2.4

By noon, having said my goodbyes to the few I could find, I was at the back of the bus carrying a duffle bag with my costume and mask, along with a few clothes and a couple of other necessities they had dispensed over the past two weeks. In front of me, the camp receded and then panned out of my sight as we turned left, being replaced by a luxurious building through whose ceiling-high windows I could still see the hooked fences at the edges of the camp.

And soon, that fell behind me too.

Despite the empty echoing roads, the mood in the bus was cautiously jovial, a kind of paranoid happiness that remains ready with a half-formed punch even as it laughs. A few familiar faces signaled towards me and I sent a few smiles back. But as I made no further gesture to join them, they returned to their own conversations, and soon began to leave the bus in droves as we reached their destinations—the various hospitals, vets, and food kitchens that had gone into overdrive since the disaster.

I felt a bit of guilt that I wouldn't be joining them today, at the hospital, again, but overrode it. I had other objectives I needed to fulfill, and those too were in their own way essential.

If I was going to use my power to save Dinah, I needed to figure out its extent.

Amy's bugs quivered in my hair and each felt as intimate as a little kiss—they were the only things she had ever modified like this. I tried to quell it, but I could see myself smiling in my reflection in the glass.

And why shouldn't I?

My guilt hung around me like an albatross I wanted to fling away. I knew that I wasn't wholly at fault—how could I not? But that didn't change the equation at all.

Though other things did.

To keep it at bay.

It was disconcerting to see through the bugs she had made for me. Unlike my normal bugs, whose feedback was entirely novel, the sight these bugs provided me filled me with a muted nausea. Suddenly the world was an Escher painting. I could see the same thing through entirely different and impossible angles. It wasn't as though this new source of sight somehow extended the reaches of my normal vision like multiple monitors stacked side by side. Instead, the new sense appeared in areas other than my field of vision and provided me with sight I couldn't see or access otherwise. And if there was any overlap between what my two types of sights' saw, I had to give up focusing on one, or both would become incomprehensible.

It had been easier in her room, with only the two of us moving against a static background. In the camps, the moment I'd let them rise from my head and cast their gaze at the tumultuous world around me, I'd felt a deep and lurching vertigo as fractured images of a thousand moving shapes crowded into my vision.

So now I kept them pressed into my hair, seeing only a dark mess of brown curls that vibrated in tandem with the movements of the bus.

The other bug, though, intrigued me in completely different ways.

My stop came deep into the city, besides one of the smaller hospitals still functioning near Winslow. As the bus departed, I turned away from the group that had disembarked with me, and started towards the Library. My regular bugs swarmed through the apartments and buildings and alleyways that passed me by, registering little but the scattered detritus that people had left behind.

There was nothing in the shadows I needed to be particularly wary of.

I didn't know whether the library could help me, but I had time, and needed to understand what the morning had revealed. It wasn't as if I hadn't researched into my limitations earlier: as soon as I'd gotten my powers, I'd tried to figure out where its boundaries lay.

But both Amy and Lisa had shown me that the boundaries went further than I had thought.

The library was a squat, modern building with an imitation brick wall and wide, tall doors that were firmly closed. Around its perimeter, grass sprouted in sparse, eccentric tufts like the hair of an old man. Some of the windows were open, while others, rust visible along their frames, seemed tightly shut. I circled the building, sending her bugs along with my regulars in to scope it out. The nausea was minimal, only a brief twinge at the start before it eased out.

If I could see through my normal bugs, as Lisa had told me, what exactly did that imply? If I'd been able to identify a person, an iPod, and even the kind of music emanating from his ear buds, via just a moth, a creature of notoriously poor senses, then either there was something missing from the picture, and there had been other bugs in the area feeding me sensory data, or—and here the hope lodged in my throat—I was enhancing the bugs somehow, to the point where a single moth could tell me the kind of music a lonely guy with an iPod bobbed his head to.

Whichever it was, it opened up a lot of new vistas. I could already see my plans regarding Dinah changing, expanding in scope.

And now that the internet was inaccessible, these books were my only recourse to try and understand this.

Except, perhaps, the bugs themselves.

I took hold of some of the insects in the brighter areas of the library and flicked open their sight again, my breath held and expectant.

It was expelled a moment later as all I got was messy static, a cacophony of vague and fuzzy sights. I played with the image for a bit, trying to cohere it into something understandable. But the messy soup of dull color resisted interpretation. I closed the sense, sighing, and continued to move.

Her bugs fed me a distorted picture of the landscape inside the library: sort of circular, with objects fore-lengthened the further they went from the center. Though the lights were closed, there was enough natural light pooling in from the windows for the outer rooms to have a musty, abandoned sort of look, enhanced by the motes crowding in every inch of sunlight. As you went deeper into the library the shadows lengthened, and the science section was largely submerged in darkness, with the plastic of some books glinting weakly in errant strands of light.

It didn't take long to find a door that wasn't locked: it was a small doorway at the back amongst the garden and flowers, and it jiggled open creakily as I tried the knob. The lock was broken. The stale air hit me a moment later and I crinkled my nose and strode through it, hoping that it would clear up somewhere inside.

It didn't.

I sneezed a couple of times in the dust. The darkness surrounding me was sepulchral, and echoing my steps back to me. The question rose suddenly, with no hint of its coming: how would Amy react in a place like this?

She wasn't timid, exactly, but there was a meekness to her that felt so familiar to me.

But, then again, shehad approached me first, after all. In fact, she had initiated almost all of the advances. Which was understandable, but still felt like a tally I needed to correct.

I found myself grinning when my bugs found the wrappers and the empty tin cans of dried and pasty food, wiping away that smile and the giddiness that seemed to have become a close companion this morning. The detritus was at the edge of one of the outer bookcases, just before the darkened areas began. I sent one of the modified bugs to scope it out, and softened my sharp and noisy stride. There were plenty of spiders in the library, and though most were the more harmless kind, and I roused them and send them skittering across the walls.

The modified bugs soon reached and peeked over the shelves.

There was an old man reclined on the ground beside a stack of books. Spokes of light poked through the bookcase to his right. He was pushing himself up as I padded towards him, his fingers groping on the floor for a long dark tube that he then held aloft. He had grizzled hair and large bulging eyes that swiveled in their sockets as he shook his head, trying to pinpoint the source of the echo. In the dim light, he looked washed out, and the skin of his face was cracked with age. My bugs crawled over the place and he absently tried to stamp a few.

I paused to observe him for a moment.

Behind and below him were the clothes he'd bunched up in a vaguely pillow-like shape and the ragged sheet he'd been using as a bed. A leaning stack of books toppled as he made too frantic a turn.

I finally called out, making my voice as unthreatening as I could. "Hey? Are you alright?"

Startled, his head whipped in my direction. He tried to stare through the shelf, towards where I'd spoken from. The angry tenseness in his face slackened. Strangely enough, his nostrils then distended and sniffed the air like a bloodhound. Eventually he relaxed and let out a relieved sigh before calling towards me. "I'm alright," he said, before placing the rod down. He had that deep cultured voice that seemed to linger in your ears long after it had been spoken. "And you?"

I moved towards the shelf, keeping the bugs close. He seemed like just another old man, lost and confused and a little bit mad in the midst of tragedy—like many I'd helped back in the hospitals. How long had he even been staying here? I counted the wrappers of food: enough for a few days. It would explain the haggard look on his face.

He met me with a weak smile as I turned into the narrow space between shelves.

"I'm just here for a few books," I said. "I'll be on way soon."

Though it wasn't suspicion, but his voice still carried a hint of unease. "Books?"

I nodded.

He let out an explosive breath and shook his head. "I'll never understand your generation, will I?" Still chuckling, he gestured with his palms. "Go ahead. I'm glad somebody is thinking about books at a time like this."

Yawning, he turned away from me, shuffling towards his bundle of clothes. He looked gaunt, his face long and deeply creviced, but his bunched up sleeves exposed strong arms lightly tanned. Now that I wasn't looked through the bugs' eyes anymore, his movements seemed deft and quick and made me reevaluate my estimate about his age.

"What are you look for?" he asked, still bent away from me. "Some sort of project? Some pleasure reading? I've been a bit of out of the loop—have the colleges reopened already?"

"Not yet," I replied, and felt the need to add on to that. "Some pleasure reading. I have time."

"And a strange definition of pleasure," he pointed out. I cocked my head towards him. "That is the biology section, isn't it?"

I shrugged.

He laughed, a bit louder than the situation intended. Staring for a moment at his awkward responses, I shrugged it aside: if he'd been living here for the past couple of weeks, in near solitude, it was understandable that he seemed a bit out of tune. It was still a bit unnerving though: there were plenty of people I'd seen brought to the hospital that had gone slightly mad due to the violence and tragedy that had engulfed the streets. I shifted slightly away from him, bringing more bugs to bear at the tops of the bookcases around us.

As if sensing my hesitation, he backed away and continued his packing.

Was he packing because I unnerved him, having disturbed his little shelter? The large scattered pile of books that he was now re-stacking into the shelves suggested that he'd been here a while. Or is this what he did, moving from place to place, an itinerant and constantly displaced refugee? There were plenty of those in Brockton Bay these days, although most traveled in their cars.

I sorted through the books with greater rapidity, moving from one case to another, trying to find that entomological compendium that I'd tried to study earlier, when I'd first triggered. I needed to focus. But thoughts of the city came wafting back, along with his sour and pungent smell.

In a way, the people at the hospital tracked the steady decline of the city. During the first couple of days, most of the patients had been people in shock, people that just needed a stiff drink, as some of the doctors had said. There had been relatively few injuries amongst the non-powered community, and most of those were caused by falling debris—those injured by the Endbringer were dead. So, I'd mostly sat beside beds and held clammy and quivering hands.

Only after this initial interim did the victims of the Merchants begin to appear, a doubly traumatized person whose eyes followed with a sickly suspicion every moment you made.

Which category did he fall in? I could feel a kind of chasm opening. Two days without going to the hospital after two weeks of spending almost every waking moment in them. Were they wondering where I was? I had no illusions about being essential to the process, but I had duties and a few regulars I had seen to.

He sang as he restocked the books, a low hymn of some sort, and the deep bass of his voice was calming.

I would take him to the hospital after I found the right book, and then get him to a shelter. There was one nearby, close to Winslow. Nobody deserved to live like this, alone and forgotten in a dark nook of the city.

Trapped, in his own why, like Dinah.

I resumed my search. Something was missing in my understanding of my powers. A single moth could not do as much as Lisa had recollected. Dazed and hurt, I must have been interpreting the scene differently than how I normally did the perception of my bugs. Maybe my powers were filling the spaces in, sort of how Amy's powers gave her the means to change the bugs into whatever she wanted, despite the fact that she didn't quite know their underlying biology?

Having packed his things away, he stood and straightened his back, the joints cracking with age. "Can I help? I don't have much experience with biology, but I have a good eye," he said, before deep crevices appeared in his forehead. "You shouldn't be alone. Do you have any idea how dangerous this area is? Between those the Merchants and the Empire, the city's gone to the dogs, I swear."

I eyed him with the bugs: as in Amy's room, it wasn't so nauseous when there were just the two of us. He looked worried on my behalf, like the guy who'd enquired about my safety two night ago. And again that struck me as wrong, as something perverse, though not as strongly as it earlier had. The guilt was still there, but it was a different kind of guilt.

"It doesn't matter," I finally said, echoing the reply I'd given two nights ago.

He took long moments to answer back. "Of course it does. Do you want me to escort you back after you're done? I think it's still morning, but I wouldn't feel right letting a lady walk these streets without any protection."

I hid my smile into the book. He was a bit creepy, but the concern seemed genuine. The awkward cadence and choice of words was probably because he couldn't relate to somebody my age.

"Sure," I said, returning the book to the shelf. It had been one of the ones I'd picked up, but it wasn't detailed enough for me to draw any real conclusions. Turning towards him, I added, "Maybe we could go somewhere after this: there's a hospital close by that I volunteered at for a few days. Their cafeteria dispenses food every afternoon. I could use something to eat."

He stared at me before bowing his head. "Thank you, Miss, but I'll be fine. You should go. The streets are not safe and it's not good to be out alone these days."

"It's okay," I said, turning back towards the books. He just stared at me as I resumed flicking through the titles, finishing one bookcase and moving to the next, closer to him. My bugs peered at his still and petrified form through lidless eyes: he seemed scared, frozen: did that morsel of kindness do this? He wasn't the first person I'd seen falling to pieces with a kind touch.

Eventually he came to a decision and began to move. He had a sad smile on his face. He moved beside me, drawing a large book from the shelves that had "Poems" emblazoned on its cover. He nodded sharply towards, as if he'd come to a momentous decision. Did he intend to bring it along?

He began to speak, and his voice had shed all traces of its earlier hesitancy. "Now here's a book as good as any other. Do you like poetry, dear?"

Feeling strangely indulgent, I replied. "Not really. My mother liked to make me and my friend recite them sometimes, but I've always preferred novels."

I shifted, bending to peruse the lower shelves. If the book wasn't here, there were plenty of other stacks beyond this one, though I would need some source of light for those areas.

"She sounds like a cultured woman." His voice was low and deferential and the book was held tight in his hands. "My mother," he started, as I went lower still to look over the bottom shelf, "hated the novel, but she was quite fond of the theatre—"

He struck.

My head banged hard against the wood and rocked back. A terrible roar filled my ear, like a thousand gallons of blood gushing out. I tried to clutch the shelves to stop from falling. Books fell, cascading off the edge of the shelf, but my flailing arms did not find purchase. I toppled, hitting the floor with the side of my head.

He struck again, punching my jaw and sending my face smashing into the ground. My vision when red, and began to blacken in and out, spokes of light jutting through the bookcase and stabbing me in my head. He loomed above me, a vague dark shape specked with light on one side. His hand pressed hard against my breast.

No, please, not that.

And the last thing I heard as blackness overtook me was him beginning to scream.

AN: So, that happened. I'm just going to say this one thing because I'm well aware of how the consequences of something like this are utilized in most, if not all, of fanfiction: this is not a hurt/comfort sort of fic, and I will not be using this to advance their romantic relationship. This event is pivotal, for other reasons.

Again, a huge thanks to my beta readers (Atlan and theBSDude) for their help here.