7. Listener
Riley rolled for cover behind a boulder before Jack could strike her a second time.
Her face stung, but there was barely any blood, despite the pulse pounding in her cheek.
She welcomed the thrill of adrenaline like an old friend, and it made everything seem a little sharper, even her movements.
Where was he? She hadn't seen him, but that didn't mean much between his range, the various chemicals saturating the air and the myriad of hiding places the forest offered.
No sound betrayed his movement.
She pressed herself against the rock, her hand raised and ready to fire a poison dart as soon as she knew where to aim. It offered the most range out of anything she had available, and the mechanism was simple enough that she was fairly sure she could make it work. Failing that, she'd have to get closer.
A sharp crack above her head was followed by a rain of wooden debris, but she remained still. It wasn't a serious attempt to hit her. Just making it clear that there was no hiding from him.
"At last, she joins the stage."
His voice came out loud and clear, in a way that denoted intent to be heard rather than close proximity. About fifty feet away, if she had to guess. Less, and he wouldn't need to project his voice. More, and the wind would impair her hearing.
Too far for the darts to reach him from her position.
Another strike grazed the top of the boulder, sounding like nails on a chalkboard.
"Seems our little Bonesaw is all grown up and ready to leave the nest."
She looked back, ear strained on his voice to detect any change that would indicate movement. It was unlikely, as ranged attackers usually found safety in distance, but he'd surprised her several times already.
The largest tree behind her bore a gouge a few inches higher than the boulder, off-centre. It looked like he'd used his left hand, which was unusual and meant that either the right one was injured, or both wielded knives and his body was turned away from her. The angle and depth of the gash spoke of his position.
"It's humbling, to have someone walk so closely in my footsteps. I might shed a tear."
A comeback hovered on her tongue, but she swallowed it. That was what he wanted. Banter. A dialogue with his audience. His favorite part of any confrontation.
A quick look at her phone confirmed his location, downhill from her. He hadn't moved much since the spiders' attack, resting nonchalantly against a tree as if his right leg wasn't a bloody mess. Was he using the pain switch? Probably. Beside the obvious advantages, he knew it would rile her up, just like his use of the biocide.
Riley commanded the spider-cam to join her. It crawled low on the ground, taking the long way around to avoid being seen.
"Hadn't expected that part to be the one to stick, but I suppose we don't get to choose our legacy, do we?" He sounded a bit irritated at the thought. She'd forgotten about that. He hadn't been much older than she was supposed to be when he defeated King.
She tried to distract herself by sorting through the content of her pockets, lining up color-coded bottles and test tubes on the ground.
"But what about your legacy?"
Riley froze.
"I suppose you've left quite the impressive catalogue."
A pile of folders with pictures and case numbers, awaiting her input as she detailed what could be fixed by healers and what had been booby-trapped to prevent intervention. A stiff refusal of any more direct help.
"Artists can evolve, but art is forever."
Mistrust. Hesitation in people's eyes. Heavy security measures.
She would always be known as a monster.
"But in a way, evolution is what truly gives art meaning. Layers. Contrast. Dialogue."
He'd been trying to figure her out since the morning. He'd had time to find the right words.
"It's a shame only artists can truly appreciate a fellow artist's journey and how far they've come."
Wasn't that something she'd told herself before? Her visits to Jamie and Valkyrie always felt like a breath of fresh air because they understood her in a way no one else could.
It was so hard to think when his voice slithered right past her defenses. At least while commanding the spider boxes from a distance, she hadn't had to listen to him.
Oh.
Riley blinked, then inhaled slowly. The air carried no scent, as her sense of smell was still disabled from the tattoo shop. Her exhale fogged in the cold air. She inhaled again, this time focusing solely on the lack of sensory input. The controls were neatly labelled, and simple enough to use without her power. Some of the first modifications she'd made to herself, as a way to cope.
She flicked the switch and turned her olfactory system back on.
The air smelled of thawing earth and withered vegetation, with a distant hint of smoke from Burnscar's fire.
The rest of her senses had similar controls, and she found the one she was looking for.
The world became silent.
Riley checked her phone.
Words continued to spill from Jack's mouth, aiming to unravel her, but they couldn't reach her.
For a moment she watched him, his usual mask of confidence still firmly in place.
Her own mask had been left behind at the same time as her power. What would he see when they came face to face?
The exhausted little girl who had no choice but to leave everything behind?
The teenager who'd trapped herself in the body of a child because she couldn't afford to let him see her growth?
The prisoner who was only just cracking the surface of how to be a person?
She wasn't sure she could bear to let him see her, the real her.
She wasn't quite sure what it looked like either.
As the spider box arrived by her side, Riley whispered her idea to it.
Her minions could perform surgery even when her power was disabled, as she'd found out the hard way during Hatchet Face's tenure, and she had taught them some of her most common recipes.
It was worth a shot.
The spider riffled through vials laid out on the ground, tucking two into its body and giving Riley a third. She ripped a band of fabric from the hem of her dress, then searched through her tools for a lighter. It used to be Jack's, before she nicked it for an experiment and never gave it back, and there was a small sense of satisfaction in using it for this.
In the absence of movement, the various chemicals saturating the air had settled into a heavy blanket of white fog covering the ground, allowing the spider to get close enough to lay the trap.
All that was left was to set it in motion.
Riley didn't move, hiding behind her rock while clutching the vial for much longer than necessary, but she hadn't been in a real fight for two years. She was rusty, damn it.
She lifted her arm, trying to gauge the right strength to exert with the unfamiliar limb. It was heavier than she was used to, and the joints had a much wider amplitude, which would likely throw off her aim, but she had to get it right on the first try.
It's a centipede's dilemma, she told herself. Stop overthinking it.
She stretched her arms, trying to keep her mind blank, and shook them until their outlines blurred and the tension bled out of them. Then, in one fell swoop, she grabbed the vial, ignited the wick, and threw it in Jack's direction before ducking back for cover.
She didn't hear the explosion, but saw the flash and smelled the smoke.
Taking a peek, she caught sight of Jack, distinctly not on fire, and hid as soon as he moved. The hit struck deep into the tree behind her, echoing through her bones.
She couldn't help but smile.
He was ticked. With good reason.
He'd avoided the bomb. It didn't matter. It was just a way to get him to move.
All around him, beneath the cover of rolling white fog, the spider box had deployed its concoction, which had congealed into the stickiest gunk this side of containment foam.
He was stuck.
She'd hoped he would fall face first, but both feet glued to the ground with his back to her was still a pretty good result. She could work with that.
She ran for a nearby tree, and only suffered a few shallow cuts.
His aim was off, his strikes weak. He had to contort his body to swing at her and couldn't put much strength into it. He tried hacking at the goo, but it only caused it to expand further.
Forty feet or so of clearing between them.
Still too far for the poison darts. She'd have to get closer to use them, and expose herself in the process. He would try to incapacitate in any way he could. Blind her. Target her legs, her extremities.
Her thick winter coat might offer a few seconds of protection, but her legs were largely vulnerable, covered only in woolen tights and winter boots. She'd have to be quick.
Finger gun ready, she ran.
Invisible knives sliced through her flesh, over and over.
She kept moving forward.
The first poison dart she fired was so embarrassingly off-target she was glad Jack didn't notice it at all.
She adjusted her aim on the second, but a glancing blow sliced her coat open, catching the wind and throwing her off.
She didn't get a third shot.
Jack swung harder, nearly losing his balance.
Her arm abruptly became lighter, her severed hand falling to the ground.
She kept running.
Three opposable claws sprung from her wrist as she closed the distance.
Jack caught both of her arms.
She kicked his injured leg, but it didn't buckle. Fucking safeguards.
Her next kick was aimed for his groin, but he twisted and her feet claws dug into the back of his leg instead.
He tried to throw her away from him and into the foam, but her feet were firmly anchored to his legs.
They grappled as he tried to catch her arms again, and he managed to restrain her.
Only his right hand still held a knife, but he could hardly aim it without dropping his hold on her.
Riley noticed too late where the left knife had gone.
It was buried to the hilt in her midsection, Jack's torso pressing against it as he used his power. It rattled against metal and bones.
She flinched, and hated that he noticed.
He smiled.
She crunched hard on a tooth until it broke, then spat acid in his face.
He shook his head, then reflexively brought one arm up to wipe it off without letting go of her wrist, but that was all the opening she needed.
Needles punched out of her fingertips to bite into his neck. She didn't care what they delivered. Poison. Drugs. Anything.
Acid splashed down her front as he fought back, and it hurt, but she didn't let go.
Each movement of the knife as they struggled was bolstered by his power, slicing and gouging her insides.
The acid was eating through the flesh of the arm he'd used to wipe his face, and he let go of her with a spasm.
Then, his leg faltered, and they both fell.
He panted, not from exertion. She panted too.
They remained like that for a moment, laying side by side, stuck in the foam, until he gathered enough breath to speak.
His mouth was still twisted with the phantom of a smile, despite the acid burns. Muscles twitched involuntarily with each movement, making it hard to read his lips, but she caught enough words to understand.
There were so many things she could say, so many things she wanted to throw in his face, that she found herself grasping for the right words and finding nothing.
It would be so easy to blame him for everything, but would it be true?
There were parts of her that would always be his no matter what, and they weren't parts she could cut up and replace, either. His work ran deeper than her scalpels.
But there were also parts that were hers alone.
For long seconds, she watched him. Blotches of grey and purple painted the skin around the injection site, spreading outward with spiderwebs of darkened capillaries. Veins stood out on his forehead, his skin glistening with cold sweat as he searched her face for a reaction.
He struggled to speak again, ragged breaths competing with the words. She didn't bother trying to decipher them. It was just more of the same.
"No," she said softly. "We're not doing that."
Foam started to leak from the corner of his mouth. He struggled to swallow.
"No?" he mouthed.
"You're not getting anything else from me," she told him, using her real voice. "I turned off my hearing. You don't get banter. You don't get an audience. You don't get last words."
The look in his eyes felt more like a victory than the poison in his veins.
"You can keep wasting your breath if you want to, but I think we both know you don't have much left."
Jack often said that the Nine showed people their truth, once everything was taken away from them.
He barely looked like himself now, like that man she'd feared and loved and loathed and looked up to.
He looked human. Flawed. Resigned. Dying.
Finally, a crack in his façade. A glimpse of truth.
Her clawed hand was wrapped around her midsection, and she realized his knife was still there. She pulled it out and examined the wound.
It was unsettling.
She'd been bisected before. Eviscerated. Decapitated. Dismembered. This was nothing.
She still felt vaguely nauseous.
Fluids leaked, and she couldn't tell for sure what they were. Things moved of their own accord, shifting and rearranging themselves like a nest of snakes had taken residence inside her chest cavity. The flesh sizzled and fumed where the acid had made contact, but the damage wasn't spreading, and the superficial injuries were already cauterizing themselves.
It didn't matter, she told herself. Everything was fixable.
Jack had gone quiet, observing her with an inscrutable expression.
How long would it take him to die?
She couldn't properly assess it without her power, and wasn't even sure what she'd injected him with. Poison, most likely, but there was also the damage from the acid to take in consideration, on top of the blood loss. Most of her poisons tended to fall in two broad categories: quick but spectacular, or slow and excruciating. That he wasn't dead yet spoke of the second, which was a problem.
She didn't have all day. Sooner or later, Siberian would come looking for her if she gave no sign of life, and she wasn't about to leave him for dead like an idiot.
His knife was in her hand, still warm from his grip. One of his favorites, that had been in his possession for as long as she'd known him.
She could remember him placing it in her hand, so long ago, and encouraging her to use it. It had felt too big for her hand then. Still did.
She couldn't rely on her power to use it efficiently. It would be messy. The safeguards would get in the way. She might have to try over and over again. She might fail.
Most daunting of all was the possibility that she might enjoy it.
Something shifted in his eyes as he caught sight of the blade.
Hers travelled from his head, to his neck, to his chest. She could remember operating on him to protect every weak point, but the knowledge bridging those memories was gone. When she tried to picture the safeguards and how to go around them, she came up blank.
Her eyes moved back to his face, and caught him looking at her with an expression she'd never seen before.
He knew she was contemplating using the knife.
Did he expect her to give him the full Bonesaw experience? To carve him up into one of her art pieces for the world to see?
Her grip on the knife weakened at the thought.
He noticed, and through no move of his own, she got the distinct impression that he felt smug.
Fighting back the urge to remove the glint from his eyes, or perhaps the eyes from his face, Riley reached for the mental link to the spider box, commanding it to fetch the solvent for the foam.
She wondered, idly, whether his pain switch was on or off. She wasn't sure which one she would prefer.
She'd known from the start that killing him would be necessary to her own survival, but part of her had also wanted to hurt him, and she couldn't tell for sure where that part fell on the spectrum from Bonesaw to Riley.
She didn't especially want to hurt him right now. She just wanted it to be over. She wanted to go to sleep and wake up in her own bed, in her own body, in her own life.
He blinked, so slowly that she thought for a second that he was done for. When his eyes opened again, the pale blue irises were barely visible, and she could see her reflection in the pupils.
The knife fell. She didn't need her power to know he was running out of time.
Say goodbye.
"Goodbye, Jack."
He struggled to say something, but she wasn't sure he even managed to make a sound. Against her best judgement, her eyes remained fixed on his mouth, tracing the outline of the words hidden behind the spasms and tremors, punctuated by laboured breaths.
There was so little to grasp that coming from anyone else, she wouldn't have been able to piece it together, but she knew exactly what he was saying.
She didn't want to carry his words with her, but it was too late.
He blinked and looked at her, still wearing that inscrutable expression.
It took a long time, but his eyes dulled, still fixed on her, and he was gone.
He was gone, but his words lingered.
She switched her hearing back on to listen to the silence.