The Other Way
Chapter Five
Dean Stansfield watched his personalized GALLANT license plate disappear around the corner to the sound of screeching tires.
I don't think she has a driver's license.
Of course, considering where she was headed, being pulled over by the police was probably the best thing that could happen to her, or his car. Or the worst thing that could happen to the cops.
Otherwise, Myriad was still going to die. If Gallant was lucky, Bakuda would leave enough of her to be identified so he could explain to the girl's parents how he got their daughter killed. Unless ...
Unless he followed her and subdued her before she got into trouble—which she would never forgive him for—or helped her take down Bakuda, and that was impossible. Not the actual combat; fighting a mad tinker in her own territory along with an entire gang was just suicidal, but getting permission for that?
Step one: ask Director Piggot for the go ahead.
Step two: get told no.
Step three: sit down and wait for Myriad to die horribly.
Breaking the rules crossed his mind more than he was willing to admit, but that was a slippery slope he did not wish to go down. Heroes needed to stand for something, and if he broke the rules now, even to save a life, that would be a level of hypocrisy that he would never forget.
Shadow Stalker wouldn't forget it either, and she would bring it up every time he tried to remind her to fill out the requisite paperwork.
Even if he could get permission, he'd need a Mover to catch up to Myriad in time.
Fortunately, he knew every Mover the heroes had. Velocity was the the only one in the Protectorate, but while the Protectorate had less restrictions than the Wards, Velocity couldn't be expected to face Bakuda on his own.
Vicky could fly as fast as Velocity could run. She was even strong enough to take Gallant with him, but he had invited her on a mission yesterday and ... it hadn't worked out. She had gotten hurt and he had gotten his team in trouble, so he didn't feel right calling her up so soon.
Aegis had nearly the same powerset as Vicky, but if Vicky found out that he had asked Aegis for help and ignored her, she would take offense. People expected capes to focus on the big things, but every big thing was made up of little things, and every cause had an effect down the line. Vicky was ... well, not volatile, but expressive. Mercurial. Her sister Amy on the other hand was the opposite; she was outwardly calm, but she was under tremendous pressure and on the verge of snapping. The situation was delicate, and if if not as urgent as Myriad's, the stakes were at least as high.
Shadow Stalker was a Mover and often patrolled around the docks due to a long term grudge against one of the Undersiders. She might reach Myriad before Myriad found Bakuda, but even that wouldn't be an ideal situation. Shadow Stalker and Myriad were about the same age, and under the right circumstances they could end up as friends, but under the wrong circumstances ... no. Shadow Stalker didn't like the Wards and she didn't like people, so she'd either warn Myriad away from the overbearing bureaucracy if she was feeling generous, or drive her away if she was not. Maybe they would connect after Myriad had settled into the team, but right now he needed someone who believed in the Wards program, someone he could always count on.
And just like that, the answer was obvious. He dialed Vista.
"Gallant!" she said as soon as she answered. "I mean, hey."
"Hey, Vista. I was wondering if you could do me a huge favor."
"Absolutely! What do you need?"
He couldn't ask her to go after Bakuda. Even if she could handle her, no Ward could pursue a cape with a body count without a tremendous amount of paperwork, and Gallant wasn't about to start breaking the rules now. He could, however, exploit them.
"Someone stole my car ..."
WWW
Myriad started out with the bravado born from attempting something that was just crazy enough to work. That wore off as soon as she learned something very important about driving.
She didn't know how to do it.
She swerved out of the way of incoming traffic, overcompensated, and ground the tires against the curb. Cars honked at her. That wasn't helpful.
Gallant's going to kill when he gets his car back.
If he gets his car back.
No. If he doesn't get his car back, he's going to kill me harder.
Still, she was making good time, and collateral damage wasn't a priority. She remembered the way that boy had dissolved into a puddle right in front of her just because Bakuda wanted to make a point. She was never going to forget it.
Bugs flew in through the open windows, filling the back seat with her swarm. By the time she made it to the docks, she was ready. She, well not a plan, but an idea of what to do.
She parked Gallant's car on the side of the road. There wasn't too much damage done to the ... oh. Oh dear. That stop sign had left a dent that looked much worse from the outside, but that's what bumpers were for, right? She left the keys under the front tire and fled the scene of the crime.
Maybe he would find the car and ... no. It didn't matter. All that mattered was taking down Bakuda before she killed anyone else. Myriad couldn't count on Gallant, the heroes, or even the villains. All she had was herself ... and her swarm.
Good.
She didn't go straight to the rooftop where she had fought Lung; the last thing she wanted to do was what Bakuda wanted. She needed to find the bomb Tinker before the bomb Tinker found her, and Bakuda would either be waiting for her on the rooftop, or she'd be be waiting in a position where she would be able to see Myriad on the rooftop. Or Bakuda would would be waiting somewhere where she could see Myriad spying on the rooftop, or ...
No, that was too complicated. It'd be better to just find an ABB thug and scare some answers out of him. Her experience with the Empire Eighty-Eight suggested that she was good at that.
After getting off the main road, she cut through narrow alleys, sending her bugs ahead of her so she wouldn't end up surrounded.
Just around a corner, she spotted a man wearing the red and green gang colors with a pipe in his hands facing the opposite direction.
Perfect.
She sent her swarm out to attack, herself trailing behind it with her baton extended. She knew her armor wouldn't be as effective against a pipe as it would be against a knife, but with enough bugs in his eyes to distract him, he wouldn't even be able to see her, let alone hit her.
As she got closer, a thought crossed her mind.
He's not reacting. What is he, deaf?
Her bugs landed on him, but he felt ... wrong. Bug eyes were so bad she ignored what her swarm saw entirely unless she actively focused on it, but their sense of touch was nearly decent. Instead of the rough texture of fabric that she had expected, the man felt ... smooth, like metal. He was shorter than he looked by a foot and a half and perfectly cylindrical.
Oh crap.
He flickered, then disappeared entirely. In his place was ...
Well, what do you know, she thought in a surreal moment of absolute lucidity. The calm before the storm. I came her expecting a game of hide-and-seek, and instead I'm playing Minesweeper.
WWW
It was a short walk across the city as rooftops warped to bridge the gaps between them and space shortened itself. Gallant had grown accustomed to Vista's powers over the years, and he was quite used to the feeling of vertigo that he experienced every time the girl took the fabric of reality and skipped rope with it.
It still messed with his GPS, though.
"Hold on a moment, please," he said as they reached the outskirts of the docks district.
Vista stretched reality back into shape, or at least mostly. Reality knew what shape it was supposed to be, and it would go back to normal if Vista left it alone for a few minutes. "Recalculating," his phone said.
"So how dumb does someone have to be to steal your car?" Vista asked.
"Very," Gallant said. "But that was far from the worst decision she has made today."
"Really?" Her arms were dangling at her sides, so she put her hands on her hips, then crossed them behind her back in a sort of parade rest as she struggled to find a posture that looked casual and relaxed. They had known each other for nearly two years, but she was still like that around him. "How could she top this?"
"Hopefully we'll catch her before she gets that far."
Vista considered that. "Hold on. Are we arresting her, or rescuing her?"
"Officially?"
The colors around her head shifted, suggesting a sarcastic mindset. "What do you think?"
"I only do rescue missions, you know that." Not everyone he rescued appreciated his help, and some resisted violently, but he did what he could.
"And are you rescuing her from a life of crime, or ..."
And explosion tore through the air, making Gallant nearly drop his phone. It wasn't a standard blast that he might expect from a grenade or C-4. Instead, it sounded like a sonic boom and even at a distance left his ears ringing.
He looked down at the map on his phone and at the dot that indicated where his car was, then he looked in the direction of the explosion.
Myriad had planned this. By throwing herself into danger, she forced him to either abandon her─which he couldn't do─or help her take on the whole of the ABB without any plan, backup or support, which he also couldn't do.
Either that, or Myriad was trying to commit suicide by super villain. Gallant hoped it was the first one.
"I'm trying to rescue her," he said, "from that."
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Myriad wasn't dead, but she felt like a bomb had gone off in her head.
No, she thought, remembering the boy who had first contacted her on Bakuda's behalf, she did not feel like that. Her ears were ringing though, and when she opened her eyes, she found that her lenses had cracked.
Compound eyes, she thought. It looks like I have compound eyes now, like a bug! She smiled at that. Something prodded her and rolled her onto her back, and she stared up into the darkening sky.
She heard ... not words, but noises. Voices. There was a figure above her, but with her vision shattered she couldn't put the pieces together in any recognizable pattern. Myriad remembered her first days after she got her powers, when she could see through a hundred thousand eyes, making it impossible to see anything at all. Back then, she had tried to force the countless images into a single form, but her powers didn't work that way. Her mind didn't work that way. She had to relax into it.
Between what she could see and what her swarm could sense, she put together the image of a man holding a hunting rifle.
Progress!
She even picked up a few words as the ringing in her ears began to subside.
"Don't ... much choice ... have to call ... don't move."
There was another person nearby. Someone shorter. A girl. "... have to ..."
"Bakuda ... watch ... before she wakes up."
Someone's waking up? That's me. I'm waking up. And now ... they're calling Bakuda to tell her that they found me.
She had an idea to jump to her feet, grab the rifle away and ... hit him with pepper spray or something when he wasn't expecting it. Bad idea. She felt woozy, and there was a chance that she would jump to her feet, fall over, and get shot. Attack him with her swarm? No. He'd panic, and might shoot her anyway, or he might shoot the girl who wasn't wearing a maybe-hopefully-bulletproof costume.
No, what she needed to do was disarm him without him knowing about it. Could she pull his gun away with bugs? No. Disable it, maybe? Could work. She'd have to, what, have a bunch of spiders crawl inside and fill it with silk to goop everything up. All she knew about guns she learned on TV, but people spent a lot of time cleaning them so they would work properly.
She reached out with her power for every spider within range. She had only brought with her the bugs that could fly fast enough to make it into the car window, but spiders could live anywhere where there were bugs to eat, and bugs could live anywhere. Basements, closets ... a backpack in the abandoned ferry station bathroom. Was she in range? Nice. They hadn't eaten each other yet.
Myriad noticed the girl trying to make a call. She covered the phone with dragonflies, and the girl dropped it with a scream. The man stepped back and pointed his gun at her.
Well, there goes the element of surprise. She'd need to swarm him and hope that he didn't shoot her in the head. That was the smart thing to do. The safe thing. Cautious.
Be cautious, Lisa had said. Or be you.
That still didn't make much sense. Be you? Be the bumbling novice cape who kept on getting into more trouble than she could handle? Be the bullied loner who was always holding back because anything else would only make things worse? Was that who she was?
Who was she before that? Before she had gotten powers, before Emma had turned on her.
Before her mother died.
"The last person I saw who called Bakuda died in front of me." Her voice sounded off, like her words were beetles crawling out of her mouth instead of actual sounds. She kept going. "She wanted me to watch him die, because she thought I would care."
The man said something, and it took a moment for the words to register. "Don't move!"
"I remember him being afraid. I remember him dying afraid, because Bakuda wanted to make a point. She had put a bomb in him, and the whole time he had known that she could kill him if he disobeyed. So he didn't disobey, and she killed him on a whim."
Myriad had managed to piece together the broken images of the two people. The girl was young, maybe about her age, wearing a school uniform. Immaculata, the Christian private school rich kids went to. The man was older, well past his middle years. Neither of them looked like gang members any more than Neil Zhang had.
Before her mother died, Taylor had been able to believe in people, her friends, her family, even strangers. That was what had made her such an easy target when Emma had turned on her. Taylor hadn't been able to understand recreational cruelty, and she had tried to appeal to her former best friend's better nature that Emma just didn't have anymore.
People need something to believe in. Taylor used to have that, long ago.
"If you call her," she continued, "she may kill you for the same reason. If you shoot me, she may kill you for denying her the chance to kill me herself. If you walk away and forget you saw me, she may kill you just because she's bored. You could die afraid, brave, or just unlucky, and as long as Bakuda is around to pull the trigger, you'll never be safe."
She had gotten into an argument with Gallant just a few minutes ago about false hope and comforting lies. If Bakuda had said to people, "Do what I say and I won't blow you up," that would have been a false hope for Neil Zhang, and maybe these people too.
Are heroes worth believing in?
She rolled over and pushed herself to her feet. She felt wobbly and the ground didn't seem to want to hold still, but no one shot her.
The girl said something. "Can you stop her?"
"I stopped Lung," Myriad said. "That's why she wants me, so she can make people as afraid of her as they were of him. Worst case scenario, she kills me and settles down because she has nothing left to prove." She hoped it wouldn't come to that.
"Are you going to kill her?" It was the old man.
"No." She thought about it. "Maybe. If I have to." She didn't know if she could kill someone if it came down to that. For all she knew killing people might be easy. She was afraid it would.
"Don't. There are nearly a hundred people with bombs in their heads that will go off if Bakuda's heart stops beating. The ones she planted all over the city might go off too."
"Good to know." That explained why no one had shot her yet. If they missed, she'd kill them, and if they hit, she'd kill everyone. "Anything else?"
"You shouldn't stay here." It was getting easier to hear now. Myriad didn't think that her ears were getting better, but she was getting better at interpreting the muted sounds. "Everyone in the city will have heard that sonic bomb go off, and Bakuda will be on her way. You don't want to be around when she gets here." He looked at the girl. "We don't either."
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"Yeesh," Vista said. "Sorry about your car. But a fresh coat of paint, a new bumper, a new windshield, maybe replace that headlight while you're at it─"
"Vista."
"And it will be as good as new." She shrunk it down to the size of a toy car and put it in her utility belt. "Hey look, the keys are still here."
"The car was just a rationalization for coming, and if Myriad's not here, then she's somewhere worse." Not only were Bakuda and the ABB looking for her, but the Undersiders frequented the docks, and he had seen what they could do to all the Wards put together.
He needed to call this in, but he knew what he would be ordered to do afterwards. Fall back, pull out, stay out of trouble and let an adult handle the situation. The rules were in place to protect him, but sometimes ... sometimes Gallant wanted to protect someone else.
Before he told HQ what was going on, he decided to make sure he had something substantial to say.
"About fifty yards behind you," he said to Vista, "there's a young gentleman in ABB gang colors watching us. Would you be willing to bring him over for me?"
"Absolutely," Vista said. She turned around and squeezed the fifty yards into five feet. When the young gentleman screamed, turned around, and tried to run, he tripped over a sudden swelling of the sidewalk.
Gallant offered him a hand and helped him to his feet. "Good evening. I hate to bother you like this, but Bakuda has made some deeply concerning threats recently, and I was wondering if you would be so kind as to tell me everything you know."
The man thrashed against his grip for all the good it did. Even if Gallant wasn't wearing power armor, the man was nearly a head shorter than him. "I don't know nothing." That was neither true nor grammatically correct. "I didn't do nothing. Now let me go! I know my rights."
"You're afraid," Gallant noted.
"No I'm not! I'm not afraid of you!"
"Not of me, no," he admitted. A finger on his left hand began to glow with emotional energy. "I can help you with that."
WWW
"Visual on target. Target at Hill and Sixth, heading north."
Bakuda drove down Seventh, or at least had Number Twenty-Four drive down Seventh. Out of all the bombs she had made, Number Twenty-Four would always have a special place in her heart. If she blew it up, Number Twenty-Four would make its host breath fire until the man cooked himself.
It made her sad that she might never have a reason to pull the trigger, but that was just poor planning on her part. When she had planted her little babies in her gang members, she had started with the top lieutenants of the ABB, people with experience, loyalty, and competence, and she had used the bombs she loved the most. By the time she had gotten down to pulling Unlucky Joe off the street who wouldn't be able to do much more than stop a bullet, she was reduced to bombs like Number Two-Ninety-Eight, which scattered its host across dimensions. Sure, it sounded good on paper, knowing that the host would have a spleen on Earth Aleph and a kidney on Earth Zet, but what it came down to was a man vanishing into thin, transdimensional air.
"You still got her location?" Bakuda said into her radio.
"Affirmative," he said. Who was he? Bakuda couldn't tell by the voice. Probably Number Thirty-Something or Forty-Something. She'd had some fun ideas in that range. "She is about forty feet north of the Sixth-Hill intersection."
Bakuda hefted her grenade launcher and did some calculations in her head. If she is forty feet north of Hill on Sixth and I'm ... what am I? One hundred and ninety. I'm one hundred and ninety feet north of Hill on Seventh, so she's in that direction one block over, so I'll need an arc over that hardware store that will put her inside the blast radius but outside the kill zone ... "Give me her location again."
"Still at forty feet north of the intersection. Target is stationary, repeat, target is stationary."
Crap! If a Master was doing nothing, then that usually meant that whatever she controlled was doing that much more.
Precision is for the weak, she decided. Bakuda aimed her grenade launcher at an angle that felt right and pulled the trigger.
I was really hoping that this would turn into a strategically intricate game of chess, she thought as the grenade disappeared behind view and exploded. Why do I always end up playing battleship?
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Going deaf in one ear was probably the best thing that could have happened to Myriad after having one of Bakuda's bombs blow up in front of her. The way a shattered eardrum messed up her balance bothered her more than having bad hearing, and her bugs could somehow help with that.
She stumbled a bit at first, but when she had her bugs crawl out on the ground in front of her, it was like her swarm was able to grab onto the world to make it stop spinning. She was connected to her surroundings with her power in a way she hadn't imagined before.
She was out of her depth, she knew, but she was learning as she went. The months she had spent making her costume and practicing with her powers had been a waste of time compared to this. She couldn't learn how to be a cape by sitting in her room and looking up bug facts on wikipedia; she learned by pushing herself.
And nothing pushed her harder than a homicidal maniac with a bomb fetish.
She could no longer feel broken glass between her feet. The sonic blast had shattered a few windows in the area as well as cracking her lenses. Myriad supposed that she was lucky to not get shards of glass in her eyes. If this is what luck is like, I can't afford the alternative.
She heard something rumbling. A car engine? She couldn't tell where it was coming from, but it was getting louder. There wasn't anything on her street, so she had her swarm search out anything car shaped.
She found it when one of her bugs hitched a ride on what felt like a windshield. Some of the rest of her swarm converged on its location, and found the vehicle open like a jeep. There were three people inside, and one of them ... one of them was wearing a mask. A gas mask?
Myriad smiled. I have you now, Bakuda!
Then she heard a ... clink? A crash? Either something loud and far away or something quiet and nearby. She looked around behind her, and through her broken vision she saw ... a caninster?
She expected it to explode. Instead, it did the opposite.
Myriad fell forward as the bomb imploded and sucked everything into it like a miniature black hole. She scrambled to grab onto something─anything─that could keep her away from having her life suck even more than it already did, and she found a sewer grate. It was slimy, gritty, and half covered with things she'd rather not think about, and she slid her fingers through the panels like her life depended on it.
The vacuum pelted her with pebbles and debris, but the implosion ended after a few seconds. Myriad panted for breath, stood up, and took an accounting of the damages.
She was fine. Her fingers hurt because she hadn't grabbed onto the sewer grate as much as wedged them in, but she'd live.
She couldn't say the same for her swarm. She had sent some of her bugs out as scouts, but everything she could use in a fight, her stingers and her biters, had stayed with her, and those had been sucked into Bakuda's implosion. The only bugs that were small enough and low enough to the ground to survive were a few ants, and Myriad couldn't defeat a supervillain with ants. With enough time, she could gather a new swarm from the bugs already around the docks, but ...
She heard another clink. Myriad realized that the sound was deliberate, that Bakuda could have made her grenades explode on impact instead of giving them a half-second delay, but the point wasn't to surprise her with the bombs, but to scare her. It was like cocking a gun before pulling the trigger.
Of course, if Bakuda thought that that degree of psychological warfare was going to have an effect on her, then that mad scientist had clearly never gone to high school. Myriad took advantage of the warning, dropped to the ground, and readied herself for another black hole.
Instead, the bomb hit her with a flash freeze. Coldness crashed into her like a truck, and while her costume protected her from most of it, her goggles frosted over to blind her even further, and her few bugs that were still alive froze solid.
Then, half blind, half deaf, and with her powers effectively negated, Taylor saw a fractured blur and heard the rumbling of an engine as a vehicle came down the street.
"Game over, kid." The voice was mechanical, robotic, like a text to speech app. "You lose."
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"Hello Director Piggot," Gallant said. "I have something to report."
"Gallant. Who died this time?"
"No one, fortunately. I have good news."
"I doubt it. Keep talking."
Gallant prided himself on his ability to work well with people. Nearly everyone he knew liked him, and he liked them in return. Director Piggot was the exception. She disliked everyone on principle and didn't care if they liked her or not. All she cared about was respect, and she respected you more if she liked you less.
It made talking to her difficult.
"Bakuda has made her move. She's been implanting bombs in all the new ABB recruits, and they now have at least ten times the numbers they had when she took over."
"I see. And how do you know this?"
He took a deep breath. "I Mastered a non-powered individual without authorization. I will write up a full report of my actions when I return and await disciplinary review."
"Do so. Anything else?"
"Yes. There is a rumor among the ABB members that Oni Lee only submitted to Bakuda's leadership if she worked to free Lung, and if she doesn't make her move soon, he will."
"A rumor," Piggot repeated.
"A rumor. Director, if Oni Lee can duplicate Bakuda's bombs as easily as he can duplicate hand grenades ..."
"I can imagine. Where are you now?"
"I'm at the docks."
"Less than an hour ago you were watching over a murder scene. I assume you had a good reason for abandoning your post?"
"Yes, Director. I will include that in my written report. With your permission, I will remain here to gather intel on the gang's movements for the time being. I'm already in position, and my powers are better suited for this than combat."
"No. Not without backup."
"I have backup. Vista's with me."
"I see. Well, it's good to know that you have a twelve-year-old girl keeping you safe."
Gallant couldn't tell if Piggot was being sarcastic or not. Despite her age, Vista was possibly the strongest member of the Wards, and stronger than most of Brockton Bay's Protectorate.
"You know that if she's with me, I won't take any unnecessary risks, for her sake if not my own." Come on, he thought. Take the bait. The PRT tried to keep Wards out of danger, but sometimes the most dangerous thing to do was to have the heroes do nothing.
"Very well. You are not to engage with Bakuda or Oni Lee if you see them, and keep your distance from the rest of the gang wherever possible."
"Understood, Director." He hung up.
"We good to go?" Vista asked.
He nodded. "We're good to go."
"Alright! Let's go to the party."
Before they had parted ways with Bruce Lau, their Mastered informant, the young man had received a radio broadcast from Bakuda inviting everyone to a "party" on Hill Street. "Anyone who misses the fireworks," she had warned, "will become the fireworks."
Despite the artificial courage Gallant has supplied him with, Bruce Lau had left in a hurry.
"Remember, be careful, keep your distance, and keep your eyes open. If Oni Lee shows up, we leave no matter what. Bakuda is one thing, but he could kills us both without trying." Gallant's powers didn't work properly on the clinically insane, and Vista's ability to bend space was useless against someone who could teleport. "If he doesn't show up, we leave as soon as we find Myriad."
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If there was one thing Taylor liked less than homicidal maniacs who blew people up for fun, it was crowds.
A crowd gathered around her. Men, women, children, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, in cars or on foot. Taylor was on her knees in the middle of a four-way intersection with three separate guns pointed at her head. In front of her stood Bakuda.
"Well, that's enough waiting," Bakuda said. "Let's get this party started! But before we begin, I believe I promised you guys fireworks, so ... Is Number Two-Fifty-Seven here? Two-Fifty-Seven? No? Then you're late, and if you're late, you're late."
At an unseen signal, a woman died. One moment she was alive, and the next lightning burst out of her and she collapsed as a smoking husk without having time to scream. The people around her screamed for her as lightning arced through the crowd. Those closest to her fell, but they were able to get back up again. She didn't.
"Huh," Bakuda said. "So you were here. Might have said something. I didn't give everyone numbers for fun, you know."
There was no remorse in her mechanical voice, no regret for having just killed a person—one of her people. But what were people to creatures like her? Why would she kill someone for no reason?
Why did Emma stuff me in that locker?
It was a game.
All of it.
Just a game.
She felt sick. The whole point of coming here was to stop Bakuda from killing anyone else, but the promised hour wasn't up yet. If she had just stayed out of the way like she was supposed to, less people would have died, but no, she had blundered into ABB territory and made everything worse. She always made everything worse.
Did you really think you could make a difference? It doesn't matter if you're in costume or not, you're still you.
She thought back to Lisa's last piece of advice. Be you. Right, because that had worked out so well for her. Taylor had been Taylor her whole life, and she still sucked at it. Why had she even listened to her in the first place? Because they had gone shopping together? Tattletale was a villain, and she was probably hanging out with the Undersiders right now laughing her butt of at how she had managed to tie up the loose end that had seen their faces.
"So," Bakuda said, "let's talk. You got a name?"
Taylor looked up at her and remained silent. It was a token of defiance, but it was all she could manage. Then she noticed something.
Spiders. Bakuda's bombs had cleared out most of the bugs Taylor had brought with her and the docks weren't outstanding with their spider population, but a hundred thousand spiders were marching towards her with single minded purpose.
"No?" Bakuda asked. "Then you're Worm now. Hello, Worm. Let's talk about fear. Are you afraid right now?"
Her backpack! She stuffed her backpack full of spiders as a security/spite measure, and had called them out the last time someone had pointed a gun at her. It had taken them a while, but they had arrived. What could she do with them?
"No? Okay then. Now, this question you will answer or I'll blow someone up. I feel like that's the only way to get a reaction out of you. What do you think I'm going to do with you?"
Taylor forced herself to talk, and did her best to keep her voice steady. "You're going to kill me."
Bakuda laughed, but her mechanical voice made the sound nearly impossible to recognize. "See, that's the problem. Dying just isn't that scary. Do you remember how old you were when you first understood what it meant to die? Mortality didn't make you wake up screaming. If it did anything, it made you a little sad that knowing that the people you care about aren't going to stick around forever."
Taylor thought of her mom, lying in a coffin, then being lowered into the ground. So much ceremony for something that a ceremony couldn't cover. So much nonsense to think that a mother could be grieved in half a day.
Stop it, she told herself. Focus. Be here in the present. It won't last that long.
"The problem," Bakuda continued, "is that you don't really know what it is. Heaven, hell, judgement, reincarnation, oblivion; death could be anything, so the only thing it can't be is frightening. Not really. It can't fill you with the kind of terror you can sink your teeth into. I can't make you fear death, Worm, but I can make you fear me."
She won't kill you without putting on a show, Lisa had said. You'll have her undivided attention, but you'll also have time.
Earlier she had had the idea to clog a gun with spider silk. Now she'd see what the idea was worth. How many spiders could fit in a gun? How much silk did she need to stop a bullet? No, it was better to gum up the firing mechanism than the barrel. Somehow.
"And you're going to tell me what you're going to do to me beforehand so I can be afraid of it." Keep talking, she thought. Keep monologuing. Give me time to find a way out.
"Now you're catching on. See, the Undersiders defeated Lung, and Armsmaster arrested him, but you Worm? You bit off his worm. In terms of reputation that was worse than devastating, that was hilarious. So that's why I'm going to something even funnier to you." She pulled out a small capsule about the size of a pill. "Do you know what the Manton Effect is?"
None of the men around her noticed the spiders crawling on their clothes, but if Taylor had a spider run along someone's arm, they'd know she was up to something. "Does that have something to do with radiation poisoning?" No, she was thinking of the Manhattan Project, not the Manton Effect. Still, if Taylor got a question wrong, what was Bakuda going to do? Give her a bad grade?
"Ugh, Parahuman Studies One-oh-one? Named after William Manton? It's a power limitation. Some powers don't work on organics, and other work only on organics. Have you seen Vista at work? She can bend space, but not people. When I tried to make a bomb based off of her powers, it came out backwards. This little baby? It bends people.
"I thought about giving you the same brain surgery treatment I gave everyone else here and make you bring me my slippers and sting my enemies out of fear of permanent disfigurement, but where would the fun in that be? No, instead I'm going to shove this thing up your nose, detonate it, and see what happens. Maybe you'll get a huge, bulbous head and itty bitty fetus legs, or bloated hands with arms to small to lift them. Maybe you'll end up some lopsided Quasimoto freak that not even a Case 53 would touch, and do you know what will happen next, Worm? I'll keep you like that. I'll show you off to my friends, rivals and all my enemies so everyone will know what happens when you mess with the ABB, and after you've gotten used to being a freak, after you start to think that maybe the life of a grotesque is still a life?
"Then I'll kill you."
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Gallant watched Bakuda and Myriad from a long way off. He had been hoping to find the girl near Bakuda's gathering. He had not been hoping to find her in the middle of it.
"What's happening?" Vista asked. The two of them stood on a rooftop about three blocks away. They could move quickly with her powers when they had to, but people noticed when the tops of buildings squeezed together like an accordian, and they needed to be subtle.
"At the moment they're still talking, but Bakuda is getting more and more excited while Myriad is ... she's scared, but it looks like she's determined, too. I think she has a plan, but she doesn't know if her plan will work." Nearly all of the Wards had some sort of Tinker-tech visor. Gallant had built-in binoculars to read people's emotions from a distance. Vista could switch to heat vision because the only thing that could inhibit her powers were living people. "If we had to, how easily could you pull her out from the middle of that?"
She frowned. "I could bring us to the edge of the crowd in a heartbeat, but into it? I'd have to do some weird overhang stunt, and we'd spend way too much time surrounded by armed gang members and the lady with the grenade launcher."
He nodded. If there had been a gap in the crowd, she'd be able to work with it, but ... could he call for backup? Aegis could fly in and grab her, but while he could survive a bullet without a problem, a grenade to the face was pushing it. Vicky would have a better chance and her aura might make the ABB hesitate, but Bakuda wasn't using standard grenades. Velocity could get into the crowd just fine, but carrying Myriad would slow him down on the way out.
No, what the heroes needed most right now was time.
He pulled out a phone─not his, but one he had borrowed from Neil Zhang after Bakuda had melted him─and hit redial.
Bakuda's emotions went from annoyed to confused when she saw who was calling her, and she answered.
"I know who's number this is," she said. "And if you're still alive after me killing you, then I'd advise you not to push your luck."
The phone still had a bit of slime─a bit of Neil─on it, but Gallant didn't rise to the taunt. "No, your bomb did it's job. I suspect you've had practice using your inventions on people."
"Hold on, I recognize this voice. You're that charming secretary from earlier. I'm right in the middle of something, so I'll call you back."
"Yes, you're in the middle of holding a public execution for the newest member of the Wards." It was a lie, but a believable one. "Lung did whatever he wanted to other villains, but not even he was foolish enough to kill a hero."
"You're right, he wasn't," Bakuda said. "He's also not here; I am. Lung was too cautious and too small-minded. He thought that if he played nice your side would leave him alone, and now he's in a cage. I'm going all out."
"You say that," Gallant said, "but it still seems like you are holding back."
There was a pause. "Are you trying to provoke me? That's hilarious! Keep going."
No, I'm trying to stall, and I hope this doesn't backfire. "I've seen some of your work, and, no offense meant, but it's derivative. Variations on a theme. You kill people with bombs. You kill them in creative ways, sure, but you still kill them. Do you have any idea how long we've been doing that? Hundreds of years. We've blown up entire cities before, and we already have enough bombs to wipe out everyone on this planet and everyone on Earth Aleph, just in case we're feeling generous. Killing people with bombs is, intellectually speaking, safe, easy, and beneath you."
Gallant heard a crunch of static on the phone, and only seeing Bakuda's emotions allowed him to interpret the noise as laughter. "And what do you have in mind? A bomb that brings people back to life?"
"That would be impressive," he said. "But have you considered what you could do against an Endbringer?" He paused to let his words sink in. "We've fought them for years, and the entire Protectorate combined hasn't been able to kill one of them yet. Not even Scion has been able to do more than drive them off. If you expressed your power to the fullest, perhaps you could succeed where they had failed. Think about it, Bakuda. If you bring down an Endbringer, you wouldn't just be Brockton Bay's most wanted anymore, you'd be a global treasure. Alternatively, you could continue to squander your talents in a gang war. You pick."
"Hmm," Bakuda said. "Hm-hm? Hmm ... yeah, I think I'll stick with the gang war, thanks. It just seems like more fun, you know?"
Gallant sighed. One day. One day that will work. "Disappointing. All the same, you would do well release Myriad."
"Who? Oh, you mean Worm."
"No, I mean Myriad."
"Meh. Tomato tuh-mah-to. Why's that?"
"Because you are invading her personal space, and if you do not step away right now, I will—"
"You'll what? You'll write me a mean note? Tell my mother? Ooh! Would I get a kill order for this? I've been trying to win one of those since I moved here, but you guys are just so damn stingy with those things."
"You will leave me with no other option but to recommend a highly skilled and licenced therapist."
There was a pause.
"What? Do you call that a threat? I'm not just heckling you; I really don't know. That ... that didn't even make sense! It's almost impressive how bad of a threat that was. Anyway, I need to get back to screwing a little girl. Uh, not sexually, I mean that when I'm done with her, there's a chance that she'll literally end up screw-shaped. Which would be pretty funny."
She hung up.
"Well?" Vista asked, looking up at him. "Did it work?"
End up screw shaped? "I managed to stall her for a few minutes," Gallant said, focusing on the positive instead of the fact that she had warned both her and possibly Oni Lee that they were in the area. Bakuda's emotions were mostly unchanged, but Myriad's ... "Now that's interesting."
"What?"
"Get ready."
"For what?"
"Anything. Myriad's planning something. I just don't know what it is."
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Gallant was planning something. Taylor just didn't know what it was.
She had only heard Bakuda's half of the conversation, but it seemed like the plan had something to do with zombie-bombs, which seemed like a terrible idea. Lisa was planning something too, but the four-word text message she had sent her made even less sense.
widow left foot mask
Taylor stared at the message, hoping that the words would rearrange themselves into something that made sense. The widow left her foot in a mask? The widow's left foot is a mask? Black widow? My mask? Bakuda's mask? Or maybe she meant window instead of widow.
Or maybe Lisa was messing with her. Taylor couldn't discount that.
"Alright," Bakuda said, hanging up. "Now where were we? Did I finish my monologue or ... hold on, are you one your phone?"
"Uh."
Bakuda motioned to one of her men who kicked the phone out of her hands. She picked it up and froze.
"Shoot her. Shoot her now."
"What?" one of the three men said. "I thought you said you were going to blow her up, make a show out of it."
"I know what I said, halfwit! This is what I'm saying now! Shoot her until she stops moving."
Great, so those four words mean something to her.
Three guns were fixed on her. Three triggers were pulled. Three guns failed to fire, and three men fell to the ground screaming as spiders swarmed across their faces. She didn't even need to have them bite; having a spider on your face produced a certain visceral reaction in most people.
Myriad rose to her feet and charged Bakuda. With one hand she reached behind her and pulled out her baton, and with the other she dropped a black widow spider from her finger like a yoyo on a string. It landed on Bakuda's left boot and crawled inside.
Bakuda brought her grenade launcher up to block, perhaps realizing that it lacked a certain subtlety as a short ranged weapon. Along the way, Gallant's advice came back to her.
What to do in a hostage situation?
Come down on her like the wrath of God.
Bring her to ruin.
Do something so horrible, no one will ever try that again.
The black widow sank its fangs into Bakuda's foot. Myriad didn't know how much venom black widows usually used, but just to be safe, she had her spider squeeze out every last drop. The symptoms included muscle cramps, nausea, and even mild hallucinations, but it could take Bakuda up to an hour to start feeling it.
Until then, Bakuda spent a moment to yell at her minions, but fear engendered a certain kind of loyalty that dissipated when you needed help, and none of them wanted to be the first one to step forward. Myriad spent that same moment to cover Bakuda's face with moths to blind her, then swung her baton into Bakuda's unguarded ribs, and when the villain doubled over, Myriad brought it up and smashed her mask.
Bakuda toppled over and fell on her back. One of the eye pieces of her mask had shattered, and Bakuda looked up at her with a single, ice blue eye.
"No more games," Myriad said. She let go of her baton, dropped down onto Bakuda's chest, and tazed her with her stun gun.
It was simply bad luck that the only area of exposed flesh within reach was Bakuda's eyeball.
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Gallant arrived before the crowd had time to disperse. Even if Vista hadn't been stretching out the gaps between them and parting them like the Red Sea, they still would have gotten out of his way. People did that for capes, especially if they were used to getting pushed around.
"Everyone remain calm," he said. Myriad's hearing was still messed up, and she was starting to worry that she had ended up permanently deaf in one ear, but his voice sounded louder than normal as though he had megaphone built into his power armor. "You've all had a bad day, but the trouble is nearly over. Just sit tight and wait for a few minutes, and we'll make sure that Bakuda is wrapped up and ready for the Birdcage and that all of you get the medical treatment you need."
He turned to Myriad, and his voice dropped down to normal levels. "Sorry I couldn't help more, but you still handled the situation perfectly. How do you feel?"
She shrugged. "Fine." A bit numb, a little jumpy, but Gallant could see emotions, couldn't he? Why did he bother asking?
"If you say so. By the way, this is Vista. Vista, Myriad. Myriad, Vista."
The younger cape who was peering down at Bakuda. "Holy crap. Did she always have a charred, smoking eye socket, or is she just having a really bad day?"
"Today's been worse for others," Myriad said, remembering the people Bakuda had blown up.
"Must be stiff competition."
Stiff, she thought, seeing the unintended pun. Ha ha. Funny. She gasped. "She needs an ambulance. I might have gone too far on her, and if she dies, all of her bombs go off."
"On it," Gallant said, pulling out his phone.
Myriad stood in the middle of the crowd, not sure what to do with herself. The three men who'd had guns pointed at her a few minutes ago had disappeared. It made sense that they wouldn't want to stick around now that the tables had turned, especially if they had joined the ABB before Bakuda had started forcing people into the gang. If they showed up for medical treatment, would they get arrested for past crimes? Or would they leave the bombs in their heads that Bakuda could blow up under the slightest inclination to avoid going to jail?
Myriad scanned the crowd, trying to pick out the old man and the girl she had run into earlier, but between her broken lenses and the bad lighting, all she got was a headache. Some of the people had dropped their weapons, relieved to no longer need them, but most of them held on to their crowbars and baseball bats, if only to have something to hold on to.
"Alright," Gallant said. "The PRT is sending a full unit along with a med team and bomb squad, and some of the Protectorate are coming over too. Do you want to stay to meet them, or have you had enough capes for one day?"
"Honestly," she said, collapsing her baton and putting it back into its compartment, "I think I'd rather just go home."
He nodded, as though expecting her to say that. "I understand. Vista, would you mind walking her back?"
"Sure."
Myriad wanted to say that she didn't need an escort, but it wasn't worth the trouble. "I'm sorry about your car," she said instead, then cursed herself. Why did she have to bring that up?
Gallant fell silent for a moment. "I know why you did what you did."
To get here faster? Because it was an emergency?
"That was a classic case of self-sabotage," he said. "You were convinced that you weren't qualified to be one of the Wards because of who you were, and that was something you did not want to face. So you stole my car to get yourself disqualified because of something you did because that would have been easier to face." He put a hand on her shoulder. "If you don't want to join the Wards, you are free to walk away, but you should know that there is nothing you could do to make me not want you on the team."
A gust of wind could have knocked her over, and she didn't say a word as Vista took her by the hand and led her away from the crowd. They were halfway to the ferry station before one of them spoke.
"He does that sort of thing a lot," Vista admitted. "You, uh, you never really get used to it."
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A/n So that's chapter five. I played with a few scenarios about Gallant calling different people for help. Some of those options would have made it a worse story, others might actually have made for a better one. Glory Girl might have found her, grabbed her, and flown away before Myriad could save the day. Shadow Stalker might have tried to tranquilize and arrest her before gaining a degree of grudging respect for the new hero. Honestly, that probably would have added to the problems and therefore drama and therefore quality of the story, but that same idea has already been used by ack1308 in Confrontation. Out of all the Worm fanfiction I've read (admittedly not a lot), Confrontation is the best by far.
Thanks for the reviews, everyone. I reread them every time I need to motivate myself to write. Taylor will (probably) join the Wards officially next chapter, so if you have any favorite heroes that you feel don't get enough attention, let me know and I'll try to spotlight them a bit.