Nothing. Too vague. Whatever aid my ‘passenger’ provided, it wouldn’t think of something I couldn’t. My bugs didn’t respond.
It was the perfect time for a rescuer to show up. My bugs had stopped going after Bonesaw because we weren’t aware about her current location, so they hovered in place, clinging to walls and feeling around for people who might be their target. There was a chance that they would bump into someone else. If a rescuer was coming, my bugs would see them.
There was nobody. No people on their way.
None of my teammates were moving, either.
If I had the ability to use my power properly, I might have done something with the smoking vials that Bonesaw had left behind. Used loops of silk to drag them away, perhaps. I didn’t. My power was clumsy, now, a brute force weapon at best.
And hell, I was just so tired. Physically, mentally, emotionally. So many burdens on my shoulders, so many failures that had cost so much. We had fucked up here, had underestimated Bonesaw. I’d gone with Trickster’s plan to set Hookwolf’s contingent against the Nine and buy us the chance to infiltrate and rescue Brian, even though I’d known the strategy had too many holes, too many unpredictable variables. I’d been too tired to think of something else, too preoccupied and impatient because Brian was in enemy hands.
I would have resigned myself to a fate worse than death, but how did one do that? How was I supposed to convince myself to give up? It would be so easy, on a level. It was alluring, the idea that I could stop worrying, stop caring, after so much pressure for so many weeks and months. After so many years, if I counted the bullying. I wanted to give up, but a bigger, more stubborn, stupider part of my brain refused to let me.
Bonesaw returned all too soon. ”Threads, Skitter? These yours, or leftovers from before?”
Threads? I hadn’t set any tripwires. I should have, but I’d been more focused on a quick rescue mission than preparations for a potential fight.
My bugs felt movement. Except nobody had entered the building, to the best of my knowledge. It was in one of the hallways. Big.
The huge stuffed animal I’d noted in the hallway.
Of course. Parian’s creations had deflated without her power to sustain them, hadn’t they? The stuffed thing was inflated, heavy, so she was here. My bugs couldn’t detect her, but she was here.
“Outlet, outlet, need an outlet. You’d think there’d be more in a kitchen, but nooooo,” Bonesaw muttered. She passed through my field of view, holding a saw twice the size of the one she’d held before.
The stuffed animal moved forward clumsily. My swarm’s contact with it was intermittent as it made its way towards us, then past us, venturing into a hallway.
“Gonna have to cut a hole in your skull, Skitter. Unavoidable. I’d go up through your nose, but I couldn’t reach the top of your brain with the equipment I have. Going to make a little window. Just big enough to get my hand through.”
She turned on the saw, and it screamed, a shrill whine on par with nails on a blackboard, but unending, ceaseless.
The stuffed animal was turning around, coming back down the hallway, towards us.
Have to stall her.
I looked up at her, then deliberately blinked three times in a row.
The saw stopped.
“Trying to say something?”
I blinked once, hard.
“Is that one blink for yes, two for no?”
I blinked twice. Just to confuse matters.
“That’s confusing. You’re not just trying to delay the part where I carve up your brain, are you?”
I blinked twice.
“Not getting what you’re trying to say. One blink for yes, two for no, okay? Now, do you actually have something meaningful to communicate?”
I blinked once, hard.
“Are you going to tell me to stop?”
I blinked twice. She wouldn’t listen if I did, and then it would be right back to the surgery. I trembled, but I didn’t take my eyes off her.
“Tell me when to stop. Last requests, threats, your friends, um… science, art-”
I blinked once.
“Art? Yours? Mine?”
Another blink. If anything would get her talking, it was her ‘art’.
“What do you want to know. About your friend there? It’s more research than anything else. Or maybe about you?”
I blinked. The stuffed animal was close.
“Art and you, huh. You want to know what I’m gonna do when we’re done with my investigation?”
Why not? Knowing had to be better than wondering. One blink.
“I’m going to go all out. Way I figure it, I set your Gemma lobe to attract bugs around you, then remove it, so you’ve got no conscious control over it. But there’s a point to it! I make some physical modifications to you, see. Implant some of Mannequin’s equipment so you’ve got enough sustenance to keep you going, and sustenance to keep the bugs you bring to you alive. You become a living hive, see? We could even make it so they crawl inside you and build nests there.”
The stuffed animal pushed the door open and walked into the cafeteria. The room darkened as it passed in front of a window.
Please don’t notice it.
“I’ve got a regular mod for your amygdala, to make sure you behave, and a frame I implant to your skeleton and heart to help control you, make you stronger, more durable. I figure we’ll try to go for a cosmetic shift. I have to say I admire this armor, so why not let take that to the logical conclusion? We’ll give you an exoskeleton. It’d be awesome. Compound eyes, claws. We’ll see how far we can go. Won’t that be fun?”
The stuffed animal had stopped in the middle of the cafeteria. Either it didn’t hear Bonesaw or something else had its attention.
I could feel that not unfamiliar sensation of darkness creeping in around the edges of my vision. Was I passing out? How much blood was I losing?
I blinked three times. Stall.
“No, no.” She stroked my hair, and my forehead lit up with a burning pain where she’d cut. ”We should get this done before you drop dead. Don’t think I can’t see the changes in your breathing and pupil dilation.”
She started up the saw and pressed it against my skull. The horror of what she was doing was compounded by the most god-awful noise, and a grinding vibration of my skull.
If it hurt, I didn’t register it, because the noise of the tool had drawn the stuffed animal’s attention. It charged for us, slamming through the glass sneeze guard of the dining hall’s serving counter. It struck Bonesaw, hard, and the saw slid across my head, cutting through my hairline. I didn’t care.
My rescuer was some kind of cartoonish dinosaur made of black and blue fabric. I could see the logo of this health club repeated several times over the stuffed animal’s exterior.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Bonesaw slowly stand. The two combatants were at opposite points in my peripheral vision; Bonesaw stood to the far left, Parian’s creation to the far right.
“That’s really rude,” Bonesaw said, putting inflection on each word. ”I was having a nice conversation with Skitter, and you interrupt?”
She snapped her fingers, and mechanical spiders leaped from a spot I couldn’t see to latch onto the stuffed dinosaur, much as they’d done with me.
Needles, saws, scalpels and drills attacked the dinosaur, and it, in turn, smashed the spiders to the best of its ability. Though it clubbed the spiders into pieces with its hands, feet and tail, it still continued to march steadily towards Bonesaw, moving over me and the others.
Bonesaw, for her part, was retreating, holding a pair of test tubes in one hand, dropping what looked like color-coded sugar cubes into them with the other. She glanced around quickly, then lunged for a nearby counter, grabbing a bottle of water. She upended it over the test tubes, going for haste over precision. More than half of the water splashed around her feet.
Parian’s creation struck the villainess a second time. Bonesaw was thrown into a metal shelf u
nit with enough force that she dented it. One test tube slipped from her fingers.
The other, she whipped at the stuffed dinosaur. It hit with enough force that it shattered on impact.
The dinosaur struck Bonesaw a third time. Heavy as the impact was, Bonesaw was cornered and she couldn’t go flying as she’d done before. My view of the scene was limited to the back of the Dinosaur’s head, and the occasional view of an stubby-fingered arm as it was drawn back for a haymaker punch. It pounded her, one hit after another.
My heart sank as I saw the stuffed dinosaur begin to deflate. It backed away from Bonesaw, and I saw a spreading area on its side where the fabric was thinning out, bleaching. Once the first holes appeared in the fabric, the rest of the process was swift. It crumpled almost explosively, revealing a figure inside.
Parian threw off the cloth that had covered her and used her power to rip away her sleeve and part of her dress where it was disintegrating; whatever had eaten at the fabric of her dinosaur armor was continuing the process with her clothing.
I could see Bonesaw too. Her face was bloodied, her nose gushing blood, and her cheek was a ruined, abraded mess. Whatever had eaten at Parian’s dinosaur had gotten on her too, devouring the edges of her dress, one sock and part of the shoe on the same foot.
“Rude.”
“You killed my mom,” Parian’s voice sounded hollow.
“My teammates did most of the actual killing, so I don’t think I did, if that makes you feel any better.”
“My aunt, my best friend, my cousin… they were all here.”
“Wrong place, wrong time?” Bonesaw shrugged. She slapped at a wasp that had managed to get in position to sting her. She wasn’t in the area of her anti-bug smoke anymore.
“They told me to run, to protect the kids. But they were supposed to escape while I handled that,” Parian sounded lost, dazed. ”I thought they’d get away, so I played dead. I didn’t know.”
She wasn’t a fighter, I remembered. She had held her own against Leviathan, but she didn’t have experience. I wanted to scream at her, to make her stop talking, to do something to Bonesaw.
“If it makes you feel any better, some of them might still be alive. We didn’t kill them all.”
Parian snapped her attention to Bonesaw, “What?”
“Some we left alive, so I could give them five-minute plastic surgery. My spiders handled most of it. Implants under the skin, some chemical dyes for hair…”
“Plastic surgery?” Parian shook her head. ”What? Why?”
“To make them look like us. They’re all running around out there, drawing enemy fire and freaking out. It’s funny. And of course, it’ll take a dozen visits with doctors less talented than I to get something even resembling their old faces back. Can you imagine how many people are going to double take when they look at them, before they’ve all been fixed? Like, ‘Oh no, it’s Siberian!’, except it isn’t.”
Parian flung one hand in Bonesaw’s direction. I didn’t see what happened next, but the bugs that were still drifting in Bonesaw’s direction to attack her were telling me that there were threads stretching between the two of them. A bug settled on the point of a needle where it had impaled the side of Bonesaw’s neck. Twenty or thirty needles with attached threads extending between them and Parian’s sleeve.
Bonesaw crunched something in her mouth, “You’re playing so rough. Ow. I think you broke one of my teeth, with your dinosaur.”
Parian ignored her. A twist of her hands, and Bonesaw was lifted into the air, spread-eagled. Bonesaw’s skin stretched where the needles pulled at it. Parian advanced towards the villain.
Broken tooth? No. When I’d kicked Cherish earlier, hadn’t she said that Bonesaw had reinforced her teeth? Surely the psycho would have done the same for herself.
She was lying.
And there was nothing I could do to alert Parian.
Parian picked up one of the scalpels Bonesaw had placed near me. Her hand was trembling even after she had it in a white-knuckled grip. ”I don’t want to do this. I never wanted to fight. But I can’t let you walk away. That’s the most important thing. I’m willing to compromise what I believe in, compromise myself, to do that.”
Bonesaw rolled her eyes.
Wall! Barrier!
My bugs left Bonesaw’s presence to form a barrier between her and Parian, but they were too few. Too many had died against Bonesaw’s bug killing smoke. Parian ignored them.
In one motion, Parian stepped close and stabbed the scalpel into Bonesaw’s throat. Then she did it again, and again, stabbing over and over, hysterical.
It wasn’t enough blood. I knew it, and Parian had to know it.
Bonesaw spat into Parian’s face. Her own flesh burned as whatever chemical she had been holding in her mouth spilled down her lip.
Parian, for her part, dropped the scalpel, tore her mask off and staggered blindly in the general direction of the sink, her hands over her eyes.
No.
What I wouldn’t give for the chance to change this, to act, to offer even one word of assistance.
Bonesaw turned her head and spat again, some residual chemical directed at the threads. When that didn’t achieve the desired result, she repeated the process. The threads snapped and she dropped to the ground.
“Burned mah tongue,” Bonesaw said, to nobody in particular. Or to me? She stuck it out to demonstrate. It was scalded, blistered and covered with dead white flesh in much the same way her lip was. She spat again.
Parian reached the sink, cranked on the tap. There was no water. She threw herself to one side, feeling along the counter for something, anything to wash out her eyes.
“You’re lucky I’m so nice,” Bonesaw said. She lifted up the tattered bottom of her dress to dab at her lip and tongue. I could make out test tubes, equipment and pouches, all belted to her thighs and stomach. ”If I was a less forgiving person, I’d make you regret that.”
Parian sagged to her knees, hands still on the counter, heaving for breath.
“But instead, I’ll leave you alone to think about what you’ve done,” Bonesaw said. She plucked some of the needles out of her skin. ”I’ll finish with these guys, and later, I can show you what I can do with a needle and thread. It’ll be fun. Common interests!”
“Making friends, Bonesaw?”
No. Any vestige of hope I’d had disappeared.
Jack leaned over the counter. Burnscar stood beside him, looking troubled.
“Jack! Yes! I’m having lots of fun! These people are so interesting,” Bonesaw smiled.
“You hurt yourself,” Jack frowned. ”Your mouth.”
“The doll-girl ambushed me. But I’m okay. I can fix myself after I’m done here.”
“You’ll have to finish fast. We’re going.”
“No!”
“Yes. The enemy’s recouping from the first few hits, and they’re stalling Siberian and Crawler. Only a matter of time before they engage in one good flank and blindside one of us three. We leave now, and all they remember is how hard we hit them and how little they could do.”
“But I have research!”
“Bring three. We won’t be able to bring them all along, and you know they get messy if you leave them like that for too long.”
“Only three?” Bonesaw pouted.
“Only three.”
“Then, um. Skitter…”
I felt hands seize my feet and pull me away from my teammates. Burnscar. She held me under one arm, my head and arms dangling. Beads of blood dripped down to the floor.
“Um, um. Tattletale. I want to see what her brain looks like, too.”
“Tattletale it is.”
“And Trickster! Because Ball-of-fire girl killed Hack Job. I want another.”
Hack Job?
“Trickster it is. Finish off the rest.”
“Can I leave Brian there? I have to show my art to people to get known.”
“Brian, is it? Hm. I think that’s a very good ide
a.”
“Yes! Then we’ll go from first to last. The girl with the horns.”
Imp?
The small circular saw started up with its high-pitched whine.
Then it stopped. I could hear a strangled noise.
“Aw. Look at his heart beating! So fast!”
Burnscar turned, and I could tell they were looking at Brian.
Another strangled noise, trying and failing to form words. It was so forced and ragged that it made my own throat seize up in sympathy.
“You don’t want to see your sister die, huh? That’s sweet,” Bonesaw said. ”Maybe you should have taught her the basics. Don’t have to see her if she’s going to walk straight into a modified wolf trap. Did you know? She turned off her power just so she could beg for help. From us. She’s not very bright.”
He made a sound that might have been a growl or a howl of rage, but there was no volume to it, and it was more high-pitched than anything else.
“Don’t worry!” Bonesaw said, “I’ll take good care of your friends.”
I felt a hand pat my cheek.
“Come now, Bonesaw,” Jack said.
“It’s just so funny, watching him react. His heart beat faster when I touched her.”
“It did. But we should go. Burnscar? Torch the ones we’re not bringing.”
“I wanted to!”
“You had your chance, little b. You got distracted.”
I could feel the heat of nearby flame as Burnscar manifested a fireball in one hand.
Darkness rolled over Burnscar’s feet, a carpet. There was no direction to it, and very little volume. It pooled on the ground and spread.
“Yes! He’s doing it! Can I look? I just want to get the hard drive!”
“No.”
“But-”
I could feel my heart pounding, pounding, then stop. The pain was gone. I was gone too. I had no body, only perception.
The scene was familiar. At the same time, I couldn’t have said what happened next. It was like a book I’d read years ago and promptly forgotten, too strange to commit to memory.
Two beings spiraled through an airless void, past suns, stars and moons. They rode the ebbs and flows of gravity, ate ambient radiation and light and drew on other things I couldn’t perceive. They slipped portions of themselves in and out of reality to reshape themselves. Push further into this reality to ride the pull of one planet, shift into another to ride that slingshot momentum, or to find some other source of momentum elsewhere. Ten thousand thousands of each of the two entities existed simultaneously, complemented each other, drew each other forward. They shrugged off even the physical laws that limited the movement of light, moving faster with every instant. The only thing that slowed them was their own desire to stay close, to keep each other in sight and match their speeds. Yet somehow this movement was graceful, fluid, beautiful even. Two impossible creatures moving in absolute harmony with the universe, leaving a trail of essence in their wakes.
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