Endgame 5.01

What to call it? When you have a deep connection to someone? When you can feel their emotions? When you can see through their eyes and hear their thoughts if they let you? When you can do the same for them? When you can, intuitively, understand each other no matter what?

Love? Friendship? In comparison, those things felt... Too shallow.

Whatever it was, in hindsight, the failure of Rachel's infestation—or rather, the fact that she was completly infested, becoming Zerg in body and being connected to the hivemind instead of just gaining a zerg healing factor—was the single best mistake I'd ever made.

Shortly after she had fully adjusted, we had just... Sat together. Felt the presence of each other, and communicated and... One thing lead to another, and we'd end up sharing... Everything. The good and the bad. The best days of our lives, the worst days of our lives. And everything in between.

Rachel had been a rock. She'd been solid ground beneath my feet when we planned Operation Flew The Coop and an anchor to keep me centered when the boss, Coil, screwed us over in response to Lisa's revenge for what he'd tried to do to me.

Things hadn't been... Quite as chaotic as you'd think since then. With Coil gone, the only other criminal game in town, besides us, was Lung and he was mostly interested in taking the territory that was left behind when we'd busted up the Empire. Honestly, based on how he'd reacted at that meeting, which felt like years ago, I got the feeling that he'd taken a wait-and-see approach, watching to see how I handle things.

Most of the trouble had come from... Other sources. The street our building was on was shut down and blocked off with police tape at both ends, with a barricade around the building proper.

However, most of the time the barricade was only manned by a single PRT Agent. No matter who was on duty at the time, they were armed but didn't make any fuss. It seemed to be more of a precaution or observation outpost than anything else.

It meant we couldn't leave the house out of the front door, but they apparently had not made any attempt to block our access to the sewers or my network of tunnels. Honestly, if we wanted to we could easily flee the city. But we didn't want to flee the city. This was our home.

From the tunnels, Dad and his men were able to, discretely, deliver groceries and such for us. Luckily the PRT didn't try to have our utilities cut.

According to Lisa, public affection for us... which, in hindsight, was actually weirdly high to begin with, had taken a bit of a dive since the dossier was released, but there were still large numbers of people who continued to support me among the public, especially since city hall had released a statement saying that the local government had reviewed some of the evidence and determine that much of it was forged.

Lisa had been working with a lawyer my dad had put her into contact with. Apparently, he was some really good defense attorney my dad had been planning to hire for my case, but I'm not sure what she'd been talking to him about.

The only other annoyance was a very persistent representative from Child Protective Services who appeared every couple of days, with a PRT escort, to stand outside our door and politely request entrance, insisting that she had no intent to help the police or PRT with our apprehension but pleading with Brian that a semi-abandoned old school apartment building full of suspected murderers, one of whom was believed to be a sex criminal, was no place to raise a teenage girl who was already troubled and to please at least come and talk with the representative in question. I never caught her name, and under any other circumstances she'd be right, but neither Brian nor Aisha were having any of it.

The last time she'd shown up, Aisha was camping on the roof with a paintball gun. Part of me felt bad for the woman, but I really did not trust that if we'd given her the time of day that the PRT wouldn't have used that to barge in.

...You know, in hindsight, they knew where we were for a while. Why didn't they do this before now? Barricade us in? I guess it didn't matter.

And as for Canary? She was settling into a comfortable safe house hidden in Dad's territory. She was still a little frazzled by everything but seriously, who could blame her?

Initially, when Coil's emails had gone out, I'd panicked, but Rachel's presence had managed to calm me, and things hadn't turned out as badly as I'd feared. I couldn't see a way out of this, but that wasn't anything new.

I woke up in the afternoon, as it sometimes pleased me to do, to find what my gut instinct told me was bad news.

I'd made it a habit to leave a drone sitting on the front steps while I slept. Normally, when I was just sleeping as opposed to resting in the cocoon, my mind wandered and the hivemind went on autopilot, but if something major had gone down, like an attack on the building without anyone else in the house noticing, the Drone's perceptions would snap me awake so that I could react.

However, it seemed that I'd gotten too used to the presence of the barricade. An entire squad of PRT Agents, all in armor, had shown up and they looked busy, talking amongst themselves... They couldn't have been here for more than a few minutes, right? But still, noticing them as my mind resettled into the metaphorical throne caused me to suddenly snap up, awake in an instant instead of a gradual transition into awareness.

Rachel. who'd made a habit of sleeping in my room lately, seemed annoyed by my suddenly springing into action but instantly understood what was going on. A perk of our strong psychic connection.

Outside, a man in a suit stepped past the squad. My drone, and by extension myself, hadn't seen him at first.

The man, to his credit, did his best to look my giant bug monster in the eye without flinching. Now, since a drone's eyes are on the sides of its head instead of the front it wasn't exactly easy, but I did my best to have my drone stare back with a confident posture.

This prompted the agents behind him to train their guns on it and... Fuck, those were big. Like, "might be able to shoot something with enough mass and force to hurt a zerg" big.

The man waved his hand, however, and the armored figures behind him lowered their weapons.

"I have been led to believe, Miss Hebert... Or, if you prefer, Empress," he began, "that you can see and hear what these... Creatures do. However, I think t would be more productive to have this conversation face to face."

I had the drone click "fuck off" in morse code.

"Well, at least I know you're listening," the man said professionally. "I understand that you are angry and that you have no reason whatsoever to give me so much as the benefit of the doubt, but I would very much appreciate it if you would hear me out.

"My name is James Tagg. I used to be a PRT Squad commander and currently, I'm a... Fixer, I suppose you could say. I evaluate complicated situations and work towards solutions. If you think of the conflict between Law and the criminal element as a war, my job is to crush tricky enemies and destroy obstacles that prevent victory or ceasefire from occurring.

"Right now, Empress, this city is bogged down in an unnecessary fight that's preventing victory over the real threats, to continue the metaphor. I'm not normally one for diplomacy, but looking things over it seems that things would not have escalated to this level if someone... Anyone, on our end had at least tried to talk things out instead of making assumptions.

"If you are willing to meet us halfway," he finished, "I think we can come to a mutually satisfactory solution. You must be tired of fighting, and I'm sure you'd like to be able to just walk around town without being harassed or looked at strangely. There's a meeting scheduled, at noon, one week from today, with the entire afternoon cleared in case things run long. If you come, no harm will befall you or whoever you bring with you and you will be permitted to leave unmolested no matter what the outcome is, you have my word."

Bullshit. Complete bullshit. His word wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. Nobody from the PRT's was. This was a trap, too good to be true, I'd go in and they'd set off a motherfucking nuke in the middle of their own building to take me out. But... He'd said the thing about destroying obstacles and tricky enemies? Was that a threat? That he'd kill me if I didn't go?

I was saved from flying into full-blown panic by Rachel silently pulling me into a hug.

"And, as a show of good faith, I believe that we have something that belongs to you."

One of the agents in the squad behind him broke away. I had my Drone's gaze follow him to the end of the street, to a PRT vehicle, and watch as he came back holding a metal box covered in yellow and black stripes and a Bio-Hazard symbol in both hands, having left his gun in the van.

The box was set down in front of the steps to our building and Tagg pressed a button at the top. the front panel of the box slid up and...

Was that my hand? The one Hookwolf saved off? The one Armsamster took? I mean, it only vaguely looked like a hand now, but...

My hand began skittering around the building until it left my Drones line of sight.

A few minutes later, it'd found its way through a window into the basement above me, where Rachel's been keeping some of her dogs, which I monitor at all times with another drone, and began making its way towards the stairway down to my room.

Okay then.

As my hand returned to me and began the process of fully integrating itself into my hivemind, I watched as Tagg and his men... Disassembled the barricade around our building and dispersed. Trying to lure me into a false sense of security, or another sign of good faith? They didn't take down the police tape as they left...

"Rachel," I asked my friend who was still holding me. "Could you go see what the others are doing? Tell them I'm going to need to talk to them in a minute?"

I didn't need to say it out loud, but... I kind of did. Rachel gave me a toothless smile as she went upstairs.

I didn't stand up from my bed as I drew my communicator to my shaking hand with my psychokinesis. "Dad?" I spoke into it as it cracked to life at my touch. "Are you there? I need to talk to you about something."