Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  “So?” Rachel asked.

  “When the walls break,” the Number Man said, “one million, seven hundred and thirty thousand tonnes of steel are going to drop on our heads.”

  “Can we go out the sides?” Golem suggested.

  “Protected by the same water that’s below us and to the sides, for the corkscrew operation. Slow going at best, we get obliterated by pressurized water.”

  I stared down at the ground. My burn hurt so much I felt nauseous. I also felt lightheaded. Probably a side effect of blood loss.

  “The Siberian,” I said. “Protection effect.”

  “Can only protect a handful of us, less if you intend to move after things collapse. Two hands, perhaps two feet, one behind.”

  Only five.

  Five wasn’t enough.

  Scion had his hand raised over his head, the other entity held above, with masses of its flesh trailing beneath them. My bugs told me the ceiling was arching slightly. I could see where the ceiling met one wall, how a crack was forming along the edge.

  “Ceiling falling,” I said. I moved my arm to point, and I only wound up moving my stump, suppressing my reaction to the pain so I wouldn’t provoke Lung.

  Golem reached into the side of his suit. A hand began emerging.

  Too slow. A full third of the ceiling over this room looked ready to collapse, and it was big enough and close enough to wipe us out.

  Alexandria flew forward. She caught the shelf of steel, concrete and granite.

  Buying time, even as the slab continued to crack and break down where the stress of her holding it warred with the sheer weight and lack of support in other spaces.

  Golem’s hand propped it up, fingers curling around the edge to secure it.

  I still wasn’t thinking straight.

  What’s he doing?

  “Cuff, find me a piece of metal to use,” Golem said. “The bigger the better. And I’m talking big.”

  “The column?” she asked.

  “It broke up some, right? Find me the closest, biggest piece.”

  Cuff nodded. “Lung, Siberian, help us.”

  Golem looked back at me.

  “Go,” I said.

  He went without another word.

  I was left sitting where I was, with injured case fifty-threes, with an unconscious Canary who’d apparently had a hand crushed, and a conscious, mostly unharmed Rachel and Imp. We stared up at Scion.

  “Well,” Imp said.

  He used his golden light to burn the other. It coursed through the tissues, through the entirety of the thing. An ocean of experimental features, of flesh and body parts.

  “Well,” Imp said, again.

  I could almost sense a feeling radiating from Scion.

  A hard emotion to name, if not a hard emotion to place. I’d experienced it well enough. Many had.

  He was lashing out, destroying the remains, out of bewilderment, sadness, despair, anger, confusion. All of it unfiltered. The same emotion a child might experience with their first loss. What a child would feel when they lost something irretrievable for the first time, when something was stolen from them and they hadn’t prepared themselves for the possibility on any level.

  It was what one felt as a child if they lost their dog, their home, their innocence.

  Their mother.

  “It’s like when I lost Rollo, Brutus or Judas,” Rachel said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “When my bro…” Imp said, trailing off.

  How do you even articulate that? When he was broken?

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Fucking good,” Imp said. “I hope it sucks for him.“

  Together, we stared. We watched Scion burn his partner. Putting a torch to the garden. Alexandria flew overhead to join the others, helping.

  He dropped the remains, and they spooled out of some other dimension that the ‘garden’ had spilled out into.

  Golem began creating the hand. The entire room shook as fingertips emerged. Each a small building unto itself. Cupping over, a protective barrier.

  Nothing that would hold out against the kind of weight the Number Man had been talking about.

  Then Cuff used her power, separating the hand in half, so it was the palm and four fingers.

  I heard him say, “…Siberian… this large?”

  “Yes,” the Number Man said.

  “Usually it’s you with these plans,” Imp said.

  “She’s hurt,” Rachel said.

  I grit my teeth, not taking my eyes off Scion.

  No, that wasn’t my excuse.

  I was too focused on other fronts. Not on survival… fuck that. I wanted to hurt the bastard. This was the best opportunity we had. So long as the other entity was here, Scion was distracted. Just like he was distracted with the case fifty-threes. One chance to hurt him, possibly without retaliation. Thinking of what we had on hand, what we could have on hand… trying to connect the dots.

  Scion lashed out, sudden, unpredictable, raw destruction.

  A section of ceiling in Sveta’s general vicinity fell. A whole section of the column above us was sliced off, falling.

  I could see Sveta on the far end of the room. She could help.

  I sent my bugs her way.

  “I think I have something,” I said.

  “Something?” Imp asked.

  “But we need to talk to the Number Man,” I said. “See if it’s doable.“

  Imp nodded, “We’ll get you on the dog’s ba-”

  I used my flight pack, lifting myself into the air. My legs dangled, and I lacked the strength to keep my head fully raised. My hair hung in front of my face.

  Whatever. Right now, at least, my body was an inconvenient puppet, a vehicle for my power and my brain, nothing else.

  Fuck me, the burn hurt.

  Rachel and Imp hurried to get the other injured on the dog’s backs while I approached the other group.

  The cupped hand turned monochrome as the Siberian used her power on it, then turned back to normal. Alexandria lifted the hand, making room for others, for us to get underneath.

  I reached Number Man. I spoke, and found my voice thin. “Your power.”

  “My power?” he asked.

  “It’s perception based.”

  “I sense complex mathematics,” he said. “Second nature to me.”

  Ask a stupid question…

  “Can you do controlled demolitions?” I asked.

  “Yes. What are you wanting to demolish?”

  “Everything,” I said.

  He gave me a funny look, then glanced over his shoulder at the others.

  He sighed. “Tell me what you need.”

  “I need to bring it all down, and I need it to happen on my signal. Can you figure it out?”

  He nodded. “We can use Pretender.”

  I turned my head, gazing at the remains of the ‘garden’, slowly being consumed and reduced to motes of darkness by the golden light.

  “We can use Sveta too,” I said. “If she’s willing. Trying to figure out what we need to make this happen.”

  “I’ll need information,” he said. “The layout, what exactly you want to happen, order…”

  “I’m not looking for anything complicated,” I said.

  I began illustrating the nature of the roof, where the cracks and rents were, and how deep they went. I also began drawing out the remaining cords I still had stashed around my costume. “Cuff?”

  “What?”

  “Secure this thing. We’ll need a floor.”

  “A floor?”

  “Fast.“

  But I extended my focus to my bugs, at the same time.

  My bugs reached Sveta. She was pulling herself free of rubble.

  “Sveta.”

  She looked around, confused.

  “The bugs.“

  Her tendrils killed maybe sixty bugs as she focused her attention on them.

  “It’s Taylor. Skitter, or Weaver. Whatever you know me as
.“

  She killed more before she got herself firmly secured to a large piece of concrete.

  “Thank you,” she said. “For getting me away from the collapse, before. I didn’t get a chance to say. I’m really sorry about your hand.”

  “I’ll get a new one if we make it that far. Listen. We’re going to attack. We need your help.”

  “I can’t hurt him.”

  “You can,” I said. “Most definitely.“

  I drew an arrow.

  “I… what?”

  “Can you do it?“

  Sveta shook her head. Or she made it sway, anyways. “But… why? And… I don’t think I can get away.”

  “We just need a few seconds,” I said. “He attunes himself to specific forms of attack, to negate them. It’s why the Siberian did as much damage as she did, earlier. It’s better if we can catch him by surprise, mix it up a little. And if we do it here, now, before that corpse finishes burning, it should be easier to get away, because it clouds his senses like you…“

  I wasn’t sure what to call her.

  “Monsters? Victims?”

  I’d always hated the use of the word victim. “Irregulars. It clouds his senses like the irregulars do.“

  Sveta’s face changed. I couldn’t quite make it out with my bug vision.

  “I can do it,” she said. “I think I might even be able to do it and get away before he kills me.”

  “It’s not that. Get into the hole in the ceiling we came from, before, if you can move that far, that fast. The walls are broken, I can point a route.”

  She nodded.

  “Thank you, Sveta. Count this as another brick on that structure you’re building,” I said.

  She didn’t reply to that.

  I looked over at the Number Man. We were all underneath the barrier, now. It wouldn’t hold against Scion, but… yeah.

  “It’s doable,” the Number Man said, looking at Alexandria. “We need a signal.”

  “Rachel,” I said. “Whistle?”

  She nodded. Alexandria glanced at us for confirmation.

  “One more thing,” I said.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “I want you to swallow a fly.”

  She arched one eyebrow.

  “Or, better yet, hold it in your mouth.”

  “I’ve lived with enough charlatans-”

  “No joke,” I said, serious.

  She frowned, then opened her mouth. I popped a housefly inside.

  A moment later, she flew from the shelter. Cuff began sealing the floor after her.

  This was not an elegant plan. Simple, crude.

  “Sveta,” I said. “Now.”

  She anchored herself on three different areas. Then she grabbed the burning corpse.

  She flung it at Scion.

  Can’t hurt him physically.

  Maybe emotionally.

  He reeled, perhaps a little stunned.

  She hit him with more. One after the other.

  His hands glowed.

  “Run,” I said, with my swarm, in the same moment I said, “Now.”

  Sveta bolted. Scion attacked, a wide-area effect that scoured the room’s interior.

  Rachel whistled, using the only opening remaining. Cuff closed it.

  Outside, Alexandria charged in response to the signal.

  She slammed into key points, where the structure was weakest. I’d outlined some of it, the Number Man had inferred the rest.

  Hitting him with the biggest thing available.

  We brought the column down. One and three-quarter million tonnes, dropping down on our heads.

  The cords were a measure that it turned out we didn’t need. The floor and Siberian’s power sealed us off from the aftershock. It sealed us off from almost all of the noise, a hammer of solid steel the size of a skyscraper, striking an anvil.

  I wasn’t so optimistic as to think we’d killed him.

  But I could hope the impact destroyed more than one body. That, like the ‘garden’, there was a constant, steady connection, and the devastation could echo out through that connection and into the well.

  “Whooo.” Imp said, exhaling the word.

  And now we wait to see if we die.

  Does he retaliate?

  Does he wipe us out, blasting his way free?

  There was only silence.

  Of course there was only silence.

  And then I sensed movement.

  A housefly, outside, approaching.

  “Drop the barrier,” I said.

  Siberian did. I could see everyone tense.

  But it’d just deform the column above, nothing else.

  Alexandria, outside, tore the hand apart. Lung and Cuff helped from the inside.

  He’d blasted his way free, straight up. Alexandria had torn away the flooring and the chunk of remaining column from on top of us. Sure enough, there was a fist-indent in it.

  “Whoooo!” Imp whooped. “Screw you, golden man!”

  I swayed a little, nearly falling. Rachel caught me.

  “You okay?” Cuff asked.

  I nodded. “Fuck me, that was satisfying.”

  “I will take your word for it,” Lung said. He held Canary.

  “Aww, he’s upset he didn’t get to play a part,” Imp mocked.

  I looked at Lung with Canary, my eyes roving over our assembled number. Ideas falling in place.

  “Except,” Golem said, morose, “He’s pissed off, now.”

  “Pissed off is something we can use,” I said.

  “A solution?” Number Man asked.

  I shook my head. “But I think, now, I know what it’ll look like when I see it. Hospital next. I’ll explain on the way.”

  29.09

  “ Cuff,” I said. I used my bugs to talk. “Can you fix the platform? Make sure the floor is sturdy enough to hold our weight?“

  “What are you thinking?” Golem asked.

  “I’m thinking we go straight up, then exit onto whatever floor has the portal.”

  “There are others inside,” Golem said. “Sveta, Weld, Shadow Stalker… prisoners.”

  “They can wait,” I said. “There’s a lot of danger there. Sveta especially, if we turn a corner and run into her… We got Doormaker, we got the clairvoyant, we have Number Man, who I’m assuming is willing to cooperate?“

  “I will.”

  “We have video footage,” I said. “Of the facility, of the garden, of Scion. Stuff we can get to Tattletale. The sooner we get back, the sooner we can get others up to date, and the better our chances of coming up with a plan before we run out of time. We send PRT squads and capes who can’t help against Scion to recapture Garotte and handle the prisoners.“

  Golem nodded. “Makes sense.”

  He and Cuff joined Alexandria in fixing a platform out of the hand we’d hidden inside.

  Much of Cauldron’s internal structure was gone. We could see a cross-section above, where rooms had been sliced through. The energy of Scion’s beam continued to eat through it, leaving a tracery of gold to cut through the gloom, all the way up to the hole at the top. Maybe two-thirds remained, with the lab and everything essential gone. A hollow husk, and this empty space, like a missile silo open to the world.

  An overcast sky loomed directly above us, and a kind of breeze reached us, maybe a thousand feet underground. It stirred flecks and fragments from the burned entity and the burned of the walls above into the air, a snowfall of pitch black flakes.

  “I’m betting this isn’t so safe to inhale,” Imp said. “Bits of alien, bits of… metal ash?”

  “Closer to soot, I’d think,” Golem said, without turning away from the platform in progress.

  “It’s essentially human flesh,” the Number Man said. “Given the form the entity took and the research the Doctor did.”

  “Oh, well then,” Imp said. She took in a deep breath. “That’s okay.”

  “You joke? Now?” Lung asked. He sounded irritated.

&n
bsp; “Especially now,” Imp said. “We hit him hard enough it mattered, we made him hurt. Be happy.”

  Alexandria turned the platform around. We each stepped inside.

  She hauled us skyward. Imp dropped down to her hands and knees.

  She saw me looking, meeting me eye to eye. Or lens to lens, anyways. “You can fly. Why are you in here?”

  “Limited fuel. Does it matter?“

  “It’s more weight on this floor. If it breaks off, we all fall to our deaths.”

  “Don’t be a wuss,” Rachel said.

  “I’m not. Wussiness is being scared about something that isn’t scary. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to have a thing about shoddy constructions and drops from… oh… seventy stories up?”

  “The Siberian’s protecting the shell,” I said. “Alexandria couldn’t break it if she tried.”

  “It’s seventy-seven, by the by,” the Number Man said. He was surrounded by his Harbingers, the wounded piled at his feet. “We’ll be eighty-three floors up once we reach the top.”

  “Here’s an idea,” Imp said. “Let’s change the topic. Like, say, it’s kind of nice to see you returning to form, boss.”

  “Form?”

  “Creep factor a thousand. You’re just standing there, and you shouldn’t be upright, with the way your weight is, but you are because of that flight pack, you’re not looking at anyone you talk to, not even opening your mouth. And when you’re talking, you don’t pause for breath or anything and there’s no emotion in your voice. I’d almost think you bit it, and your ghost lives on in the swarrrrmm.” She waggled her fingers as she drew out the last word.

  “I’m alive,” I said. I made myself raise my head.

  “Right. But you look dead, and that’s creepy, and that’s good, because creepy reminds me of old Skitter. Old Skitter was cool.”

  I shook my head a little. Now that things were quieting down, my body was deciding to remind me of the pain in my arm.

  I focused on my bugs. Searching the area. I didn’t have many, but two bugs floating a foot apart could fly at chest level and run into most people standing in a corridor.

  A cluster of bugs died, wiped out by lashing tendrils.

  Sveta made it.

  There was a crackle, followed by a voice. “…ear me?“

  “We’re here, Tattletale,” Golem said, raising a hand to his ear.

  “Kinda got a little spooked there. Long time for radio silence.”