“So we just ask, and hope he’s feeling good enough to say yes?” Which means biting my tongue when it comes to the accusations, calling him on what he did at the debate.
Lisa spoke at a more normal volume, “He doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who’ll be influenced much by his emotions. He probably decided a while ago whether he’ll give up the girl or not. But I say we should take anything we can get, and that includes approaching him on a good day. Choose your words carefully, by the way. There’s bystanders.”
I nodded, but I didn’t follow as she tugged on my arm. ”Can we check on my dad before we go?”
“They were moving him when I poked my head in. I peeked at his chart, and it looks like they had queued him up for an MRI, what with his recent internal injuries from Shatterbird’s attack.”
I winced.
She went on, “I told him I might take you to my dad’s clinic, where the load won’t be as high, if you were okay to be moved. If I did take you, it’d mean you were okay. He didn’t like that, but he agreed. That doesn’t mean we can’t stay if you want to stay. Like I said, it won’t make a huge difference if we get in touch with our boss now or two hours from now.”
“But it’ll make a difference? A bit of one?”
“I think so.”
I thought back to my earlier feeling, that leaving my dad just the one more time might mean some kind of terminal break.
Stacking that up against everything I’d done with the end-goal of getting Dinah out of captivity, though… not even Dinah, exactly. I barely knew her. No, this was more selfish, I had to admit. I was thinking of my own sense of guilt, about my own responsibility, and the crimes I’d committed in getting this far. The terror, pain and distress I’d caused in the course of being Skitter.
Fifteen and a half years spent growing up with my dad versus two months as Skitter. My dad was there, though. He’d always been there, and the only thing I had to suggest that he wouldn’t was a vague feeling.
Just like there was only the vaguest possibility that our going to see Coil now would make the difference in him setting Dinah free.
“My dad’s going to be okay?” I asked.
“He was fine. No sign of any deeper problems or pain.”
“Then let’s go.”
We made our way out of the hospital. I could hear the cries of pain.
“Are we to blame for this?”
“No. Don’t set yourself on this path. We didn’t know, we couldn’t know, and we weren’t complicit in any way.”
“I was there. I could have stepped up and done something, but I didn’t.”
“Done what? Fought back? Helped the wards?”
“Yes.“
“No. Best case scenario, you might have tripped him up. But it wouldn’t have been worth it. Watch your step. Stairs.”
I had no problem identifying the spots I was supposed to step down. There were spiders on the underside of the stairwell, and I sent a few flies forward to alight on the underside of each stair to check the footing.
“It’s funny,” Lisa murmured, lowering her voice, “I’ve been meaning to suggest a training program. That you should spend a while blindfolded, see if we can’t force you to rely on your power to see, get your brain to the point that you can actually process that info. Guess you beat me to the punch.”
“It’s not that funny,” I said. I didn’t like thinking about what might happen if I was still blind when the next disaster came along.
“Stepping outside,” she said. I felt the warm air sweep past me as the door opened. ”Car’s just over here. Nice thing about the city being in this state, it’s easy to find parking spots.”
She sounded so jovial, cheery. I wasn’t nearly so optimistic.
She led us to the car, and opened the door for me. ”We’ll stop by your place so you can grab your costume and meet up with the others. Then we’ll find Coil.”
“Find him? He’s not at his base?” I raised my voice to be heard as she walked around to the other side of the car and opened the door to get into the driver’s seat.
“He’s not at his base. As of now, Coil’s dead and gone. He’s sticking to his civilian identity. Which is going to make meeting him and talking to him sort of difficult.”
I paused. I’d been thinking over the scenario, calculating Coil’s overarching goal. ”Is he Keith Grove?”
“No,” Lisa said. ”One sec.”
The car started up, and there was a shuffling sound as she dug through a container.
A recording played over the car’s sound system. Lisa shifted the car into gear and reversed out of her spot. I listened.
“A town meeting with hundreds of Brockton Bay residents was interrupted by a terrorist attack by a local villain just earlier today, an alleged assassination turned to even greater tragedy as a superhero-made piece of technology exploded unexpectedly.
“This tragedy joins countless others that have recently befallen Brockton Bay, a city that was recently the subject of national discussion, where the United States Senate debated condemning the city, evacuating the remaining citizens and abandoning it as a lost cause. A local crime lord headed a small group of supervillains in an attempt to assassinate Mayor Christner, Mayoral Candidate Keith Grove and Mayoral Candidate Carlene Padillo. When local heroes intervened, however, a device owned by local Wards member ‘Kid Win’ malfunctioned, ultimately exploding in the lobby of the building. While the number of casualties is yet unconfirmed, we can confirm that WCVN’s own on-site reporter and camera crew perished in the blast. More information will be forthcoming as we have it.
“First reports from the site report allegations of sabotage on the part of a known double agent within the group of junior heroes. No members of the Brockton Bay PRT, Protectorate or Wards teams were available for comment, but sources inside the organization report that Director Emily Piggot, manager of the city’s PRT and government sponsored hero teams, is being put on leave pending a full investigation.
“Filling in for the interim is Commander Thomas Calvert. When asked about this new placement, the PRT reported that Commander Calvert served as a PRT field agent before an honorable discharge. For the past several years he has offered his expertise to the PRT as a paid consultant in parahuman affairs for New York, Brockton Bay and Boston, later serving as a field commander for the PRT strike squads. The PRT expresses full confidence in Commander Calvert’s ability to handle the daunting task of Brockton Bay’s parahuman-“
The sound cut out. Lisa had stopped the recording.
“Thomas Calvert,” I said.
16.10
I pushed open the rusted metal door that marked the first real barrier to entry for Coil’s underground base. It was unassuming, if secure, easy to ignore for anyone who happened to find their way underground. It swung open without resistance; unlocked.
Every door was unlocked as I made my way through the series of checkpoints and gates. There were no guards, and the cameras in the final room before I entered the base proper didn’t move to track my movements.
I pushed on the final door and let it swing open. The base was empty. Except empty wasn’t exactly the right word. It had been cleared out.
The on-duty squads of soldiers were gone, as were the trucks, weapons, supplies and furniture. The entire ground floor was desolate, with clean patches in the dust where furniture and crates had been.
In groups big enough for me to get full coverage of the area, my swarms took turns roving over my surroundings. They couldn’t pass through closed doors, but they gave me a sense of my surroundings that my eyes couldn’t. The results were almost the inverse of what I might expect from my eyesight. There was no grasp of color, beyond what I could guess from the various clues I got from my other senses, but I had a keen sense of textures. Where my eyes would have been capable of focusing on one thing at a time, my swarm-sense gave me the ability to pull together complete mental pictures from a thousand different points of focus. I could ignore line of
sight, sensing around objects, and even though my bugs’ senses translated poorly, the sum total of their awareness gave me a sense of the little things, in addition to the big picture. I could sense where the air currents were traveling and the force with which they moved, the thickness of the dust in one area versus another, and where temperatures where higher, if even by a fraction.
None of this was new, exactly. I’d always been aware of it to some small degree, but my core senses had always been there as regular, reliable fallback. I’d never researched the subject, but reports seemed conflicting when it came to the topic of blindness making other senses sharper. With only half of a day’s experience, I was beginning to think that maybe it didn’t improve my other senses, but seemed to free up the semi-conscious, semi-unconscious intake that my eyes typically used as my dominant sense. The brainpower that was usually allocated to idle glances, comparing and contrasting, or just taking in ambient sights while my thoughts were preoccupied with other things? It was freed up to be used for listening and my swarm-sense.
The Travelers were here, I noted. I wasn’t startled to note their presence, but I was somewhat surprised. They’d gathered in one room above the vault that Noelle was presumably being kept in. They’d noticed the bugs and were venturing outside onto the walkway. I met them halfway between their apartment and the entrance.
They were in civilian wear. Trickster and Ballistic were in regular shirts, jeans and shoes, but Sundancer was wearing what I took to be pyjamas, her hair tied back in a bun. Genesis was in her chair, a blanket on her lap, with Oliver standing just behind her.
“Skitter,” Trickster said, “You’re here alone?”
“My teammates are upstairs. We wanted to have words with Coil, but he wasn’t free to talk until sundown, so we’ve been killing time and waiting around. There’s still a bit of time, I sensed some movement down here, I needed to stretch my legs to keep my injuries from earlier today from stiffening up, so I decided to take a bit of a walk.”
“And they’re staying put?” Ballistic asked.
“I can signal them in a heartbeat if I have to,” I responded.
“Just saying, but you know Coil’s dead, right?” Trickster asked.
“I saw it happen,” I answered him. I chose my words carefully, “So I have a very good idea of how dead the man is.”
“Fair enough.”
“And you guys?” I asked. “You’re keeping eyes on your teammate? Noelle?”
“Noelle’s fine,” Trickster said, “You don’t need to concern yourself over her.”
There was just a touch of hostility here. I turned my head to face the two girls, using my bugs to figure out the orientation so I could appear to be looking at Sundancer and Genesis. The two of them were, I figured, the closest thing to allies that I had among the Travelers. That wasn’t to say I was on good terms with them; Sundancer was especially wary of me and had been since I’d carved out Lung’s eyes, and Genesis had been a little weird in how she related to me when I’d delivered Trickster to her at the mayor’s house. Part of that might have been a reflection or a response to my own paranoia, where I’d thought they were planning to kill me. Either way, they hadn’t given me the impression of dislike or hostility to quite the same degree that I was seeing with Trickster and Ballistic right now.
This was where my current inability to see was hurting me. I couldn’t read their expressions or body language, and even though my bugs were giving me a sense of how they were standing and where their head, arm and legs were positioned, I didn’t have that innate human ability to instantaneously assess and process those details. Time and effort spent trying to figure it out was taken away from my ability to plan and follow the conversation. It was sort of like talking to an answering machine; I was left trying to hold up my end of a conversation without the ability to assess what the person on the other end was making of it. End result? I was left there, silent, while none of the Travelers were volunteering anything.
“If you’re done checking up on us, or visiting, whatever you want to call it,” Trickster said, “You could go. Your duty’s done, you’ve paid your respects to the other team while you’re in their territory.”
That’s something we’re supposed to do?
“I don’t want us to be enemies,” I said.
“We’re not,” Trickster replied, but his tone was far from friendly. “We’re on the same side.”
“But?” I asked. “It sounds like there’s more to that.”
“We’re not friends, Skitter. Let’s not pretend like we are. You’ve got your goals, we have ours. You want to work together to tackle a situation like the Dragon thing? Fine. Great. You want to backdoor Ballistic, going to the boss to recruit that cape he was trying to take down? Hey, that’s fine too.”
Ballistic folded his arms.
Trickster went on, “Really. We’re doing what we have to do in order to make this thing work. I don’t love what you pulled, I’m not jumping for glee, but I get it.”
“So we’re business associates, but not friends.”
“Succinctly put.”
“There has to be more common ground there. We can’t meet, share a box of donuts and talk about ways to mutually benefit our territories?”
“The fact that you have to ask that is a pretty good indication of how clueless you are about this. Let’s count the ways. One, I don’t give a ratfuck about my territory or the people in it. None of us do.”
I could feel Sundancer turning slightly away from him. Was there disagreement there?
“Two,” he continued, “We don’t plan to be here much longer anyways. Either Coil fulfills his end of the bargain and we’re out of this hellhole, or he doesn’t and we take a hike anyways. Take our chances elsewhere.”
I could remember how Ballistic had talked about his frustration with the group, the idea that he might stick with this gig regardless of what Trickster and the others did. If I brought it up, would it refocus the discussion to the point that Trickster wasn’t opposing me, in an abstract sense, or would it derail it with the ensuing drama?
I kept my mouth shut, and I was sort of glad that I couldn’t see, or I might have given in to my impulse to glance at Ballistic and give something away.
Maybe it wasn’t worth worrying about. I was wearing my full costume, including the additional pieces I’d accumulated over time; I wore the tattered cape, the ragged semi-dress over my leggings, and a heavy carpet of bugs clung to the black fabric and armor panels. My goggles would hide my eyes. Nobody would see any tell, if I could see, and I doubted they’d notice I was essentially blind.
Trickster took my silence for an excuse to go on, “Three, again, there’s no common ground to be found, and I’m not interested in hunting for it. There’s two things I want in this world, and being part of Coil’s thing was my way to get those things. You were useful only as far as you helped make Coil’s thing work, and that’s over now. To put it bluntly, you don’t have anything to offer me.”
“I get the picture,” I told him, cutting him off before he could continue. “Okay. Friendship’s off the table. Even a friendly business relationship would be pushing it.”
He nodded once.
I sighed a little. “Okay. That said, as one local warlord to another, I’d like to extend an invitation. We’re going to talk to Coil, and I’m saying you’re free to come.”
“Coil’s dead,” Ballistic made the words a drawl.
That was getting old fast. “Do we really have to maintain this charade?”
“Coil went to a lot of effort in putting together his grand plan. He died in a blaze of glory and violence, just like he wanted. Do you really want to spoil that by going on about how he’s still alive?”
“Like you said,” I retorted, “We’re on the same side. If you didn’t know, you’d be more upset than you are now. Why pretend he’s dead when he’s alive? Especially when it’s getting in the way of the larger conversation about the man and my invitation to come hear what he
has to say?”
Trickster leaned against a wall and fumbled in one pocket for a cigarette. “You mean outside of the possibility that you’re wired and my saying the wrong thing could out him? Whatever. I don’t have anything to say to him that I haven’t already said. Maybe you aren’t getting the point. We went out of our way to help you once, rescuing Grue, and it nearly got us carved up by Bonesaw.”
Your plan, I thought.
He went on, “I don’t care about the Undersiders. I don’t care if you get a hundred trillion dollars and wind up kings of the planet, and I don’t care if Coil kills you. We’ve wrapped up our business with Coil, and that’s as far as my interest goes.”
“Alright,” I said, raising my hands, “Point taken. Listen, I get that maybe we haven’t gotten along so fantastically, but I really do wish you guys luck with your circumstances, whatever they are. I hope you get what you’ve been looking for.”
“Sure,” Trickster said. He turned to leave, making his way to the doorway that led to the pseudo-apartment they stayed in when they weren’t in their individual headquarters. He beckoned for his teammates to follow, and they did.
Only Genesis lagged behind, her hands on the wheels of her chair. After Trickster had rounded the corner, she said, “He’s tense. Too much comes down to what happens in the next forty-eight hours.”
“Believe me,” I replied, “I get that.”
“Then good luck with your thing,” she said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I hope I never see you again.”
How the hell am I supposed to take that?
I didn’t respond as she wheeled herself to the corridor.
Okay, I thought, learned what I needed to.
Whatever the terms between Coil and the Travelers were, he hadn’t seen fit to invite them to the meeting place. I’d had to think for some time before making the offer to join us for the meeting. I knew that whatever Coil had planned, inviting the Travelers wouldn’t hurt.
Worm Page 243
