“I know how scared and suspicious you feel because I feel the same way. Except I trust Tattletale.”
“I do too,” I said, “And I’d trust her if I could be sure she was Tattletale.”
“Trust your heart.”
I wanted so desperately for it to be like in the movies, where people could trust your heart. Where you were holding the gun and you had to choose between shooting the evil clone and shooting your friend, and you just knew.
He gestured around us with one hand. “This doesn’t work. This is going to lose us the fight, and all the danger we’ve been through in our fight against the Nine will be for nothing if they win here.”
I shook my head. ”I don’t disagree, but that line of thinking isn’t going to make me drop the gun.”
“Then can I try acting from my heart?” he asked.
Before I could respond, he started approaching me. I backed away a step, kept the gun leveled, but I couldn’t bring myself to shoot as he advanced.
He stepped in close, ignoring the gun, and wrapped his arms around me. My forehead pressed against his shoulder. It wasn’t the most comfortable hug I’d had, not that I’d had many. It felt awkward, stiff, clumsy. But somehow that made it feel more right, like a real hug would have felt off somehow.
He was warm.
Grue?
Then, without waiting for me to give an answer, Grue stepped back, taking hold of my left hand and pulling. I followed without complaint. I couldn’t complain. If I doubted him now, after this- I’d be ten times as angry at myself as he was with me.
“Priority number one, we get in contact with Cherish,” Tattletale said, grinning. ”From there, we can decide whether we want to track down Panacea or go after the Slaughterhouse Nine.”
“Right,” I said.
“Keep checking your cell phone. The second we have service, call Coil.”
“Coil is?”
“Our boss, and since he’s hidden away, he won’t be affected, so he’ll be able to place the name and fill us in on the details the agnosia has blocked from us.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not the end of the world after all,” Tattletale smiled.
I nodded. I was acutely aware of the gun in my right hand. I felt like I should put it away, but with the way we were moving and my general sense of unease, I couldn’t stop and do it. Hated this. It reminded me of school.
The reminder made me angry, and it somehow made all of this seem worse. I muttered, “Sooner we’re fucking cured of this miasma, the better.”
“Hey!” Tattletale paused, pointing at me with a stern expression on her face. ”Don’t swear!”
14.09
“Your powers are working alright?” Tattletale asked.
I nodded.
“Bug powers, was it? Don’t want to get it wrong. Control them, see through their eyes-”
“No. I can’t see through their eyes or hear what they do. It’s mainly touch.”
“Just wanted to check.” She paused. ”If I asked you what my power was?”
I shook my head.
“Okay. And if I said I was born in Mexico, could you tell me where I was born?”
“Didn’t you just say?”
“Yeah. Repeat it back to me?”
“You were born in Mexico?”
“Your short-term recollection is still good, at least. That would be why you can retain the information Grue and I have shared over the past few minutes. That big beetle of yours, you named it?”
I glanced at Atlas, who was crawling a short distance away. ”Atlas.”
Tattletale nodded. ”That would be the short-term memory, again. Your power probably gives you enough contact with it that you don’t lose track of who and what it is.”
“Right.”
“So long as that keeps working, we don’t need to worry about you and Grue forgetting who we are in the middle of a conversation. But for us, we might lose track of each other if we split up, so let’s stay close, okay?”
“Okay.”
She reached out and took my hand.
“Can you use the bugs to scout our surroundings? This will go more smoothly if we don’t need to worry about running into people.”
It made sense. I sent my bugs out to cover the surrounding area.
The red mist was everywhere. Color was strained out, leaving everything a monochrome red. I could still make out the surroundings, but just enough light was filtered out that the area had settled into an oppressive gloom, with many existing shadows made nearly opaque as a result. The drifting movements of the mist and the subtle shifts in color and shadow made me feel like things were prowling in every corner and in the edges of my field of vision.
That deep, primal prey-animal part of my psyche kept telling me something was wrong, that I was in danger. I tried to tell myself that it was just my fear working itself up, my brain playing tricks on me. There was nothing out there.
The weight of the gun in my hand was both a reassurance and a burden. It would be so easy to do something I would regret for the rest of my life.
“Hate this,” I muttered.
“Me too,” Grue answered. He put his hand on my shoulder to offer some reassurance. ”But we manage, we cope because we’re a team. We belong together.”
My awareness snagged on someone who was walking a distance behind us, measuring their pace with ours.
“We may need to stand together as a team sooner than later,” I said. “We’re being followed.”
“By who?” Tattletale asked. She paused, then laughed. ”Silly question, I guess.”
“Tie them up?” she suggested.
“Right.”
My bugs gathered in out of the way spots, and the spiders began drawing out lines of silk in preparation. I didn’t want to inform this person that I was on to their tail.
Then, just in case they decided to drop the tail and attack us, I began to gather bugs together into decoys. Human-shaped lumps and clusters of bugs gathered in alleys and at the edges of rooftops. Still more gathered in the street, standing in alcoves and in other hiding spots. I invested less bugs in the ones that were further away from our pursuer, trusting that the shadows the miasma cast would help round them out. There were no decoys our pursuer would see from where they stood, but there were now enough to give them pause.
Grue drifted away from our group to approach one of the decoys. He extended one hand and traced his fingers through the massed bugs. ”You’re versatile.”
I felt a little uncomfortable at the compliment. ”We should keep moving.”
“You’re not tying them up?”
I shook my head. A miscommunication on that front. Hadn’t I recently been thinking about chemistry and intuitively understanding how your teammates operated? The miasma might be throwing us off in that department. ”Sorry. Need to prep for it first, I’ll make my move in a minute. For now, we should act normal.”
“Fine.” He dropped his hand to his side and rejoined us. We kept walking. I had to admire them, the way they were confident enough to avoid looking over their shoulders. I had my bugs to track our pursuer with, and I was still feeling nervous having them behind me.
“Is paranoia a side effect of this mist?”
Tattletale nodded. ”Could be. As the symptoms progress, you could have fits of anger, paranoia, hallucinations…”
I swallowed.
“Or it could progress in another direction. A broader agnosia, with the inability to recognize anything, not just people.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
She nodded.
“I’m going to bind her now. If it doesn’t work, or if she has a way of breaking free, we should run, with the decoys for cover.”
Tattletale just smiled.
The bugs swarmed our pursuer. I’d minimized the number of bugs on them, just to be safe, with the drawback that I wasn’t getting a full picture of who they were. The bugs couldn’t get to her flesh to sting or bite her, b
ut they were telling me she was female in general shape.
I had them deploy the silk they had prepared. I focused my efforts on her arms and legs. It took only a couple of seconds to get the threads in place.
She tripped as the silk went taut mid-stride. Raising one hand to try to catch herself, she found silk threads hampering those movements as well. To avoid landing face first, she twisted herself in mid-air so she hit the ground with her shoulder instead.
“Got her,” I said. ”Let’s keep going. We can lose her.”
“We should investigate,” Grue said. ”Make sure she isn’t a threat, and deal with her if she is.”
“With this miasma affecting us, there’s no way to be sure of exactly of just who we’re dealing with,” I pointed out.
“We have Tattletale. She can tell us if this person’s a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine.”
“Tattletale’s not-”
I stopped. Where had that come from?
“What?” Grue tilted his head as he looked over his shoulder at me.
“I was going to say she’s not always right, but I’ve still got that black hole in my memory of her, so I’m not sure where that’s coming from.”
Grue rubbed his chin. ”Something to keep in mind, but I still think we should check this person out.”
“I agree,” Tattletale said, a slight smile on her face. She tugged on my hand. ”Come on!”
We had to stick together. I reluctantly followed, knowing that separating from the group could mean losing them altogether.
We stopped a few hundred feet away from the woman. The silk strands had formed a cord around her arms and legs, and the work of the spiders had tightened the binding as she allowed it to slack. She hadn’t made it back to her feet after falling to the ground.
Grue drew a knife.
“Hey,” I said. I grabbed his arm. ”What are you doing?”
“She’s obviously a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine,” Tattletale said.
“Fill me in? Because I must have missed something. Doesn’t seem that clear to me.”
“Think about it. Why is she wearing a mask like that, if not to filter out the miasma? She knew about it in advance.”
“Maybe,” I said. I could make out something like a gas mask or filter, now that Tattletale had pointed it out. “Maybe there’s another explanation. It could have something to do with her power?”
“It doesn’t,” Tattletale said.
Thinking about killing someone was one thing. I’d always assumed I might have to do it out of necessity to save a teammate… I’d even come close to doing it when attacking the Nine, not long ago. Couldn’t recall who it had been, but I’d gone all out, used potentially lethal stings and bites.
That had been at a distance. Now we were looking at killing someone face to face.
The mask, there was another reason for it. The-
Tattletale interrupted my thoughts. ”If you guys aren’t going to do it, I can. She was following us, she was prepared for the miasma, and I’m positive she’s a bad guy. My power, you know.”
“We can’t be certain,” I said.
“With my power, I’m five hundred percent sure. Trust me,” she said, grinning. She started toward the heroine.
“No,” I said.
“Skitter’s right,” Grue said. ”She could be playing possum. Best to avoid being reckless. Keep our distance and finish her.”
“That’s not what I meant. Let’s just leave,” I said. ”I’ll make that phone call to, um-”
“Coil,” Tattletale supplied.
I nodded. ”We’ll get the information we need, get ourselves cured, or track down the Nine.”
“Cherish could lie,” Grue said.
It took me a second to place Cherish’s name. Names were slipping from my mind too easily. ”Maybe. We’ll use our own judgement to corroborate her facts.”
Tattletale scowled, “Have you forgotten how aggressively we’ve been going after the Slaughterhouse Nine? The attacks, the harassment, capturing Cherish and Shatterbird. And now you want to leave one of them there? We don’t have to get close to her to take her out. You have the gun.”
I stared down at the weapon in my hand.
“Trust me,” she said.
“No.”
Both Tattletale and Grue turned to look at me.
“No?” Grue asked. ”We’re a team, Skitter. We’re supposed to trust one another when the chips are down, have each other’s backs.”
I didn’t like the implications of that. Like I was failing them.
But I shook my head. ”No.”
“Explain?” he asked. He looked calm, but I could see the irritation in his posture. Was the mist getting to him?
“The miasma… if it makes us paranoid, it could be coloring our perceptions here. Even Tattletale’s.”
“I would know if it was,” she said. She seemed impatient.
“Maybe. But I’m not certain enough about that to take another life.”
“You nearly took Siberian’s,” she retorted.
“Yeah. Sure. But that was different.”
“I don’t see how.”
I stared at the bound woman who was prone on the ground, half-covered in my bugs. She was looking in my direction.
“It bugs me. This is too easy. If the Nine were this easy to take out, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”
“Sounds like a pretty thin justification for backing out,” Grue said.
“Yeah,” Tattletale added.
This kind of social pressure wasn’t the sort of thing I was good at coping with. Just going by my recollection of how we’d planned many of our capers, I could usually trust some of the others to have my back when I was arguing a point. Or I’d had some other motive or reason to go along with them.
“Why are you pushing so hard for this?” I asked.
“Did you forget what they did to me?” Grue asked, his voice cold.
Him specifically? I had forgotten, yes. But I could remember that scene, the emotions then, every feeling that I’d experienced afterward. Frustration, hate, pain, sympathy for the pain he must have experienced himself. I could remember the feeling of heartbreak, because someone I cared about was gone, in a sense.
“No,” I replied.
“Where’s your anger, your outrage? Or don’t you care?”
“I care! It’s-”
“Then end this.”
I shook my head, as if I could clear it. It wasn’t that I wasn’t thinking clearly, necessarily. It was that my thoughts kept hitting that dead-end where I couldn’t reach back for context about people, about Tattletale and Grue and the Nine. I was in the dark.
What I did know was that I’d done too many things I regretted. I wasn’t about to add something as serious as murder to the list.
Grue must have seen something in my posture, because he shook his head and turned away. ”Give me the gun, then.”
“Just use your power,” Tattletale told him.
“I want Skitter to acknowledge that she doesn’t care enough about this team or about me to do what’s necessary. She can do that by admitting she doesn’t have the courage to shoot and allow me to do it.”
“That’s not what this is about,” I said. ”Murder is serious. You don’t kill without being absolutely certain it’s right. And nothing’s certain for as long as we’re under the influence of this miasma.”
He scoffed. ”And you call yourself a supervillain?”
“I call myself Skitter. If someone wants to stick me with some other label, that’s their issue to deal with, not mine.”
“You’re not giving me the gun?”
“No.”
He shrugged, “So you don’t care at all, about what happened to me. You don’t care about this team. And you’ll even look down on us while you do it. Your contemptible friends.”
“I care. More than you know. But you told me, not long ago, that I should follow my heart, trust my gut. Fine. That’s what I’m doing. You a
ttack her, I’ll fight to save her.”
He barked out a laugh, “You’ll fight me? You’re a traitor now?”
The word hit home. I must have flinched.
“A traitor again,” he added.
I snapped my head up to look at him in surprise.
“I wonder what it says that the notion of you being a traitor is so ingrained in my impression of you that it jumps to mind, even with the mist affecting me?”
“That’s enough,” I said.
“I know you like me. I can read it on your face, I could see the way your eyes widened when you heard my name. You’re an open book in some ways. And I’ll tell you right now, I’m pretty sure I’m in love with you.”
I felt a nervous feeling deep in my gut. It wasn’t pleasant, at stark odds to what he was saying.
Grue’s words spoke to that feeling of trepidation. ”But this? It’s telling me I could never have a relationship with you, never be close to you, because I’ll always wonder if you’ll stab me in the back or fuck me over, fail to do what’s necessary in a situation like this. I’ll never be able to shake that image of you as a traitor.”
He kept saying that word, traitor, hammering it in.
“Unless I take this gun and shoot that woman, who you’re convinced is a member of the Nine,” I guessed what he was getting at.
“Guess I had the wrong impression of you,” he said. The emotion in his tone was so different that it caught me off guard. Almost contemplative. If I thought of it as him emotionally closing down, it almost fit with the impression I associated with Grue. At the same time, it didn’t quite jibe with what I was seeing. Again, I felt that distinct discomfort.
Is this how I lose my mind?
I shrugged. ”I guess you did.”
I carefully holstered the gun, as if hiding it could keep it from coming up again in conversation.
A long pause reigned.
“I’m disappointed, but there’s nothing I can do about that,” he said. Then he smiled. He turned and began walking away. ”Let’s go.”
“Just like that?” I asked.
“We’re leaving her?” Tattletale asked.
“Seems we have to. Tattletale, can you use your power to make sure the lady from the Nine doesn’t pose a danger?”
Worm Page 190
