"Fuck, ow!"
"Hold still, you big baby. I'm almost done."
I sat on the edge of the couch, gritting my teeth. Victoria was opposite me, perched on a coffee table with first aid supplies spread out beside her. I stifled another flinch as she finished applying the antiseptic solution to the scrape on my face. It was a small cut, but it stung like a bitch. When I had packed the medical supplies, I hadn't expected to need them so soon.
Victoria's warm hands left my face, and she turned to fetch bandages. I blinked, still slightly dazed from… whatever it was that Crimson had done to me, and flopped back into the couch. The movement raised a cloud of dust, making me sneeze.
There wasn't much light in the living room. It was still very late at night (or very early in the morning), and this area of Brockton Bay had been without streetlights for months now. Even with the curtains drawn over the windows, we didn't want to risk using the flashlights. Instead, Vicky was running her shield actively, like a human glowstick. The soft golden glow shed just enough light to see by.
We'd taken our attackers' 'advice' and found a deserted apartment to spend the night in. I'd scoped it out first - the piles of old mail and thick coating of dust on everything suggested that it had been empty for a while. As Victoria applied the butterfly stitches, I found myself idly wondering about the family that had lived here. There were a few pictures lying around, showing a young man, his pretty wife, and an ugly adorable baby. Where were they now? Had they just upped and left? It had been happening a lot in Brockton Bay. We were too close to the exclusion zones here, and not as big or important as Boston or Providence. People were looking for ways out.
I was shaken from my reverie when Victoria grabbed my shoulder.
"Huh?" I said, just realizing the she'd been speaking.
"I said I'm all done. How're you feeling?" She looked at me, eyebrows furrowed with worry.
"Better, I think," I said, sitting up. "I've still got a killer headache."
"Here." She handed me a paracetamol tablet and a bottle of water. I downed it, grimacing as the movement sent a jab of pain through my head.
Job done, Victoria flopped down on the couch beside me.
"What happened?" I asked quietly, "After I was knocked out?"
She sighed. "I was still fighting the ghost bitch when the other one attacked me." She shuddered in disgust. "She used those creepy blood tentacles. I think she was trying to suffocate me, but it didn't work. This shield thing is pretty badass, huh?"
"It is," I said, with a small smile.
"Anyway, that's when she brought you out. You were… walking. Like a puppet. Your eyes were closed, your face was drenched in blood. I thought…" She swallowed, visibly shaken.
I took her hand in mine. "I'm fine, Vicky. A little banged up, but I'm okay."
She gave my hand a squeeze. "Yeah. Anyway, that's when I surrendered. You woke up about ten minutes later."
We sat in silence for a few minutes. I pulled out the burner phone, and placed it on the table in front of us. We stared at it. The adrenalin had worn off, and now I was just tired. Tired and angry - more at myself than anyone else. I glanced sideways at Victoria, and saw that her face was set into a thunderous expression. This morning I'd been so confident, and now that confidence had been shattered. I felt drained. After a while I found myself almost drifting off, and was startled awake when Victoria finally spoke.
"Okay," she began. "So. Where do we go from here?"
I shook myself awake. We had to deal with this now. "We can still run," I said thoughtfully. "If we leave now, we can be out of the city and miles away by tomorrow. They'd never find us."
"True," she replied, "but should we?"
"These people are dangerous."
"Our whole lives are going to be dangerous, Taylor. And we do need the money. Twenty thousand dollars! We could… we could buy a car!"
"You can fly, Vicky."
She looked startled for a second. A small smile crept onto my face, and then we both burst into giggles. I felt a little bit of worry drain away.
"Oh yeah, forgot about that. But think about it. Whatever we decide to do, wherever we go, that sort of money would be useful to have."
I thought about it.
"You're right," I said slowly. "The money would be useful. The question is, can we trust those psychopaths not to screw us?"
She was silent for a moment.
"No."
"No," I agreed. "You heard what they said. It's a dog eat dog world."
"You're saying we should cut and run, then?"
"Not quite," I said. In the back of my mind, something was starting to take shape. A nascent idea. "They offered us twenty thousand. How much do you think they're really making off this job?"
"Probably substantially more," Victoria said thoughtfully. She shot me a sharp look, meeting my eyes. "What're you saying?"
"I'm not saying anything!" I said, my eyes narrowing. "I'm just asking questions. They mentioned a client. Who? What is it that we're supposed to be stealing anyway? It must be pretty valuable. Actually, I guess I'm saying that maybe we need some more information."
Vicky stared at me. Slowly, the corner of her lips curled upward into a smile. It wasn't a pleasant smile. It was a smile that promised pain. It mirrored my own. "And once we have more information?"
"We bite back."
Maybe it was just the headache pill taking effect, but my head was suddenly feeling a lot clearer. I turned to face Victoria, pulling my legs up onto the couch. Vicky leaned back against the other end, hugging her knees.
"We need a plan. We need to be ready for anything they try. Let's start with their powers - what did you notice?"
"Well, firstly, ghost bitch isn't completely untouchable when she goes insubstantial - it's more like a gaseous state. I think it hurt her when I punched through - or at least, she had trouble pulling back together for a couple of seconds."
"A gaseous state, huh?" An idea started taking shape in my mind. "Do you think she'd be affected by aerosols? Something like pepper spray?"
"Maybe," Victoria said, frowning, "but you'd have to get up close to use it, and she's quick with that crossbow. That reminds me, she can phase her bolts too - she was shooting at me through things. Still didn't get through my shield."
I raised my eyebrows, impressed. "Well, that's useful. You're basically invulnerable to her."
"Hmm, I don't actually know what my shield won't stop. I'm not looking forward to finding that out the hard way. But ghost-arrows, yeah, looks like it can handle them. What about Crimson, what happened there?"
"Blood manipulation, and with pretty fine control, I think. She was also tracking us with a sensory ability - she can see blood, or circulatory systems, or something. Not sure what the range was, it might be greater than mine."
"And then there's the blood-puppet thing."
"Yeah, that too," I said, shifting uncomfortably. Thinking about it made my skin crawl. "I'm not entirely sure how that works."
"Line of sight?"
"It might be," I said. I thought back, trying to remember the last moments before I passed out. "Actually, I don't think so. She could see me before I fired the gun, but didn't mess with my body until after…" I shuddered. "Until after she 'drowned' me in it." I was definitely going to have nightmares about that. "I think she had to get it into my bloodstream. Like an infection." It was funny, I wouldn't even blink at being covered in bugs any more, but this made me feel like throwing up. It wasn't cold, but a shiver went down my spine. "As long as she can control me, I'm a liability."
Victoria looked at me, concerned. "It must wear off, right?"
"Couldn't say. Maybe… maybe it only works as long as her blood is in me. How long do blood cells last before being replaced?"
She shrugged glumly. "Not sure. I think they say you have to wait 12 weeks between blood donations; that's how long it takes your body to regenerate the stuff. We can look it up."
"Fuck," I swore. "Even if it does wear off, that's not good. In a fight, I'd have to stay out of range and take her out fast, or I'm dead."
"Actually, there might be another way." Something seemed to have occur to Victoria, and she brightened. Literally - I noticed the light of her shield getting stronger. "Crimson tried to puppet me too, but my shield stopped her."
"And you can extend your shield." I felt a burst of optimism. "But we can't be sure it'll protect me if I'm already infected," I concluded with a grimace.
"Hey," said Vicky, noticing my glum expression, "It's an idea. We've got a picture of their capabilities now. We're not going to be taken by surprise again."
We continued bouncing ideas and plans back and forth for a while. Crimson and Spectre were dangerous, and had proved it to us the hard way. We could learn from that, learn from them. We had the potential. We had little to lose, and everything to gain, and in a way that made us even more dangerous.
It wasn't long before the conversation began wandering way off topic. We needed the release. We talked about the future. We avoided the past. We laughed about what Emma and the rest must be thinking right now. They were probably safe in bed in their little ticky tacky houses. Tomorrow, they'd wake up and go to school, and the hallways would be full of whispered rumours… 'Gosh,' they'd say, 'I always knew there was something off about those two!'. Emma would be all sniffles and teary eyes, cradling her broken arm. The social climbers would take the opportunity to fawn over her, doing everything short of fellating her for a chance to join her posse.
The image made us both crack up, and soon we were sprawled out on the floor, weak with laughter. In a moment of clarity, I reflected on what my life was going to be like now. The things we'd been discussing, the plans we were making… it was life and death stuff.
School's out forever, Taylor!
This was a complete break from the mundane reality I'd known for all my life. It was scary, and liberating at the same time. A few short hours ago, everything had gone sideways, and my reaction had been to say 'Screw it!' We could have died. But we hadn't! I glanced at Vicky, and saw the same wild happiness I was feeling reflected in her eyes.
It was… indescribable, to just be able to talk openly with someone like this. It might sound pathetic, but I hadn't had a friend, a real friend in a long time. I felt like I'd gotten to know Vicky better in the last few hours than in the previous year that we'd known each other. I wasn't sure when the exhaustion finally caught up with me. Despite everything that had happened, the last thing I remembered before drifting off was feeling safe, for the first time in a long while.
When I woke up, there was something soft and warm under me. Blinking the sleep from my eyes, I sat up, lifting my head from Vicky's shoulder slowly so I wouldn't wake her. Watery light filtered into the room, muffled by the curtains. I glanced at my watch. It was a quarter to eight. I slipped out from under the military blanket, taking care not to pull it off Victoria. As I stood up, sore muscles stretched awkwardly. Shivering slightly in the chilly morning air, I ran a quick inspection of my range and found nothing suspicious.
I heard movement behind me and turned to see Victoria blinking sleepily.
"Morning," she mumbled, stifling a yawn. "Sleep well?"
"Yeah, surprisingly."
She was about to say something when her stomach grumbled audibly, eliciting a grin from me. "Well, I guess we should see about breakfast then," I said.
"Mhm. Those power bars really weren't enough last night. Wow, I can't believe the last meal I ate was a crappy Winslow cafeteria lunch."
I laughed. "We're not that far from the boardwalk. I was thinking of stepping out to get some food. Maybe pickup some other stuff too, like clothes for you."
"By yourself? Are you sure that's a good idea?" she asked, concerned.
I shrugged. "I'd rather keep the supplies we have for an emergency. There won't be many people around right now, and even if they started circulating both our pictures last night, I'm pretty generic looking. If I put on a sweatshirt and tie my hair back, I don't think anyone will recognize me."
The blessing of being neither eye-catchingly pretty, nor eye-catchingly ugly. I was fairly confident that I could slip by unnoticed. The most recent picture they'd have been able to find of me was my blurry high school ID photo, taken nearly a year ago.
"It's risky," Victoria said, looking uncomfortable.
"I'll be keeping an eye on anyone nearby, don't worry. Twenty minutes, tops."
She relented. "Okay. But if you aren't back in twenty minutes, I'm coming after you."
I pulled on an large grey sweatshirt, tied my hair back into a ponytail, and pulled the hood up. I grabbed a wad of cash, and Victoria wrote down a couple of things she needed. With a wave, I stepped out into another glorious day in Brockton Bay.
There was stiff breeze blowing in from the sea, but I was warm enough with the sweatshirt wrapped around me. I looked up and down the deserted street before taking off south-east, towards the boardwalk. I scanned the buildings as I went, placing tracking bugs on anyone moving in the same direction as me. In less than five minutes, I was at the boardwalk.
I stepped over to the railing that lined it, and took a moment to look out to the ocean beyond. The boardwalk was nice enough, but there was a reason it raised promenade. The sand below was not a place for frolicking in the sun. Dreary grey waves lapped at a dreary grey beach. Seagulls hopped between piles of garbage and discarded needles, picking at fish carcasses. I inhaled deeply, taking in the sea air. It wasn't a particularly nice smell - salty, with an undertone of rotting seaweed - but it was a familiar one. Comforting, in its own way. It reminded me of a simpler time, of summer days and ice cream.
About a hundred metres down, a wharf jutted out into the Atlantic Ocean. There, at least, an effort had been made to keep the beach presentable. At the foot of the wharf, a black obelisk speared the sky. The Memorial Pillar. It was a scaled down replica of the one in Washington. The emblem at its top - a silhouette of the old Capitol Building - was just catching the first rays of the sun, the gold leaf shining brilliantly. There was a list of names below it, which I couldn't make out from here.
Glancing around casually, I started down the boardwalk towards the shops. It was practically deserted, other than the odd retail worker opening shop for the day. I kept my head down, avoiding eye contact. No one paid me a second glance.
I went to a convenience store first - I needed to pick up pepper spray. It said something about Brockton Bay that I could find pepper spray in a convenience store. I also picked up a six-pack of bottled water, two toothbrushes, toothpaste, and a packet of black hair dye. Next, I headed to a thrift store. Vicky had written down her measurements for me, so I picked out a couple of pairs of jeans, some T-shirts, and a few sets of underwear for her. Finally, I made my way to a breakfast place, where $12 got me scrambled eggs, a few rashers of bacon, and a stack of pancakes, all stuffed into a couple of takeout containers.
A glance at my watch told me that Victoria would be expecting me back in another ten minutes. As I started back towards the apartment, I couldn't help slowing down as I passed the Memorial Pillar again.
I wondered what Victoria felt when she saw it. Would she want her parents names up there? In a very real way, they had been victims too. I wondered what she remembered of that day. I certainly didn't remember it. All my memories of that time were muddled and chaotic. I was six years old, my mother had disappeared, and my father had shut down. I could only imagine what it had been like for her.
It had been a hellish time for the whole city. The Ellisburg crisis had gone from catastrophic to apocalyptic, and refugees were flooding in from Massachusetts and New York. The infestation had reached as far south as Albany, and there were crazy rumours flying around that the government was thinking of abandoning the entire north-east. People were fleeing in boats, trying to head south.
In the midst of it all, Congress had pushed through the first of the regulation acts. Maybe it was desperation, and fear. The army was in disarray, and the bombing campaigns had only made things worse. Maybe they thought it was necessary, the only way they'd contain the infestation. The only way they'd stop it happening again.
They were the traitors, I thought, a hard knot of anger was forming in my stomach. They used an atrocity to justify their hate.
Sarah Pelham - Vicky's aunt - had been in Washington that day. She'd left the front lines for a day to be there, protesting alongside a hundred other independent capes. Inside, the President was addressing an emergency session of Congress. There were videos of the event. The protestors had been outside the Capitol, less than a hundred meters away, when it fractured.
It hadn't been the first act of parahuman terror in the US. It wasn't even the most deadly - the Ellisburg crisis had already claimed over a million lives. But it had been devastating to the country. Two hundred and ninety-one Congressmen, sixty-seven Senators, and the President of the United States had died that day.
Lady Photon had flown back to Brockton Bay. New Wave had released a statement denouncing the act of terrorism, but refusing to comply with any registration or enlistment act. In a few hours, they were being castigated by the media. As leaders of the protests, they were accused of being complicit in the attack, of harbouring terrorists. The public had called for blood. The PSD had delivered.
I tried to shake the dark thoughts from my mind as I walked. The past was the past. We had the rest of our lives to make them pay. I sped up my pace - it would start getting busy soon, and I didn't want to risk being outside for too long. When I got back to the apartment, I entered to find Victoria hovering anxiously by the door.
"No problems?"
"Nope. Here, I got you clothes and stuff."
I put the food down on the coffee table and handed her the bag full of clothes from the thrift store. While she went through the stuff, I opened one of the takeout containers. The scent of greasy, artery clogging breakfast food hit me, and my stomach did backflips in anticipation. I hadn't realized how hungry I was until just now. I grabbed a plastic fork and started to dig in.
"Thank you," she said, earnestly. "Umm, I don't have any money yet…"
I looked at her, confused. "Hmm?"
She blushed bright red. "To, uhh, pay you back."
For a moment I looked at her like she'd grown a second head. Then I was overcome with giggles, and half chewed scrambled eggs sprayed out of my mouth.
"Oh god, sorry!" I swallowed the next mouthful before I could embarrass myself further. "Vicky, you don't have to pay me back. It's our money, okay?"
For some reason, this only made her blush brighter.
"Here," I said, shoving the stack of pancakes at her. "Eat."
She took a bite and an expression of bliss rolled across her face. "I don't think anything has ever tasted so good in my life."
"Agreed."
For a few minutes, the only noises were the sounds of us stuffing our faces. Victoria seemed to have regained her composure by the time we were done. She flopped back onto the couch beside me, sighing with pleasure.
"Hey, I almost forgot. Have you thought of a name yet?"
"I've got a couple of ideas," I said reluctantly, "but nothing really seems to fit." For some reason it felt really weird to be picking a name for others to call me by.
"Let's hear them!" Victoria seemed a lot more enthusiastic about it.
"Okay," I said, relenting. "There's the obvious ones like Swarm, or Stinger, but they're both sort of… meh."
"Meh, I agree."
"Another one I though of was 'Myriad'. It's more abstract, doesn't give my power away."
"Hmm, I suppose that works. Y'know, I've always been a fan of the mythological theme myself. We could match!"
I rolled my eyes, laughing. "Really? I'd never have guessed, 'Nike'."
"Do you want to hear my suggestions or not?" she asked, pouting.
"Sorry, go on."
"Well, Mellona was a Roman goddess of bees and honey, and it's a really pretty name. If you want to go Egyptian there's Serket and Khepri - scorpions and scarab beetles respectively, those are more immediately intimidating."
I scrunched up my face in mock disgust. "Eww, why would I want a dung beetle as my signature creature?"
"They're pretty cool, actually! The ancient Egyptians considered them sacred. According to legend, Khepri rolled the sun across the sky, just like scarab beetles roll balls of dung."
"You know what, you are actually a huge nerd."
"Hey-"
Our conversation was interrupted by the buzz of a vibrating cell phone. The burner phone that I had placed in the coffee table the night before had just received a message. For a second, Victoria and I locked eyes, both wearing the same look of apprehension. I reached out and grabbed the phone, flipping it open.
/6pm warehouse frm last night. come prepared to hit the road./
I looked at Victoria. "Last chance. We're doing this?"
She nodded firmly. "We're doing this."
/see you there./
"Well then, let's get ready."
