If I hadn't grown up in Brockton Bay, I probably would've never come to like it. It wasn't beautiful, or pleasant, or comfortable. But if you asked the older Brocktonites, they might boast about the tenacity of the place. Maybe it didn't bounce back, but it held on. It survived its villains, its economy, and in another world, it survived three different S-class threats, then thrived until the moment the world ended. The city was tenacious about its inhabitants too. For me and many others, leaving had never really been an option.

By all rights, I shouldn't like it. But growing up here had made me the kind of person for whom Brockton Bay was enough. It was big enough to have everything I wanted out of a city, and it was quiet enough I could go for a run and meet no one. That was one of the things I'd always unambiguously liked. The early mornings, when I had the entire city to myself.

Made you wonder if I'd always had the makings of a warlord.

Lying on a couch in my temporary base, lit by moonlight through broken windows, I sighed. No. What I'd liked was the peace and calm, not some delusion of owning the city. It was a stupid attempt to convince myself I could do this again. To turn this city around by force. To hold it, defend it against all comers, to be prepared for enemies who came at me through the people I called mine.

Stupid, maybe, to get second thoughts on the night I'd step out into the open. The doubt had been there before, but I'd thrown myself into my preparations, planning and helping as much as I could while staying under the radar. Maybe I'd just wanted to prove I could still be relevant. That I would be more than the team tailor, occasionally brought out to weave up some equipment. That might've been how I'd use a projection with my powers.

Damn tinkers. Making my life more complicated, even when it's me.

I rose to my feet and paced around the living room. The house I'd occupied was a vacant residence, all crumbling brick and cracked plaster, more termite nest than wall in some places. My bugs had cleaned the place, I'd patched up some abandoned furniture with silk, but unless I counted my brief time in the shelters... I'd never worked with less. It didn't inspire confidence.

You'd think experience would make it easier. It didn't. Heck, I barely understood how it ever got so far last time. I'd been entangled in it – making up for past failures, working toward future goals, protecting people the best I could. At some point I'd realized what needed doing, so I did it, and I'd kept doing it because there wasn't anyone I trusted to do better.

All of that was less intense now. I had no momentum yet, no commitment. Less guilt to drive me forward. No goal as clear as saving Dinah. And if I had to be honest, it'd been a hell of a lot easier to sympathize with strangers when they were victims who lost everything to Leviathan. The people who needed help now were drunks and addicts. The same people I'd chased out when they'd worn Merchant armbands. It created room for hesitation.

I did still want to help. Revitalize the city somehow. But the stupid thing was, even knowing how things turned out, how I'd felt about it, what I became to move forward? I wasn't sure what I'd do different. I'd been successful, hadn't I? Power, money, prestige, respect, my goals nominally achieved. But I hadn't felt good about it. There had been bright spots, but I hadn't been happy. I'd done horrible things and this fucked-up world had rewarded me.

In the end, had 'Skitter' done more good than bad? Depending on what I counted, how much credit and blame I took for events I'd helped set in motion, maybe I came out ahead. Maybe. But if I looked at what had happened to Dinah, to Brian, to the people Mannequin and Burnscar killed because they were mine... my answer to that question wasn't yes. I wasn't rational enough to make it into math, and if I was, I had to acknowledge a lot of the good I'd done was built on Coil's resources. I didn't doubt he had ruined lives to get his operations to where they were.

But if I didn't do this, what else did I have? What else was I allowed? It wasn't like I could go back to being Taylor Hebert – this world already had someone filling those shoes. Dad didn't even know I existed. I dropped back into the crappy couch in my empty home. Fitting, really. I'd abandoned him, over and over. Made perfect sense I'd eventually stop being his daughter. Fuck.

My power chose that moment to expand, stretching a block in every direction, which I grasped onto for a distraction. In the basement back at home... at my dad's house, a caterpillar recorded the time and exact distance, while I processed information from the newly-controlled bugs. Underground worms, ants on surfaces, bugs inside walls and dark corners. It didn't take more than a moment to register everything and everyone in my newest slice of territory. The invasiveness stopped bothering me a long time ago.

It wasn't because of stress, or feeling trapped, or whatever my passenger had originally given me extra range for. This was how my power worked now. Approximately every hour, it grew. Outward or inward, in breadth or depth. Prioritizing raw range gave me a little over three hundred feet each expansion, more or less depending on metrics I hadn't found yet. Three hundred forty just now.

It sounded good, a growing power. So far it'd just been an exercise in frustration. It was fragile; if I moved too much, I lost huge chunks of progress. If I shunted my body in that not all here state, or if I was swapped out, I lost it all. And it was slow. An extra block of range for every hour I stayed in place? I could cover more ground by walking. It needed almost prohibitive amounts of time to be useful, and even then it felt specialized for just one thing.

Territory creation.

It had taken me eighty-six hours to cover the northern half of Brockton Bay.

From the forest to the bay, I was there. Biting stems and chewing leaves, drinking from raindrops and livestock, all sweet to my senses. My muscles contracted to shake off the winter chill as simple brains shook off the torpor of hibernation. I ate and was eaten, crawled as crabs, swam as krill. My power had never been this vast.

I'd never felt so small.

I'd kept my attention away from them, but now, I looked in on the Undersiders. Bugs brushed by Rachel and the dogs she was tending to. I kept more distance from Lisa, who was doing something on her laptop. Two of my favorite people in the world. They wouldn't recognize me if I passed them in the street.

Regent… I'd expected him to be playing video games, but he was in his room, sketching. I couldn't recall if I'd ever seen him doing it before. What made him quit? The superficial laziness? The part of him that just couldn't care? Or something deeper and truer, the core I'd only ever caught a glimpse of?

I didn't know how to describe the emptiness I felt. Nostalgia, a yearning for something I could tell was right there and also beyond my grasp. Regrets I could never address in the way I wanted.

My senses lingered on Rachel and Lisa. Rachel, I might be able to rebuild a friendship with. It wouldn't be easy, it wouldn't be the same, but I remembered the steps. Lisa though? I wasn't so sure. I wasn't trapped this time around, or I was, but not in a comparable sense. Even if I brought her to my side when I could afford to, it'd be a different dynamic. How much would Lisa come to like a 'Skitter' she wasn't responsible for?

I exhaled slowly. Fine then.

No goodbyes. Right, Lisa?

I turned away before her power could notice me.

I'd told Taylor, the human Taylor, that capes were chain reactions waiting to happen. When I first attacked Lung, I paved the way for the Empire. Bakuda, left with no reputation and a gang barely loyal to her, escalated. Implanted bombs, and her terrorism campaign after she failed to kill us – killing forty-three and debilitating dozens more for life in exchange. Once we dealt with the gang war that followed, Coil had to choose between enacting his plans or letting the Empire capitalize on the ABB's downfall, and he'd taken away their every reason to hold back. I remembered Purity flattening buildings. They hadn't all been empty.

None of that was my fault, not even by a stretch, but I'd played a role. For close to a month, I'd managed to ignore that, my fraction of the responsibility, the faceless strangers hurt by my actions. Until Coil gave them the face of a drugged-up little girl.

I wasn't going down that road again. I was going to be damn careful about where I was going. This entire situation wasn't a second chance, not even one third of one, but it had happened, so we had to make the most of it. If that meant I had to move slower than I liked, maybe that was what I needed. A different path.

I'd always functioned best with a goal, and right now, that goal was turning this city around. It was both a goal in itself and a foundation for everything that came after. Poverty wasn't a problem my powers gave me an obvious way to fix, but before we could even start to try, there was one glaring obstacle.

Coil. Calvert. If it weren't for him, this would be simple. Not easy, but simple. Aside from everything the man could do himself, he had powerful eyes on him. What would happen if someone took him out this early? Would Cauldron write off their experiment? Would they replace him with someone stronger, someone I knew nothing about? Would Contessa even let things get that far? I only had a vague recollection of her, barely a memory of a dream, but I didn't believe for a second we hadn't already registered to a power as strong as hers. So why hadn't she done anything yet?

There were too many questions I couldn't answer, so I'd act on what I knew instead. Last time, Cauldron had accepted a replacement for Coil as ruler of the city. This time it won't be the Undersiders.

First step, a reputation. Cape life revolved around it, enough to consider it a power on its own. Fear deterred attacks, gave credibility to intimidation and bluffs. Respect fostered cooperation, and meant more influence within that cooperation. Prestige attracted recruits and helped ensure loyalty. Even in fights, reputation affected opponents, shaped their expectations, could be used to create weak spots I could slip bugs inside.

It made people listen.

Last time, my reputation had been built gradually, mostly in the process of resolving crises and helping people. Right now, the gangs hadn't gone to war yet. Leviathan hadn't wrecked the city. There was rape and there was murder, both of which I stopped, but I could do very little to actually help. I had no way to give proper homes to people living in squalid conditions. I didn't have the time or skill to help addicts, couldn't threaten parents into loving their children, didn't have the resources to cure disease. I could do something about the hungry, but they'd probably object, and putting bugs inside people by force was generally something I saved for enemies.

With the one human body in my swarm, I sighed. I'd have to pick fights instead. Frustrating, how much easier that was.

My swarm scattered throughout the Docks and the north end, feeding me a million viewpoints every second. The city wasn't the humid breeding ground Leviathan had made it, but we had warm enough winters, and my range gave me bugs to spare.

I found Über and Leet, racing through the streets in configurations of scrap I hesitated to call cars, vandalizing other vehicles they passed by. No doubt a tribute to some game. I didn't really care.

Bugs mapped the streets ahead, blocked off likely routes with swarms dense enough to seem solid walls. When the duo chose to slow down instead of plunge through, another wall swooped in to cut off their retreat. In the time they took to get out of their buggies and draw their guns, spiders webbed up inner mechanisms, beetles chewed through wires and whatever else they could damage. While the duo fumbled with broken buttons and triggers, I painted the rust of their vehicles black with widows.

One step ahead each time. It didn't help my reputation to let the likes of Über and Leet struggle, and I'd given them just enough forewarning it didn't feel like a sucker punch.

I condensed the blockades into human shapes. Swarms of bugs were something you could find if you went looking, but an uncannily humanoid army that couldn't be hurt with any conventional weapon, that threatened immense agony if it reached you? That was memorable. It was something people would talk about, and admit losing against.

Über stood straight, his arms crossed, said something I ignored. I wasn't going to broadcast my bug senses to the world this early. Leet kept trying to pull apart his gun until I gave him a taste of what I could do – a queen-sized hornet where he could literally taste it. A clone pointed the two at a street sign and I left them webbed to it. A nearby resident was already calling the PRT.

Were Über and Leet important in the scheme of things? Did their removal really help anyone besides me? Probably not. But they were more harm than help and I could remove them without consequence. It was that simple.

As an afterthought, I merged my clones into a giant and had it engulf their flying camera.

Next. The Merchants.

It was still bizarre to see them as they were now. The Merchants of my memories were an environment, humanity at its worst, caught up in depravity and desperation. An oppressive fear and anger that made it hard to breathe. The Merchants of today were bums, and aside from some posturing, practically non-violent. A far cry from the gang I'd seen forcibly shooting up kids with cocaine.

Still. You didn't wait for a tumor to grow.

Squealer was in her workshop with a few guards, her trashy clothing protecting nothing. Two neighborhoods south-west, Skidmark was in the tourist shop I'd scouted out before, speaking to some subordinates. And then, with minimal fuss, they were buried in bugs.

Squealer howled as she tried to claw open a webbed-shut door to one of her vehicles. Skidmark tried to evade the bugs by using his power on his coat. Tried. I wasn't sure what he was expecting to happen. My bugs found skin and bit and tore and stung, hurting but holding back their venom. Rider or Assassin could get there in time, but I wasn't going to cut my evening short to jab an EpiPen into Skidmark.

Some of the underlings were brave – or high – enough to try and save their bosses from buzzing masses of pain, but most of the unpowered Merchants fled. Wasp-clones violently discouraged those who tried filching drugs or cash in the chaos.

Fifty city blocks away, I poured some tea from a thermos.

The third Merchant cape was watching television at home. I let him be. Not the kind of villain worth violating the code over. I needed people to work with me, not stab me in the back, or decide I was an enemy before we ever spoke. Fear was useful, paranoia wasn't. As long as capes behaved, their civilian identities would be safe from me.

An absent thought coordinated my bugs to abscond with the Merchants' money. No sense being impractical.

Leaving those bugs on autopilot, I moved on, forming a swarm-clone near one of the independent villains I hadn't heard of in my previous world. I intended to warn her off, but the clone was promptly blasted with some kind of pinpoint lightning, frying one bug directly, and a handful more from the heat. I swarmed her with the remainder.

There would come a time when I could be forgiving without being weak. I wasn't there yet.

And, I had to admit I wasn't all that inclined to be generous with unfamiliar independents. They hadn't been around last time, and I doubted they'd all been victims of cape turnover. Had they given up on the city during the gang war? Had they fled when the sirens sounded?

In the meantime, Velocity had arrived where I'd left Über and Leet. Apparently Über's power let him Houdini his way out of constraints, so now Velocity, a very fit man in a skin-tight costume, was beating up Über, a very fit man who'd escaped my web by leaving his clothes behind.

I considered reactivating Leet's flying camera. A whim inspired by the Regent and Imp in my memories, maybe. I could rationalize it as an attempt to confuse people about my personality... but no. There were too many reasons not to, and it was mean-spirited besides.

As I waited for more heroes to arrive, I let my attention wander over the rest of my range. I had a couple dozen eyes on Trainwreck, but I was counting on the police sirens to keep him at home tonight. The Undersiders. No change. Lung and Oni Lee... accounted for. My range reached into downtown a fair distance, but I walled it off from my conscious attention. If I looked, I'd see, I'd act, and I couldn't afford that yet. I could act with impunity in the north because the major gangs would let me – that wasn't true for downtown.

I'd once lain in ambush, watching the Nine cut through a crowd of innocents, because the alternative was suicide by Slaughterhouse. I'd almost call my current inaction harder. Intellectually, I knew provoking Coil and the Empire would set off events that innocents would get caught up in. Emotionally, it felt like a betrayal of who I was. I could tell myself that was a good thing, that it was change, a more careful road, but when I thought of the people the Empire was probably victimizing right now, it didn't feel convincing. Was that selfish of me? Wasn't it?

I turned my attention away. On a rooftop near the Merchant base, the Protectorate had seen the swarm-clone I'd left there to be found. Time to make my introductions.

Contrary to my expectations, they took their time. Assault arrived first, then Battery, but they busied themselves with the Merchants rather than approach my clone. Maybe I shouldn't have expected them to confront an unknown power as readily as Armsmaster. I could fly my swarm down, or even create a second body near them... but I'd be yielding to them, in a small way. It didn't fit the narrative, and more importantly, I didn't want to.

I spent my time redistributing bugs until a third cape arrived on a motorcycle. It surprised me when my bugs flew into a scarf and fatigues where I expected a helmet and armor. Some things did change.

Together, the three heroes made their way onto my rooftop, bugs on their shoes and elbows letting me track their movement. I couldn't tell if Assault allowed it or if his power didn't notice. Miss Militia strode toward my clone, her power something small by her side, though I didn't doubt it was a thought away from being a flamethrower.

Meeting people I knew from before was conflicting sometimes. Vague memories of the future told me I'd come to genuinely like this woman, viewed her as an example. In my own experience, there was only a seed of that. The current Miss Militia was still stuck in the system, faithful to it, and no words from an upstart new independent would turn her away. If I was going to try, it'd have to be later.

"Hello?" she called. My bug-hearing was more reliable than I remembered it – I could somewhat make out her apprehension. "May we assume you have a way to communicate?"

"Yes," my bugs answered with a chirp and buzzing. I had my clone step aside, then point an 'arm' at its previous location, where a microphone lay on the roof. Not quite spy equipment, though small enough for the bigger members of my swarm to carry.

Battery backed off a few paces and reached up to her ear. "The bugs speak. They were hiding a small microphone."

A dozen blocks away, with Armsmaster at Squealer's workshop, a moth caught the other end of that conversation. "Controlled from another location then. Try to get him talking."

"Do you have a name we can call you?" Miss Militia asked, smoothly, no obvious sign of acting on an instruction.

It was a question I'd been thinking about. Skitter felt natural. I'd never liked it, but I'd made it mine, owned it. In many ways, I was more her than Taylor. But I couldn't go back. Couldn't and shouldn't. It wasn't some big symbolic gesture, but it felt like I should move on.

"Caster," my bugs said. I wasn't happy about accepting a name assigned to me by a power I hated, but choosing something else... frankly, it felt pointless. An impressive name didn't create a reputation, a reputation made a name impressive. Caster had enough possible meanings. Once I had some renown, others would do the explaining for me.

"Caster," Miss Militia repeated. "I'm not familiar with the name. A newcomer, or new to this city?"

I shook my head, fireflies flashing to highlight the movement. Denial or refusal to answer – I'd let them decide.

She waited to see if more information was forthcoming, and quietly exhaled when there wasn't. "I'd like to ask you to accompany us to our base. We're assuming what you did tonight was done with good intentions, but I believe we'd all benefit from a conversation in a more leisurely setting. Cape affairs can be volatile. Particularly for someone with your apparent capabilities."

"No." I wondered how they'd interpret my terse language. Antipathy? A limitation of my bug speech?

A slight pause. "Will you tell us why?"

"Power reasons. Personal reasons." I made some adjustments to my swarm. "And more importantly, I am not done."

Then, like a tidal wave crashing down on my territory, my bugs descended on the unpowered.

The dealers. The pimps. The enforcers. Traffickers of arms and drugs. The scattered gang businesses in my territory, down to the compounds on the very outskirts. Every local cog in the machine called organized crime, sparing only the insignificant. Bugs ambushed criminals in their workplaces, their homes, their beds, chased them out into the streets until web immobilized them. I raided caches, stashes, safes my bugs could open, and left the evidence on full display.

Considering my procedure, I doubted even half of my targets would end up in jail. But this wasn't intended as removal. This was a powerfully-worded suggestion. Behave. It was a warning for those who would carry on the Merchants' work, and a declaration of war against the ABB, hitting them where it hurt more than just Lung's pride. He likely would've challenged a new neighbor anyways; his reputation demanded it.

What this wasn't was Kaiser's problem. There would be no anti-bug alliance in Somer's Rock, and not just because Somer's Rock was now mine.

Back with my clone, the heroes were looking at their phones and listening to the PRT operator. They'd received eight, nine calls already. I imagined they could extrapolate to the hundreds of targets I was hitting.

"Caster, if this is your doing, stop." Miss Militia's words were rapid, her tone... worried perhaps, though it wouldn't be for me. Her power was a shotgun now. "I don't know what you intend to do, but acting on this scale, it demands reprisal. You're making enemies."

"No new ones."

"Wouldn't be so sure of that," Assault said. I didn't have enough experience with him to judge his voice. Could be jovial. Could be threatening.

"Is there a problem?" my bugs buzzed. "I acted at night to avoid scaring innocents. I caused minimal collateral damage, minimized chances of medical complications, and I'm positioned to help if they do happen. All my targets were reported to the police at least six hours ago. I should be within Griffin's extended policies for citizen's arrest on each individual count."

Of course those policies were designed to be flexible – if the PRT wanted to brand me a villain, they could. But they had an excuse if they didn't want to. Assassin had pointed me at some articles on vigilante policy, at capes who successfully walked that thin line, and I was hoping I could strike the right chord.

Acting on Assassin's knowledge wasn't entirely in my comfort zone, but I'd cope. She and I were firmly the same person on one count: we wanted people to cooperate. We wanted things to be fair, we wanted a system that functioned, we wanted a world that made sense. I'd have to be the world's biggest hypocrite if I couldn't trust a future version of myself at least a little.

Assault turned to Battery. "Dunno about you, but Caster here is sounding an awful lot like a villain who's read up on his rights."

"Her rights," I said.

"That's interesting, but I notice you're not correcting the rest."

In my own body, I exhaled slowly. Hero, villain. Hated those labels. So insufficient, inadequate. Words, Rachel might've said.

"I don't intend to be a villain." Though part of me was treating it as a matter of time. "And I don't intend to give you a reason to consider me one. I'll cooperate. But I don't subscribe to your brand of heroism. If that makes you want to go bug catching, bring a net next time."

Battery stepped toward my microphone, but stopped when Miss Militia raised her hand.

"Vigilantism," she said. Disappointment? "Not many start out as vigilantes, Caster. Most who consider themselves heroes at least start out trying to do the right thing in the right way. What should we make of you skipping past that?"

That I stopped believing in a 'right' way a long time ago. Irritating, that one of the most veteran heroes of the country could pretend things were as simple as right and wrong. I kept quiet though. Anything I said would be either pointlessly adversarial or weaken my position. My words wouldn't reach the heroes. I was nothing but one minor event in their very eventful career, a newcomer with a curiously big range and attitude, who wouldn't even meet them mask to mask. I wasn't someone they would listen to.

Not yet. Cycled back to reputation.

"I suppose I've put you in an awkward position by letting you find me. I'm not sure you're willing to just let me walk." Wherever Piggot was, I imagined she was thinking about how it looked if they let 'me' leave without even an attempted arrest. To the spectators in the street, it would look like tolerance. I wasn't sure if she was actually going to brand me a villain here and now, but I could nudge her in the other direction. "If it helps, my teammate intends to register our team with the PRT later this week."

"Your team," Miss Militia said. "Would this have anything to do with the people seen flying on the back of a gigantic insect last week?"

"Yes. Though they weren't who I had in mind."

The heroes shared glances between them. I could more or less follow their considerations, and they would mirror those of their Director. One problematic vigilante was easy to brand a villain, and in terms of their precious PR, it might be best if they did. But a small team of three or four new capes? They wouldn't burn that bridge so quickly. Some members might well be more reasonable than me.

Unfortunately for them, the other members were also me.

After some time, Miss Militia spoke. "I don't think you're giving us much choice in the matter."

"No." I started dispersing my clone, the bugs of my 'head' taking flight. "I suppose I'm not."

Then, because they would understand I was giving them a look at my hand, and because it was a card I didn't mind showing, I made a rat dash out of my bug-clone and scurry off with the microphone.