“You don’t want to know,” I said. “And Tagg would be exceedingly upset if I shared.”
My dad frowned and stared down at the table. “I believe you.”
I nodded.
Alexandria had found an alley and promptly took to the air, zig-zagging between buildings and flying with enough speed that people couldn’t follow her with their eyes.
“My phone isn’t working,” Mr. Calle said.
“Can’t have you warning them,” Tagg replied.
“I’m offended at the implication,” Mr. Calle said.
“Can’t have her warning them either,” Tagg replied.
Warning them. I needed a way to contact my team. Cells wouldn’t work. A land line? An unoccupied office… Tagg’s office would do. My bugs made their way there.
Too small to affect anything, to press a key on the computer, even if I could see the screen. Too small to transmit a message of any sort.
I needed a larger bug. There were larger beetles and cockroaches outside. Everything else had been wiped out by Kid Win’s drones.
I could see Mr. Calle and Tagg watching my dad and I, looking between us. “What?”
Mr. Calle answered, “I’ve represented a lot of supervillains. I can count on one hand the ones who had parents show up at their trial, let alone pre-trial. When they did show up, half of them were a nightmare. Bambina’s mother, for example, all of the worst aspects of a showbiz parent, but the kid’s a vandal and a mass murderer. Don’t even get me started on how toxic that dynamic was. You two are civil with one another, at the very least. That’s… something. Hold onto it.”
“Hold onto it?” Tagg commented, from the opposite end of the table. “I think you’re forgetting your client’s circumstances.”
Again, interjecting himself in between my dad and I. Driving in wedges. I felt a momentary urge to do something painful to him.
I couldn’t rise to the bait, though. I had to channel the anger. Bugs were finding their way through vents and down hallways, spreading out so the two or three remaining drones couldn’t eradicate them.
Others clustered on Tagg’s phone. Silk allowed multiple bugs to effectively ‘grip’ the phone handle. Larger bugs found their way under the base of it, wedging their bodies beneath as the pull on the cord tilted it. A little bit of progress, driving in the wedge to make sure the phone didn’t simply fall back into place.
“You’re going to jail, Skitter,” Tagg said. “And if you’re very, very lucky, it won’t be the Birdcage or a death sentence.”
“She’s a minor,” my dad said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Mr. Calle sighed.
“Look at me, Tagg,” I said. “You said you weren’t going to underestimate me. Do you really think I’m worried? Do you think I would have surrendered if I didn’t have confidence that I’d be able to manage?”
My dad was staring at me.
“No,” he said. “I think you have a number of plans in the works. But it doesn’t matter. Alexandria can out-think your plans, counter anything your Tattletale throws at us.
His phone handset fell from its perch, clattering across the keys before it fell from the desk, swinging. I could see the flare of light on the phone, marking that the line was active. I hoped there wasn’t a secretary who’d notice.
I flew the largest beetle I had into the number pad, driving him into the number five. The bugs on the mouthpiece heard a sound I took to be the answering beep.
Five again. Second number in the sequence.
Not hard enough. No beep.
Five again.
Seven numbers.
The message that came through was odd, rhythmic somehow, though I couldn’t make out the words. A recording.
I had to dial an outside line.
Eight numbers this time, starting with… Nine. It took a full minute to hit the buttons.
Nothing.
Eight numbers starting with eight… No.
Seven.
The call went through. I got a response.
Please be Lisa.
I tried buzzing out words. It didn’t feel like enough.
So I retired the abused beetle and set to using cockroaches. My bugs felt the indents of the characters on the number pad.
Two, five, three, nine, two, six…
The voice interrupted me.
The number of syllables was right. She understood. The numbers each corresponded to three possible letters, and each number pressed on the phone generated a different sound. Anyone else might have struggled, but Tattletale picked up on it right away. ‘Alexandria’.
I could only hope it helped. A little forewarning, at best.
Still couldn’t make out words that followed. The filter of both the phone and my bugs was too much, and I couldn’t begin to guess where the speaker phone button was. Wasn’t sure I wanted to risk using it in case someone stepped into the office. A phone being off the hook was far better than a voice talking to nothing.
“You meant it, when you said they were your friends,” my dad said.
“We’ve been through thick and thin. They saved me, in some ways. I’d like to think I saved them.”
Tagg snorted. I ignored him.
“They did… bad things, didn’t they?” my dad asked.
“So have I,” I said.
“But you’re willing to martyr yourself for them?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t come here to be a martyr, I had other hopes. But… things didn’t work out like that. It’s down to secondary goals… and if those fail, then I’m willing to go to jail for their sakes. Not just my friends. The people in my territory, and maybe just a little, everyone.”
I looked at Tagg as I said that last word. He gave me a dirty look, then more or less turned his attention to his phone, watching me with one eye while texting with one hand.
“Everyone?” my dad asked.
“We can’t lose the next Endbringer fight,” was all I could say.
“No, I don’t imagine we can,” he said.
That was something he understood in full, even if he didn’t know the particulars. The Endbringers were something we all understood. A fact of reality, something that touched everyone, struck a chord of fear in cape and civilian alike.
My heart sank as Alexandria appeared. She plunged past the cloud of bugs that had collected over the roof, into an opening aperture in the ceiling. She passed down a shaft that ran parallel to the elevator, and into the Wards’ quarters.
From there, she reached the elevator and made her way up to the cells.
Alexandria rejoined us in the cell, virtually the same, though her hair was disheveled, her suit jacket folded over one arm. She laid it across the back of Miss Militia’s empty chair and stayed there, leaning on the back of the chair that was bolted to the floor.
Noting Miss Militia’s absence led to me double checking on her. She was on the roof. No, I couldn’t count on anything from her. I’d hoped to have one more piece in play, but she was leaning over a railing at the edge of a helicopter landing pad, staring out over the city.
Alexandria had to be my focus. She was staring at me, scrutinizing me. I met her eyes, and she locked hers onto mine.
“I’d thought Tattletale had figured it out…” she paused, “But no. You told them. You have an open line of communication with them.”
I shrugged, thinking of Tagg’s phone, with the handset still dangling over the edge of the desk.
Wished I could hear her response. What had happened to my teammates?
“Let’s take five minutes more to talk. Then I’ll take care of another of the Undersiders.”
“Another?”
“A PRT van will be along shortly. I wanted to keep to my time commitment, so I sent a truck.”
“Why should I say anything?” I asked her.
“Because as long as we’re talking, I’m not out there, taking your team to pieces, and you have a shot at passing them information. It gives them time to recuperate and strategize
. Five minutes gives them time to make a getaway, or contact help. I imagine you arranged for backup. Hired mercenaries to help break you out if this went badly enough that you faced jail without getting anything you wanted or needed.”
I set my jaw.
“I know the general value of the properties you acquired, the proposed value of it. Your team would spend it. Ninety two million dollars, spent on hired soldiers, hired parahumans. That’s only your liquid assets.”
I didn’t reply. I set to typing the next message on Tagg’s phone. K-N-O-W-S-A-B-O-U-T-M-E-R-C-S
She straightened, removing her hands from the back of the chair. “If you’re not going to say anything, I might as well go now. You’re rather partial to Grue, aren’t you? Or should I take Tattletale out of the picture?”
“We can talk,” I told her.
“Excellent,” she said. She stepped around the corner of the table and sat in her chair, opposite me. “Do you need anything? Water? Coffee? Soda?”
I shook my head.
“Mr. Calle? Mr. Hebert?”
Two refusals.
She removed her phone from her jacket pocket. “Forgive me for using this in the midst of our discussion. Chevalier is likely to become the head of the Protectorate once the Triumvirate has departed, and he’s insisting that I keep tabs with him, what with the scandal and all. I’d show you, but that would be a breach of confidence.”
She smiled, as though at a private joke. The smile didn’t matter to me. It was the way her eyes didn’t leave me.
“You’re cold reading me,” I said.
“Cold reading?” My dad asked.
“Tattletale does it too. Mixes details she knows with ones she doesn’t, with very careful wording and a bit of an edge with her thinker powers.”
“Mm hmm,” Alexandria said. She typed expertly on her phone, almost absently. “I know you’ve probably got someone in the lobby or outside, receiving coded messages. I know about the mercenaries. More mercenaries than I implied. I expect Tattletale called in favors. Probably not the Irregulars, but I didn’t read that. Simple logic. They wouldn’t work for you. I know that you’re still feeling confident, but not entirely so. If you were very close to breaking or very, very confident, you would have accepted my offer of a drink. And I know that your bugs can’t see computer screens.”
Was she bluffing on that last part? Did it matter if she was? I could refuse, play some kind of trick, and she’d see right through it.
“I could make some noise about my client’s rights being trampled, a lack of consent to that kind of analysis,” Mr. Calle said.
“But you know the law doesn’t apply here. We’re in a gray area, up until the moment we decide to press charges and set this into motion, or you decide to force the issue. But neither of us want that. For now, this is… somewhere between her being in our custody and us having a friendly chat.”
My lawyer glanced at me. I frowned. “Yeah. So long as she doesn’t start grilling me.”
“As you wish,” Mr. Calle said.
My head turned as I sensed the truck arriving. Bugs clustered to it as it found a spot at the side of the building, PRT uniforms moving their target on a stretcher. My bugs shifted position, tracking what they were moving. The white mask, the curls, the shirt, with a tightly woven fabric beneath… a spider silk shirt? It was Regent, unconscious.
The bugs moved, tracing down the length of his arm. It was broken in two places, virtually zig-zagging. His leg was the same. I caught the words ‘medical’ and ‘doctor’. ‘Tranquilizer’.
“He’s arrived, I take it.” Alexandria said.
I nodded tightly.
“The paradigm has changed,” Alexandria said. “In… two minutes and thirty seconds, I go and dispatch another of your teammates. I’ll hear concessions, offers or relevant information, and I’ll adjust my methods and the severity of my attack where appropriate.”
“This is extortion,” my dad said.
“She makes the process easier for us, we make it easier on her and her friends.”
I frowned. “That’s still extortion.”
“Two minutes and eight seconds,” she said, not even bothering to deny it. She had the same habit as Tattletale, of knowing the time without looking at a clock. “They’re going to be running, now, trying to throw me off their trail. I’ll find them. I can study the environment, I’ve studied the case histories and I know where they own property.”
Another alert I needed to give. I was still typing in the last one. The cockroaches weren’t strong enough to hit the keys with enough force, so it was more of a case of having to leverage the key down through the combined efforts of several larger roaches and carefully arranged silk.
I grit my teeth, trying to focus on the spelling while keeping track of what Alexandria was saying. Started on the next message. X-K-N-O-W-S-P-R-O-P-E-R-T-I-E-S
“You’re backing me into a corner,” I said. “Backing them into a corner. Someone’s bound to snap.”
“Most likely,” she said, and there wasn’t a trace of concern in her expression. It was almost eerie, how little she seemed to care. Was that her passenger at work, or was she simply good enough at what she did, comfortable enough in her invincibility, that she’d grown able to shrug off the insignificant things?
I shook my head. “I’m not making concessions. The terms I gave still stand. If you want to discuss the reasons behind-”
She was already getting out of her chair.
“-behind why I made the demands I made, we can. I think you’ll find it reasonable.”
“I’ve heard this,” Alexandria said. She donned her suit jacket, buttoning it up in front. “Read it, rather. I’ve thought about all the permutations and unless you’re willing to change tack or tell me something I don’t know, there’s no point to this discussion.”
She walked to the door and knocked. While waiting for the officer to open the door, she turned, “One last chance to offer me something. Any detail I can use, things to watch out for.”
Bitch, I thought. Her power, it screwed with her head. She can’t relate to people. She doesn’t understand facial expressions, body language or our social constructs. It’s all replaced by dog behavior.
Grue. Post traumatic stress. He doesn’t like doctors, doesn’t like being confined, or the dark. But he’s stable otherwise.
Information that could be used to protect Bitch, protect Grue. To keep a bad situation from getting worse. It felt like it would be a betrayal anyways. It was an eerie reversal of the rationalization I’d done back at the bank robbery, on my first job as a villain. Telling myself that terrorizing the hostages was for their own good.
But I couldn’t bring myself to betray them on that level. Not to people who trusted me.
And she was gone.
I grit my teeth. I looked at Calle, but he shook his head.
Tagg reached for his phone, where it sat on the table.
Long minutes passed, as Tagg texted and I sat in anxious silence.
“You said you’ve worked with cape families,” my dad spoke. It took me a second to realize he was talking to Calle.
“Yes,” my lawyer answered.
“Can I ask you some questions?”
“I was just about to step outside, call some colleagues.”
“Oh.”
“After. Unless you want to join me?”
“Isn’t it better if she isn’t alone?”
“Everything’s recorded. Short of her being threatened with serious bodily injury or death, I don’t see a problem.”
My dad cast me a look. I nodded.
He left with Mr. Calle.
“You and I,” Tagg said.
I folded my arms as best as I was able, then leaned forward to rest my head. Not worth giving him the benefit of a conversation.
The table shook, and I briefly looked up, only to see Tagg setting his feet on the metal surface.
He took his time getting comfortable, and kicked the table several ti
mes in the process.
When I set my head down, he started humming.
He’s trying to get to me, I thought to myself, for the Nth time.
They were bullies. Tagg and Alexandria both. They were the equivalent of the older child picking on the kindergartener, or the adult picking on the child. They had power to throw around that I didn’t, they had freedom, liberty, the power of choice. They wanted to punish me, to put me off-balance for their own ends.
Just… bullies in a grander scale.
I simultaneously felt like I understood Tagg a little more, and a little less.
Mr. Calle answered a ton of my father’s questions, big and small. About things I’d thought were common knowledge, like trigger events, and more specific, grave matters, like the prospect of my receiving the death penalty. When he’d exhausted each of those questions, he asked about other things. Smarter things, like the degree to which he might be able to stand up to Alexandria or Tagg, about how he could work with Calle to throw them off-balance, and signals to arrange a plan of attack.
My dad, entirely out of place, out of his depth, confused and utterly unarmed, fighting to get up to speed, in the hopes that he could do something to help.
It was a step forward. A small step, but a step forward.
Tagg stood, approaching me, then leaned on the table just beside me, so he loomed over me, not speaking, invading my personal space, denying me the ability to rest or relax.
And my bugs, in his office, continued punching away as best as they were able. Me, communicating with Tattletale, unable to hear her response, straining to hear some sign of the violence. Had they split up?
Regent’s arms and legs had been set, and he lay on a bed identical to the one I’d had, apparently tranquilized.
I was the target, the mastermind, the one they were trying to break.
Alexandria only took six minutes. She arrived by the same route, only she held a girl this time. A hard mask with horns and slanted lenses that tapered into points at the corners, a skin-tight bodysuit. Imp.
Alexandria had found a way around Imp’s power. Or her mental powers had overridden them.
One more body in the cells. One more Undersider down.
Alexandria found her way back to the cells before my dad and my lawyer did, accompanied by Miss Militia. Alexandria grabbed one of Kid Win’s active drones from the air and tucked it under one arm like a football as she made her way down, and held it up as she visited the cell where they were checking an unconscious, tranquilized Imp. Every bug was eradicated by the mist that appeared, leaving me utterly blind.
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