Vindication
Chapter Five
"Then they just talked for a bit until the girls on the dinosaurs rode off and the bug girl walked away."
Assault nodded. He prided himself on being good with kids, and this kid looked like he was about twelve—old enough to be afraid of capes, but young enough to pretend not to be. Skinny, dirty, and a little sickly, but that could describe anyone in the neighborhood these days.
No bug bites that he could see. Skitter was playing nice.
"What about her friend?" he asked. "The girl in the cape."
Surprisingly few capes wore capes, and that was one of the only things they knew about her. She hadn't been wearing a mask when she turned up in the hospital, but neither her civilian identity nor her cape identity was on record. No name, no past, hardly anything about her powers. She was a ghost.
The boy shrugged. "You sometimes see her on rooftops at night, but that's it."
Assault considered pressing him for more information, but decided against it. If he did, the kid might make up something he thought he wanted to hear instead of what he had really seen. He reached into his pocket and tossed him an energy bar and a ten dollar bill. "Thanks, kid. Take care of yourself."
The boy nodded absently and hurried off.
"So, it looks like they're still together," Battery said.
He glanced at her. "Hmm?"
"Skitter and the Undersiders. Armsmaster said that they separated before Leviathan, but maybe he was reading too much into it."
He shook his head. "No, they are definitely separate now. If they were on the same team, they would have met indoors and out of costume. Instead they picked a neutral area where either side could run if things got dicey. Skitter even had her new friend hiding in reserve."
Battery frowned. She was a great hero, far better than he was, but she didn't understand villains like he did. "If you say so."
"I do," he said brightly. He went over all the other things the boy had said. They weren't recruiting henchmen. They weren't running a protection racket either, at least not yet. The kid had heard from a friend of a friend that they had stopped a mugging a few days back, but Assault wasn't sure how reliable that was. "So now what? Honestly I was expecting one of them to show up by now to yell at us to get off their lawn, but ..."
The bugs around him began buzzing all as one. They rose up, forming a wide ring around the two of them, and then coalesced around a figure standing by the street corner.
Assault grinned. Speak of the devil. "Hey, Skitts," he said cheerfully. "We were just talking about you."
They each had a syringe of antivenom just in case Skitter decided to stop playing nice. Nothing for her capsaicin trick, though, but they would (probably) not die.
"State your business," she said, her swarm buzzing as she spoke to distort and amplify her voice. "And go."
She hadn't done that before. She hadn't worn her bugs like a cloak either, but villains tended to find ways to make themselves seem more impressive than they were. They were like cats in that way. And, like cats, villains tended to leave messes all over the place, destroyed things for fun, and expected everyone else to clean up after them.
He had no idea why Battery wanted one. He was more of a dog person himself. Dogs were fun.
"Alright," Assault said. "Straight to business. Your friend, the one you went to Boston with." That had taken them by surprise. The Boston division had started panicking a few days ago when two new capes had seemingly tried to kick off a gang war overnight. They had identified one of them as Brockton Bay's own Skitter just in time for the prodigal trucebreaker to return. "What's her name?'
Skitter stood silently for a moment as Battery shot him a glare. "What?"
"What's her name? I can't keep calling her Evil Jane Doe in my reports forever. It's already taken. It will save me a mountain of paperwork in the long run if you can give me her cape name."
He could almost hear Battery grinding her teeth, but as long as she didn't call him out, they were "maintaining a united front." That meant that he could get away with nearly anything for the next fifteen minutes. After that, Battery would have words for him, but makeup sex was not the negative reinforcement she thought it was, so it all worked out.
Besides, all they really needed to do here was stall.
"You have stated your business," Skitter buzzed. "Now go."
Dang it. Apparently she was no fun. Luckily for him, he had brought an expert in no fun.
"That's not what we're here for," Battery said, stepping forward. Her tone suggested that yes, there would be words after this, but they might end with a lonely couch instead of the more desirable alternative. "We're here to talk about what happened at the hospital last week. You've been a cape for what, a month? We give villains like you much more leeway than we should when you rob banks and fight in the streets, but that's because we need to count on you when the real monsters show up. Well, a real monster showed up. We want to know what happened."
Battery knew when to be hard and when to be soft. She knew when to throw the book at a villain, and when to give them a second chance. That was what made her a good hero.
But Skitter didn't bite. "I have nothing to say to you."
"That's not good enough, Skitter! You attacked a hospital in the middle of a truce, and we don't even know why. Talk to us, please, before ... before this goes any further than it already has."
Skitter stared at them, her body covered in so many bugs she was barely visible. "Don't pretend like you came here to talk."
Well, crap.
Battery sighed. The lines on her costume began to glow. "No," she admitted. "I guess we didn't."
This wasn't the plan. The plan was for them to make great big targets of themselves and then for their reserve teammate to hunt down Skitter's reserve teammate. On the other hand, they had expected Skitter to be the reserve teammate and for her friend to come out to talk. If they could take Skitter out fast, then ...
Battery launched herself across the empty lot at blinding speed and punched Skitter square in the face.
It should have ended there. The first strike should have knocked the villain out cold, and then her mystery friend would have had to face them alone—if she even showed up at all.
Instead, Skitter took the hit and remained standing. That should have been a red flag, but Battery usually pulled her punches. She used the rest of her charge to hit the girl in the stomach, knocking Skitter out of her swarm, into the air, and across the pavement.
She landed on her feet with catlike grace, and without all the bugs in the way, Assault could see her tattered, charcoal gray cape.
Well, double crap.
He sprang into action, but not before not-Skitter fired a chain that had been wrapped around her forearm at Battery. It coiled around her before she could react, so fast that Assault couldn't tell if it was just momentum or actual control. As Battery struggled, not-Skitter launched herself at her, punching her in the face with a crack so loud he could hear it.
He caught Battery before she hit the ground. She didn't seem conscious.
Triple crap.
"So," he said. "About that name ..."
He should have seen it from the start. He had already seen Skitter in person twice before, and although this girl had been covered in bugs and was wearing Skitter's mask, she was nearly a foot too short.
That meant Skitter was still in reserve. But if he could just keep this other girl still for half a moment, their own reserve member would ...
Right on cue, he saw something from the corner of his eye. Perching on a nearby rooftop, Shadow Stalker fired her crossbow.
The bolt shot through the air right on target—then missed. It didn't just miss, it changed direction in midair. The girl turned and jumped at least fifty feet into the air to pursue the Ward, leaving Assault behind.
WWW
It's not my fault, Shadow Stalker grumbled. She had been told to find Skitter, and she did. She had peeked into every dead end alleyway until the girl had walked out in broad daylight, swarming like an angry anthill. Then Shadow Stalker had to search all the nearby rooftops for the other one, only Skitter was the other one, and now she was right in Shadow Stalker's face after knocking the daylights out of Battery in no time flat.
She phased out of existence, letting the girl's fist go right through her. Wait, was she wearing Skitter's mask? Gross, but then again, the girl had already let Skitter cover her in bugs, so they were likely long past sharing costumes.
Kicking off the ground, she jumped backward into the air to get some distance, becoming solid long enough to fire her crossbow.
Big mistake. Some unseen force yanked at her, wrenching her crossbows free, sending her spare ammunition flying, even nearly ripping off her mask.
Alright. CQC it is. Honestly, she preferred it that way. It was more fun.
She leaped forward and aimed a flying kick at the girl's face. Idiot. The girl didn't even try to dodge.
Her foot connected with a satisfying impact as she became solid, but at the same time something stung her in the back. One of Skitter's bugs? She swatted at it as the girl stumbled backward, and one of her own tranquilizer bolts fell free.
No! No, no no! Damn it!
She went intangible, hoping that would slow the drug spreading through her.
It didn't work. Almost immediately she started to feel very ... sleepy.
WWW
Assault leaped to the top of the building, only to find Shadow Stalker lying unconscious at the villain's feet.
What the hell happened? He had only stopped for two seconds to set Battery down, and Shadow Stalker was already out of the fight. "Well, this is just a crap buffet, isn't it?"
The villain took a defensive posture. "Carry your two friends out of here and leave."
He laughed. "That is an incredibly generous offer. I appreciate it."
He didn't accept it, but he appreciated it. Had she taunted or threatened him he might have considered it, but there was something desperate in her tone now that she wasn't impersonating Skitter. She didn't want to fight him, and that meant that he could win.
On the other hand, how much effort did he want to put into his job today? With the city in the state it was, he had been pulling double shifts all week. If he had a chance to take the rest of the day off, shouldn't he ...
He blinked. That was weird. Where had the Monday blues come from? He loved his job. It let him punch people in the face and get paid for it.
He lunged at the girl and swung a fist at her. She anticipated it, dodged, and punched him in the chin. It tickled.
She backed away, realizing her mistake. For him, Newton's Third Law was more of a suggestion, and while there would be a reaction equal to her action, it wouldn't necessarily be opposite.
He charged again, siphoning off a bit of the kinetic energy she had given him, and this time his fist connected, knocking her off the rooftop. The impact rebounded back into himself, making him even stronger. It took him a while to build up, but after he got some momentum there wasn't a whole lot that could slow him down.
The girl twirled in the air and landed on her feet on the street below. He jumped after her, knowing that he could absorb the landing. What he didn't know was that Skitter had prepared a trap. The moment he touched down insects surged from the shadows, from wastebins, from discarded cans and cardboard boxes. In the blink of an eye the street was swarming with bugs, many of them taking on looming, humanoid shapes.
Well, that was just lovely. Instinctively he flailed his arms as the insects covered his skin and costume, and he did his best to squeeze his nose and mouth shut against the countless tiny legs.
The girl, on the other hand, dove right into a bug pile and came out covered in them just like when she had been impersonating Skitter. Assault launched himself at her to end the fight quickly and get the hell out of here, but as he came into contact, the girl dissolved into a swarm of bugs.
What?
No, he had hit a decoy. There were so many bugs in his face now that he couldn't keep track of what was what, he couldn't hear anything besides the buzzing. Maybe he should pull out. Maybe he should grab Battery and Shadow Stalker and—
There was a sharp pain in his back. It didn't feel too deep, but it came with more force than he had been prepared for. He spun around and took another swing at the girl, but she jumped back out of his reach. Okay, now he knew which one was real, so as long as he kept his eyes on her ...
As long as ...
God, I want to take a nap.
WWW
Taylor sat in their lair, keeping an eye on the heroes with her swarm as Vin returned.
"They're all down," Vin said, pulling off Taylor's mask. "I don't sense anyone else using powers nearby. Now what?"
The fight had gone perfectly. Vin had noticed the oncoming heroes before their arrival, and Taylor had been able to identify and plan for how to deal with them. The heroes would be back, though, and each time they did they'd be better prepared, better equipped, and have a better idea of what Vin could do.
How do we keep them from coming back?
"I thought about writing them a note," Taylor admitted. "You know, explain that what happened at the hospital was a misunderstanding, that we were just afraid and confused, looking for a way out."
Vin nodded. "They said they wanted to talk. I couldn't hold a conversation with them pretending to be you, but if you had gone instead ..."
"It wouldn't have worked." Taylor thought about how Shadow Stalker had nearly killed Brian before she had even joined the Undersiders, or how the Ward had put her in handcuffs in the mall at the first opportunity. If they wanted to talk the Protectorate might've sent Assault and Battery, but they wouldn't have brought a trigger happy psycho. "And a note won't do anything either." It wouldn't convince them to leave her alone. It would only make them see her as a scared little girl. An easy target. "We have to hurt them."
"What?"
If the Merchants, the Chosen, and the Pure are too dangerous for the Protectorate to go after, well, there's a nice little trucebreaker or two down the street they can scoop up if they need a good headline.
Tattletale had been right about that. The heroes had arrived only a day later. What else was she right about?
They need a win. And you? You're weak enough for them to handle.
She couldn't be weak. She couldn't be an easy target. She couldn't be the side that was afraid. Even if she was.
"We have to hurt them," she said again, standing up. "We have to make this cost them something, or else they'll just keep coming back."
Vin gave her a hard look. "I'm not going to kill someone who's unconscious."
Taylor's eyes widened. "No, of course not." That wouldn't work anyway. She needed reputation, not heat. "Tie them up and leave them dangling from a streetlamp."
"Okay," she said slowly. "Why?"
"To humiliate them. They need to know that if they attack us, they'll risk losing as publicly as possible. Trust me. Reputation means everything to these people."
Vin frowned, still not understanding, but she shrugged. "Sure."
"And Vin?" she said before she left. "Pretending to be weak and unimportant isn't going to work. Not with the heroes, not with Coil, not with anyone that matters."
"But we are weak. There's two of us against literal armies."
"Then we'll just have to fake it! We know too much for Coil to ignore us, and the heroes want an easy win." Just like Tattletale had said. "Looking weak isn't going to make them overlook us. It didn't today. It won't tomorrow."
No more being an easy target.
Vin held her gaze for a long moment, but in the end, it was Taylor who knew this world. Maybe things were different in Scadrial, but here the weak weren't ignored. They were hunted.
Just like high school.
"We won't be a thieving crew then," Vin said. "We won't be what I know. We'll be acting like a great house."
A great house? That seemed significant to Vin, but really it was just a matter of scale. Besides, the great houses had ruled Vin's world while the thieving crews had struggled to keep one step ahead of death.
"We'll need to start recruiting. I'll need your help with that." Taylor had rejected the idea of Mastering henchmen, but she couldn't think of any other way to create a show of strength. Besides, hadn't Vin always insisted that her power could only influence people?
That was a shallow rationalization and she knew it, but they didn't have a choice. Not anymore.
WWW
In the back of a PRT truck where Battery winced everytime they hit a bump in the craggy, potholed road, Assault decided to cheer her up.
"Though if you think about it," he said, "did we really lose?"
Battery shot him a glare. Her jaw wasn't broken, but there was a wide, purple bruise on it that made her not not want to talk.
Fortunately, he was fluent in glare. "Yeah, sure, we got beat up and knocked out." At least she had. He had been peacefully drugged, but he didn't want to rub that in her face. "And sure, now they have pictures of us tied up and hanging from a street light, but if you think about it, that was all Shadow Stalker's fault."
Shadow Stalker had ditched them as soon as she had woken up. Real team player.
Battery gave him an incredulous look, as though shocked that he would blame a troubled teen for the failure of two experienced, adult superheroes.
"I mean, I was knocked out with one of her tranquilizers, wasn't I?" She didn't seem convinced. "But that's beside the point. What did we lose? Sure, we didn't catch the bad guys, and sure, the cape in a cape who hangs out with Skitter bruised your beautiful face ..."
Battery winced.
"I'm not saying it looks bad or anything. Seriously, you look gorgeous. But again, besides that, what did we lose compared to everything we gained?"
Now she looked skeptical. Had they gained anything from that fiasco?
"Information!" he said, answering her unspoken question. "We've confirmed that Skitter broke up with her old team, and we know more about her new friend's powers. Flight and telekinesis."
She glared at him.
"Okay, we knew that before, but now we know more. When she flew away from me during the fight, I felt something push against my costume." Mostly around his belt and shoulder pads, but he had definitely felt something.
Battery's eyes widened, and she nodded. "When she flew at me," she said, mumbling her words, "I was pulled toward her. Flight. Telekinesis. They're connected."
He blinked. "I was right? Dang, I was just talking out of my perfectly chiseled ass!" He grinned at her. "What a day!"
She rolled her eyes, but he could tell her mood was lightening.
"And you know what else?" he said. "We get to name her now!"
She frowned, looking confused.
"If you fight an unnamed villain, you get to name them. Section B subsection F clause seven of the Hero's Guide to Heroism."
Battery shook her head.
"That is almost possibly a thing. Besides, 'the cape in a cape who hangs out with Skitter' would take up way too much space in the report. Let's see. She has no identity, no background, she can fly and move things with her mind, and she's dressed up like a haunted house extra."
"Not Ghost."
"Yeah, I'm sure that one's taken. How about ..."
WWW
Talor would have preferred that Vin do the talking. She was the one with the emotion powers, while Taylor was the awkward teenager who enjoyed public speaking as much as she enjoyed sticking her face in a blender.
But this was her world and her people. She understood them in a way Vin couldn't. She knew what they had been through just by living in Brockton Bay their whole lives, let alone the past week. And with Vin backing her up and influencing the crowd, they listened.
No, they did more than that. Her power alone demanded their attention, but with Vin helping her they hung on to her every word. They laughed, they cheered, they roared in anger as if on cue, and even though Vin wasn't hitting Taylor with her powers, she felt the passion of the crowd just the same. She had nothing to offer them, nothing to pay them with besides vague promises of protection, but when she was done she had dozens of men and women eager to be directed.
She didn't know what to do with dozens of people. She didn't know what to do with five, so she stalled. She had her ... henchmen? Minions? She had her helpers go through the neighborhood and make an accounting of the people in their territory and find out how many were there and what they needed.
She expected the answer to be "food" repeated a few hundred times, but by the time they were done she hoped to have something more substantial for her helpers to do. Instinctively she was certain that as soon as she stopped giving them orders, even if it was as simple as to come back tomorrow, they'd stop following her.
Taylor plopped down on her bed, a series of couch cushions with a reasonably clean sheet over them, and peeled off her mask. "Didn't you say that you needed to be subtle with your emotion powers? That anyone would notice they were being manipulated if you pushed them too hard?"
Vin took off her own mask and rolled up her cloak. "There's a lot more leeway with groups, something about a mob mentality. If everyone around them is acting in a certain way, they can blame their feelings on that instead of on Allomancy." She shrugged. "Breeze could explain it better, but I just know it works. Also, you promised to keep all the mosquitoes off of them, so you could have declared yourself to be their god and they might have gone along with it."
Taylor considered that, but she understood group psychology even less than she understood emotional manipulation. Heck, she had spent months designing her costume preparing to be a hero, and everyone she met while wearing it assumed she was a villain. That was after spending over a year not understanding how her bullies had managed to turn the entire school against her.
"Well, it certainly worked," she agreed. "Now we just need to figure out how to manage thirty-one henchmen, a few blocks of the city, and several hundred people."
Vin held up her hands. "We? Becoming a Great House was your idea. I couldn't manage a thieving crew on my own, let alone all this."
"Yeah, that's fair." She had let Vin take point for most of the fights they had been in, so it was only fair that she handled most of the administration.
So, what does everyone need? Food and clean water were at the top of the list. Shelter was important, and much of the housing was damaged. Medicine. Plumbing. Electricity. The city was hiring anyone who was able to work on reconstruction and clearing the wreckage. It would be a pretty dick move for the PRT to have the crews avoid her territory specifically because it was hers, so ... so they might. Maybe she was being overly cynical, but she expected nothing from strangers and even less from the heroes.
Ultimately, it all came down to money, in sums that she couldn't even have comprehended a year ago. She didn't want to form a protection racket, and the people she wanted to protect didn't have that kind of cash anyway. She wouldn't deal drugs either. Could the two of them rob a bank or something? That had been her first job with the Undersiders, but she doubted that even the banks had a lot of money on hand anymore. No one did, except for the other gangs ... which was a sure way to piss off the few factions left who weren't actively targeting her.
Maybe Lisa has something for me. She kept her phone off most of the time to conserve the battery, but when the screen lit up there was a single message waiting.
Hey, Taylor. Talked to the boss and got your old account unlocked in exchange for the armband. You should seriously treat yourself! There's over a quarter mil sitting there doing nothing!
p.s. Turns out your friend has a name now, courtesy of the PRT. Ask her what she thinks about Wraith.
WWW
A/n So what do you think of Wraith? I'm generally pretty lousy with cape names, but I'm fairly happy with it. Also, Happy Valentine's Day! Or at least, that's what I'd be saying if I had managed to publish this as soon as I had hoped to. That's why I filled this chapter with so much romantic subtext, like Taylor and Vin having (what I hope was) battlefield synergy, and Assault and Battery, one of the three healthy canon pairings, existing, and ... okay, fine, I guess there wasn't any romantic subtext. I have many, or at least some talents, and writing romance has never been one of them.
Anyway, this chapter has been edited by Exiled, without whose help this would be complete trash, and it was brought to you through the support of my amazing Patrons, Exiled, Prime 2.0, Sphinxes, Kelsey Bull, Hubris Prime, Apofatix, Janember, Yotam Bonneh, Svistka, LordXamon, Victoria Carey, and Kurkistan. I can't thank you enough.