I looked down at Atlas. ”I don’t have enough brute force, and neither does Atlas.”
“Legend does. We’re on our way. See you in a few.”
“Right.”
I hung up.
I drew more words in the air with my bugs, near Legend.
‘FOUND THE 9. UNDERGROUND SHELTER.’
As an afterthought, I added:
‘MAYBE CIVILIANS INSIDE.’
I drew an arrow by the words. Then, to make it as clear as possible, I drew a giant arrow in the sky, pointing down at the shelter door.
I was going to look foolish if they weren’t inside, and maybe cost Legend in whatever plan he was operating under.
I could feel him changing directions. He kept facing Siberian, unloading laser blasts, but he was flying my way.
Siberian dashed forward. I could feel her cutting a swath through the swarm as she ran, the truck in one hand, one corner of it dragging on the ground, cutting a line into the pavement. She leaped into the air, out of the reach of my swarm-sense. I felt something massive collide with the bugs that were in the air around Legend, felt more die as he shot a laser and caught them in the area.
She’d thrown the truck, and he’d obliterated it.
Legend shifted into high gear, flying out of reach of Siberian as she lunged for him. He dove, hard, and I could imagine her leaping off the side of a second building, trying to get her hands on him.
Legend turned my way and flew towards the library. I hurried out of the way, directing Atlas to higher altitude, just in case Legend decided to level the place.
The leader of the Protectorate had arrived on the scene, and I could sense Siberian on the ground, hot on his heels. He raised one hand, and a laser beam shot forth, splitting into eight smaller beams that bent in the air. They hit the outside edge of the vault door with precision, evenly spaced out, then drifted in a clockwise direction. The door toppled free.
Legend spread his arms, and hundreds of individual beams radiated out from his body. Three quarters of them turned in sync to spear towards the library, stabbing through the architecture. Other beams split off to strike through doorways and windows and across rooftops. No less than three struck me.
I flinched and nearly lost my seat on Atlas, but found it wasn’t much hotter than steaming tap water, and it only lasted two or three seconds before cutting out. Siberian had approached close enough to demand Legend’s attention, and he’d terminated whatever it was he’d been doing.
I turned my mind away from whatever the beams had been intended to do and toward my own contributions to this fight. Had to strike before they got their bearings. I took advantage of the pause to send bugs flowing into the shelter.
I could count a number of people, young and old. The mosquitoes in my swarm could scent blood. Twenty or so people were inside the shelter, standing there. There was metal on their bodies, like backpacks or prosthetic body parts, but they didn’t seem to be hurt.
There were three more inside, but I wasn’t feeling so generous as to call them ‘people’. They stood apart: two men and a preadolescent girl.
It was them. The Nine.
I couldn’t trust my ability to get to Legend and communicate the necessary details in time, and I might even be endangering him by getting too close to Siberian. I couldn’t say for sure how he would really act in the field, but his PR sold the idea of a legitimate good guy who would balk at attacking an enemy with a hostage.
Or maybe he wouldn’t. It could even be a mercy, sparing someone from one of the Nine’s clutches. Siberian devoured people alive.
Either way, it was better to try to catch his attention with a written message: ’20 CIVILIAN, JS, BS, SIB’.
He was too distracted by Siberian to see it. She wasn’t as fast as Battery or Velocity, but she had the physical power to move quickly, and she was leaping between buildings to throw herself at him with the speed and aim of an arrow shot from a bow.
I tried leaving another message for Legend, stating the same thing. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw him looking at me. Our eyes met. He nodded, and I turned my attention to the shelter.
I didn’t want to do this half-assed. No mistakes this time around. I gathered a swarm of generous size, but I held it at bay. There were more preparations to carry out. I drew the capsaicin bugs from beneath my armor and added them to the swarm. I drew out silk threads and held them suspended in the air, ready for use. For a final measure, I withdrew a lighter and the changepurse from the utility compartment at my back.
Primary swarm in first. As one singular mass, they flowed inside. The capsaicin-laced bugs joined them, going straight for the eyes.
Jack reacted, as did the man, but Bonesaw was unfazed. I saw Siberian flicker. Legend noticed as well. He snapped his eyes to me, and then the shelter.
The creator needs to concentrate?
My heart was pounding so hard I felt like it would dislodge me from Altas. Bugs settled on the three members of the Nine and then they attacked. It wasn’t the sort of attack I’d ever done before. I’d had bugs bite, I’d had them sting, I’d even used them to deliver payloads of their various venoms.
I’d always held back to some degree. The only ones I hadn’t held back against had been untouchable. These three weren’t so lucky.
Mandibles bit into flesh, seeking not to pinch and inflict pain. Ants scissored flesh away, beetles tore and rent into the flesh, flies spat their digestive enzymes onto the exposed flesh.
I buried them in every kind of insect I had that could eat, cut or pierce meat. The bugs didn’t eat their fill: they simply bit, chewed, let the food fall from their mouths, then bit again.
Bonesaw’s hands were smooth as glass as she reached for her belt. She was cool and collected, even as the bugs slowly flayed her.
She was stopped short as the silk strands tangled her ceramic fingers.
My bugs could hear her speak. Though I could barely make out the words, I thought maybe the first one was ‘Jack’. She held out her hands.
I tried to bind him, but tying his arm to his side was harder than using silk cords to lash fingers together. At least partially blinded by the capsaicin, he swiped his knife a few times in Bonesaw’s direction. He cut her several times, and my bugs could feel her flesh part around her collarbone and face. Some of the cuts were on target, however, and the threads around her fingers were severed. An instant later, she was free to put together her anti-bug smoke, working her hands to break the threads as I tried to tangle her fingers again.
Okay. Not the end of the world. The bugs were still devouring the three, and I still had a plan in mind. An idle hope.
I withdrew the tissues I’d wadded in the changepurse to keep the contents from jingling or rattling around. My bugs took hold of them and carried them into the air, two or three dozen in all.
I tested the lighter, then held it out to ignite the first tissue.
It was a slow burn, taking fifteen or twenty seconds to consume the paper. The flies that carried it died as the flame reached them, consuming them.
By the time the first was burned, my bugs were positioning the second, allowing it to ignite. In this manner, I chained them one after the other. A slow-moving relay of flame.
Bonesaw had her smoke going, despite my efforts to rebind her fingers, and I could feel it murdering my bugs en-masse. I pulled them away and out of the shelter, leaving only a few to track the movements of the Nine.
The trail of burning tissues made their way inside the shelter. I ignited the last few tissues and sent them to Bonesaw. I could feel the bugs die as they hit the smoke.
Nothing. I swore.
It had been too much to hope for, that the smoke was flammable. Even if the smoke had exploded in the mildest possible way, it would have at least given me a countermeasure.
I turned away from the area. I’d told the others I would play safe. I’d tried what I could, I’d maybe even done a little damage to them, now I’d back off. I’d earned Siberian’s
attention by attacking her creator, but she was preoccupied with Legend, so that was one threat I didn’t have to worry about. The rest of the Nine were still inside.
Legend, for his part, was keeping up the measured, carefully paced assault. I saw him raise one hand to his ear.
A communication from his team? Had something happened with the rest of the Protectorate? Or the other members of the Nine?
He dove straight for the shelter. Siberian gave chase, and without slowing in the slightest, he raked a laser across the street to render her footing less stable. It couldn’t have bought him more than a fraction of a second, if it even made a difference at all; I could see her placing one foot on a shattered piece of road that wouldn’t have held a squirrel without collapsing. She used it to kick herself forward, soaring after Legend, hands curled into claws. He was ahead of her by only ten or fifteen feet.
The scattered bugs I had at the fringes of the extermination smoke gave me only a half-completed picture. Legend inside, blasting a laser in the direction of the cloud where Jack, Bonesaw and Siberian’s creator were. He grabbed one of the civilians that were standing dumbly in the shelter, only to get mobbed. She latched onto him, and the others did the same, trying to drag him down. My bugs felt a flash of heat as he used his laser to blast at them and free himself. Another laser speared out of the top of the Library, followed soon after by Legend, spearing up toward the sky. He directed another laser straight down at the library, continuing to fly straight up.
That was reason for me to do the same. I rose with one hand on Atlas’ horn, and I drew my phone with the other. I speed dialed Tattletale. Trusting to her penchant for picking up the phone on the first ring, I started shouting before I heard any response, “Something’s up! Take cover and get back!”
The stealth bomber streaked across the sky, just as it had before. Its payload this time was smaller, barely visible.
The devastation wasn’t so easy to miss.
The only word for it was chaos. I could hardly pick out the individual effects as they mingled. A cloud of yellow-green smoke being pulled into a spiral around a vortex, which was causing the section of the library that had turned to glass to shatter and implode. There was a flare of brilliant mixed colors I could barely look at, frying a scattered assortment of boneless, faceless, fleshy monsters. One monster made it four steps before being turned to dust. Where the dust touched, more dust was created, until the vortex expanded enough to start pulling it all in, stopping what might have been an endless chain reaction.
I could see time slowing in one spot, I could see pavement heating into a liquid in another. I could see one area that was serene, untouched, a bubble where a newspaper that had been scattered on the ground was flapping violently with the movement of air. Half a building was annihilated by the flash of an explosion, and it toppled into the midst of the bomb site. In seconds, it was obliterated and chewed up.
The effects spread and expanded all down the street, a stripe of this madness three blocks wide, extending into the midst of the blaze from the previous bombing run.
I drifted toward Legend, raising my hands over my head to show I meant no harm.
“Thank you for the assistance,” he spoke, when I was in earshot. ”Some was misguided or off target, but it did make a difference.”
I could only nod.
He put one hand to his ear, then paused for several long seconds. When he spoke, it was vague. ”Acknowledged.”
I waited, staring down at the disaster area below.
“Crawler and Mannequin observed to be in the blast site.”
“How did they disengage while keeping them there? They- they did disengage?”
“Clockblocker managed to tether Mannequin in place. Crawler freed himself from the same trap by tearing himself in two against the immovable object. It was Piggot who managed to keep Crawler in the blast area.”
“How?”
“She had Weld pass on a message, telling Crawler what we had planned. He was so tickled at the idea that we would be able to hurt him that he stayed where he was while the teams made their retreat.”
“Just like that?”
“Apparently so.”
“If he survives-”
“He didn’t.”
There was a series of smaller explosions below. I could see a section of ruined building glowing red, then detonating in a blast of light that sent a nearby glacier spinning into a patch of burning ground.
“And the other three?”
“Remains to be seen. The civilians are dead, but it’s something of a mercy. Bonesaw’s mechanical spiders were welded to their skeletons, allowing her to remotely control them. Like zombies, only they were aware and in incredible pain. I expect she had measures to inflict agonizing deaths on them if we attempted to disconnect them from her spider-frames. Maybe I could have saved them, can’t say. From the glimpses I saw of them, I don’t know if they would have thanked me.”
We spent a minute staring down at the devastation.
I ventured to ask him a question, “Can Brockton Bay take this? It feels like it was on the verge of collapse already. Add this mess, the firebombing… can we really come back from it?”
“You know this city better than I do, I’m sure. I like to think people are stronger than they appear at first glance. Perhaps the same goes for cities as well?”
“I’d like to think so. But if I’m being realistic-”
I stopped mid-sentence.
My bugs had found a group of individuals on the edge of the blast radius.
“No fucking way.” I pointed.
Siberian flickered violently as she crouched beside Jack and Bonesaw, one hand on each. In between the three of them was a man, hunched over.
Legend raised one hand, but he didn’t shoot.
“Legend?”
“They haven’t seen us. I would like to take out Jack or Bonesaw while they’re distracted and unguarded, I just need Siberian to step away or let go of them.”
The group shifted positions, so the man had an arm around Jack’s chest and an arm around Bonesaw’s shoulders, Siberian behind him.
“See that?” Legend asked.
“What?” I could barely make them out from our vantage point. ”I can’t.”
“My eyes are better than most. A minor benefit of my powers. The backs of his hands, perhaps you can make out the tattoos? A cauldron on the left hand, a swan on the right.”
“I- I don’t follow.”
“No,” he sighed a little. ”I suppose you wouldn’t. It does mean we know who he is.”
“Someone I’d know? An old costume?”
He shook his head. ”A scholar.”
Jack glanced up, and Legend fired in the same instant. With Siberian’s strength, the group of the Nine lunged to one side, disappearing behind cover. I sent bugs after them.
My swarm sensed other arrivals. The Undersiders and Travelers came from the west, taking a circuitous route around the top end of the bomb site. Legend fired a series of blasts after Siberian and gave chase, but she was keeping a building between her group and Legend. He stopped where he was, one hand outstretched, and touched his ear.
“My teams are on their way,” he said.
“That’s good,” I said. ”The Undersiders and Travelers are too. I’m going to go fill them-”
“We need them to back off,” he interrupted.
“Another bombing?” I asked.
He shook his head. ”No. It seems we’re facing the worst case scenario.”
“We’re winning,” I said, incredulous. ”You guys took out two of them, we’ve got them on the defensive-”
“Exactly,” he interrupted me. ”We’re winning. And we’ve broken enough of Jack’s rules for his ‘game’. Now I fear we’re about to see whatever ‘punishment’ it was that Bonesaw prepared for us.”
14.08
“How did it go!?” Tattletale called out to me before I’d even landed.
I set Atlas down on the groun
d and hopped off. ”Whatever the fuck they just dropped on the city, it apparently took out Crawler and Mannequin.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Tattletale said. ”I think that was Bakuda’s stuff they just used. What about the other members of the Nine?”
“They’re on the run. Last I saw, Siberian’s creator looked pretty rough. Not sure if the spider bites and stings will kill him or if Bonesaw will manage to counteract it. Depends on whether Legend and the other heroes can keep up the assault long enough to keep Bonesaw from getting to work.”
I could see Bitch react to the mention of Siberian’s creator. She looked startled, then scowled.
“You found them?” Tattletale asked. ”Siberian and Legend?”
“Yeah. Legend told me to scram, in case Bonesaw deploys the threat she’s been holding over our heads, and so I don’t get in the way. I would have fought to stay, but he’s an intimidating guy to argue with.”
Grue nodded. ”I wouldn’t feel bad about it. It means we can serve as backup if the heroes lose.”
“And this threat? Do we know what it is? Some zombie apocalypse?” Regent asked.
“No.” Tattletale shook her head. ”She sees herself as an artist. She’s going to want to do something that catches us off guard, something that scares us in a way that simple horror movie monsters don’t.”
“I don’t know about you guys,” Sundancer spoke up, “But monsters scare me enough.”
“Says the girl who can vaporize buildings and give Leviathan pause for thought,” Regent said, giving her a sidelong glance.
“Leviathan broke half the bones in my body. The only reason I’m standing here is Panacea,” Sundancer said, a little defensively.
“You two do raise a point, though,” Tattletale cut in. ”Capes are powerful. If she wanted to scare the locals, she’s done that. I’d be willing to bet the ace she has up her sleeve is going to be more aimed at scaring people like us, like Legend. She wants to terrorize the strongest, target people who everyone looks up to and fears.”
“Just us?” I asked.
“She’s shown she knows how to disable powers,” Trickster said. ”If she did that on a larger scale, then-”
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