Okay, at least she wasn’t someone who could kill me if this went the wrong way. I called out, “Vista!”
She whirled on the spot to look at me, then swiftly began backing away.
I raised my hands to show her I meant no harm, “Hold on! I’m safe!”
“That’s just what they would say!” She retorted.
They?
“Who? The Nine? In what universe would I be a member of the Nine?”
“Shut up! Don’t try to convince me! Just… just back off! Leave me alone until all this stops!”
She was breathing so hard I could see her shoulders rising and falling through the protective suit she wore.
A thought struck me. It was working through the suit? The mask had to have filters for smoke, why hadn’t it worked against this miasma?
“I just want to help.”
“Leave!”
She used her power, extending the pillar she had used to ascend to the rooftop. It missed me by a wide margin, but the threat was clear enough.
I regretted it the instant I did it, but I moved forward to avoid any further movements from the shaft of asphalt. If I was going to fall, I wanted to land on the roof, instead of the alleyway a dozen stories below.
“No!” The word was as much a scream as anything else. She extended the shaft well over my head and then pinched it off so the top part fell.
I’d seen her fight Leviathan, and she’d done the same thing then, if on a somewhat bigger scale. I had Atlas carry me out of the way and watched the teardrop shaped piece of asphalt crash to the floor of the alley.
That, apparently, was enough to get Legend’s attention. He rose from the street level and surveyed the scene. He’d taken off the hazmat-style mask and filter, and what little I could see of his expression was drawn. His eyes were narrowed, a vein stood out on his forehead, and he furtively looked from Vista to me and back again.
“Legend,” I started. How was I supposed to address him when he was like this? When I didn’t even know what was going on with them?
Not that it mattered. He raised one hand in my direction, and I veered away, taking evasive maneuvers. It missed me by a foot, circled around and struck me off of Atlas before I could cancel out his momentum and change direction.
Legend had clearly set his lasers to ‘stun’, but it still hurt. Hitting the rooftop hurt more. I could feel a piece of armor crack beneath my weight, hear my things spilling to the ground.
I coughed out half a lungful of air and involuntarily sucked in another breath to cough again. It was humid, tasting slightly off, almost stagnant.
When I opened my eyes, I was seeing red, and not in the metaphorical sense. I was in the midst of the miasma.
Still coughing, I struggled to my feet. The back compartment of my armor had cracked as my weight had come down on the lip of the roof. My weapons, the epipens, the cell phone and the changepurse lay on the ground.
“Stay down!” the junior heroine screamed.
If I hadn’t still been reeling from my fall, I might have been able to avoid it. As it was, the section of rooftop behind me bulged up into a wall and then folded down over on top of me. It bent to accommodate my shape rather than crush me, leaving only my head and shoulders sticking out.
“If you try that trick on me, little girl, I’ll shoot you,” I heard the threat from the air above us.
This was going south, fast.
“I’m going to turn my back and run,” she responded. ”If you try shooting me in the back, I’ll show you what I can really do.”
There was anger in the threat that caught me off guard. Was it this miasma that had pushed her to that level of anger? I wasn’t feeling anything like that. Had something about the way he had talked provoked her? Or was that the norm for her?
I tried to think back to my prior experiences with her and found nothing.
What was her name?
Was I suffering from brain damage? Another concussion?
I did a series of multiplication, addition and subtraction in my head and found no problems on that front. Not general brain damage, apparently.
Amnesia?
My name is Skitter, I thought, Taylor Anne Hebert. Sixteen. Born in Brockton Bay. Student at Winslow High. Ex-student. Member of the Undersiders.
No problems on that front.
My line of thought continued absently, as if I wanted to reassure myself that I was mentally intact. My parents are Dan Hebert and Annette Rose Hebert.
I struggled, wiggling to try and free myself from the hump of solid concrete. I could inch myself out.
What would my mom think to see me now?
I tried to picture her expression.
Again, that gap, the chasm. Nothing.
I could have been hit by five more of those laser blasts on ‘stun’ and it wouldn’t have hit me as hard as the realization that I couldn’t remember my mother. Couldn’t remember her face, the details, her mannerisms. Even the happy memories we’d shared, the little moments I’d clung to over the past two years, they were gone. There was only an empty void where they should have been.
I couldn’t remember my dad, either.
The other Undersiders, their faces, their costumes, their personalities and mannerisms, all gone. I could remember what we’d done: the bank robbery, fighting Purity’s group, lazing around in the old loft, even the general progression of events from the moment I’d met them. But the people were blanks waiting to be filled in, and I couldn’t go from thinking about one name to thinking about the events that were related to it.
I felt a rising panic as I struggled to work myself free. I didn’t know the people who were on the rooftop with me: the man who floated in the air, wearing a sturdy hazmat-style firesuit and a blue and silver mask that left only his mouth, chin and wavy brown hair exposed. I couldn’t recognize the girl he was shooting in the back. I saw her fall face first and writhe with pain. He shot her two more times, and she went limp. Out cold.
I couldn’t make the mental connection between the Nine and their appearances or their powers. If I didn’t have the benefit of being able to remember my actions over the past few minutes, it would have been impossible to say whether the two people here were allies or enemies.
Everything suddenly made sense. The infighting, the tactics they were using, the mixture of hostility and paranoia. Legend was attacking with nonlethal blasts because he couldn’t be sure if he was attacking a teammate or one of the Nine, so he was striving to take everyone out of action with as little permanent damage as possible.
Sundancer’s worries about being alone struck me. We were all alone, now. Every single one of us. From teams to individuals, everyone was fending for themselves because they couldn’t afford to trust the others.
And it would ruin us.
It would be impossible to mount any kind of defense against the Nine if we were fighting them as individuals.
The man with the blue and silver mask floated over to where I was, ready to dispatch me, to knock me out, just in case I was a threat.
“Help?” I called out. It was a spur of the moment response. My mind raced as I tried to form a plan. Even a bad one would serve. I lied, “I’m stuck. Break me out?”
I stared up at him. His face was riddled with conflicting emotions, his body language tense. There was a nervousness there that belied simple amnesia.
We’d been warned about drinking the city’s water. It might mean the effects were more pronounced for the people who hadn’t been informed. Or there might be side effects.
“Stay,” he ordered.
He stayed at the level of the rooftop as he floated out above the street, aiming more blasts at the others.
This wasn’t rational for him, it didn’t jibe with my knowledge of him. That could mean there was something about the miasma that was making him irrational.
I waited for long minutes as he continued firing down on the others. He cast me one sidelong glance, then flew off in pursuit of someone I couldn’t
see.
Even after I was able to start wiggling myself free, it was slow. I measured my progress in half-inches. My chest, small as it was, proved an issue. Coupled with the armor at my front and the remains of the armor at my back, it made getting free an issue. Several times, I stopped breathing for a good minute before I forced myself back under the concrete sheet to be able to breathe again, then I did it again. As much through the wear and tear on my armor as anything else, I managed to slide my upper body out on the fifth attempt. I took a second to breathe and rest, and then began the slow process of getting my midsection and hips past the mouth of the concrete shelf.
I directed every curse word I knew at the belt and armor panels I’d placed around my hips as I tried to work myself free. My hips and rear end were proving as difficult as my chest had been, and with my upper body being further away, I couldn’t get the same leverage push myself out with my arms. Minutes passed as I grunted and struggled. I could hear inarticulate screams, shouted threats, screamed warnings and the noise of destruction on the street below as paranoia gave way to violence. I brought Atlas to my side, but even with his strength and his horn, he wasn’t strong enough to affect the concrete. I used his help to squeeze myself out, bracing his horn against the lip of the concrete sheet and pulling.
When I was free, I gathered my knife, baton and gun from where they had fallen and fit them into the few remaining elastic loops in my ruined utility compartment. Cell phone was a yes, but I didn’t have a spot for it, so I tucked it in the chest compartment of my armor. Similarly, I stuck the epipens and changepurse through the space between my hip and the belt, wedging them in next to the straps.
I double checked that Atlas hadn’t been hurt by Legend’s lasers and then climbed on top of him.
There was destruction below, and signs of the mad fighting between capes. Sheets of paper frozen in time, a mailbox destroyed, a light-post toppled, all still in the midst of the red water. Everyone had fled or been knocked out of commission. The fighting had migrated to several scattered spots nearby.
I didn’t know exactly what to do, so I focused on helping the wounded, making sure they were okay. I turned an unconscious girl over into the recovery position, and started to drag a wounded man out of the middle of the road. I stopped when he started struggling and fighting with me and just left him there.
I felt lost. Was I helping the enemy when I was propping someone up to make sure they didn’t choke on their own vomit or drown in a puddle? If I used the plastic cuffs I had in the changepurse, would I be tying someone up, leaving them helpless against one of the Nine?
I checked my cell phone. No service.
I was alone here. Everyone in the world was a stranger.
Vibrations rocked the street. I saw the wounded man stir in response.
A monster. Bigger than a car, fangs, teeth, claws, and a thorny exterior. It didn’t act like it had seen me.
One of Bitch’s dogs? Or is it Crawler?
If it was Crawler, and I acted like he was friendly, he’d tear me to shreds. I could draw my gun to threaten him, defend myself… except that wouldn’t do a thing to slow Crawler down.
If it was one of Bitch’s dogs sans rider, then there was little point in staying. I didn’t even know if it was suffering from the miasma’s effect. If it was Crawler…
I drew my bugs around me as a shroud, simultaneously forming decoy swarms. I ran, my footsteps splashing, and called Atlas to me. The second I was out of sight, I climbed on top of him and took to the air once again.
Couldn’t settle down, couldn’t stop. I had to treat everyone I met as an enemy.
I was beginning to see where the paranoia came in.
“Skitter!” a voice called out.
I stopped.
A blond girl, waving at me.
I drew my gun and leveled it at her.
The smile dropped from her face. She brought both hands to her mouth as she shouted, “It’s me! Tattletale!”
I hesitated.
How tragic would it be if I shot my friend, so soon after I’d wanted to scream at the heroes for fighting among one another?
“How did you get here?”
“On the dog. I don’t remember its name, but it wasn’t as affected as we were. This effect is tailored for people.”
I looked in the direction of the creature I’d seen. Had that been the dog they’d come on?
I drew closer, but I kept the gun aimed at her. I glanced around. ”Where are the others?”
“Most are hiding,” she said. ”My powers kind of let me work around this gas, I think. I brought Grue, too.”
I looked around. What she was saying felt right, even if I couldn’t remember her powers, specifically. ”What is this? Amnesia?”
“Agnosia. We haven’t forgotten. Just… can’t use the knowledge we have. Looking at the others, I think they’re hallucinating. If it’s prions, like Bonesaw used with the power nullification darts, it fits. Hallucinations would match with heavy prion exposure.”
“Prions?”
“They’re small enough to pass through water filtration and gas masks. Badly folded proteins that force other proteins into identical shapes, perpetuating the problem. If she found a way to guide them, or specifically target the parts of the brain she wanted, she might get results like we’re experiencing. In a really bad case, it’d cause lesions in the brain and give you hallucinations.”
I looked around. ”How long does it last?”
“Forever. It’s incurable and it’s terminal.”
I swallowed. ”But Panacea could fix it.”
She nodded, then smiled wide. ”There’s hope, right?”
“Right.”
She jerked her head to one side, then used one hand to brush the hair back out of her face. ”Let’s grab Grue and formulate a plan.”
She turned to leave, but I stayed where I was. After three steps, she turned around. ”What’s wrong?”
I didn’t lower the gun. ”Sorry, a little paranoid.”
She frowned. ”That’s fair, but we’re short on time. If others are getting lesions on their brain, then that means they could die soon. Seizures, violent mood swings, loss of motor control… Creutzfeldt-Jakob was a prion disease, but the progression here’s faster.”
I shook my head. ”Crews-what?”
“Neurological disorder caused by eating the meat of a cow infected with mad cow disease. You get the prions in your head, and you slowly die while suffering personality changes, memory loss and vivid hallucinations.”
“And it’s faster here.”
She nodded. Her expression was solemn. ”Hours instead of weeks. And as people experience mood shifts with anger and fear, or if the hallucinations get worse-”
“The fighting among teammates will, too,” I finished. ”It could get ugly.”
“If we’re going to save everyone, we need Amy. For that, we need to ask Cherish.”
I shook my head. ”Who?”
“Um. You remember capturing a member of the Nine?”
Did I? We’d ambushed them, walked away with captives, yes. But we’d lost someone too.
“Yeah,” I replied.
“And we confined one?”
I nodded. This was working. I could piece together the information. We’d called that person on a phone, hadn’t we? ”Cell phones aren’t working consistently.”
“Is it safe?” a male voice asked.
“Sure.”
I stayed silent.
He stepped out from around the corner to stand by the blond girl. ”This is Skitter?”
She nodded. ”Skitter, this is Grue.”
I didn’t recognize him any more than he recognized me. I kept the gun trained on them.
“This is slowing us down. What’s it going to take to get you to trust me?” she asked.
What would it take?
“The fight with Empire Eighty-Eight’s mooks. When I made the human-shaped tower of bugs for the first time, and they shot into it
while I crouched inside…”
She shook her head “I don’t remember that.”
How many people had I been with, then? I would have said one, but I felt like someone else was involved. Had they arrived late? I could remember hurrying off.
She spread her arms wide. ”I’m sorry. I might not look like it, but it’s affecting me too. I’m just using my power to uncover the answers we need.”
I nodded. That would have been reassuring if I could remember what her powers were, or if I could think of something about her I could quiz her on. It was like two blind people playing hide and seek.
“Look, come here,” she offered.
I hesitated.
“You can keep the gun. I’ll keep my hands above my head. Grue, stand back.”
He stepped away and leaned against a wall, his arms folded.
I landed Atlas and stepped forward.
She got on her knees, and with her hands above her head, she walked through the flooded street on her knees until her forehead was pressed against the barrel of the gun.
“I trust you. I know I’m a pain in the ass sometimes, I know we’ve had our ups and downs. I know I’ve kept way too many secrets for someone who calls herself Tattletale…” She smiled. “But I trust you. Now, even if you don’t recognize me consciously, what’s your heart telling you?”
In truth? It wasn’t telling me much. If I didn’t think on it, if I just went with the vague impression I associated with the name Tattletale, the smile, the fountain of information…
I backed away a step. ”I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to trust you.”
“Darn it. Um. Let me think…”
“Do you want to go ahead without her?” the guy asked.
I turned to look at him. The idea of being left alone here-
“Go somewhere safe,” he suggested.
I frowned.
“If the Slaughterhouse Nine find Panacea first, or if things get much worse-”
“I want to help, really,” I said. ”But it’s just that…”
I trailed off.
“You want to help, but you’re suspicious. And you feel bad for being suspicious, because of everything we’ve been through, our close calls?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. I was double checking everything he said against my own awareness. Was he saying anything that indicated he knew something I couldn’t?
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