Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  Imp shrugged. “So? What do we do?”

  “Handle what we can,” I said. “Let’s go talk to the others and hash out a plan of action.”

  The three of us made our way down the hill to the settlement. In the doing, we passed through a darker patch where the Simurgh’s wingspan blocked out a portion of the sun. What little sunlight could pass through the cloud cover, anyways. I glanced up and saw her in shadow, the light behind her outlining her body, hair, feathers and the halo of improvised weapons.

  Defiant had his helmet off. His hair had grown in just a little, but wasn’t much more than a buzz cut, stubble on one side of his face was much the same. But for the lack of stubble on his cheek, I might not have noticed his face was partially a prosthetic. A gift from the Nine.

  “It worked,” he said.

  “More or less,” I responded. “One civilian death and seven civilian injuries in the fighting, the death and two of the injuries were the Simurgh’s fault.”

  “Only that many,” Defiant said.

  “She was letting us know she could,” Tattletale said. “Which is something we really should pay attention to, so long as we’re trying to make sense of Endbringer psychology. I’m wondering if you could say that they’re primarily a warped super-ego, devoid of any real ego or advanced id. Built in codes and rulesets, not human social rules, but still rules established by a creator.”

  “Sigmund Freud,” Defiant said. “I remember being back in University. Second year psychology elective. The professor said one word, ‘Freud‘, and the entire auditorium of students exploded in laughter.”

  Tattletale smiled. “You’re calling my analysis into question?”

  “If you’re basing it on the Freudian structural model, yes.”

  “Freud was big on the whole Oedipus, Electra thing. Mommy issues, daddy issues. I’d say if we have any understanding of the Endbringers at all, there’s definitely something going on there. Not sexual, but you get what I mean.”

  “You’re way overstating my intelligence,” Imp said. “I don’t get what you mean at all.”

  “The Endbringers have a fucked up connection with whoever made them,” I said. “Be it Eidolon or someone else.”

  “I understand that.”

  “So if they’re unmoored from whatever’s anchoring them to reality,” Tattletale said, “What’s motivating them now?”

  “A better question,” I said, “Is… well, who the fuck is she following?”

  “Us,” Imp said. “You guys are overthinking this.”

  I sighed. “She is following us, probably. Leviathan was following the Azazel, Simurgh followed the Dragonfly. Both maintained consistent speeds, matching pace, keeping a short distance. What I’m asking is, which of us, exactly, does the Simurgh follow?”

  “Who’s in control of her, for the time being?” Tattletale summed up the question.

  “There’s an easy way to check that,” Defiant murmured. Odd, that his voice had a vaguely mechanical twang to it even with his helmet off. “Each person that was on the Dragonfly walks in a different direction, and we see who she follows.”

  I frowned, glancing skyward for a moment. No sign of any movement or response from the Simurgh.

  “What?” Tattletale asked.

  “I wouldn’t say anyone’s in control of her,” I said. “Because I don’t think anyone is in control of her except her, and-”

  I stopped there.

  “What?” Tattletale asked, again.

  “When she was first attacking the settlement and I was musing aloud at the possibility of betrayal, she very deliberately looked at me. It was a communication, all on its lonesome. Letting me know the whole betrayal thing was a possibility, that she had some self-volition, and letting me know she was listening.”

  “We know she hears. We know she’s aware of everything around her, present or future. Simurgh S.O.P.,” Tattletale said.

  “I know,” I said. “But I’m not just saying she heard me. I’m saying she was listening. She’s hearing every word we say here and she’s paying attention to all of it, processing it, applying it, maybe.”

  “You may be reading too much into a momentary eye contact,” Defiant said. “I’m watching the video footage in question right now… yes. I see what you’re talking about.”

  “Right?” I asked. “So you agree?”

  But he shook his head. “I suspect It’s a bad sign if you’re getting paranoid over this. It’s counterproductive, and the moment your fear or second-guessing is detrimental enough, you need to step down and walk away.”

  I took a deep breath, then sighed. “I’m fine.”

  “If there’s an issue…”

  “No issue. All I’m saying, the only reason I brought this up, is because I don’t want to get on her bad side. I’d very much appreciate it if we treated her with due respect. Let’s not upset her by talking about her in a negative light. Electra complexes, talking about who’s controlling her, or experimenting on her. I don’t think it’s that easy to understand her, and we’re only going to upset her if we keep going down that road.”

  “She doesn’t get upset,” Defiant said. “Didn’t we just spend an inordinate amount of time talking about how Endbringers don’t have conventional emotions?”

  “Better safe than sorry,” I said.

  “Yes,” he sighed the word. “Yes. Of course. I’m mentally exhausted, I’m being stubborn.”

  “We’re all mentally exhausted,” I said. I glanced up at the Simurgh. “Keep that in mind.”

  There were nods all around.

  “The Pendragon won’t fly until I fix it,” Defiant said, standing. He pulled on his helmet, and there was an audible sound as it locked into place. “I’ll need parts from elsewhere. It also means leaving some people behind. You can’t fit everyone into the Dragonfly.”

  “We’ll do something low-risk in the meantime, then,” I said. “Reduced group.”

  “Sensible. I’ll go see after the others, then. This would be a good time to eat, stock up on supplies or use the facilities.”

  Defiant wasn’t one for goodbyes or formalities. He said he’d leave, and he left, his boots making heavy sounds with each footfall.

  “Well, I’m going to go make water,” Tattletale said, jerking a thumb towards one of the outhouses. “I’d be all girl-code and invite you with, but I actually like you guys, and I don’t want to subject you to that atmosphere.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  When Tattletale had disappeared, Imp and I sort of meandered over towards the others.

  Canary was closest, helmet off, her hair plastered to her head with sweat, making her feathers that much more prominent where they stuck out of her hairline.

  “This is crazy,” she said.

  “This is a Tuesday for us,” Imp replied, overly casual in a way that was almost forced.

  I saw the dawning alarm on Canary’s features. I hurried to reassure her, “It’s really not. Ignore her.”

  Canary nodded.

  “Holding up okay?” I asked.

  “Pretty much. There’s one thing, but it… it’s pretty trivially stupid in the grand scheme of things.”

  “We’re killing time while we wait to get organized,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  “There were two people I was talking to. Forget their names. One’s really forgettable and the other’s obscure.”

  “Foil and Parian,” I said.

  “Yes. Right, yeah. I was talking to them, and we had a lot in common, and then they went from warm to ice cold in a flash. Couldn’t understand why.”

  I frowned. “That doesn’t sound like either of them.”

  “They didn’t really say anything. They just talked about going somewhere, and I asked if I could come, and they looked at me like I had three heads.”

  “They probably wanted to be alone,” I said.

  “Yeah. I get that,” Canary said.

  “Alone alone,” Imp responded. “End of the world, making every minut
e count? Nudge, nudge, wink wink?”

  Imp held her mask in one hand, using it to nudge Canary twice, then tipping it to the side as she winked, keeping time with the four words.

  Canary’s eyes went wide. “Oh. Oh!”

  “Dudette, with all the hugging and reassuring they were doing, how was this even in question?”

  “I don’t follow the cape scene. I don’t know how close teammates get. I just figured, shitty situation, life and death, maybe you cling tighter to any buoy in a storm… oh god. I asked if I could come with them.”

  Imp nodded sagely. “I can see where you’d get confused. We’re very close, here, after all.”

  Canary was blushing, humiliated, the pink of her skin contrasting her yellow hair.

  Imp continued, “After all, Skitter… Weaver and I… well…”

  She tried to make bedroom eyes at me, holding her hands in front of her, twisting her arms as she drew her shoulders forward, the very picture of a lovestruck schoolgirl.

  Canary’s face reddened further as Imp continued to poke fun.

  Imp, for her part, gave it up after only two or three seconds. “Fuck. Can’t do it. Weaver here has diddled my brother, and it just feels squick and incestuous.”

  “That’s the reason we haven’t ever done the relationship thing,” I said, my voice flat. “It’d be weird in an almost incestuous way.”

  Imp cackled. One of very few people I knew who could cackle. She was enjoying herself. This was her medium. One of them. “You’d do better with Tattletale, or Rachel.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and I injected a little more sarcasm into my voice, “for the mental pictures that evokes.”

  She cackled again.

  Eager to change the topic, I glanced at the others. The Wards were sitting a short distance away, Kid Win, Golem, Vista and Cuff, sitting together. Cuff was fixing up Golem’s costume.

  I’d feel weird about approaching them. Technically, I was still a Ward, though my eighteenth birthday had come and gone. I should have moved up to the Protectorate, but I’d never been sworn in, had never filled in the paperwork.

  The Slaughterhouse Nine, Scion and the mass-evacuation from Earth Bet sort of gave me an excuse, but I still didn’t want to face the questions.

  I glanced at Saint, who was sitting between Narwhal and Miss Militia. They were pretty clearly talking guns.

  Lung stood alone. He was holding a skewer with meat all along the length. A glance around didn’t show any possible source.

  A check with my swarm did. A few hundred feet away, there was a cooking fire that had gone out in the aftermath of the Yàngbǎn attack. Lung had apparently claimed some food as a matter of course.

  “Lung,” I said, almost absently.

  “You know him?” Canary asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “He was kind of notorious in the Birdcage. A lot of people, they come in, and they do something to make a statement. Kill someone, pick someone suitable and claim them, challenge someone suitably impressive to a fight, that sort of thing.”

  “What did Lung do?” I asked.

  “He marched into the women’s side of the prison, killed his underling, and then killed and maimed a bunch of others before the cell block leaders ordered people to pull back. I got called into a meeting, too, where a bunch of people in charge of cell blocks asked me to come and tell them what I knew about him, since we arrived at the same time.”

  I nodded. “But you didn’t know anything.”

  “No. I think some of them were really worried, too. I thought they were going to hurt me, until Lustrum, uh, my cell block leader, backed me up, gave me her protection.”

  “Geez,” Imp said. “That’s messed up.”

  Canary shrugged. “How did you put it? A Tuesday? A Tuesday in the Birdcage.”

  “No, I’m not talking about that,” Imp said. “I’m talking about the fact that Lustrum the feminazi was in charge of your cell block and you still didn’t pick up on the thing between Parian and Foil. Isn’t that, like, Sappho central?”

  Sappho?

  Canary blushed again. “I… uh.”

  “I mean, seriously,” Imp said.

  “Ease up,” I warned her.

  “I… I live and let live,” Canary said. “I just didn’t want to step on toes.”

  “And you never got any?”

  “I had somebody, but like I said…”

  They were still going as I focused on my swarm. I gave some commands to the Dragonfly, which I had landed a mile and a half out of town, and brought it our way.

  With the relay bugs, I could sense most of the settlement, the surrounding landscape, everything above and below. That was only using half of them.

  The remainder were fertilized, bearing eggs.

  I’d flipped the switches, shifted them into breeding mode, and I was working on keeping them warm and well fed. I’d have to wait until the eggs hatched before I found out whether the young had any range extension ability. If I had to wait until they were adult, well, the world might end before I got that far.

  Defiant was returning. I stepped away from Canary and Imp to greet him.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  ■

  Smaller team, while the Pendragon was out of action, smaller job.

  The ones who were grounded would be looking after the settlement, ensuring the survivors were able to make it through the next few nights.

  Tattletale was with me. Imp and Rachel had come with for much the same reason Lung had. They were restless personalities, unwilling to relax when there was a possibility of a conflict. I wanted to think that Rachel’s intentions were a little kinder in nature than Lung’s, that she wanted to protect her friends, but I wasn’t going to ask, nor was I going to set any hopes on it.

  A pleasant idea, nothing more.

  Lung was eerily quiet. He’d acted to stop Shadow Stalker from attacking me, but he hadn’t shown a glimmer of his power.

  After we’d decided who went where, before we’d left, Canary had found a moment to talk to me. To finish what she’d been about to say when Imp had interrupted to poke fun at her.

  Information about Lung.

  He coasted on reputation for some time. Didn’t use his power, didn’t fight, just intimidated. Nobody was willing to start something because nobody really knew what he was about. Until this guy from Brockton Bay came in. Had some info. Except, by then, Lung was entrenched in Marquis’ cell block, and even if someone wanted to go after him, they didn’t want to deal with Marquis in the process.

  Lung hadn’t been using his power. Why? Was there a reason?

  A deep seated concern about his passenger, maybe? No. What would excuse that?

  I needed to ask Tattletale, now that I knew, but there hadn’t been a moment where we’d both been alone.

  We had Shadow Stalker, who had no interest in rebuilding and resettling. Defiant was with us as well, relying on remote monitoring to perform the occasional check-in on Saint. Narwhal would manage the rest.

  Miss Militia had come along, and nobody had said anything to mark it as fact, but I got the distinct impression it was for Defiant‘s sake.

  And, of course, we had the Simurgh. Following. She’d finished building what she’d been working on as she hovered over the aftermath of the fight at the Tav settlement.

  A shortsword, four feet long, without any guard to protect the hand from an enemy’s weapon, both sides of the blade serrated. Black.

  Defiant had called it a Gladius.

  Defiant had the cockpit and Miss Militia’s company, and so I was left to hang out in the cabin, with Rachel sleeping beside me, Bastard and Huntress sleeping at her feet.

  I admired her ability to rest in such stressful situations. I glanced at Shadow Stalker, who seemed to be filled with nervous energy. When we’d kidnapped her for Regent to control, Rachel had been able to sleep then, too.

  I felt like I had to be responsible, somehow. I’d taken on three very dangerous individ
uals, with reputations ranging from bloodthirsty vigilante to Endbringer, and I knew I’d blame myself if something went wrong on any count. I couldn’t sleep when there was information to take in, when there were people to watch, people to watch over, and personalities to keep in check.

  Threats and conflicts, within and without.

  Many of the monitors were focused on Bohu, the towering Endbringer, tall enough that her heads reached the cloud cover. Five miles tall, give or take. Gaunt, expressionless, without legs to walk with. No, she moved like a block of stone that someone was pushing, not with lurching movements, but a steady, grinding progression that left bulldozed terrain in her wake. Overlapping rings marked the area she traveled as well, as she continued switching between her typical combat-mode cycles, altering the terrain, raising walls, creating traps and deadfalls, generating architecture.

  The monitors abruptly changed. One shaky image, from one cameraman at just the right vantage point.

  A golden streak crossing the evening sky, appearing out of nowhere.

  Just about everyone in the Dragonfly tensed. I felt myself draw in a breath, my meager chest swelling as if I could draw in confidence as well as air, preparing to give orders, to provide the call to arms.

  But the golden light disappeared as soon as it had appeared. Like the jet stream of an aircraft passing overhead, except it was light, not smoke, and it only marked a brief period where he’d passed through our world on his way to other things.

  We relaxed.

  Rachel hadn’t even woken up. She was exhausted, though we’d barely participated in any fighting.

  The Dragonfly moved closer to the ground as we approached the next portal. It was squatter, broader, allowing for more ground traffic at a moment’s notice, though it made the passage of flying vehicles more difficult.

  Like Scion, exiting one world, passing through Bet on our way to the next. It reminded me of my discussion with Panacea. People who build and people who destroy. We were trying to do the former, Scion the latter.

  The Dragonfly passed through the portal.

  Heavy rain showered down around us. The Dragonfly faltered for an instant as it changed settings, very nearly nosediving into the ground beneath us.