Reconnaissance in Force 5.5

I consolidated and organized my bugs while I watched the Number Man finish cleaning his rifle. Most of the swarm I'd collected earlier that day had been crushed or suffocated, but there were still a little over eighteen hundred of them from forty-three different species left.

That wasn't a big number, not where bugs were concerned, but the ones that could handle the climate in China would breed, and so would their offspring. I doubted that particular area would recover any time soon, but I wasn't going to add to the ecological damage by leaving non-native arthropod species to wander around unchecked.

And they'd be useful to me.

"Hey," I said.

He looked up from the spring he was wiping down. "Yes?"

"Can you get me a door to my place? I need to store these, and I think the Custodian would appreciate if I moved them soon."

"Go ahead," he said, and that was enough for a portal to open to my workshop. I stepped through and directed my new acquisitions to follow one species at a time. Once I secured them inside terrariums, I directed them to mate.

This forced me to consider an entirely new set of problems. I was used to collecting and using bugs that naturally inhabited a given area, where everything they needed was available and they could take care of themselves when I wasn't around. I wasn't used to breeding exotic species in captivity, and even a cursory review of the facts indicated the logistics would be daunting.

I had to find a way to feed them all and their offspring. Spiders were among my most important tools, and managing them was simple; they just ate other bugs. So did wasps, although many of the new ones slightly complicated the matter by being parasitoidal. I'd need to get them access to the other species they needed to lay their eggs in.

Most beetles weren't carnivores, so I'd have to find them the plants and fungi they did eat. The ironclad beetles in particular were my priority; I wanted lots of them quickly so I could make my armor. If I remembered my research right, ironclad beetles needed lichen to survive.

I wasn't sure what that meant. Would they eat just any lichen, or would I have to collect it from Texas (a Texas, rather) myself? I could ask Wrath what the local options were; he'd probably appreciate me coming to him for advice, assuming he wouldn't see it as weakness or an attack on the natural ecosystem of Earth #1054.

Or maybe I could order a lot, assuming there was enough of a demand for lichen that ordering it in bulk made for a viable business. Try as I might, I couldn't imagine any circumstances under which the average civilian would have an actual use for lichen. Maybe I would have to hire someone on another earth to collect it for me.

The last bugs I brought were the giant hornets and winged spiders I'd collected. The Number Man hadn't insisted on killing them, and I decided that meant I was allowed to make more. I'd still use the Darwin's bark spiders for costumes, but there were other things I could do now, things that would be easier. Producing silk rope instead of silk threads, using the fact they could fly and carry other bugs with them, and half a dozen other possibilities raced through my head.

The hornets were less obviously versatile, but I still had ideas for them. Their stingers were big enough they might be useful against lower-level brutes or people with heavier clothes—and I could appreciate the intimidation factor inherent in plate-sized wasps whose only response to dying was to turn into more plate-sized wasps.

There was one problem. I'd seen how aggressive every other one of her creations was, and I'd seen that aggression extend to others of their kind when there was no better target. It wasn't too far of a stretch to suppose that the bugs would act the same way once I wasn't controlling them anymore, so I ended up putting each in its own terrarium.

I was going to need more terrariums. A lot more.

I'd start there. I turned to get my laptop and collided with the Number Man.

He'd been standing right behind me—for how long? I hadn't noticed him come in.

I suppressed the instinct to apologize. He'd snuck up on me in my own room; he could afford to be walked into. "What do you want?" I asked.

"You're not staying for breakfast?"

I was about to refuse, but I decided to test an idea I'd had before. "Give me a minute?" I asked. "I need to check on my teammates."

My absence hadn't affected my team, most of whom were still asleep. Mercurial and Reset were the only ones awake, and they were watching television in the company of the dhole pup. The rest of them were in bed save Prominence, who was laid out on the floor of his workshop and snoring loudly enough my bugs could hear. I suspected he'd wake up with a backache.

I made a show of dismissing the bugs that didn't belong in one of the terrariums before nodding to the Number Man. I followed him, tentatively sending a handful of gnats into Cauldron's headquarters to scout ahead. The Custodian killed them immediately.

When I followed them in, she brushed against my left hand three, four, five times.

"Sorry," I said. "I'm trying to keep my bearings, not cause you trouble."

Her only response was to touch my left hand again. Annoyance? Reprimand? A warning?

I allowed my shoulders to slump a little. "I get it," I said.

That seemed to satisfy her.

It also satisfied me. She hadn't crushed any of the spiders I'd hidden on myself—not the one on the small of my back, or the one on my shin beneath my jeans, or the one in my armpit.

It wasn't an answer to the question of how to neutralize Cauldron's security measures, not really. It wasn't as though I could do very much with three spiders I had to keep immobile.

But it did give me back a measure of control, however small. I felt more like myself, and I suppressed a smile as I followed the Number Man into the kitchen where we'd started the morning.

He went for a cutting board and knife block. "Can you cook?" he asked.

"A bit," I said, watching him cut into an onion. I'd had to learn after my mom had gone. "Nothing fancy."

"I thought scrambled eggs and oatmeal would be adequate after expending so many calories," he said.

Dork, I thought. I started poking around in the drawers and cabinets.

"What are you looking for?" he asked.

"Measuring cup for the milk?" I suggested.

"No need," he said. "There's a grater in the third drawer from your left. Cheese is in the refrigerator, second shelf."

I looked where he said, and I did find cheese wrapped in unlabeled white paper. It was cheddar—white cheddar, of course. I rolled my eyes. Somebody in this outfit had to be afraid of color. The Doctor, maybe?

Beside me, the Number Man swept the onion skin and root off the counter, and the Custodian destroyed them before they could hit the ground.

"Like this," he said, reaching over and rearranging the placement of my fingertips on the cheese. "Increases your control, reduces the chance you'll cut yourself."

It was easier, I noticed.

I suddenly felt . . . lost. Empty. Maybe it was coming down off the adrenaline. Maybe it was standing here, being forced to do something mundane without being able to use my power. Maybe it was the emotions conjured by cooking with someone else the way I used to cook with my dad. Whatever it was, I was feeling less sure of myself than I had during the fight I'd just finished.

"Something's on your mind," he said. He'd finished dicing tomatoes and was in the process of mixing eggs and milk—no measuring cups, as he'd said.

"Whiplash," I said. "I don't know what's supposed to be happening anymore. I'm just standing here making eggs when I—The world's going to end, I'm completely cut off from everything I grew up with and worked for, I'm having to do meaningless tasks with people who are some kind of cross between children and slaves, I've killed two people, and—"

"Two people?" he asked.

"Directly," I said. I had tied someone down so she could be shot, lured Butcher into a trap, lied to Sundancer about the capes still inside Noelle, killed several of Noelle's clones, and deliberately left someone to die. Between them, the people I hadn't saved from Mannequin, and anyone who might have died when Shatterbird escaped during Noelle's rampage, the list of people whose deaths I bore responsibility for was . . . not short enough.

He poured the egg mixture into a skillet. "May I ask whether James Tagg is one of those two?"

"Yeah," I said. I couldn't think of anyone else who would count as having been "directly" killed by me—the Butcher? "Why?"

"If you poured gasoline all over a man and dropped a lit match, would you blame the match when he died?"

I frowned. "Are you telling me to blame Alexandria?"

"'Blame' might have the wrong connotations. It's accurate to say she was in control of your actions in that moment." He paused a moment to add the tomatoes and onions, and the grim sort of non-smile I'd noticed a couple times before briefly showed on his face. "Mostly. Cheese?"

I wordlessly handed him the bowl I'd collected the cheese in. Hearing that she made a mistake didn't make me feel better at all. She'd made a mistake about my power, not me. She had understood me, understood Taylor, and she had used that understanding to control me the way I used my power to control my bugs.

She'd read a few files and extrapolated enough information to break me in a way that would achieve four or five of their goals, all the while without me realizing they were in control. I turned away from him and set out plates, bowls, and cutlery as I tried to sort through what I was thinking.

After a few minutes, the uneasiness I'd been feeling finally crystallized into a coherent thought. "You people could have made this transition easy on me," I said. "But I think you want it to be hard."

"Orange juice," he said, and I returned the refrigerator. I was relieved to see the pitcher that held the juice was clear, not white, and poured us each a glass while he emptied the eggs into a serving bowl. "Integrating you is difficult because of who you are," he said. "You resolved your problems with authority by becoming the authority. You're used to making the decisions, and now you can't."

Was that really what it looked like from the outside? To people who knew my history, but didn't know me?

"I had to," I said, speaking over the sound of the whistling kettle, the same one that he'd used to boil water for tea that morning. "The system was bro—"

"You're right," he interrupted. "We could have tricked you into accepting us as readily as you did Rebecca's ruse. I could have asked her for advice on how to get you to kill our target without protest this morning, or to make you think that continuing your education was your idea instead of ours. Is that what you would like me to do in the future? Check with her to ensure I avoid offending you?"

I did not want him to ask Alexandria for tips on manipulating me, and I could hardly believe that he'd raised the possibility. Was he trying to provoke me? Why couldn't Cauldron find a hobby that wasn't pissing me off?

He turned the kettle off and brought it over to the bowls of oatmeal I'd prepared. "Stop bristling at me," he said mildly.

I tried to think up a comeback, but it was like I was trying to keep my footing on quicksand. I wasn't sure how to categorize him, so I seized on something I did understand: their piss-poor team management. "I think I'd rather you spend your effort on alerting me to things like the fact your test subjects to do stupid things during combat," I said coolly.

"Why didn't you get a briefing when you got to your team?" he asked.

"I didn't get much of anything," I said. "Mostly just files about their powers that require context you won't give me."

He shook his head. "Not from us. You should have someone who knows everything about how the rest work. History on the team dynamics, the basics of what the others do, certain phrases and gestures that can give you control in an emergency—everything that isn't kept in the digital files."

He meant Prominence. "He was busy," I said. "Then he was asleep. I was in a hurry. Like I told Alexandria."

His brow furrowed. I reached for a change of subject.

"How many people have you killed?" I blurted.

"Four hundred sixty-eight, personally," he said. "Three hundred eighty-nine of them were from before I joined Cauldron."

"How does that figure?" I asked. "Does Cauldron have some sort of anti-aging device?"

"No," he said. "I was recruited around my twelfth birthday."

I almost choked on my juice. "You killed hundreds of people before you were twelve?"

"I misled you earlier," he said. "I chose a word that, while accurate, gave you the wrong idea. I knew what you would think and let the misconception stand."

"Which word?"

"Rescue," he said.

He'd used it in context of the Slaughterhouse Nine. "And what word would give me the right idea?"

"Poach," he said. "King called me Harbinger."

I'd heard the name before, but I couldn't place a face—costume, rather—or powerset to it.

I didn't know what to think about it. On the one hand, it had been a long time ago, he'd obviously been young, someone had probably pressuring him, and he'd taken the opportunity to leave—the same things I used to think about Alec. On the other hand, the Slaughterhouse Nine was the Slaughterhouse Nine, and finding out he'd been part of them made his earlier comments about Gray Boy make more sense and less at the same time.

I set it aside; whatever he'd done, the Number Man possessed personal insight into the man I had to stop. That was an opportunity I couldn't forego, no matter what my feelings were. "You knew Jack?"

"Yes. We were friends. After Nicholas—Gray Boy—died, we killed King together. I wanted to stop, he wanted to go on."

"You, Jack, Gray Boy," I said. "Why were there so many kids?"

"King had particular tastes," he said.

"I'm sorry," I said lamely.

"You wanted secrets," he said. His expression was neutral, blank even for what I'd seen of him so far. "That was one I could share without risking extinction."

I was bad at offering sympathy, and I knew I would be bad at trying to pretend I wasn't extremely interested in what he could tell me about Jack Slash, so I changed the subject again.

"You didn't know we would be going anywhere this morning," I said. "Why did you want to talk to me?"

"I alluded to it before," he replied. "I saw that you deleted your readings and problem sets and wanted to know why. I was surprised to see you cede ground so easily to your enemies."

I blinked. "What?"

"Your enemies interrupted your education. You intend to let that stand?"

"The stakes are too high. The world's ending." I paused. "Multiple worlds are ending. Giving me quizzes is a waste of time."

"The end point is precisely why you should seek out an education," he said. "It's impossible to foresee what will be left once the calamity has passed, but there are some things that will inevitably true. One of those is that humanity will need to rebuild from nothing. We need to retain our knowledge somehow."

"By putting it in my head?" I scoffed. "I think I should train, not study. They aren't the same."

"True," he said. "You will train while you are with us. I suggest you also expand your mind in more conventional directions, and I will say refusing this would be turning down an opportunity to prove yourself."

I forced myself to eat two, three, four bites of oatmeal. I'd resolved not to let these people make me lose my cool again, and I was now very aware of the possibility he was trying to play me. He'd mentioned my bullies, which was a good indicator he trying to make me feel like refusing him would be capitulating to them.

He also had a point, but maybe not the way he thought. My dad . . . I needed to see him, and it might be a good idea to be able to tell him I was studying again.

"I looked at what was in there," I said. "It's too advanced for where I was when I left."

"The math curriculum is designed to be self-taught," he said. "Answer the initial questions and the program will adjust to your level. It will alert me if you need assistance in a particular area."

"And the readings? I thought they were like something you'd find in college," I said.

"I wouldn't know," he said. "The only person here who technically graduated from college was Rebecca—specifically, Director Costa-Brown—but she had a body double and a powerful thinker ability."

I frowned.

"I think you'll find most of the readings relevant. Some of them focus on concrete things—history, economics, generalship. Others are more abstract excerpts from literature and philosophy. You'll read three or four related articles at a time and analyze them with an essay. Again, the curriculum will automatically adjust to your level."

I nodded. I'd told Alexandria I'd overcome whatever obstacles they set in my way. If one of those obstacles was homework, I could either deal or find a way to get around it.

He'd also said one word that was enough to capture my attention. There was a lot he seemed to be promising or implying about what I'd get if I did pass their stupid tests, and I didn't want to read too much into that or get my hopes up—but that one word spoke to something inside me, something that could be happy with what I got out of this arrangement.

Generalship.