Vindication
Chapter Six
Dinah Alcott gave numbers away until her head began to hurt. What were the odds that the Undersiders would succeed alone? With the Travelers? Together? What if they blackmailed a member of the Protectorate? Kidnapped a Ward? Could one of Coil's PRT moles make a difference?
She hated those numbers. She hated the pictures, the worlds that stabbed into her brain every time Coil asked her a question. But Coil knew ways to hurt her worse than just a headache, so she answered every question he asked.
Finally she returned to her room, and Mr. Pitter gave her some candy. It always felt bad when the needle went in, but then it made her forget about the pain, and then it felt good. It was the only thing that made her feel good.
The headache was still there, but her head was too numb to feel it. Mr. Pitter left her in a room with a big screen television, a DVD player with more movies than she could watch in a lifetime, a tablet full of games and books Mr. Pitter had downloaded for her, and in many ways it was nicer than her room at home.
She hated it. She hated everything about it besides her bed, and she buried her face in the pillow determined to sleep off her headache. A fly buzzed in her ear.
She swatted at it weakly, but it just came back. She tried to ignore it, but it seemed determined to annoy her. She sandwiched her head between two pillows, but that stupid fly crawled in through the cracks. She ground her teeth together. After everything else, this. She just wanted to sleep. Was that too much? This shouldn't have been the thing to drive her to the brink of tears, but ...
There were words on her ceiling.
Can we talk?
Coil kept his base so clean, there were hardly any bugs. The fly should have given it away, but the trail of ants forming letters made it obvious. Skitter. Dinah had seen her once, the same morning Leviathan attacked. Coil had spent a few questions on her afterwards. The odds that Skitter would work against Coil were in the seventies, but there was a twenty-something percent chance that the Undersiders would turn against him if he killed her, and another ten or so that they would quit.
She got out of bed and went into the bathroom. There were no cameras in here, a token concession to her privacy that Coil ignored everywhere else. In her darkest moods she had considered drowning herself in the bathtub, but there had been only a thirteen percent chance of that working, worse than her odds of going home.
The bedroom camera wasn't pointed at the ceiling, so it hopefully hadn't noticed anything.
"Yes," she said. "We can talk."
Bugs crawled in through the crack in the door and the vent. On the ceiling, they formed the words again, Can we talk?
But she had just said ... she nodded, and the words dispersed. Flies flitted down to a line of beetles on the floor, pulling a small device by a line of spider silk. It was a small ... microphone? No, probably a recorder or something. Coil had to use landlines this far underground, but if Skitter could have her bugs carry messages to the surface, that should work nearly as well. She flipped a switch on the nickel-sized device, and a small green light appeared.
The bugs reformed on the ceiling. I have some questions.
Dinah's stomach turned. Questions. She hated questions, but if she could give Coil everything he wanted in return for candy, she could push herself a bit more to get back home. "Ask away."
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On the roof of a building a block away from Coil's base, Skitter contemplated murder.
"His powers mess with mine. I can give probabilities, but he can squeeze between the odds. And ... I don't understand how, but he can ask me questions without talking to me. I don't even know what he asked or what answer I gave him, but it makes my head hurt just the same, and he doesn't give me any candy for those, and I ... I ..." Dinah's voice cut out for a moment. "I don't know what his powers are. He doesn't tell me. He doesn't trust me. He just ... next question."
Skitter paused the recording, feeling a cold, calculating anger well up inside of her. Her swarm told her that Dinah was still in her room, safe and lying in her bed, and that Coil was in his office, completely exposed.
"I could kill him right now," she said. "It would be easy. It could all be over today. Tattletale could take over his organization, and she wouldn't hold Dinah captive like he is." Coil's organization wasn't held together by loyalty, but by promises and money, and Tattletale could hack his accounts without trying. Hell, with Dinah returned home, Skitter might be able to patch things up with the Undersiders, and everything could go back to normal.
Tattletale didn't object when she found out about Coil's little pet, a gnawing voice in her mind whispered. She pushed it away.
Vin, or Wraith in costume, shook her head. "It's too easy. Dinah gave him a, what, a seventy percent chance of you coming after him? This is the first thing he'd expect you to do."
"Then why hasn't he done anything to stop me? He's just sitting there in his skintight bodysuit ... waiting for me."
"It's too easy," Wraith repeated. "We don't know what he's capable of. We don't even know what his powers are."
Destiny manipulation. Whatever the hell that meant. Though honestly, just having Dinah was power enough. If Coil knew she would come after him, how could he stop her? A bodysuit that her bugs couldn't get through would be a good start, though just having a body double wear his costume while he led his organization from afar would work just as well.
It's not like I can actually see who's under that suit.
Actually, a body double would protect Coil from nearly anything Skitter could do. If she struck now, she might do nothing more than murder a random henchman while alerting the real villain.
"You're right," she said. "It's just ... frustrating to have him right there without being able to do anything." Wraith watched her silently, her dark eyes unreadable. Skitter took a deep breath and shook her head. "But you're right. Besides, we have an advantage right now with Dinah feeding us information. Maybe next time I talk to her, I'll ask her the odds of a direct attack working out."
She hadn't asked Dinah to use her powers yet, but the girl had volunteered. They just needed to make it count. Too many questions gave her a bad headache, while Coil already pushed her to her limit.
"Unless he expected us to contact her," Wraith pointed out. "If he can ask her questions without her even knowing, he could be feeding her false information to pass on to us."
Skitter took a deep breath. "None of our information is going to be one hundred percent certain, so we just have to do the best we can with what we have." Oh. Oh, God, that sounded terrible when she said it out loud. What made it even worse was the truth of it all. Not for the first time, Skitter missed working with Tattletale. Lisa had always been certain about everything, and even when she turned out to be wrong, they always managed to pull through anyway.
"But there's another problem," Wraith continued. "We have a seventy percent chance of attacking him. If we don't, he's not going to think that he got lucky. He's either going to think we're planning something, which we are, or that he has an information leak, which he does."
Skitter frowned. As she considered her options, she saw double edged swords as far as her mind's eye could see. It was a familiar feeling that she didn't like. "What should we do instead?"
"We need to challenge him and lose." She made the suggestion sound obvious. "Ideally in a way that embarrasses us as much as possible without hurting us. If he thinks we're beaten, he'll forget about us and move on."
"He'll be easier to con when he's overconfident." That was, she supposed, what con meant.
"Exactly."
High school. That was what this situation reminded her of. There, every choice she made ended with her losing, and all she could hope for was to lose as little as possible. As a cape, she could win. Winning didn't always mean anything, but she'd had more than enough of the alternative.
"That won't work," she decided. "Not Coil. All he has to do is ask Dinah if we're still a threat, and I'm betting that we're closer to ninety percent now than seventy." Dinah's first prediction must have been back when they were still in Boston or something. "Bluffing won't work. We have to do something so unexpected, he won't even consider it."
Wraith raised an eyebrow behind her mask. "Like what?"
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The rest of the day was one long stakeout. Skitter placed bugs in the trucks leaving Coil's base, and Wraith carried her across the city to keep up with them.
From there they mapped out some of Coil's storehouses. Coil kept most of his valuables in his base, but he had warehouses of food, drugs, and construction equipment all over the city.
No weapon stockpiles that they could find. That would have been too easy.
Their target was a small patrol. Coil's mercenaries kept order in his territory, providing some actual protection for his protection racket. Maybe Skitter should have felt conflicted about causing trouble in one of the few safe parts of the city, but Coil's hypocrisy, his false pretense of civility made her sick.
A group of four mercenaries walked down the street. Skitter knew they would have military grade weapons or better, military training or better, night vision goggles, handheld radios, the whole package. It wouldn't do them any good.
Wraith dropped down into an alley they were approaching, smashed a window, and jumped back to the rooftops. The patrol stopped and sent two men ahead to investigate.
From above, Wraith maneuvered behind the two that had stayed back, while Skitter made her move. Two sacks held open by her swarm dropped onto their heads, blinding them as Wraith Pulled the guns out of their hands. Before the men could pull the bags off, she was gone.
They could have pressed the fight further, but the two mercenaries who'd gone ahead had returned and they were on full alert. Wraith returned to Skitter with the stolen rifles. "They started yelling 'cape' as soon as they went blind," she muttered. "They're like a bunch of hazekillers."
"Hazekillers?"
She shook her head. "It doesn't matter. It's just that I'd rather take another group by surprise than push my luck with these ones."
Skitter went over what happened during the brief exchange, mentally checking for loose ends. The mercenaries might report being attacked by a telekinetic, ironically more from Skitter's bag trick than from Wraith's actual telekinesis, but they wouldn't have seen any bugs and telekinesis wasn't that rare.
"Let's see if we need to." Skitter held out her phone as a flashlight and examined the two rifles. The first one looked normal. She wasn't an expert on guns, but it had a barrel, a scope, and all the other parts she had expected. She could leave it with the people in her territory so they could keep things safe while the two of them were away.
The other one, though, looked like it came out of a science fiction movie. The main part looked like a machine gun, but with a laser attachment on top of the scope. Was it Tinkertech, based on Tinkertech, or just Coil getting the best normal equipment money could buy?
Either way ... "This is exactly what we're looking for."
"Will it work?"
Skitter nodded. She guessed that most of Coil's patrols had at least one of these just in case they ran into a cape immune to bullets. "It's distinctive. Everyone knows his mercs are equipped with stuff like this. Anyone we shoot with it will blame Coil."
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Armsmaster rode his motorcycle down his patrol route. It wasn't too long ago that he would have encountered nothing on a patrol like this, and he would have expected to have found nothing. Going out in public was about appearances, more intended to frighten criminals away rather than catch them in the act. Break ins and extortions required a lookout, and when a villain saw the heroes coming, they had to scatter, leaving their crimes abandoned.
These days, though ...
He heard a scream, a woman crying out in the night.
"Help! Somebody, help!"
These days, he didn't just get to see some action. He had to clean up the trash. He accelerated, trusting in his bike to handle the broken streets, as his navigation program triangulated the sound of the cry and the optimal route.
He reached the location, the assault still in progress, and jumped off his motorcycle, trusting it to autopark. "Unhand her, scum." Perhaps not the best heroic banter, he mused, pulling his halberd from its magnetic sheath on his back, but who were these men to deserve his best? They ...
They helped the woman to her feet, and all four people in the alleyway turned to face him as one. The woman was wearing a mask, and she slipped off her coat to reveal a black and purple costume that he recognized without any help from his software.
"Good job, boys," Tattletale said. "You managed to be just rapey enough without crossing the line. Really sold it, didn't they, Armsmaster?"
It was a trap. They had lured him out here to ... do what? His armor would protect him from Regent's powers, his resonance-based imaging display neutralized anything Grue could throw at him, and Bitch's monsters were nowhere in sight. Skitter, though ... he had underestimated her before, and she was unpredictable. Was that the play here?
"What is this?" he demanded.
Tattletale smiled at him. "A chat between friends, of course."
LIE.
Sarcasm, but he hadn't programmed his software to tell the difference. "Allow me to rephrase that. Why shouldn't I arrest you right now?" Maybe she had information to sell him, though it was more likely that she had a hostage.
"You know, it was a dick move you pulled on Skitter after Leviathan. You drove a scared, vulnerable girl to the point of panic, and when that didn't work out like you hoped, you set her up to take the fall. You accused her of breaking rules no one explained to her and marked her as a trucebreaker before she even understood what was going on. She was really looking forward to seeing everyone standing together for the common good, but ... she's always been a little weird about heroes."
TRUTH.
Again, there was that smile. Had Skitter played him from the start, somehow fooling his software in the process? Or had she intended to be a hero and then changed her mind? Tattletale's knowing, mocking smile clarified nothing.
But at this point it didn't matter. Skitter had picked her side. They all had. "If you have evidence of foul play, you may submit it to the proper channels."
Tattletale's smile widened. "Oh, this is fun. This is honestly my first time doing the whole karmic retribution thing. No, I don't have anything that could vindicate her. You know what happened. Panacea does too, and maybe a few PRT troopers who are equally complicit and content to point fingers at someone else. What I do have is proof that before that, you tried to get her killed, blew out her armband so she couldn't call for help, so you could solo Leviathan in a vain attempt to validate your vanity."
TRUTH.
His blood went cold. Truth? She had proof? What sort of proof could she have?
Tattletale casually pulled out a phone and held it out to him. "Anyway, here's a call from my boss." She grinned at him, knowing that she had him. "Or, should I say, our boss."
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A/n And here's another chapter! Not much has happened here besides a lot of scheming, and it would be so much easier to scheme schemes if no one else was scheming schemes, but Brockton Bay has some real schemers.
I would like to thank Exiled for being my most consistent beta reader and letting me know when what I write just doesn't make sense. And I'd like to thank my Patrons, Exiled, Prime 2.0, Sphinxes, Kelsey Bull, Hubris Prime, Apofatix, Janember, Yotam Bonneh, Svistka, LordXamon, Victoria Carey, and Kurkistan. Without you, I wouldn't update nearly as consistently. And finally, I'd like to thank my readers. Without you reading this, me writing this would be a very boring and lonely life. Thank you.