be like, ‘Are we supposed to clap’? Can you picture it?” Bonesaw was getting so excited with her idea that she was almost breathless.
“No,” Amy said. Then, just to make it clear, she added, “No, it’s not going to happen. I won’t join you.”
“You will! You have to!”
“No.”
“I have to do like Jack said. He said I won’t be a true genius until I’ve figured out how to get inside people’s heads.”
“Maybe- Maybe you won’t be inside my head until you realize there’s no way I’m going to join the Slaughterhouse Nine.”
Bonesaw frowned. “Maybe.”
Amy nodded.
“Or maybe I need to figure out your breaking point. Your weak spot. Like that man there.” Bonesaw pointed at Mark. “Cherish said you sleep here, and you’ve been around him for a while… so why haven’t you healed him?”
Amy shivered.
“Who is he?”
“My dad.”
“Why not fix your dad?”
“My power doesn’t work on brains,” Amy lied.
“You’re wrong,” Bonesaw said, stepping closer.
“No.”
“Yes. Your power can affect people’s brains. You have to understand, I’ve taken twenty or thirty people apart to figure out how their power works so I can put them back together again the way I want them. I’ve learned almost everything about powers. I’ve induced stress of all kinds on people until they had a trigger event, while I had them on my table and wired to computers, so I could record all the details and study their brains and bodies as the powers took hold.”
Twenty or thirty people she’s taken apart. However many others she’s tortured to death.Bonesaw smiled, “And I know the secrets. I know where powers come from. I know how they work. I know how your power works. You have to understand, people like you and me? Who got our powers in moments of critical stress? The powers aren’t meant for us. They’re accidents. We’re accidents. And I think you could see it if you were touching someone when they had their trigger event.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t have to. What you need to know is that the subjects of our power, the stuff it can work on, like people? Like the fish lady in Asia? The boy who can talk to computers? Our powers weren’t created to work with those things. With people or fish or computers. It’s not intentional. It happens because the powers connect to us in the moments we have our trigger events, decrypt our brains and search for something in the world that they can connect to, that loosely correlate with how the powers were originally supposed to work. In those one to eight seconds it takes our powers to work, our power goes into overdrive, it picks up all the necessary details about those things, like people or fish or computers, sometimes reaching across the whole world to do it. Then it starts condensing down until there’s a powerset, stripping away everything it doesn’t need to make that power work.”
Amy stared.
“And then, before it can destroy us, before we can hurt ourselves with our own power, before that spark of potential burns out, it changes gears. It figures out how to function with us. It protects us from all the ways our power might hurt us, that we can anticipate, because there’s no point if it kills us. It connects with our emotional state at the time the powers came together, because that’s the context it builds everything else in. It’s so amazingly complicated and beautiful.”
Bonesaw looked down at Amy. “Your inability to affect brains? It’s one of those protections. A mental block. I can help you break it.”
“I don’t want to break it,” Amy said, her voice hushed.
“Ahhh. Well, that just makes me more excited to see how you react when you do. See, all we have to do is get you to that point of peak stress. Your power will be stronger, and you’ll be able to push past that mental block. Probably.”
“Please,” Amy said. “Don’t.”
Bonesaw reached into her apron and retrieved a remote control. She pointed it at Mark, where he sat on the couch. A red dot appeared on his forehead.
“No!”
One of Bonesaw’s mechanical contraptions leaped across the room, its scalpel legs impaling the suede cushions on either side of Mark. One leg, tipped with a syringe, thrust into Mark’s right nostril. He hollered incoherently, tried to pull away, only for two mechanical legs to clutch his head and hold him firm.
Amy’s screams joined his.
“I’m doing you a favor, really!” Bonesaw raised her voice to be heard over the screams. “You’ll thank me!”
Amy rushed forward, hauled on the metal leg to pull it from Mark’s nostril, pulled at the other legs to tear it from him and then hurled it away. Lighter than it looked.
“Now fix him or he’ll probably die or be a vegetable,” Bonesaw told her. “Unless you decide you’re okay with that, in which case we’re making progress.”
Amy tried to shut out Bonesaw’s voice, straddled Mark’s lap and touched his face.
She’d healed him frequently in the previous weeks, enough to know that he was remarkably alert in a body that refused to cooperate
or carry out the tasks he wanted it to. Not so different from Bonesaw’s creations in that respect. She’d healed everything but his brain, had altered his digestive system and linked it to his circadian rhythms so he went to the bathroom on a strict schedule, to reduce the need for diapers. Other tune-ups she’d given him had been aimed at making him more comfortable, reducing stiffness and aches and pains. It was the least she could do.
Now she had to focus on his brain. The needle had drawn ragged cuts through the arachnid layer, had injected droplets of acid into the frontal lobes. More damage, in addition to what Leviathan had inflicted with the head wound, and it was swiftly spreading.
Everything else in the world seemed to drop away. She pressed her forehead to his. Everything biological was shaped in some way by what it had grown from and what had come before. Rebuilding the damaged parts was a matter of tracing everything backwards. Some of the brain was impossible to restore to what it had once been, in the most damaged areas or places where it was the newest growths that were gone, but she could check everything in the surrounding area, use process of elimination and context to figure out what the damaged areas had tied to.
She felt tears in her eyes. She had told herself she would heal him and then leave the Dallon household. Actually doing this, fixing him, taking that plunge, she knew she would probably never have found the courage if she hadn’t been pushed into it.
It wasn’t that she was afraid to get something wrong. No. Even as complicated as the mind was, she’d always known she could manage it. No, it was what came after that scared her more than anything. Just like finding out about Marquis, it was the opening of a door she desperately wanted to keep shut.
She restored his motor skills, penmanship, driving a car, even the little things, the little sequences of movements he used to turn the lock on the bathroom door as he closed it or turn a pencil around in one hand to use the eraser on the end. Everything he’d lost, she returned to him.
He moved fractionally. She opened her eyes, and saw him staring into her eyes. Something about the gaze told her he was better.
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