Connection 1.02

Immediately after my encounter with the Endbringer I put my mask and coat, the only parts of my costume I'd taken the time to put on, back in my hiding place in the old coal chute. Although I really wanted to change out of my soaked clothes and take a hot bath, I couldn't. Instead, I met up with my parents at the Docks and walked thirty minutes back to our house.

All my plans were straight out the window.

I had acquired my powers on Monday, January 3 and spent the month since planning and experimenting. I had always intended to be a superhero, but there were a lot of things I needed to take care of first.

For one thing, my costume wasn't finished. I had vivid memories of mocking wannabe superheroes with bad costumes. As a fifteen-year-old, I was always at risk of being seen as ridiculous. Having a good costume would show that I was willing to put the energy into making one. It would show that was serious.

On a more practical side, I wasn't done experimenting with my power. In a perfect world I would want to spend another month just trying things.

But there was an Endbringer on my doorstep. The issue had come to me.

It occurred to me that I had lots of strategic reasons to look the other way, or even flee. With my daisy-chains of portals, my power essentially had a global range. I wasn't limited to only fighting this one Endbringer in this one encounter. I could flee to Wisconsin and become a milkmaid, biding my time while I familiarized myself with my power. In a few months I'd be more ready to fight.

But I couldn't flee to Wisconsin or become a milkmaid. My family was here. My friends were here. The kids I'd babysat for every Saturday for three years were here. Barring a speedy evacuation (which was a contradiction in terms) the lives of a lot of people I cared about were in peril, and there was no guarantee an evacuation was even possible depending on how wide an area the Endbringer intended to terrorize.

I put a pin in those competing thoughts. Most pressingly, there were a few experiments with my power I'd put off for too long. One of them was unobtrusive enough to do presently, as my parents and I walked home. (And that was another thing that needed a lot of thought. I didn't know what the Union leadership was going to do about the strike, and I didn't think they did either. The Lord's Port was going to be shut down for a while whether we picketed or not; anything we did was redundant at this point. But that didn't mean it was over, just temporarily on hold.)

The experiment was this: Above the clouds, I spread a grid of portals spaced a kilometre apart over the Atlantic. I'd done this before, but I'd never extended it very far. There was no limit on how many portals I could make as far as I could tell, but I had never done it over a really large area. For instance, I had never tried to extend my pseudo-clairvoyance over a significant fraction of the Altantic ocean, out of a generalized caution against doing anything really big.

But there was no reason I shouldn't be able to.

I extended a grid, first five portals north and south spanning ten kilometres, then ten more east. Filling it in put me at a hundred portals and took about a minute. I found the Endbringer out at sea, heading south. I followed it down, extending as I went.

A hundred portals south took a thousand portals and ten minutes altogether. I didn't feel any strain from supporting that many, but the noise was too much to parse all at once. I felt like I was in a crowded room with a dozen conversations going on around me, and I could only focus on one at a time.

I focused on the Endbringer and its immediate surroundings. I watched – was it more appropriate to say listened? - as it took a wide turn and headed back for the coast, straight for Boston at the southwesternmost edge of my portal grid.

As aforementioned, I was stuck walking home with my parents for another twenty minutes, so I had nothing to do but make another two thousand portals. My intention was to make an excuse and abscond as soon as I was over the threshold, but Dad had other plans. After the obligatory "Are you okay?"s and "It was so close!"s and "Are you sure you're okay?"s, my parents had been silent for the walk home. Both of them had a lot to process, and to be honest so did I. Once we got home, though, Dad burst into a sudden flurry of activity.

"We need emergency supplies," he began. "Bottled water, canned food, and a first-aid kit. There's going to be a rush, so we need to get in before everyone else does. We also need a rendezvous point in case we get separated, and a backup rendezvous point in case something happens to that one, and a way to communicate in case-"

"Shouldn't we leave?" Mom protested.

"Our lives are here!" Dad said.

"Our lives will come with us as long as we don't die," said Mom. "Maybe we should go somewhere safe. We could go to Boston; people say there's work there."

"I don't think Boston is safe," I said.

It wasn't. The Endbringer had made land in Boston ten minutes ago. My portals were above the clouds and the clouds were more than a kilometre up, so I couldn't directly sense anything happening on the ground, but the Endbringer's private storm was moving north along the coast. If it kept going, it might hit Brockton Bay a second time.

I had too many competing thoughts to weigh. I'd decided against telling my parents about my powers weeks ago because I knew they'd never let me fight the Endbringers if they knew. On the other hand, I hadn't expected this. I had the ability to move us all to Michigan in five minutes; was that the right move? The Endbringer hadn't shown any inclination to go inland, but that didn't mean that it wouldn't.

I'd read every scrap of info on the Endbringers I could get my hands on. They were an enigma, but I knew the history of where they had attacked and when. There were twelve Endbringers (thirteen now; it was lucky that I didn't believe in unlucky numbers). Each one alternated between brief periods of activity and long periods of dormancy. While they were active, they chose their targets and attacked until they or the targets were destroyed. While they were dormant, they grew stronger, often emerging with new powers to shore up their weaknesses. Only four had ever been killed, all newborns and all within the past decade.

In any case, it was risky to apply any of those generalities. For any rule you cared to name, there was an Endbringer that broke it. Most targeted geographic areas, but Dark Horse targeted individuals and followed them wherever they went. Neither Babylon nor Charybdis had dormant phases. Scylla had a dormant phase, but it spent the whole time spawning proto-Endbringers that were if anything worse. They were nothing if not diverse.

There was a compelling case for evacuating my family, but it wasn't urgent. If the new Endbringer came inland, I would see it coming long before it posed a threat. Hear it coming. Whatever. We were in no imminent danger. For now I would keep my secret.

Separate from my reverie, Dad was still talking. "The most important thing is that we don't panic. The bridge is out and thousands of people are going to be piling onto the 95 as we speak. There'll probably be more deaths on the highway than there were in the attack. We're in less danger here than we would be if we tried to escape." He shook his head. "Taylor, I want you to go to the grocery store. I'm making a list."

"Okay," I said. I was listening to Boston. Not the band, the city, through my powers.

Internally I was conflicted. I could fight the Endbringer any time before it went dormant. I had never even tested using my power violently. Strategically I had lots of reasons to wait and no reasons to engage now. Strategically, there was nothing selfish, greedy, or wrong about getting our share of canned food before people started rushing the grocery stores, all the while, statistically speaking, people were probably dying in Boston. Nonetheless, I felt coldhearted just watching from a distance.

I had already skipped out on one Endbringer attack. Babylon had been besieging Seattle since early 2005. I could have gone to fight it at any time, but I chose not to. All of my good reasons still applied.

I needed to come to a resolution about these things sooner rather than later. I needed to give serious thought to what my plan of action for the next few months was going to be.

When Dad finished his list, I walked to the only place in my neighbourhood that sold groceries, Young's. Young's was a big box store living like a hermit crab in the hollowed-out shell of a former chain. It was one of the thousands of small businesses that had sprung up in the wake of the of the Antitrust Massacre of 2002. The facade was still the same shade of blue, and you could make out where the old letters had been ripped off. There was a big painted wooden sign saying "YOUNG'S" nailed to the wall above the doors.

If I felt like a jerk for pre-emptively rushing the grocery store thirty minutes after an Endbringer attack to get to the nonperishables before anyone else had a chance to, it was nothing compared to what I thought of the owner of the store when I saw her in the canned goods aisle tripling all the prices.

"Are you actually serious?" I asked, standing in the aisle with my empty cart, staring at the label that indicated that a can of corn cost $3.99.

"People will pay." The owner rose and turned to face me. Fat, mean, and old Mrs. Young, after whom the store was named. She had the air of a mobster more than a shopkeeer. I remembered her from the last time we'd met. Her workforce had tried to unionize in 2009. Labour was a tight-knit political lobby in Brockton Bay, so organizers from the Dockworkers' Union, the Teamsters' Union, and the Teachers' Union had all stepped in to lend their hard-won experience. The negotiations lasted six weeks and ended in violence. Dad had needed stitches.

"It's been half an hour and you're already price gouging?"

"Miss Hebert, always a pleasure. Obviously you, like me, realized that recent events have raised the value of these goods." She gestured to the canned food. "You wanted to buy them for less than they're worth, or you wouldn't have come straight here. Lucky for me, I was first."

I crossed my arms. "Just because there's going to be a panic doesn't mean canned corn is worth more. You bought it from a wholesaler. The price you paid won't change retroactively. You're just gouging to make a quick buck."

"On the contrary, the panic does mean it's worth more. Supply and demand, Miss Hebert. You're here half an hour after the fact, just like me. Does that mean that you, like me, anticipated that a mob of terrified soccer moms is going to buy me out of nonperishables before this evening? If that's the case, clearly demand exceeds supply. For the sake of everyone who's not as quick on the uptake as you or I, I need to raise my prices in order to lower demand so that I don't run out and everyone gets their fair share."

"You think $3.99 for a can of corn fair?"

"Do you think it's fair that the early birds like you get to hoard the city's supply of nonperishable food?"

It wasn't an entirely unreasonable point, which only made me angrier. I turned on my heel and stormed out of the store without buying anything. She wouldn't get a cent from us, but I still had a shopping list. I detoured through an abandoned alleyway and took a portal downtown. The first place I went hadn't changed its prices, so I did my shopping there instead.

Which one of us was the real bad guy? Mrs. Young, for price gouging? Me, for stockpiling limited supplies during a natural disaster? The general populace of Brockton Bay for its statistical certainty of panicking, thereby forcing people like Dad and I who weren't panicking to nonetheless descend to antisocial behaviour like hoarding?

Trick question; the real bad guy was the Endbringer. The rest of us were petty by comparison.

I spent the walk home working out a plan of action. When I could implement it depended on when, if ever, my parents planned to leave me unsupervised. Unfortunately for the people of Boston, I couldn't slip away for the entire afternoon and evening.

Dad was a planner by nature. He insisted that we sit down and decide on a rendezvous point (the house) and a backup rendezvous point in case something happened to the house (a plaza on the west side of town, on high ground). Then he wanted us all to get and memorize email addresses so that we could communicate if we were separated, and since we didn't have a computer we had to walk to the public library to do that. Then he wanted to hide all our valuables, our canned food, and our bottled water just in case the situation deteriorated to the point of roving gangs of looters.

I wasn't completely idle during all of this. A few minutes after hitting Boston, the Endbringer went back out to sea and further south, out of my grid. I extended lines of portals after it, but I couldn't keep up and also maintain total coverage, so I switched to a web structure with large gaps. Like a spider, I could tell how close the Endbringer was to any strand of my web by the strength of the storm that followed it. With my web, I tracked it as it made its attacks. Boston, New York, Boston again, Brockton Bay again (the south side of the city rather than the north, this time), up the St. Lawrence to Montreal, Lake Ontario, Toronto, Montreal, back down the St. Lawrence, Brockton Bay again, and so on. It never stopped moving and never stayed in one city to fight a protracted battle. At ten, an hour after it arrived, it fled under the surface of the ocean and out of my ability to track it. Unless it was very unusual for an Endbringer, it would be back soon. There were no recorded instances of an active phase that lasted less than a month.

Finally, at two thirty in the afternoon, after I'd memorized our backup-backup rendezvous point where we'd meet if Brockton Bay was destroyed and we were separated in the evacuation, the news started reporting on the Endbringer, which distracted Mom and Dad thoroughly enough to cancel everything else.

I could've slipped away, but I was as glued to the TV as they were. I still wasn't resolved on what to do, except that my reluctance had solidified into an intention not to do anything drastic until I'd had more time to come up with a plan.

A handsome anchorman spoke out of our television set: "Ladies and gentlemen, in the early hours of the morning, a new Endbringer emerged to attack the eastern seaboard. Officially named Endbringer Blitzkrieg by FEMA for its rapidfire attacks, it struck several cities in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions of the U.S. and Canada. With me here is superhero and Endbringer expert Armsmaster. Armsmaster, thank you for being here."

"Always a pleasure," Armsmaster replied.

Armsmaster was one of the most prominent national-level superheroes in the mainland U.S. He was also a native Brocktonite, or at least he'd spent the first few years of his public career in the city. I used to be a big fan, but (ironically) I'd sort of lost interest in capes when I started high school.

Armsmaster was wearing his characteristic chrome and dark blue power armour, which covered his entire body from head to toe including a heavy-duty gas mask. As he often said, exposed skin was a weakness he couldn't afford. From what I'd read, the armour weighed over a thousand pounds and was completely bulletproof, even the lenses over the eyes. Rumour had it that the armour disguised his voice so no one could use it to track down his mild-mannered alter ego, but if that was true it was impossible to tell hearing him speak.

"Armsmaster, you're one of the nation's leading experts on Endbringers. I know the incident is fresh, but what can you tell us about Blitzkrieg?"

"First and foremost, it could have been much worse. Blitzkrieg made no attempt to directly kill or maim, and other than those unlucky enough to be in its way there were few injuries and fewer deaths, at least by the standards of an Endbringer scenario. Racking up a bodycount wasn't part of its objective."

"Do you have a theory as to what its objective may have been?"

"Yes," said Armsmaster. "I believe Blitzkrieg is targeting bridges and roads."

The anchorman looked perplexed. "Bridges?"

"Mostly roads, although the bridges will be more difficult to repair for obvious reasons. The Endbringer made many hit-and-run attacks this morning, all of which followed a distinct pattern: It made land close to a bridge or span of highway, destroyed it, and then retreated. I have yet to find an incident of injury, death, or destruction which was anything but incidental to Blitzkrieg's main objective. It's a threat to those in its path because of it enormous bulk and the hailstorm that follows in its wake, but it pays no attention to people unless attacked."

I frowned. Armsmaster was wrong about that, I was sure. Blitzkrieg had clearly targeted the Lord's Port with malicious intent. On the other hand, that didn't necessarily contradict his theory. Roads, bridges, ports – if Blitzkrieg was targeting transportation infrastructure, it fit nicely.

"Speaking of attacking it, did you fight it? I know you were in New York this morning."

Armsmaster shook his head. "No, its attack on New York was over before I heard about it."

"Do you intend to engage it next time? Assuming there is a next time."

"I'd prefer to play that close to the chest. I still don't know to what extent the Endbringers are eavesdropping on us, if at all."

"Scary thought."

I watched the rest of the program out of some poorly construed notion that it would have important information, but Armsmaster had less information than I did. After fifteen minutes he was replaced by a professor of Parahuman Studies who didn't know anything at all.

I was reluctant to leave the house while my parents were both home and awake, in case they noticed I was missing. I spent the afternoon and evening loafing around waiting for night to fall. I didn't detect Blitzkrieg again, even after I extended my spiderweb of portals across the entire east coast of North America.

Mom and Dad stayed up later than they usually did on a Sunday. I was stuck laying in bed pretending to sleep until eleven thirty before they finally turned in. I had to be "up" for school at seven. That gave me seven and a half hours to work with.

I hadn't slept since the night of January 2. As far as I could tell, I wasn't even capable of sleeping anymore. Another one of those invisible secondary powers. It was common enough to be a documented phenomenon; a cape whose powers removed the need for sleep was called a Noctis cape, after the notorious serial killer.

As soon as Mom and Dad were in bed for the night, I snuck out to my favourite nighttime getaway, the Sahara Desert.

It was not hot in the Sahara at night. In fact, it was often cold. At night, the heat escaped very quickly. The Western Sahara was five hours ahead of my native New Hampshire, which made it four-thirty in the morning. It was just below freezing, but I was a New Hampshire girl so for me it was just sweater weather.

I didn't need to wear my mask. There was no one for kilometres around. The isolation was important; if the experiment I was about to conduct didn't go the way I thought it would, anyone nearby would be in terrible danger.