This is the sequel to Conquer This. You can find it in my profile. Reading that first is recommended, but not necessary.
Taylor could identify Amy Dallon through lice alone.
The girl had no shortage of them, after all. Some would hop off for greasier pastures without Taylor around to keep them tethered, but Taylor always topped them up the next weekday morning. She did this not out of spite, merely a niggling curiosity as to how many blocks' worth of lice she could fit on Amy's head. The answer was 'a fuckload' as long as she really packed them together. She stopped after Amy's hair started to appear black beyond the roots—any more and people would start to think Panacea somehow moonlighted as the local bug villain Skitter.
A casual observer might assume that Amy would instantaneously kill any bloodsuckers in contact with her scalp, but the truth was that she kept them. She cultivated them, even, like secret tiny tenants: she let them play hide-and-seek among her brittle brown stalks, she let them drink from her without restraint, she friskily pulsed the swollen olives of their bellies when they were done. She was as generous and patient with them as they were selfish and capricious.
Of course Taylor saw the logic of it. She felt the same way. Lice were not friends, therefore they could not disappoint her.
Taylor approached the infestation by the front steps of Arcadia High. Amy had parked herself on a stretch of pony wall in front of a rhododendron-shrouded espalier. She was puffing at a cigarette, gazing blearily out at the milling clusters of students having lunch on the lawn not ten feet away.
Smoking was banned on school grounds. Amy's low-cut top—flapping over negligible cleavage, Taylor noted—and distressed black jeans were technically against the dress code. The Red Cross insignia stark on the sleeves of her white coat was technically prohibited by the Geneva Convention. Yet faculty and security staff alike walked past without so much as a whisper of rebuke. The Dallon sisters had considerable clout, and it did not stop at the students.
It had taken Taylor a good long while to acknowledge that their social standing was mostly earned. But she'd gotten there in the end.
"Hey," Taylor said, barely audible. She coughed to clear her throat, then tried again, projecting her voice. "Hey."
What if Amy had heard her the first time? She'd look like she said 'hey' twice for no reason. Worse, what if her second 'hey' sounded aggressive?
"Hi," she said, to rectify this flub.
Amy ignored all greetings issued in her direction, continuing to chew on the white end of the cigarette while the orange filter burned away merrily.
Taylor wasn't sure whether she just didn't understand how tobacco worked or was attempting to send some counterculture message. A couple of times, she'd seen Amy light the cigarette correctly, reverse it, then stick the lit end into her mouth.
Taylor hoisted herself onto the wall, pushing the absolute limits of her upper arm strength and taking care not to accidentally kick Amy's belongings on the ground. Slumped against the wall below Amy's sneakers was a water bottle and her battered red backpack, its sole decoration a nifty-looking enamel badge. At first Taylor thought it was a cape team's emblem, but it seemed bizarre that she'd wear one that wasn't New Wave's. Then a faint memory sparked—the symbol was a faction crest from some roleplaying game. Ogres and Oubliettes or Sledgehammer or something.
Fucking nerd. It was the first non-derogatory thought she'd ever had about Amy. She slid nearer and fished a slightly melted chocolate bar out of her pocket. "Um, so, the guy at 7/11 snuck a Milky Way into my bag this morning. But I prefer Snickers, so I was wondering if maybe you—"
"I don't ingest anything that gives me serotonin," Amy interrupted, not looking at her. She tore a bit of the white cigarette paper off with her teeth. "Cut to the chase. What do you want? Nose job? BBL? GRS?"
The old Taylor might have bridled at Amy suddenly affecting this standoffish devil-may-care attitude as though they hadn't disposed of a body together less than a month ago. She might have started a petty shouting match with her.
I've seen your piss bottle, the new Taylor thought, and she held that warm kernel of truth close to her chest. "I want to join New Wave."
Amy didn't blink. "Tough titties. There are no available spots. Try again next life."
"Why?"
"What are you, dumb?" Amy asked. "You know why. You're not one of us."
"But I could be," Taylor said.
Amy just looked at her, muddy brown eyes half-lidded and uncomprehending.
"You're going to make me say it."
"What?"
Taylor sighed, and jumped off the wall. She dropped to one knee. Amy hastily rolled up a sleeve, preparing to euthanise her, but was beaten to the punch.
"Amelia Dallon," Taylor said. "Will you adopt me?"
Lisa stepped out of the car, shading her eyes from the sunlight with a hand. "She said no?"
"She said no." Taylor joined her out on the pavement. "But then she said yes."
"Look, Amy. I want to be a hero, all right?"
"Sobe a hero. Don't drag me into your redemption arc shit." Amy twisted her fingers together, fidgeting, probably holding back a tsunamilike desire to unravel Taylor's entire circulatory system.
"Statistically I would have a better chance of success in an established team than I would as an independent," Taylor said. "New Wave is the only team in Brockton Bay that ticks all my boxes, and I don't have a hope of joining the family business unless I'm, well, family."
"Statistically you can bite me. I'm sixteen. I couldn't do it even if I wanted to, which I seriously fucking do not."
"It's legal. I checked." Everything was legal in Brockton Bay.
"Taylor. I don't know how you got this far without realising, but let me spell it out: I don't like you. At all. I sure as hell don't love you."
"What does that have to do with you being my mother?"
Amy paused. She sucked sullenly on her cigarette, like it was a pacifier. "Point. Still no."
"Okay. Then I'll be forced to pursue the other option."
"And what's that?"
Taylor shrugged, trying for indifference. "Marrying your sister."
Amy did not know that Taylor had already been rejected by Victoria—Taylor had begged Victoria to keep it between them—or she'd have immediately recognised the emptiness of the threat.
"She's out of your league," Amy said dismissively. "She'd never date a two."
Taylor's world spun on its axis. "You rate me a two?"
"Out of a thousand, and only because I pity you. Besides, she's back with Dean."
"Yeah?" Taylor challenged. "How long will that last this time? A week, tops?"
"Ugh, just join the Wards."
"You join the Wards," Taylor returned, before she remembered the new Taylor was friendly with the Dallons even when Amy was being annoying. "I mean, you'd have better work-life balance. I have my reasons for not joining the Wards."
"Bitch, you don't even know what you're asking. Trust me, you do not want to be in New Wave. Carol will eat you alive."
"I taste pretty bad."
"I know. It won't help. Your power is ugly and creepy—it's bad optics and that's all she cares about. She'll hate you more if you're even tenuously related to me."
Taylor had figured she'd be difficult, which was why she'd brought a carrot. She glanced around, judged that no one was listening in, and lowered her voice. "I know who your dad is. If you go along with this, I'll tell you."
A silence that Taylor hoped would not be followed by her own liquefaction, and then Amy's hand suddenly grabbed Taylor's by the wrist, crushing the cigarette against her skin. "Say that again."
Taylor repeated herself.
After a moment, Amy let go. Her eyes thrashed with a storm of competing emotions—anger, hatred, fear… and more than a droplet of hope. Her voice fell just as low as Taylor's: "What makes you think I want to know?"
Taylor smiled with a cockiness she wasn't really capable of feeling. Lisa had told her this game was best left unplayed, that she didn't need to answer all of Amy's questions to reel her in.
"I can do more than tell you. I can get you in contact with him."
Taylor and Lisa stared up at the Hebert house. Her mother's car was in the driveway.
Lisa pecked Taylor on the cheek and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. "You sure you don't want backup?"
"Yeah," Taylor said, nudging the rotten front stair with the toe of her shoe. "I'll be fine."
She ran through the plan in her head a few more times, plotting out her route through the house with bugs. Collect the last of her things, drop the news that she was initiating the emancipation process, run.
Or she didn't have to run. Why should she? There wasn't anything to be afraid of. What was her mother going to do—seize her by the curls and dunk her in a vat of boiling acid? If it came down to it, Taylor could fight her off.
Maybe.
She felt a familiar dread rise in her chest and stay. Lisa gave her a last pat before releasing her.
As she opened the door and stepped inside, her bugs searched the rooms for signs of life. She exhaled when she found none on a perfunctory sweep. Her mother was probably out at a neighbour's. Sure, that only postponed their inevitable confrontation, but at least she'd live to fight another day.
Out of caution she proceeded silently anyway, avoiding all the creaky spots in the floorboards and stairs. She was tiptoeing past the Danny Room and almost at her own bedroom door when her bugs detected something human-shaped.
How could she have missed it? Someone else was in the house. The master bedroom, to be exact. A woman that wasn't her mother—the hair was too short, the way she sat different. She even smelt wrong, though Taylor struggled to translate that sense to something she could articulate. Computery was the best she could do, and Old Spice Fiji with Coconut.
The woman slapped at the gnat Taylor planted on her knee, nailing it. She brushed the remains off with a disgust palpable in the violence of her movements.
Then came Taylor's mother's response, outside the range of hearing as she emerged from the bathroom. Taylor rounded up some of the lice she'd been saving for Amy and had them leap on the stranger's scalp, just in time for them to experience her mother's long slender fingers threading through the other woman's hair with impossible tenderness.
Taylor started flipping through a mental catalogue of textures, tastes, and scents, piecing together this sensory jigsaw. Within moments she'd narrowed the stranger down to one person.
Her former principal, Agnes Blackwell.