I, Panacea (Worm SI Fanfic)

I, Panacea

Part Twenty-Nine: Introductions

[A/N 1: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

[A/N 2: Ugh. This chapter kicked my arse.]


Skitter
The Undersiders' Loft

Taylor frowned as her phone rang. It was the one Lisa had gotten for her, which meant that everyone who should have the number for it was already in the building. Alec was engrossed in his console gaming, Lisa was typing away on her laptop with a smirk on her face, Brian was doing some kind of complicated exercise routine involving hand weights, and as far as she knew Rachel was in her bedroom, brushing her dogs.

Lisa looked over as Taylor pulled the phone out, also looking somewhat puzzled. "Who's that?" she asked.

"Dunno." Taylor looked down at the screen and wanted to facepalm. "Oh, right. Panacea." Because of course Amy Dallon was the only other person she'd given out her number to.

Alec turned his head toward her, his game temporarily forgotten. "How does she know your number?"

"Uh, we exchanged numbers a little while ago," Taylor confessed. "I'd forgotten until now." The phone rang again, prompting her to answer it. "Hey," she said. "What's up?"

"Hey." Amy sounded ... normal. Or at least, not overly stressed. "Can we talk? There's someone I'd like you to meet. It's kind of important."

This was definitely out of the ordinary. With what they'd been through, Taylor didn't imagine for one second that Amy—or Michael—was setting her up for a trap of any kind. Which left the question open: what was it about?

It didn't escape her notice that Amy hadn't given a name for the person she wanted Taylor to meet. This in turn (seeing how she was literally calling Taylor so they could meet) meant she didn't want the name to get out. Specifically, that she didn't want Lisa finding out the name ahead of time.

"Uh, sure," she said. "Where?"

She already knew Panacea wasn't anywhere close by, because her widespread network of bugs would've detected the girl by now, but hopefully she wasn't all the way across town. Fortunately, Amy Dallon might be snarky on occasion, not to mention downright obscure, but she wasn't a total bitch like that.

Well, she wasn't now. Taylor didn't have Lisa's ability to discern every last aspect of a person's psyche, but there was a possibility that Amy's association with the guy living inside her head—and wasn't that a weird thing to say—had mellowed her out a bit. He certainly seemed intent on fixing the bad things that were going to happen to her before they had a chance to. Merely associating with Amy had improved Taylor's life immeasurably; the memory of Vicky breaking Sophia's jaw still raised a savage glee within her.

"We're at the old ferry terminal right now. On the deck, enjoying the scenery. It's nice here, if rusty boats and rotting seaweed add up to 'nice'."

Well, the snark was definitely still there, but it was toned down to normal levels, rather than being Amy's go-to for every situation. Sometimes, in the less frantic moments, Taylor had caught glimpses of the girl within, and she was … nice. Usually frazzled, which was not exactly unexpected, but still someone Taylor enjoyed spending time with.

"I'll be there in about twenty minutes," she said. Getting up from the sofa, she ended the call. "Guys, I'm heading out for a little bit, to meet up with Amy."

"Yeah?" Alec tilted his head. "What's she want with you?"

"To trash talk you behind your back," Taylor said sweetly. "I'll tell you what; when it becomes your business, you'll be the first to know."

"Fuck you too, dork." He took up the controller again.

She rolled her eyes. "I will never be that desperate." Ignoring Lisa's sudden fit of the giggles, she headed for the exit leading to the spiral staircase.

Behind her, she heard the clunk-clunk as Brian put the weights down. Her bugs tracked him across the room as he hurried to catch up, so she paused at the top of the stairs to wait for him. Studiously, she refused to admire the way his muscles filled out the shirt he was wearing.

"Hey," he said, slightly breathless from the exercise. "Not trying to pull an Alec, but do you have any idea why she wants to talk to you? I'd just like a heads-up before we end up facing off against Alexandria again, that's all."

"She wants to introduce me to a friend of hers," Taylor said, deciding that much couldn't hurt. "It sounded like it was important to her."

"Ah." He tilted his head thoughtfully. "So … not a Security thing?"

She shrugged. "His name never came up." She reached out with a single knuckle and pushed against the centre of his chest, trying to ignore the solidity of his musculature. "Maybe she just wants to hang and chill for a while? I don't see the rest of you making the effort to be her friend, even after she and Vicky took Shadow Stalker down for good."

"We're grateful," he said hastily. "Don't think we're not. I mean, Stalker needed to go down in the worst way. But … even Lisa has no idea what they're thinking at any given time. They're an unknown quantity. Security's clearly got plans over and above helping you out with your bullying problems. The stakes are getting bigger all the time, and I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that."

Taylor shook her head. "And how do you think Amy feels? She's the one person who's stuck on the roller-coaster with no way off. He can only act through her, and I'm pretty sure he's determined to save the world, no matter what it takes."

He held up his hands defensively. "Which is a good thing, don't get me wrong. The world being saved is a good thing. As the saying goes, it's where I keep my stuff. I'm just not so thrilled with the idea that I might end up being a casualty in the process, because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I've got responsibilities. Outside the team, even."

"Are we even a team, anymore?" Taylor looked at him steadily. "We're not really a villain gang. Not since Coil …" She trailed off, reliving the moment of shock in her own mind when she realised she'd actually pulled the trigger and murdered a helpless man. At her side, her fingers worked back and forth as though trying to drop the pistol she wasn't holding.

"Not since Coil, no," he agreed. "And definitely not since we got Alexandria's attention. But we can still be a team, can't we? Capes need to stick together."

"Yeah, that's true." She took a deep breath, then released it again. "Look, I'm going to go meet with Amy and her friend. When I get back, we're going to need to have a talk with everyone about where the Undersiders are going, or even if the Undersiders have a future at all."

He chuckled uneasily. "The scariest phrase in the English language. 'We need to talk'."

"No, that's 'if you don't know what's wrong, I'm not going to tell you'." She grinned at him, then started down the staircase. "Don't wait up for me. I might just go home after this. See how Dad's doing."

"Okay, understood."

As she clattered down the spiral stairs, her bugs watched him go back into the loft. Lisa would ask what they'd talked about, she knew, and Brian would fill her in. It didn't bother Taylor; she knew no more than what she'd told him. And they really did need to talk about the future of the team.

When she reached the bottom, she went to the metal door and let herself out, then locked it behind her. The ferry terminal was about twenty minutes away by foot; a nice bit of exercise to stretch her legs and get her blood pumping. The few people around, she tagged with bugs, just in case.

Humming a tune she'd heard on the radio, she set out toward the ferry terminal.

<><>​

Panacea

Amy knew Taylor was nearby long before the girl came into sight. A fly landing on her hand wasn't an uncommon experience, but its brain activity told her that it was under Skitter's control. This was absolutely Taylor sending her a message: I'm on the way. She briefly 'twanged' its nervous system by way of reply. Seated beside her and gazing out at the ocean, Riley showed no sign of even noticing the insect, let alone registering it as significant.

You're getting better at that, Michael observed. Have you thought about making any more bugs for her to play with?

Actually, that's not a bad idea at all. Amy had intended to do just that, but with all the upheavals currently going on with her life, the concept had been pushed to the back burner more than once. Now, however, she had the time to remedy the omission. What do you think I should make?

Your choice. She got an impression of him shrugging. The cutter bugs worked well. Maybe bugs with better hearing or eyesight, or the relay bugs? To be absolutely honest, any kind of bio-manipulation you do that isn't straight-up healing people is a good use of your powers right now. Shards need data, and they'll push hard to get it. It's better to do stuff willingly rather than be forced or tricked into it.

A chill ran down her back at the reminder. Ensuring that she didn't accidentally turn her sister into a horrorshow wasn't a one-and-done. She had to keep working at it, maintain her progress. And, somewhere along the way, help Michael save the world.

Of course, where Riley fit into those plans, she had no idea.

<><>​

Skitter

When the ferry terminal came within range of her outer screen of bugs, Taylor quickly determined that there were exactly two people sitting on the deck overlooking the water. One was indeed Amy, while the other was younger; or at least, more petite. With the length of hair, Taylor suspected a girl, but even that wasn't a given.

She landed a fly on Amy's hand to alert her, and felt the answering pulse as the biokinetic briefly adjusted the insect's brain chemistry. Amy's companion didn't react at all as a few bugs landed on her, which meant that Amy probably hadn't warned her that Taylor was in the vicinity. That was fine; Taylor didn't have any nefarious intent, and she trusted Amy not to be pulling something on her as well.

A few more minutes of walking got her within sight of the terminal. She was definitely a lot fitter than she'd been when she first got powers; even striding out as she was, there was no particular feeling of being out of breath. There was nobody waiting outside (not that they would've been able to hide from her bugs) so she ignored the sign that promised the return of the ferry any day now and climbed the steps to get onto the outdoor deck.

Amy was seated there in the shade, alongside a girl who looked maybe Dinah's age. Interestingly enough, while this girl bore little resemblance to Dinah aside from the age and skin colour, she shared a certain gauntness around the cheekbones and a look in the eyes that said she'd Seen. Some. Shit.

"Hi," Taylor said, trying not to show the curiosity she felt. Amy undoubtedly had her reasons for bringing a kid to meet her; from her experience so far, Amy (and Security) knew exactly what they were doing. "How's things? Brian says hi, by the way."

He hadn't, but that was her way of thanking Amy for saving Brian from the gunshot wound. Amy's eyebrows hitched slightly, and Taylor figured she'd picked up the subtext.

"I'm okay," Amy replied, standing up a little stiffly. From experience in such matters, Taylor diagnosed bruising rather than actual injury. "Taylor, I'd like you to meet Riley. Riley, this is my friend Taylor." There was an undercurrent to her words that told Taylor she wasn't saying everything, but it didn't feel malicious or gleeful; rather, Amy was a little anxious about what she was doing.

"Hi, Riley." Taylor offered her hand to shake.

The twelve-year-old grasped it and shook hesitantly, as though she wasn't used to meeting people. "Hello, Taylor." Her voice was soft. "It's good to meet a friend of Amy's."

Something was definitely off here. Again, Taylor instinctively checked the area with her bugs. There were no armed people—or even capes—lurking in hidden corners, readying to pounce. All the insectoid senses she could muster indicated that what she could see and hear was actually there.

So why had Amy asked her to come out just to meet some random kid? There was something deeper going on here.

"Okay," she said, and took a seat. "I'll bite. What's going on?"

Amy frowned. "This ... is going to take a little bit of explanation."

"Don't bother trying to sugarcoat it," Riley told her with a grimace. "We both know it won't make any difference."

"Well, it's better than just coming out and saying it!"

"Sugarcoat what? What won't make any difference?" Taylor stared at the younger girl, trying to discern her mysteries. "Who are you?"

Riley took a deep breath. "My name is Riley Davis, but for the last six years I've been known as Bonesaw."

Taylor froze, eyes measuring the distance between them. The swarms she'd had combing the area began to merge and pull back in from all directions; even a bunch of crabs under the waterline surged up toward the surface, ready to climb up to the deck level. "Explain." Her voice sounded harsh even to her own ears.

"It was Michael's idea," Amy said steadily. "When he was explaining to Alexandria how to take the Nine out of the picture, he specified that Bonesaw—Riley—should be captured and not killed. Since then, I've removed all of her built-in tech—and let me tell you, there was a crap-ton of it—and put her through a little corrective therapy." She put her hand on Riley's shoulder. "You're looking at what she would've been like if she never met Jack Slash. More or less."

Riley shook her head. "Not really. Even though I don't believe in the stuff he crammed into my head anymore, he's still had an effect on my life. I've lost my real family and the shitty family that was the Nine. Six years of my life have been replaced with a non-stop horror movie where I was the bad guy, while convincing myself every day that I was being a good girl." She shuddered as she spoke the last two words.

Taylor studied the girl. Her hair was the same as Bonesaw's—blonde, with ringlets—which should've been a warning flag right off the mark; that particular colour and style combination had fallen all the way out of vogue for girls of her age. Nobody wanted to be mistaken for a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine, even briefly. There was too much risk of someone deciding to take no chances and pulling a gun.

Likewise, her facial features were the same as the pictures Taylor had seen of Bonesaw, less the slightly manic grin. Instead of the Alice dress and bloodstained apron, she wore sneakers, jeans and a T-shirt with a picture of Alexandria on it, while Amy's featured Armsmaster.

"... okay," Taylor conceded at last. "You haven't steered me wrong yet, so I'll trust you when you say that she's not Bonesaw anymore. Congratulations: you've rehabilitated a member of the Nine. The question is … why? And equally important, why bring her out here to introduce to me?"

"I don't want to sound ungrateful," Riley said, glancing quickly at Amy, "I mean, Taylor seems like a nice person, but she's got a point. Why are you introducing me to her? What's the end result you're looking for?"

"I want to introduce you to Taylor's friends as well," Amy said carefully. "She was just the one who was least likely to react badly."

The dots connected inside Taylor's head so abruptly she was surprised there wasn't an audible crack. "Wait … you want to introduce her to those friends of mine? The ones I've just come from?" What the hell? Does she honestly want to place Bonesaw with the Undersiders?

"Yeah, those ones," Amy said. "It's Michael's idea, and I don't know all the details of the plan, but that's a major part of it. I've been through her body systems and taken out everything that didn't belong, so she should be safe enough to be around."

"Yeah, you said." Taylor frowned, studying Riley dubiously. "You also said you did corrective therapy. I thought you weren't able to, uh …"

"Work with brains?" Amy completed. "No, that's something I can absolutely do. It's just that I usually choose not to, and I don't tell anyone about it if I can avoid it. Three guesses as to why, and the first two don't count."

"So why are you telling me now?" asked Taylor. She could absolutely make a guess why Amy was keeping quiet. Modify brains with a touch? Yeah, I'd keep my lip zipped about that, too. "I mean, we've backed each other up more than once and I suppose it's a nice gesture, but you didn't have to."

"Yeah, I did." Amy hooked her thumb at Riley. "She knew I could, because Jack Slash gave her the heads-up on that little aspect of my powers. And she just might have told you guys at some point or another, just to mess with me."

Taylor turned to look at Riley, who rolled her eyes. "Yeah, I might have too, if I'd thought of it." Her voice turned flat and robotic. "Curses, my master plan has been foiled."

Shaking her head, Taylor let a chuckle escape. "Exactly how much work did you do on her?"

"Surprisingly little, actually." Amy held up her hand and waggled it from side to side. "There was a lot of repressed personality buried under the surface, that came up once I got the overlay of Jack Slash's influence out of the way."

"Wait a minute." Riley stared at Taylor. "Wait just one heckin' minute. Introducing me to your bestie still makes exactly zero sense ... unless ..."

Even if she hadn't known who Riley was—or had been—Taylor still wouldn't have liked the way the girl was staring at her. There was altogether too much knowing in that gaze.

"'Hecking'? Really?" Amy shook her head. "Where'd you get that from?"

Riley stuck her tongue out at the biokinetic. "Six years of needing to be a good girl, desperately wanting to swear, and having no idea how. Bite me." She turned to look at Taylor. "You're a cape. Nothing else makes sense."

Taylor knew there was nobody within two blocks in any given direction, but she still didn't like the way Riley had just pulled that fact out of mid-air. Just like Lisa would've, except without Lisa's power to explain matters. She folded her arms and tried not to sound defensive. "Not saying I am, and not saying I'm not, but is that something you're likely to be yelling from the rooftops?"

"Give me some credit," Riley snarked. "I'm twelve, but I'm not a total idiot. Besides, I'm curious. You're Amy's friend, which makes you a hero or a rogue, but I don't remember any capes with your body type making it in the hero scene recently in Brockton Bay."

"Why would the Nine have even been interested in Brockton Bay?" Amy asked. "We don't exactly stand out."

Riley grimaced. "Jack Slash loved to screw with people's heads. And if he ever got chased out of an area, he would make a point of coming back a couple of years later and messing everyone up who had a hand in things the first time around. He was actually talking about coming back here sometime, when he got the chance."

"When did the Nine ever come through Brockton Bay?" asked Taylor, frowning. "I'm pretty sure I'd remember if something like that happened."

"Oh, it happened more than ten years ago," Riley explained with a flip of her hand. "Before I was born, I think. Maybe before you were born. It was a totally different Nine then, but people talk. The stories I heard was that Marquis got tired of them causing problems and called them out. Told Jack to get out of town … and he did."

Amy rubbed her forehead. "I think I remember something like that, too … oh, wait. Michael says that actually happened. Jack Slash tried to get Marquis to break his code against hurting women or children and failed. That's when Marquis told him to leave town." She paused. "Which was pretty impressive, given that he was a low-level Master when it came to capes."

Taylor frowned. "He was?"

"That's what Amy says," Riley assured her. "I mean, part of me still wants to not accept it, but when I look at how I was, and how I am since you got rid of his influence … the rest of me can't believe that nobody else has figured it out."

"Well, it was very subtle," Amy agreed. "Hard to detect, and scary powerful. Michael tells me that his power would not only tell the other members of the Nine to act as meat-shields for him—and they'd do it—but if the attacker had a clear run, it would literally influence them into choosing not to attack."

"And Marquis still told him where to get off?" Taylor was impressed despite herself. "That would've pissed him off."

Riley nodded. "One of the things he hated the most was being told no. Whole towns died when that happened."

"And yet, he waited until ten years after Marquis was Birdcaged before he even thought about coming back," Amy said with a smirk. "Seems Marquis made a real impression on him."

"Alexandria made a bigger impression, though." Riley gave Amy a nod. "Thanks to you and your friend. And I mean that. Thank you both. I know I've done a lot of bad stuff, and I was just going to get worse as I went along." She turned back to Taylor. "And I think I've figured it out."

Taylor blinked, not sure where this shift in topic was going. "Figured … what out, exactly?"

"Who you are, duh." Riley rolled her eyes. "You're definitely a cape and probably a hero, but I've already met the one non-blonde in New Wave, so you're not Panacea. So I'm thinking Wards. You're too old to be Vista, so that leaves …" She made a dramatic flourish, finishing with finger-guns pointed at Taylor. "Shadow Stalker, am I right?"

Taylor's brain skidded to a halt so hard, smoke should've been leaking out her ears. "Wh-what?" she demanded. "What the fuck? Did you just—"

"Bahahahaahaaaaaa!" cackled Amy, rolling sideways and nearly falling off the bench. She tried to say something, pointing at Taylor, but another gust of laughter came out instead. Her face turning red, she pounded on the faux stone with her fist.

Riley nodded with satisfaction. "Okay, with a reaction like that, I've got to be right, but why's she acting like I just said the funniest thing in the world?"

"Because it's not …" Taylor stumbled over her words, trying to figure out how to tell Riley just how wrong she was without screaming at the top of her lungs. "Riley. You need to listen to me. I am not Shadow Stalker. I could never be Shadow Stalker."

"Right, got it." Riley leaned close and lowered her voice. "Your secret is safe with me."

Amy rolled a little farther and hit the floor, but even the short fall to the deck didn't mute her hilarity.

"No." Taylor took a deep breath and pushed her emotions off into the swarm. "Riley. Listen to my words. I am not Shadow Stalker, because right now Shadow Stalker is handcuffed to a hospital bed with a concussion, a broken jaw and twelve missing teeth. This is because she punched Amy in the face and broke her nose. I could never be Shadow Stalker. I'd rather be Jack Slash."

"Uh, quick reminder," Amy said, in between repeated chuckles. "Jack Slash is dead."

Taylor nodded. "Still rather be him and dead, than wake up every day and be Sophia Hess."

Riley blinked. "Okay, let's back up a bit here. Amy broke Shadow Stalker's jaw and knocked out twelve teeth? Or was that you? And why'd she punch Amy in the face, anyway? I thought she was supposed to be a hero."

Letting out a long, aggravated sigh, Taylor shook her head. "Shadow Stalker was never a hero. At best, she was a villain who went after the bad guys. In her civilian life, she went after me. Did her best to grind me into the dirt." She gave Riley a bright artificial smile. "That bitch personally caused my trigger event. And now she's going to juvey, where she belongs."

"Ah." Riley stared at Taylor, then at Amy, who was starting to recover from her fit of laughter. "Gotcha. I think. So … if neither of you punched her lights out, then who did? And if you're not Shadow Stalker, who are you?"

Taylor got up and helped Amy to her feet. "That's a story we can tell you while we walk. I'm convinced Amy's managed to rehabilitate you pretty well. So now you get to meet the rest of my friends."

"Sure," said Riley. "But who are your friends?"

Taylor grinned. "We call ourselves the Undersiders, and we used to be villains."

Riley spread her hands. "What do you mean, used to be villains? And who punched Shadow Stalker? I'm kind of missing a lot of context here."

"Okay, then," Amy said, starting down the steps. "It all started when the Undersiders were robbing a bank while I was in it …"

<><>​

Grue

Angelica lifted her head and barked, and Lisa looked around. "We've got company," she said.

"What, really?" snarked Alec. "What gave it away? Taylor's back, right? And she's brought Panacea."

Brian chuckled. "You're still pissed that Security can no-sell your power?"

"No, I'm over that." Alec glanced at the screen and headshot another opponent. "I'm pissed about the rest of it. We're not even a real villain gang anymore. We're a bunch of people who sit around in a crappy hideout and play nice because fucking Alexandria knows who we are and probably where we live, and if we put a foot out of line, she'll come down on us like … well, like Alexandria."

"It's not just Panacea," said Lisa. "There's someone else, too."

"Great," groused Brian, looking at the untidy stack of pizza boxes and soda cans in the corner. "Taylor couldn't have given us a heads-up so we could've done some cleaning before she went out?"

"Who gives a shit about that?" asked Rachel. "I just want to know why the fuck they're bringing a stranger straight to where we live. I get that Panacea doesn't understand the concept, but what part of 'secret hideout' doesn't Taylor get?"

The metal door downstairs closed, and Taylor's voice floated up to them. "Okay, up here now. Watch your step."

A voice that Brian had never heard before—a girl, a bit younger than Lisa—spoke up then. "Spiral staircase? Cute. I like it." Footsteps sounded on the metal risers.

The first to appear through the doorway was Taylor. She looked around at everyone staring back—glaring in the case of Rachel—and stepped inside. "Hey, everyone. I brought Amy, plus another visitor, so nobody freak out."

"Why not?" Rachel's challenge was blunt. "What the fuck gives you the right to bring just anyone to our base? Into our personal space?"

"She's got a point, dork," drawled Alec, putting down the controller. "I mean, it's bad enough with Panacea dropping over like she's got a right to be here, but at least she's kind of badass if you squint just right. But who the fuck is this?"

"Taylor?" Brian tried to hit a diplomatic tone. "What's going on here?"

"It's why Amy called me up," Taylor said, her tone more challenging than defensive. "She wanted to introduce someone to us, so she started with me. I trust her when she says everything's on the level. When's she ever screwed us around before?"

Nobody else answered, so Brian took up the ball again. "It's not Amy we have a problem with." Alec snorted, and Brian shot a warning glance that way. "But every new person who comes in here is a whole new risk. What if they suddenly decide that they're not okay with us being villains, and they turn us in?"

"Well, it's not going to do much right now," Lisa reminded him. "Alexandria owes us a solid. So long as we keep our noses clean—"

"—and Armsmaster never figures out who popped Coil—" added Alec, giving Taylor a significant look.

"—which he won't, because nobody here's going to tell him," Lisa countered, making the two-fingered I'm watching you gesture toward Alec. "Anyway, given all that, nobody's going to be coming after us. And hey, whoever this new person is sounds interesting if both Taylor and Amy are willing to vouch for her."

"Well, she's not exactly a stranger to villain gangs," Amy said as she stepped in through the doorway. "But she's willing to not hold that against you if you're okay with it too. Come on in and meet the guys. Guys, this is Riley. Riley, meet Alec, Brian, Lisa and Rachel."

The newcomer followed Amy into the room. As Brian had already guessed, she was two or three years younger than Taylor, and not quite as self-assured as she wanted to appear. He frowned at Amy's words, wondering which villain gang she'd been a part of before. There weren't many in Brockton Bay with tweenage girls in their ranks. In fact, the only one he could think of was …

"Holy shit, you got hold of Rune?" Alec's tone was frankly disbelieving. "What the hell are you trying to pull, here? Kaiser's going to—"

"—not do a damn thing, because this isn't Rune," Amy retorted. "The Empire's going to be winding back their operations anyway, especially after Hookwolf goes to the Birdcage."

"Wait, what?" Startled, Lisa turned back to her laptop and started typing frantically. "When did he get captured? What did I miss?"

"Less than you think," Amy assured her. "Vicky and me, we went and had a chat with Kaiser, and convinced him that it was in his best interests to cut Hookwolf loose." She buffed her nails on her Armsmaster T-shirt and studied them theatrically. "It definitely helps to know which strings to pull."

Rachel sat forward, her gaze intent. "It's true? He's going to the Birdcage? For real?"

Amy nodded. "If he doesn't, Kaiser's in for a very bad time. The man knows which side his bread is buttered. Now, I can't guarantee this will put an end to the dog fights—in fact, it probably won't—but Hookwolf won't be there to guard them."

"Okay, yeah, I get that." Rachel nodded. "And this is a Security thing?"

"He supplied the appropriate information, yes." Amy smiled beatifically. "It's amazing how easy it is to get people to do what you want if what you know about them is damaging enough."

"That is kind of how blackmail and extortion work, yes," Brian agreed dryly.

Amy smirked. "He tried to use those words, too. I asked him if he was okay with me just telling everyone what I knew. It turns out that he wasn't."

Rachel let out a bark of laughter. "I wish I could see the look on that fucker Hookwolf's face when he finds out his own boss gave him up."

"Okay, good, the great Kaiser has been humbled, Hookwolf is on the way to the 'Cage, justice and light have prevailed," Alec interrupted in an annoying sing-song tone, then pointed at Riley. "So if she isn't Rune, who the hell is she?"

Taylor took a deep breath. "I was totally surprised when I found out, but like I said, don't freak out. Guys, Riley is—"

"Bonesaw," Lisa said flatly. "She's Bonesaw, isn't she?"

Amy rolled her eyes. "Goddamn it. I knew we should've cut the big reveal short. Yes, Riley used to be Bonesaw. She's not anymore, not since I rehabilitated her this morning."

At the word 'Bonesaw', Brian had come to his feet. He studied the blonde girl, measuring her pose and her apparent level of readiness. Alec had actually scrambled up onto the sofa and was pressing back against the wall, and Rachel was standing up, her dogs already beginning to grow.

"Please define what you mean by 'rehabilitated'," Brian said carefully.

Amy took a deep breath. "Just what I said. She's not Bonesaw anymore."

"Amy's telling the truth," Taylor added helpfully. "Security says Jack Slash was a low-level Master, and I believe him. Amy apparently stripped away his cumulative influence over her. I've been talking to Riley for maybe half an hour now, and she seems totally normal to me."

"That's what they all say, just before someone decides to decorate the Christmas tree with their guts," Alec objected. "How can you know?"

"I know," Amy told him. "When I touch her, I can see everything that's in her brain. If she was a sociopath, I'd be fully aware of it. But she's closer to baseline than you are."

"Not a high bar," murmured Brian.

"Fuck off." Alec gave him the finger, then stepped down off the sofa. Leaning down, he picked up his sceptre, which had fallen over in all the fuss. "Lisa, are we safe from her or not?"

Lisa put the laptop aside and stood up, then walked over to Riley. "Hm." The sound was almost contemplative as she looked the girl over. "Answer me one question. Are you planning to cut us up and use us in bizarre medical experiments?"

"For fuck's sake," Alec complained. "I said 'tell me if we're safe', not 'give her ideas'."

"I'm not planning to hurt you at all," Riley said. "That's not me. That was Jack Slash's plan for me, but he's dead so I don't have to do what he wants anymore."

Slowly, almost reluctantly, Lisa nodded. "It's true," she said. "She hates the idea of cutting someone up to hurt them." She looked around at where Rachel's dogs were waist-high and still growing. "We're not going to need those."

Rachel shook her head stubbornly. "I'll be the judge of that."

"Rachel." Brian turned to her and made a cutting motion with his hand. "Lisa says Riley's not a danger to us."

"And what if Lisa's wrong?" protested Alec. "She got it wrong in the bank. We remember all the times she got it right, but how many times has she been wrong and we just never knew about it? What if Bonesaw's so fucked up that even she doesn't know how psychotic she is, until she wakes up in the middle of the night with the urge to snack on our livers or something?"

"Whoa, hey, now," Riley said. "When I was Bonesaw, yeah, I did some really screwed-up stuff. I hurt people and killed them in ways that make me want to puke now. But I never ate people. That was all the Siberian and Crawler." She shook her head. "I know now that Sibby was a projection, which makes me wonder why the heck did she even eat people? It's not like she could get hungry."

"A … projection?" Brian knew he was going to regret asking the question, but he couldn't not ask. "Who was the projector? Was it one of the other members?"

Oddly enough, Riley glanced at Amy, who gave her a go-ahead nod. "Ever hear of William Manton? Yeah, that Manton. I'm told Siberian looked like what you'd get if you did a mashup of his wife and daughter, and painted her white with tiger stripes. And considering that she never wore clothes, and I sometimes cuddled up to her so I could sleep at night, that's extra creepy all the way around."

Alec stared at her. "Fuck you. Why did you have to say that? I did not want to feel sorry for you."

"Never asked you to," Riley retorted. "Shit happened. I bet it happened to you, too. I've seen that look in the mirror. Well, guess what? It's not a contest. I don't get to win because I got turned into a serial killer by Jack Slash and getting a hug from the Siberian was the highlight of my day. Even if whatever happened to you is even more screwed up than that, you don't get to win either. Life's a rigged contest from the start, and we all lose."

"Okay, okay," Brian said, patting the air. "Can we just … back off, or something? Nobody got here because of good things happening in their life."

Taylor raised her eyebrows. "Well, true, but you can't say that life hasn't been getting at least a bit better. The Slaughterhouse Nine, as a group, are done. Lung's Birdcage bound. So's Hookwolf. Shadow Stalker's going to juvey. The PRT and Protectorate aren't going to be kicking in our door any time soon."

"… no more Endbringer attacks," Amy added. "At least, if Michael's preparations work out like he says they should." She paused, looking around at the people staring at her. "… what? Didn't I fill you guys in on that?"

"No," Brian said carefully. "No, you did not. Are you serious? Can he … do that? I thought he could only act through you."

Lisa regarded Amy; her freckles stood out starkly in contrast as her face paled. When she spoke, it was in a bare whisper. "Jesus Christ, you're serious, aren't you?"

"If his preparations work, then yes," Amy confirmed. "We'll know on May the fifteenth."

"Exactly what will we know?" asked Taylor. "That it worked, or it didn't work?"

"Well, either one, to be frank," Amy conceded. "I mean, there's the chance that someone will be a fucking moron and Leviathan will attack anyway, but even if he does, it shouldn't be here. Because it would've been here."

"… who's likely to be a fucking moron?" Brian didn't want to ask the question at all, but he figured someone had to. "And why wouldn't he attack here, if he was going to in the first place?"

"You don't need to know the name, but as for the rest of it … conflict." Amy spoke the word with authority. "Between the two gangs working on ripping the city apart between themselves, Noelle in Coil's basement, the PRT working itself ragged and making errors of judgement because they weren't being given adequate support from Washington, and a few other things I'm not going to mention …" She paused and looked around. "An attack on the Bay would've lit the fuse on an absolute fuck-ton of conflict. But most of that isn't going to happen now. So if he attacks, it'll be someplace where all that damage will cause maximum conflict. Possibly Miami."

"And you've been working to defuse all those trouble spots, haven't you?" Lisa fronted up to Amy. "You knew what they were, so everything you've been doing has been aimed at pulling those plugs, right?"

"Well, yes." Amy's smile could've been carved from granite. "That, and saving the world in general. Which is why I asked for your advice on getting Riley on side. There's stuff I can do that she can't, and stuff she can do that I can't. But I'm thinking that between us …"

Riley turned her head to stare at Amy. "You actually want to team up with me?" Her voice quavered, then broke a little. "I thought … I thought …"

"That I was watching over you, ready to punish you if you ever tried to use your powers again?" Amy shook her head. "Yeah, that's not it at all. Your power is amazing, and Michael tells me you can pull off power synergies that I can't even begin to understand. But I wanted you to be comfortable enough to not have any self-doubts when the time actually came." She glanced at Lisa as she said this.

"And that's where I come in," Lisa said, in tones of realisation. "Where we come in. You want us to what, help socialise her?"

Amy nodded. "Well, yes. I've laid the basic foundations, but there's only so much I can do. Riley's as good a person as I can make her in the time I had available, but I want her invested in saving the world."

"You do realise what you're asking, don't you?" asked Brian. Ever since Amy entered with Riley, he'd been feeling as though he was out of his depth, and now he knew why. When Amy looked his way, he glanced at Alec and Rachel. "Not all of us are likely to be really on board with this. Just saying."

Apparently taking her cue from this, Rachel glowered at Riley. "Keep away from my dogs, and I won't have to hurt you."

"I'm not going to hurt your dogs," Riley said. "I like dogs. When I was—before I was Bonesaw, I had a little fluffy dog called Muffles. He loved to play in the snow." Her voice caught in her throat. "Jack Slash killed him, just to prove a point."

"Hey, can I just say something here?" asked Alec. "Did we get advised this was going to happen? Did we get asked if we wanted to help rehabilitate a pint-sized serial killer? Did I, personally, get any input into any of this at all? Pretty sure the answer's 'no' on all counts."

Amy raised her eyebrows as she stared him down. "You're correct. I didn't ask you, because I know you. You'd say no on general principles, just to be a dick."

Brian chuckled. "Well, she's got you there."

Riley moved toward where Alec stood at the sofa. He raised the taser defensively, but she didn't move into his personal space. "I'm sorry you got blindsided with this. It wasn't my idea. In fact, I've got no idea where this is going at all, just that Amy and Michael want me to be a good person."

"Hmm." Alec's lips twisted. "Well, the best way I know whether to find out if someone's worth knowing is to play a couple of rounds of FPS with them. You up for that?"

Ignoring Amy's quiet hmph of amusement, Riley nodded tentatively. "I've never played. It kind of never came up, you know? But … sure. I'm willing to try."

"Awesome." Alec handed her a controller, then gave Amy a challenging stare. "This doesn't mean I'm okay with her being here, just saying."

"Totally." Amy folded her arms and leaned against the wall; as far as Brian could tell, she was trying to hide a grin.

As Alec made room for Riley to sit down, keeping a healthy distance between them, Brian couldn't help wondering how his life had become so strange.

<><>​

PRT Building ENE
Director's Office

"Should've seen it. Pigs flying everywhere—"

Emily Piggot held up her hand to halt Assault's verbal report about an ecoterrorist bomb attack on a piggery. "Is it just me," she said carefully, "or did you just feel a chill down your spine, too?"

Assault paused, then shook his head. "Nah, I only get that when I know Battery's looking for me."

"Indeed." She shook her head to dispel the last of the feeling. "Carry on."



End of Part Twenty-Nine

[A/N: This fic should be wrapping up in the next 1-3 chapters.]

 

I, Panacea

Part Thirty: The Beginning of the End

[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]


Tattletale

Riley—Lisa was still having trouble dealing with the fact that a tweenage mass murderer (or all that was left of one) was sitting on their sofa—took a little while to get used to the controller. Faster than some, to be honest; despite her power's best efforts, Lisa had never been more than mediocre at the games Alec liked. But Riley stuck to it anyway, and only a few minutes in she got her first unassisted kill.

Well, technically unassisted. From Alec's sly sideways glance, Lisa figured he'd set it up to give her the chance. Not that he was being nice. That sort of thing wasn't even in his DNA. But he'd evidently decided (as had she) that not antagonising the girl who held the distinction of having been the youngest ever member of the Slaughterhouse Nine was probably his best possible life choice, right then.

As Riley dived back into the game, Lisa was struck by an epiphany. Not via her power; she had it turned down right then, so as to not overuse it. This was the ordinary type that ordinary people got, but she was still nearly blinded by the intensity. All of a sudden, everything she'd been vaguely wondering about made sense.

Stepping up beside Amy, she cleared her throat gently. "This is all part of the master plan, isn't it? For dealing with Scion."

Part of her still wanted to gibber madly about what she'd learned during the terrifying confrontation in Coil's bunker, just over two weeks previously. Panacea was possessed … partnered … whatever … with an eldritch being that knew far too much about things it had no business knowing, and went by the unlikely name of 'Michael Allen', or the equally unlikely one of 'Security'. Also, that Scion was another eldritch entity that needed to be killed in order to save the world.

Amy gave her a sideways glance. "Partly that, yeah. And partly because she needed to be saved."

Lisa let the 'needed to be saved' thing go by the wayside. If someone who'd never heard of Bonesaw or lived in a world with the Slaughterhouse Nine met Riley now, they'd think she was just a normal twelve-year-old. They could interact with her without flinching every time she made a move in their peripheral vision.

Intellectually, she knew, Panacea's work could be trusted.

Emotionally, however, was another kettle of fish altogether.

"So, what's the plan?" she urged. "I'm pretty sure it's more complicated than sneaking up behind him and smacking him over the head with Circus' mallet."

Amy grimaced. "Michael's still working on the exact plan. He's got options, he says, but none of them are great. Some of them involve me working on brains, but he's trying hard to avoid going there." Her eyes cut over to where Riley was concentrating on blasting her opponents on the screen, tongue sticking out one corner of her mouth.

"So, he's going to get Riley to do the brain work where you can't or won't do it?" Lisa guessed. Doing this sort of thing without using her power was actually difficult, but she didn't want the sort of Thinker headache that came from trying to unscrew the inscrutable enigma that was Michael Allen.

"If and when it's needed, yeah." Amy sighed. "I really hope it isn't, but if it comes to saving the world, we're just going to have to grit our teeth, get it done, then get therapy after the fact."

Lisa tilted her head, raising her eyebrows slightly. "Huh," she observed. "I'm impressed. Two weeks ago in the bank, there's no way you would've been able to face up to making a compromise like that. You were so black-and-white in your thinking, you would've made the Siberian jealous."

Amy snorted softly. "Two weeks ago, I hadn't had the facts of life explained to me in great fucking detail by Michael. Including stuff about the nature of reality that I'm still getting my head around." She shuddered theatrically. "It has not been the most fun time of my life."

"What?" Lisa frowned. "From what I can see, you're sitting pretty. You're literally getting the secrets of the universe handed to you on a silver platter. It's basically my dream. What's not to like?"

"What's not to like?" For a moment, it seemed Amy was going to raise her voice, but then she grabbed Lisa's elbow. "C'mon, we need to talk."

Together, they headed down the corridor to the kitchenette area. Amy pulled out a chair and spun it around, then straddled it and crossed her arms over the back. Lisa debated doing the same, but decided to sit in hers normally. "Okay, what's on your mind?"

"You asked me what's not to like." Amy drew a deep breath, then let it out through her nostrils. "At the point in my life when you hit the bank, if you'd asked me if I had my life together, I would've said yes. I thought I had all my problems under control, but I was lying to myself so hard my pants should've spontaneously combusted five minutes before I put them on."

Lisa nodded cautiously. She'd known of some of Amy's issues due to her delving at the bank. Now that she knew the healer somewhat better, she regretted pushing Amy's buttons quite so hard when she did, but at the time matters had been more than a little fraught. "Okay," she said in an encouraging tone. "So … I'm guessing Security changed things?"

"If you want to understate things massively." Amy rolled her eyes. "He pulled the damned Band-Aid off everything. Every little lie I was telling myself, every stressor I was pretending to ignore, he made me face it all."

"Wow." Lisa got up and set the jug to boil. This was a moment for tea, if there ever was one. "Sounds like every hardass drill sergeant ever."

"Yeah, kinda." Amy seemed to rethink her harsh attitude. "But then he helped me through the aftermath and let me lean on him while I figured out who I really was."

Lisa resumed her seat. "And in the meantime, you're pulling crap like setting up Coil and fixing Taylor's shithole of a life and saving Alexandria's life and stuff. And, you know, making sure nobody comes down on us like a ton of bricks."

"There is that, yes." Amy seemed pensive. "But there's more that he's told me about. A lot more. More than you know about. You probably haven't guessed how deep the rabbit-hole goes. I'm not sure if I even want to know what I know."

A shiver ran down Lisa's spine at the portent behind Amy's words; she did her best to ignore it. "So, what's the big plan?"

Amy seemed to still be pondering over her answer when the jug burbled to indicate that the water had boiled. To give her time, Lisa got up and poured cups of tea for both of them. She knew the way Amy liked it—no milk, half a teaspoon of sugar—but she refrained from making it that way. Instinctively, she knew that showing off with her powers was not a great thing to do right now.

With the half-teaspoon of sugar in the cup, Amy stirred her tea gently as the teabag hung inside. "Like I said, we're still working on that. We've got several options, some of which are more palatable than others, and some that he really doesn't want to go with."

"Why not?" Lisa felt the question had to be asked. "I mean, this is the end of the world, right? How bad does an option have to be, that we reject it outright?"

Amy raised her eyes until she met Lisa's gaze. "One option involves sitting back and waiting until Scion snaps, then taking him down the hard way."

"Whoa, wait." Lisa held up her hands. "Slow down a bit. How does he snap? Why does he snap?"

"Michael says he's not sure about the second time, but the first time it was because Jack Slash talked him into it. Apparently Jack's got—had—some weird bullshit trick for talking to Scion so he listened. Anyway, Jack's dead, so I guess we'd have to wait for another inciting incident."

"Great." Lisa ran her hands through her hair. "So, what happens then?"

Amy shrugged. "Scion starts blowing shit up. Everyone's got their own personal plan for fighting him, that they're sure will work. Spoilers: it doesn't. Lots of people die. Whole countries get cratered. He even starts attacking the alternate earths. People get scared and alliances fracture. Taylor talks me into jailbreaking her power as a Hail Mary pass. She takes control of basically every cape everywhere, and uses lessons her bullies taught her to fuck with Scion's mind and kill him. But, you know, the jailbreak also breaks Taylor's mind for good and she ends up taking two bullets to the head before she can become a danger to the rest of the human race."

Her tea forgotten, Lisa stared at Amy. "Jesus Christ," she whispered. "That sounds … fuck, that sounds way too specific. Is that a Dinah prediction?"

"No." Amy shook her head. "Michael. He said he's seen it happen. He's also seen an instance where he prepped everyone to fight Scion as thoroughly as he could, but shit went sideways anyway. We won with a lot less bloodshed, mainly because we had all our planners running strategy and tactics, but he had to pull a sacrifice play. Scion killed him, then Taylor and Dragon killed Scion."

"You're talking alternate timelines here." Lisa wanted to bring her power into play, but knew it wouldn't give any results worth a damn if Michael was involved. "How many versions of our world are there? I thought there was just Aleph."

"No, no." Amy shook her head. "I was confused too, but it's more like alternate multiverses. Entirely separate. You can't get there from here, unless someone like Michael intervenes."

The conclusion was inescapable. "But he can go wherever he likes."

Amy paused for just long enough that Lisa was convinced there was more to the situation than she'd already figured out, then nodded. "That's what he told me, yeah. For him, it's effortless. It's part of the whole 'older than our universe' thing."

"There's something you're not telling me." Lisa leaned in. "Something you're aware of, but you're not sure about."

"Yes. No." Amy hesitated again. "You're seriously not going to believe it. The only reason I believe it is because he's never lied to me, not once. Also, because it's the only thing that fits in with everything else he's told me. Everything. About how he knows stuff he shouldn't."

Lisa drank from her teacup. "Well, doesn't that fall under 'inscrutable eldritch entity from beyond time and space'?" Her question wasn't quite as rhetorical as she tried to make it sound. "They know shit because they know shit."

"I only wish that was the case. There is an actual reason." Amy shook her head morosely, then took a sip herself. "Michael dropped enough hints that when he finally confirmed it, it wasn't as big a shock as it could've been, but still …"

"Do you think I want to know?" Lisa challenged. She absolutely wanted to know, of course, but she also knew somehow that was her power talking. What she was actually asking was more nuanced: would it help for me to know?

"Not sure yet." Amy took another sip from her teacup. "What we're reasonably sure of is that right now we've got direct or indirect access to all the assets and resources we need to beat Scion. The trick is to assemble an action plan with as few moving parts as possible, but with the best possible chance of destroying him. Michael is talking about getting in contact with Accord."

"Oh, hell no." Lisa shook her head vehemently. "The last thing we want is that twitchy little asshole coming in on this. I bet he doesn't even know all there is to know about half the people you want to make use of. I do; or rather, my power can fill me in as needed."

"What if you worked together?" Amy's voice was reasonable. "You give him the specific details and he works out the broad strokes?"

"Accord rarely works well with anyone," Lisa declared. "And if anyone even looks like being a disruptive influence around him, his go-to is murder."

Amy raised an eyebrow. "Michael says that's not entirely true. In late July, Behemoth was due to attack New Delhi. You would've been there, working alongside Accord to coordinate planning for the defenses. He can control himself when it's urgent. Are you sure you aren't pushing back because when he's working on a big problem he's the smartest person in the room?"

Lisa gritted her teeth. "Accord's thing is, he takes all the facts and puts together a rock-solid plan of action that takes all the minor details into account, right?"

"Uh huh." Amy kept eye contact with Lisa while she finished off most of her tea. "That's more or less exactly what we want, right?"

"Wrong. That's not what you need." Amy still wasn't getting it, so Lisa tried again. "When Accord makes his plans, he only takes into account the facts he knows at the beginning. My power lets me intuit more options as we work on the plan. Anyway, I know you. I've seen what you can do. With Accord, you'd have to go through the whole process of gaining his trust—if you could ever really get it—and talking him around into believing you. Me, I'm already there."

"Hmm." Amy finished her tea and put the cup down. "I'm still not totally convinced that you're not just trying to prove you're smarter than Accord. This is not about bolstering your respective egos. The lives of everyone on Earth—on all the Earths—are at stake here. Pride has to take second place."

"So, try me." Lisa set her own cup down and spread her hands. "Give me all the deets. See what I can figure out." She paused, then when Amy went to open her mouth, cut in again. "But start with the basics. What is Scion, and why's he so hard to beat?"

Amy was silent for a moment, then nodded fractionally; Lisa figured she'd consulted with Michael and he'd given the go-ahead. "Okay, imagine a giant multidimensional space whale. That's almost totally wrong, but it's right enough for the current situation. Now, each one of these whales is composed of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of smaller bits and pieces that can detach—"

"Whoa, wait a second." Lisa held up her hands. "I need a sense of scale here. How big is 'giant'? How small are these smaller pieces?"

There was another brief pause, then Amy shrugged. "Michael says that data is inconclusive, but the whales are maybe the size of a small planet. The shards are like their cells, but they're semi-autonomous, and maybe the size of Manhattan. They're what contain and generate powers." She raised her eyebrows. "Any more questions?"

"Keep going. I'll think of more." Lisa gestured generously.

Amy gave her a dubious glance, but continued anyway. "When the whales get to a life-bearing planet like Earth, they dump a bunch of shards into its local dimensional space. These are set up so they can link up with whatever is the most intelligent species on the planet. After going nuts with their powers for a few centuries, shards would have picked up lots and lots of data on how to use the powers most effectively, so the whales reclaim the shards. Then they blow up everything and ride the shockwave on to their next target. Rinse and repeat."

"Jesus." Lisa became aware that her nails were digging into her palms. She'd known it was bad, but not this bad. "All this, just to get information on how to use their powers?"

"They're not overly creative, and they're kind of obsessed," Amy explained. "Some do it a bit differently, but Scion's part of a Warrior-Thinker pairing. They had plans for Earth that would've made it a lot harder to fight back, but due to a series of fuckups and fortunate events, we've only got Scion active. The Thinker is currently semi-dead; we are gonna have to make her all the way dead sooner rather than later, though."

Lisa wanted to ask why, but decided not to take on any extraneous information right at that moment. "Okay, so if Scion's the size of a small planet, that means he's got the powers of all the shards he kept, right?"

"Got it in one." Amy didn't look or sound thrilled at the explanation. "He handed out a lot to the population, but he kept enough back that he can take care of himself. His real body's parked in a dimensional pocket, and one of his powers allows him to project the Scion form as a three-dimensional plug over the entrance. Destroy the golden man, and we can get access to his real body. Of course, that's easier said than done."

"Thank you, Captain fucking Obvious." Lisa rolled her eyes, drawing some comfort from the snark. "What about the Endbringers? Where do they come into this?"

Amy drew a deep breath. "They need us to fight, to gather data, right? The original idea was to have a bunch of nations, their capes all engaged in low-level warfare with each other. Whenever peace threatened to break out, a superweapon would attack someplace, and kick the fighting over again."

"Superweapon." Lisa didn't like the sound of that in the slightest. "So, they're not independent. They're weapons. Tools. Projections." A thought worried her. "But if the same three kept attacking different nations, pretty soon they'd figure out that it's an outside force, right?"

"If there was only three, yeah." Amy looked unhappy as she spoke the words. "But there's twenty. And if we kill one, two or three pop up in its place."

Twenty? Twenty Endbringers? Fuuuuuuuuck. Lisa didn't like the way this was going, but she'd started asking questions and she hated to not know all the answers. "Okay, so why are they just attacking cities at random now? This definitely isn't pitting capes of one nation against another."

"That's a whole other rabbit-hole," Amy said, making a cut-off motion with her hand. "Let's just say that when shit went sideways, it didn't do things by halves. But on the upside, Michael says he may have possibly fixed the Endbringer problem. Back to Scion; what else do you want to know?"

"How we kill him." This was, after all, the point of the entire uncomfortable discussion. "Or rather, how Michael's seen him killed before."

"It's a two-stage thing," Amy explained. "First, you have to destroy the fake body while it's fighting back all the way. Second, you get to the main body in its pocket dimension and hit it with planetary-scale damage. But you can't brute-force your way in. He's called the Warrior for a reason. You've got to use his emotions against him."

Lisa blinked. "Emotions? Really?"

"Really." Amy nodded earnestly. "It's what Michael told me. The first time, they kept hitting him with the Thinker's face and reminding him of her death—remember, he's depressed as fuck right now because she's basically gone—until he stopped fighting and let them take his body out. The second time, Michael pissed him off badly, to the point that he didn't register danger until it was too late."

Lisa leaned forward intently. "Wait, wait, go back. 'Take his body out'?"

"It's a power effect the whales use for offense between themselves. It basically destroys anything it hits. Michael calls it Sting, and says Flechette can empower weapons with it."

"But he can dodge it?"

Amy nodded. "Yeah. Remember Contessa? He's got the same power as she does. Nearly everyone who goes up against him, he can anticipate their attacks."

Lisa remembered Contessa, alright. She also remembered how Contessa went down. "But Michael can ignore that, right? Scion can't anticipate him."

"Michael's pretty sure that's the case, but it raises a whole other set of problems." Amy gestured to herself. "I'm not a Brute. Sure, Michael can wrong-foot Scion by doing something he doesn't expect, but then he can hit me with a wide-area attack that I can't dodge or run away from."

"Good point, good point." Lisa got up and took the empty cups to the sink, dropping the used tea-bags in the trash along the way. "So, the trick will be to figure out how to leverage Michael's ability to bypass Scion's precog ability in such a way that we can one-shot him. Scion, not Michael."

"That's the problem, yeah." Amy leaned back in her chair and sighed. "Michael says that the last time he went through this, he got Leet to build a gun that emulated Flechette's ability. The idea was to get Dragon to reverse-engineer it and give everyone one, but Scion attacked before he'd made more than the prototype."

Lisa blinked. "Well, we could do that again, right? Just give you the gun. You front up to Scion and pop a cap in his golden ass. He won't be expecting that."

"And if he can analyse what sort of Tinkertech that's gone into a device, just by looking at it?" Amy shook her head. "I'd be a cloud of greasy smoke before I even aimed it at him."

"Right, right." Lisa sagged back into her chair, closing her eyes. This was starting to sound not as easy as she'd hoped it would be. "Uggh. Name the other resources we've got access to. I probably know them, but I need to hear them out loud."

When Amy spoke, her voice held a smirk. "Well, if we're going by alphabetical order, first up is Accord."

Lisa cracked one eyelid, just to give her a filthy look. "Thought I told you why he's a bad idea."

"No, you gave me excuses why you don't want him in on this. Michael, on the other hand, knows exactly how to secure his undivided attention and his absolute cooperation. That's a direct quote, by the way."

"Okay, fine. The man can make a plan that won't blow up in our faces. Granted. Next?"

"Coil." Amy spoke the word blithely.

"… is dead." Lisa closed her eye again. "I watched him die."

"Michael insisted his body be put on ice," Amy countered. "We have access to his genetic material."

"Let me guess," Lisa snarked. "Next you're going to say we can get Blasto to make a clone of him, with his powers?"

"Well, yes," Amy agreed. "That's something that can actually be done." She paused. "Michael says the last time something like this happened, it was the Slaughterhouse Nine. They kidnapped Blasto and raided Toybox for Cranial's stuff. Cloned themselves and had basic personalities implanted, so the clones would raise havoc, all for shits and giggles."

"Let's put a pin in that and move on." The last thing Lisa wanted to face was a clone of Coil. "So, when Leet made the Flechette gun, it actually worked?"

"Michael says it did, sure." Amy shrugged. "Will it work this time? No idea."

"Okay, so once you get access to the real body, how do you kill that? Size of a small planet and all, I mean."

"Well, that's the easy bit, or so I gather." Amy leaned back in her chair. "There's a lot of capes who can do a lot of damage in a short time. There's also a bunch of Tinkers who can also build really destructive stuff, like String Theory or Bakuda. Give them free rein once the way is clear, and he's toast."

"String Theory's in the Birdcage though, isn't she? And I thought Bakuda was heading there."

Amy grinned. "Well, she's not there yet. And she can make all kinds of nasty shit."

"Yeah, so I gathered." Lisa frowned. "Talking of nasty shit, how good is Blasto's tech anyway?"

"Give me a second here." Amy paused as though listening, then whistled softly. "Damn. Okay, he's good. At one point, he does a hybrid of Myrddin and the Simurgh, and damn near ends up with a viable cross."

"Nope, nope and hell nope." Lisa shook her head vehemently. "The man is fucking certifiable if he's going to pull that shit. Why hasn't he been kill-ordered yet, anyway?"

Amy gave her a tight grin. "There's an unsigned one just waiting to happen, if he ever creates something that can replicate itself. Nobody wants another Nilbog."

"Ah. Good point. Next on the resources list?"

"Doormaker." Amy said the name casually. "Portal cape. You might recall Michael asking for access to his ability. Well, we got it. If we need to be somewhere, we can be there." She snorted. "Remember how I said Jack Slash could talk to Scion? He could talk to other capes too, and make them listen. He gave himself access to Doormaker, and we had to chase him all over America."

"That must have been annoying … wait. Wait, wait, wait." Lisa sat bolt upright. "I just had an idea."

"What?" As Amy stared at her, Lisa dipped into her power.

What are the chances … pretty damn high. Huh.

Lisa raised a finger. "Tell you in a second. But I'm going to need you to make a phone call for me first. We need one thing to make this work."

Amy took her phone out. "Name it."

<><>​

Grue

Brian hated to admit it, but Alec had been right about something after all. Specifically, watching Riley play first-person shooters was a good way to figure out her current state of mind. As unnerving as her current presence was (and why had Panacea and Lisa gone off to talk privately at the far end of the loft, anyway?), he was able to pick up a lot of tells from her as she concentrated on the screen.

She'd been tense when she first arrived, which wasn't totally surprising, given that she was literally walking unprotected into the middle of a bunch of teenage supervillains. Never mind that they'd been more scared of her than she of them (Brian was never going to let Alec forget how he'd actually jumped up on the sofa) and was under Panacea's protection; it would've been a nerve-wracking experience for anyone but a total sociopath.

… which was, he belatedly realised, a point in her favour.

However, she'd begun to relax, not even expressing more than mild irritation every time her on-screen avatar got shot, stabbed, blown up or run over by an APC. Alec was, of course, far and away her superior in the game, but even he wasn't being as much of a dick as he could've been. In fact, Brian caught him subtly assisting her from time to time, though he wasn't sure if she even realised it.

A shy smile was showing up on her face each time she overcame another obstacle. Alec's praise, rarely given as it was, made her smile widen, and she doubled down on her efforts to conquer the electronic battlefield.

Rachel had headed out, picking up the collars and leashes for her dogs but not bothering to attach them straight away. Brian hadn't been sure whether this was a reaction to the stranger in their midst—Rachel had seen enough of Panacea for her not to count as a stranger, he hoped—or just because she needed to go out. Either way, it was probably a good thing to remove a potential source of argument from the room.

Taylor appeared to be casually watching with a tolerant smile on her face—she had about as much use for computer games as Brian himself did—but Brian knew three things. First, Taylor never did anything casually. As a matter of course, she would be watching the surrounding few blocks with her bugs, checking and following every person who moved within that area. Second, he'd gathered that she knew a thing or two about spotting people with a hidden agenda, and she'd already spent some time in Riley's presence without sounding the alarm. Third, there would be a truly massive swarm gathering somewhere close by, getting larger by the second. If Riley were trying to pull a trick on them, about a million bugs would descend on her and strip the flesh from her bones at a rate that would cause the average piranha to back away carefully.

"Hah!" Lisa's voice echoed down the corridor, startling Brian and making Taylor turn her head. "I knew it!"

For some reason, the sheer level triumph in her voice gave Brian a deep sense of foreboding. "Is this something we should be worried about?" he asked Taylor in a low voice.

She shrugged. "I have no idea. I haven't been trying to listen in, and bug senses are crap anyway."

"Is Lisa being smug again?" asked Alec without taking his attention from the screen. "Can one of you responsible adults go and ask her to do it somewhere else? We're busy here."

"It should be okay." Taylor sounded like she was trying to convince herself of what she was saying. "Panacea's there, and she's got Michael to advise her against doing anything really stupid."

Brian grimaced. "Unfortunately, Lisa can be the stupidest smart person I know. And when she uses her power to get answers, those answers can be totally convincing and utterly wrong, all at the same time."

"Yeah," Alec threw in. "Remember the bank, and how she totally borked her prediction of the response level? Yeah, that's happened more than once."

"Do-do you think it's happening now?" ventured Riley.

"That bit, I'm not sure about," Brian said. "Like Taylor said, Panacea's there. Whether she's got enough of a level head to keep Lisa from going off the deep end—"

In the most egregious example of 'speak of the devil' Brian had ever encountered, he was interrupted by the girl herself making a grand entrance from the direction of the kitchen. "Ladies and gentlemen," she declared, throwing her arms wide. "I am a certifiable fucking genius!"

"Well, you're certifiable, that's for sure," snarked Alec. "As for the rest of it … meh, you do you."

"Shut up, Alec." Brian's sense of foreboding was ramping up quite dramatically. Seeing Panacea wearing an unhappy expression behind Lisa did nothing at all to dispel it. "Lisa, what've you done now?"

"Oh, nothing much." Lisa batted her eyelids in an apparent attempt at false modesty. "I've only figured out a plan for saving the entire fucking world from inevitable fiery apocalypse, that's all. Yeah, that's right. Me. The stupidest smart person you've ever met." The savage irony in her tone would've required an angle-grinder to cut through it. "The line to apologise for misjudging me forms on the left."

"Is that right, Amy?" Taylor looked at Panacea. "Have you two come up with an actual plan? Is that what you were doing back there?"

Panacea sighed. "Yes, there's a plan. It's … not a bad one, to be honest. Not where I would've gone, and I'm really not going to enjoy implementing it, but … Michael says it should work."

"Shit, it's that bad?" In the time Brian had known Panacea, he'd formed an impression of someone who it was hard to put on the back foot, but she didn't look at all thrilled. "Does someone have to die to make it work?"

"Hah, nope." Lisa was definitely riding the endorphin high. "That was the last one. This time around, there's gonna be exactly one casualty. The big golden doofus."

"What do you mean, last one?" Alec asked suspiciously. "We've never fought Scion before … right? Or did I sleep in one time and miss the whole thing?"

Panacea shook her head. "No, but Michael has. As far as he's concerned, the time and space constraints of our universe are merely polite suggestions. He's been through it a couple of times already."

Brian blinked. "He what?" Then he shook his head. "Okay, you know what? I'm not even going to ask."

"Okay, so what's this plan involve?" Alec put the game on pause and turned to give Lisa his full attention. "And how come you came up with this plan when Pan-Pan there's got the guy with all the knowledge in her head?"

"Because the plan she came up with isn't one I would come up with," Panacea answered with a touch of asperity. "Just because it'll probably succeed doesn't make it a good plan, just a successful one."

"Hey, any plan that doesn't involve Scion blowing up our everything is a good plan in my book." Alec spread his hands. "So elucidate us, o tattler of tales. Give us the straight dope. Spill the beans. Give with the sordid details. How are we gonna kill him?"

"You're a dope," muttered Lisa. "So, this plan is going to involve spending a stack of cash getting a few people to cooperate. Also, I'm going to have to ask the Chief Director of the PRT for a favour. But once that's done, the answer is … with panache and style."

<><>​

PRT Department 22, Washington DC

Chief Director Costa-Brown

It was somewhat restful to be able to settle back into her office chair and pretend that her cape persona didn't exist for the time being. Events had been moving in unexpected directions since the Panacea situation had cropped up. Formerly very much a wallflower-type cape who would never have gotten Rebecca's attention had it not been for her healing ability, Panacea had in one night thrown all of Cauldron into turmoil.

It had been highly tempting to pigeonhole Panacea's enigmatic passenger as being the result of a Case 70-style second trigger, but she knew damn well that it just didn't fit the prerequisites. Case 70 capes involved two personalities and powersets sharing the same body, but the powers were invariably similar in nature. Panacea's powers revolved around manipulation of biology—Rebecca had known for years that the girl's 'inability' to affect brains was a self-imposed limitation, nothing more—whereas 'Michael Allen' had a whole different set of abilities.

As far as she could tell from observation—and from listening to Contessa's less than totally thrilled account of events—the man called 'Michael Allen' had no active powers of his own, but could hide Panacea from precognitive observation. He also had access to a terrifyingly broad array of information he had absolutely no business knowing, including things that Rebecca had trouble believing herself, such as Eidolon's purported connection to the Endbringers.

And of course, he knew about Scion. In fact, befitting his self-described status as an extra-dimensional being, he apparently knew more about Scion than the entirety of Cauldron had been able to divine in the last thirty years of operation. So much so, that he was confident of formulating a plan to kill the golden demigod with the resources at hand.

Which was more, Rebecca had to admit, than they'd managed to do in all this time.

Her desk phone rang. She frowned as she picked it up, noting that the caller ID showed up as the PRT ENE phone desk. "Chief Director Costa-Brown speaking."

"Sorry to bother you, Chief Director, but I have Panacea on the line. She says it's important."

Rebecca's eyes widened. "Put her through." If Panacea considered something important, then so did she.

There was a click, then the background noise changed. She could dimly hear the sounds of combat … no, that was a combat-style computer game. "Hello, Chief Director? This is Panacea."

She recognised the voice. "Panacea, good to hear from you. What do you have for me?"

"We're, uh, we're working on a plan to end a certain problem, and we need some information. Specifically, when you ended Jack Slash, did you keep the body?"

"No. It was destroyed. Why?"

A second voice, one her perfect memory marked as belonging to Tattletale, muttered "Shit," but Panacea bored on. "Genetic material. Did you keep any?"

There was only one use Rebecca could think of for DNA, and that was for cloning. Though as horrific—and resourceful—as the Slaughterhouse leader had been, she just couldn't see him facing off against Scion. Still, she'd been asked the question. "I took a sample, yes. To ensure it was indeed him and not a fake, and to test for bio-agents. The sample is still in storage. Why?"

She heard two separate sighs of relief, before Panacea replied. "Don't want to spill too much over an open line. Thanks; I'll get back to you." As the call cut off, she heard the beginnings of a triumphant whoop.

Putting the phone back down, she shook her head. If Panacea's plan involved cloning Jack Slash, the world was in more trouble than she'd thought. Still, the plan had to have Michael Allen's okay, which meant there were facts she had yet to learn about the situation.

She got back to work, dealing with necessary documentation that absolutely had to be sighted and signed by her personally. It would've been tempting to delegate such things to her subordinates, but she'd heard of many cases where this led to the decay of authority to the point that the boss had no idea what was actually going on in the organisation. As it was, she could speed-read and absorb the content of any document in seconds, and any hinky wording would leap out at her just as quickly.

Just as she was scribbling a request for clarification in the margin of a seventeen-page document—the wording felt just a little too vague to be accidental—a Doorway opened in her office, in front of her desk. Automatically, she pressed the button next to her knee that locked the office door and lit up the DO NOT DISTURB sign, but it wasn't Contessa who stepped through, or even any other member of Cauldron. Instead, it was Panacea, out of costume, followed by a girl with bottle-green eyes and blonde hair in a French braid.

Rebecca's agile mind processed the information even as she spoke. "Panacea, when we granted you Doorway access, I did not give you permission to invade my office, nor bring along those not authorised to be here, such as …" There was barely a pause before she matched body type, height, and hair and eye colour. "… Tattletale." She hadn't so much as raised her voice, let alone stood up, but Tattletale went pale.

"Sorry," Panacea said breezily, in a tone of voice that made it clear she wasn't sorry at all. "We had some more questions to ask you, and I didn't want to do it over the phone. Most important secret in the world, and all that. Also, Tattletale's the one who came up with the plan."

Now she stood up. "You actually have a plan to kill Scion? One that will work?"

The corner of Panacea's mouth quirked in a dry half-grin. "We both know that there's no guarantees in the cape business, but Michael thinks it's got a better chance than most. But we're going to need access to stuff, as well as certain capes. Not all of them are heroes. Also, how's Flechette's transfer going?"

"I've expedited it," Rebecca said firmly. "She's one of the capes you need access to?"

"Yup," confirmed Tattletale. "Also, what's the status of Bakuda?"

Rebecca queried the name in her own head, leading her to a report she'd viewed the previous night. "Alive, though in some residual pain. Currently awaiting trial for multiple crimes against innocent citizens. The chances are that she'll be Birdcaged. Why?"

Panacea placed both hands in her desk and leaned over it. "Would you be good with granting her a certain amount of leniency, if she can build something for us? A really big and dangerous bomb?"

Just for a few seconds, Rebecca looked Panacea over. Aside from holding herself differently—she was far different from the self-effacing girl Rebecca had seen in every New Wave publicity shot—the teen didn't seem disturbed or insane. Which just begged the question as to why.

"I have no doubt that she could construct an extremely dangerous device from the contents of the average garage," Rebecca posited. "However, I have to query your reasons for allowing her to do so. What do you need this for? Why not a more focused attack?"

Tattletale grinned. "Well, you see …"

<><>​

Panacea

Amy and Lisa stepped back through the Doorway into the Undersiders' loft, Lisa leading the way with a jaunty step. "That went well, I thought."

"It did," Amy agreed. She was glad Lisa had kept her mouth more or less under control, as well as the fact that the Chief Director had seemed to be in a cooperative mood. She hadn't even queried the plan too deeply, merely raising an eyebrow at salient points. "That's the interview with Bakuda set up, and she'll release funds for dealing with Blasto and Toybox."

"What's this about Blasto and Toybox?" asked Brian, entering the kitchen. "And what did the Chief Director say about talking to Bakuda?"

Amy grinned. "She said yes. And as for your other question, we're going to be dealing with both Blasto and Toybox in the near future. It's part of the plan. How's Riley going?"

Brian shrugged. "Alec says he's satisfied that she's not a scheming mass murderer, which doesn't comfort me as much as it should. Rachel came back from the walk, and she's showing Riley how to brush her dogs down. When are we going to hear the rest of this plan?"

Lisa rolled her eyes. "When we're sure we aren't going to fall on our faces before we ever get it off the ground, duh. We've got to refine our technique and work on our lines."

Confused, Brian shook his head. "I thought we were going to be killing Scion, not auditioning for an acting job."

Amy smirked. "Who's to say we can't do both at the same time?"



End of Part Thirty

[A/N: Next chapter of I, Panacea will be the last chapter.]

 

I, Panacea

Part Thirty-One: Tattletale Saves the World (Part One)

[A/N 1: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

[A/N 2: This chapter got way bigger than expected. Here's the first half. Whee.]



Tattletale

"Good point." Lisa gave Amy a searching look, picking out a few subtle tells that the biokinetic probably didn't even know she had. "Though I can see you still don't actually like the plan."

"I'm allowed to," Amy said defensively. "I'll still do it, though."

"Because, like Alec, you don't want your everything blown up." Lisa smirked; she felt she'd earned it. "Also, because you don't feel like being ground zero for a Scion tantrum."

Amy rolled her eyes, while Brian widened his. "Mike says once was bad enough."

"That's because he was too busy sniping at alternate-me to actually pay attention to any kind of plan she might have come up with," Lisa said with absolute certainty. She'd met people like that before.

She'd also reduced them to total sobbing wrecks with a few well-chosen barbs, so there was that too.

"He's saying 'maybe', but in a way that makes me wonder," Amy reported after a few seconds. "Though he also says he had you working alongside Accord and Uber, and bitching about it the whole time."

Brian nodded. "That bit, I can totally believe."

Lisa rolled her eyes. "Well, he clearly had a way too elaborate plan that needed a lot more working parts than mine does. Tell me I'm wrong."

"He says he's taking the Fifth." Amy gave Lisa a disbelieving look. "How did you know? I thought your power didn't work on him." They headed back through from the kitchen area into the living room, with Brian following behind.

"It doesn't." Lisa grinned. "I just know how guys think."

"Right." Amy dusted her hands off. "Riley, are you done yet?"

"Almost." Riley ran the brush down Angelica's back legs, then handed it back to Rachel. "Thanks for letting me help."

"Welcome," grunted Rachel. "Dogs like you."

"I'm glad to hear that." Climbing to her feet, she turned to Alec. "I will be back, and I will beat your skinny ass at that stupid game. Just saying."

"Yeah, yeah, sure thing." Alec yawned theatrically. "I'll be waiting."

As Riley was putting her shoes back on, Amy turned to Lisa. "So, who were we going to talk to first? Blasto or Bakuda?"

Lisa considered their options. "I'd much rather talk to Blasto outside his lab, once he's had time to sweat a little. So … yeah, Bakuda."

"Let's do this, then." Amy cleared her throat. "Doorway to Bakuda's holding cell."

Brian and Alec stared as the portal soundlessly opened in the middle of the room.

"Well, I'll be damned," Brian muttered. "You can do that too now?"

"Just don't give that ability to Lisa," Alec snarked, without looking up from the screen. "She's already smug enough as it is—ow!" He yelped and grabbed his ear where Lisa had just flicked it.

"I don't need it," she informed him with great satisfaction. "I'm awesome just the way I am." Then she stepped through the portal, followed by Amy and Riley.

<><>​

Brockton Bay PRT Holding Cells

Bakuda (aka Alice Takawara)

Everything hurt, even things that Alice didn't think had nerve endings. The pain had been gradually decreasing since she woke up in the holding cell, but not fast enough, and not uniformly. Not for the first time, she cursed her own capability when it came to constructing a pain bomb. That had been a singularly unpleasant experience.

Armsmaster (or someone working at Armsmaster's direction) had been dismayingly thorough when rendering her harmless. When she came to, she had none of the carefully devised backups that had been previously concealed on her person. Worse, her captors hadn't even been careless enough to leave innocuous items like soap, shampoo or even toothpaste lying around.

Damn, what I could do to this place with a tube of toothpaste …

Her hair was kept to a half-inch crop, and there was a complete toss of her cell and full-body search every three days, to locate and remove anything she might be hoarding. And so far, they had found everything. It was considerably irritating.

Staring at the floor, attempting to devise some way to get something past the guards that would let her get out of there, she gradually became aware of voices outside her cell door. This wasn't usual; normally, the only time she saw or heard anyone was during the cell checks. Unusual meant things weren't going to protocol, and that meant she had a chance to do something about her circumstances.

"Yes, we are going to be speaking to Bakuda," said a teenage girl, sweetly but with an edge of steel to her voice. "Yes, you will be letting us in there. If you'd checked your messages like I told you, you'd see we already have clearance."

Another voice broke in; this was one of her guards. "Uh, yeah. Here it is. We're supposed to let them through."

"But that one can't be more than thirteen!"

"I'm twelve." This was a younger girl. "Doesn't matter. I go where Panacea goes."

Panacea? What the fuck is Panacea coming to see me for?

After some more grumbling by the guards, the outer door opened, and three teenage girls—or rather, two teens and one tween—were ushered in. Panacea wasn't, as Alice had expected, in costume. Instead, she wore a T-shirt and jeans, the same as the other two.

Alice had never met Panacea up until now, and probably wouldn't have recognised her without the heads-up, but once she was clued in, it was obvious. The healer had a haunted look in her eyes that told anyone in the know that she'd been at the sharp end too many times. It was mirrored by the younger girl, while the blonde with the green eyes seemed to view the world as her personal target for sharp wit.

None of which explained why they were there.

As soon as the door behind them shut, the one blocking entry into the cell proper opened up. Panacea stepped forward with the other two following behind. She gave Alice a once-over as she entered the cell, with a gaze far more penetrating than anyone that age should've been able to muster.

"Bakuda," she said bluntly. "You're in a ton of shit. If you hadn't already figured that out, of course."

"Wait, wait," murmured the green-eyed girl. "Are we already doing good-cop-bad-cop?"

"Fuck the good-cop-bad-cop play," Alice retorted. "What do you want from me? Because nobody gets in with this kind of clearance to play stupid games."

"Before we get to that," Panacea said, folding her arms, "I did want to ask if you knew how bad things were for you."

Alice grimaced. She'd been trying not to think it through, but … yeah, no matter how she folded it, it was going to be pretty bad. "I was going to try for a plea bargain."

"The DA's already knocked that off the table and into the trashcan," the wannabe good-cop said. "Oh, we've met before, very briefly. Tattletale. I'm the one who suckered you into that trap, and I'm the next best thing to psychic. I know what you're thinking before you do."

"She's also irritating, but we work around that because when she's right, she's very right." Panacea gave Alice a hard stare. "You're never going to get a plea bargain. You put bombs in the heads of schoolkids. If you ever walk into a courtroom, there's exactly one place you'll be going once you're out of here."

Tattletale put her hand up alongside her mouth, as though she were passing on a secret. "Spoilers," she said in a stage whisper. "It kind of rhymes with Murdercage."

"And she totally deserves it," the younger kid said, staring at her with eyes that were far too old for her face. "Even now, she's not feeling any kind of remorse. She thinks she should've gotten away with it."

Alice tried to meet the kid's gaze, but couldn't. It was creepy as fuck, and chills kept running up and down her back. "Yeah, well, I should've."

Tattletale smirked. "If it wasn't for us meddling kids and our little dogs, huh?"

Panacea closed her eyes for a moment, as though in pain, and shook her head. Then she opened her eyes and looked at Alice. "Ignore them. Here's the deal. You get to have your plea-bargain and go into stock-standard ordinary supermax, against the protests of the DA."

"He was planning a run for the state Senate, on the strength of having put you and Lung into the Birdcage," Tattletale added mischievously. "Now he's going to have to settle for just Lung."

Playing for time, Alice looked at the kid, who shrugged as if to say, I have nothing to add.

It sounded plausible, even probable. In Alice's limited time in Brockton Bay, Tattletale's rep had basically been 'smartass bitch who knows more than she should'. If anyone was plugged into what was going on behind the scenes, it was her.

"Okay, assuming all that's true, what do I have to do to get this plea-bargain?" Alice was definitely willing to entertain a deal, though she did want to know all the fine print before she signed up for it. Not doing that was how she'd ended up in Brockton Bay in the first place.

Panacea smiled for the first time, but it wasn't a happy smile or nice one. "It's very simple. We want you to build us a few bombs."

Alice snorted and rolled her eyes. "I'm going to need a lot more detail than that. Just saying."

Tattletale ticked points off her fingers. "One, able to be launched from a howitzer tube. Two, has enhanced effects against anything even remotely lifelike it encounters. Three …" She paused, looking at Panacea. "What was that thing he said about the size of the explosion?"

Panacea rolled her eyes. "Let's say, hypothetically, we don't actually need the planet anymore."

"Whoa, okay, no." Alice put her hands up and leaned back into the wall. "I'm already Birdcage bound. I don't need a kill order on top of that." She didn't even want to know who 'he' was.

"No kill order. This is not a trap." Panacea eyed her for a moment, then sighed and looked back at Tattletale. "You're our villain whisperer. Why am I not getting through to her?"

"Well, duh." Tattletale's smirk widened. "You're using the wrong words. In villain-speak, 'this is not a trap' translates as, 'this is totally a trap, dumbass'. Also, you're not offering to pay her."

"We're keeping her out of the Birdcage," Panacea protested.

Tattletale rolled her eyes. "Ah, yes. Holding back a punishment. That's not a positive. That's a lack of a negative. Not the same thing."

"I never got paid," the kid remarked.

"That's because you were Mastered all to hell and gone." Tattletale turned her attention to Alice. "Listen up. Villain to villain, they're on the level here. You're not the only Tinker we're looking at for this, but you're the best one for the job. I figure we could secure you a nice tidy pension once you get out of supermax, where you never have to earn money ever again, and can spend your retirement making small, fun bombs for shits and giggles. And in return for this, all you have to do is make us three or four mega-fuckoff doomsday devices, absolutely guaranteed to shred everything—especially anything living—within a thousand miles or so."

Though by no means convinced, Alice was more than a little intrigued. She raised a finger. "I have questions."

Tattletale grinned and ticked off points on her fingers. "No, we're not going to use them here on Earth; no, we're not going to tell you where they're going to be used; yes, our authority does come directly from the Chief Director of the PRT; and no, I don't know of any other bomb Tinkers, but if you decide to be unreasonable, we'll simply have to make do. You were just our first port of call."

Alice put her finger down again. "Then I'm going to need a document signed by the Chief Director saying that I'm allowed to build this shit. Also, access to my workshop, and all the tools I need to build stuff."

"You'll get it." Panacea tilted her head. "I notice you're not negotiating to get Lung released."

"Fuck, no. He's the reason I'm in this fuckin' cell."

"Good point." The healer put her hand out. "Nice doing business with you."

Reflexively, Alice shook it, then she paused and gave Panacea a hard look. "Wait, did you just use your powers to make sure I wasn't planning to pull some tricky shit or something?"

Panacea stared right back. "Yes. Wouldn't you?"

Tattletale chuckled. "She's got you there."

Alice had to admit, it was true.

<><>​

Boston PRT Interrogation Room

Blasto

Rey Andino had no idea what was going on. He'd been chilling in his hideout, not even prepping to do any crime (yet), and Alexandria had kicked the front doors in and taken him into custody. It hadn't even been a fight. Fights involved being able to hit back.

Now he was sitting on a cold hard metal seat, handcuffed to a cold hard metal table, wondering where his due process had vanished to. Though he was certain there were people behind the mirror on the other side of the room (it wasn't even a cliché by now) nobody had spoken to him since he'd been secured in the room, much less asked him any questions.

When the door lock clicked open, he didn't know whether to be overjoyed or terrified. It had been made quite clear to him some time ago that if he ever made self-replicating creations, there was a pre-signed kill order that would go into effect immediately. Is that what this is about? Have they got the idea that I've done something like that? He hadn't, but he also knew how hard it was to prove a negative.

The three people who walked in only served to raise his level of confusion. Three girls; two teenagers and a kid. A vaguely familiar frizzy haired brunette, a blonde with the smuggest look he'd ever seen on someone who wasn't high as fuck, and the aforementioned kid; all of whom looking at him like they were the adults and he was the child here.

The smug blonde cleared her throat. "I suppose you're wondering why we had you brought here."

It was absolutely a line, and he knew damn well she was winding him up, but he had to bite anyway. "Okay, who the hell are you, and why am I even in here? And where the fuck are my Miranda rights?"

"Introductions are in order, then." The blonde pointed to herself. "Tattletale, Thinker extraordinaire." A gesture to the frizzy-haired girl. "You may have heard of Panacea. And this is Riley. She's our muscle."

Riley meandered around the table, stopping close enough to reach out and touch him if she felt like it. "'Sup."

This was weird, and getting weirder by the second. Whoever this 'Riley' really was, her steady gaze was freaking him out. "What the fuck is going on? Why am I here? I wasn't even doing anything!"

"No, no, that's true." Tattletale leaned against the table, hands clasped in front of her, while Panacea took the seat across from Rey. "You've committed no crimes recently, and in fact you're not officially under arrest. You're just in custody, for the specific purpose of listening to what we've got to say."

"Specifically," Panacea went on, as though they'd rehearsed this, "whether or not you'd be able to clone a specific person from genetic material. Or rather, make a whole bunch of clones of the same guy."

"Uh, sure, I guess," he said doubtfully. "I'd need more cloning tubes, though."

"Assume they'll be supplied on demand." Tattletale steepled her fingers in front of her. "Can you see any problems with doing it?"

He frowned, knowing that he was going to screw things up but not seeing any way out of it. "Yeah, two. First, if you're trying to clone a celebrity for, I dunno, your own private shirtless softball team, the clones won't be the real guy. They won't have his memories, for one thing. And if I'm cloning from a cape, it'll be even dicier. Without specific circumstances, they'll be unlikely to end up with anywhere near the same powers."

Tattletale's grin reminded him of a shark. A friendly shark, one that had decided not to eat him quite yet. "That's okay. We've got that covered."

<><>​

A Small Roadside Café in the Midwest

Cranial

Not for the first time, Lil wondered exactly what they were doing here. The message had come to Toybox, filtered through a series of cutouts designed to strip out any tracking software. It had been simple: Job for Cranial and Dodge. Face to face meeting required first. Your choice of location. Not overly surprising in itself, but the signature line had startled her: R Costa-Brown, PRT.

So she and Dodge were, but not alone. They had Pyrotechnical on guard in the back of a rented van outside, and Dodge had a device on standby that could snatch them both out of danger if things went entirely pear-shaped.

Not that she expected anything of the sort, but it was far better to be safe than sorry.

"More coffee, hon?" The waitress paused by their table, coffee pot at the ready.

"No, thanks." Lil shook her head. The coffee wasn't bad, but if she drank any more she'd have the jitters all day, and Dodge rarely drank the stuff. "Though I'll have a slice of that pecan pie, if you don't mind."

"Coming right up." The waitress hustled back behind the counter.

"I didn't know you liked pecan pie," Dodge observed.

"It's not my favourite," Lil agreed, "but Costa-Brown has until I finish it before we get up and leave. We've already been here for thirty minutes, and that's half an hour we could've been Tinkering. If this is some kind of power play, I'm not playing."

The tinny bell over the door jangled as three kids entered. Lil wasn't good at ages, but the older ones might've been sixteen or seventeen, while the younger one was about Dodge's age. They started along the diner toward where Lil and Dodge sat.

"That's funny," murmured Dodge. "Where'd they come from?"

"Huh?" asked Lil.

"There's been no cars for the last five minutes. Where'd they come from?"

Before Lil could come up with an answer, the trio had reached their table. "Hi," said the tall blonde as the shorter kid slid into the seat and moved up until she was opposite Dodge. "I'm Tattletale, and this is Panacea and Riley. Pleased to meet you."

Lil had zero idea of what was going on here. She'd never heard of Tattletale, but the frizzy-haired girl could maybe be Panacea. As for Riley, she was just another kid, and Lil didn't generally associate with kids if she could help it. Dodge was the exception, but he knew his business and was a savvy operator.

"Nice to meet you too, but I don't think we're the people you're looking for," she ventured cautiously. "You see, we're meeting someone very important—"

"Nah." Tattletale, if that was who she really was, shook her head confidently. "Costa-Brown might've reached out, but we're the ones with the plan, so we're presenting it." With Riley and Panacea in place on the seat, she sat down on the end.

Costa-Brown's name absolutely got Lil's attention. She narrowed her eyes behind the sunglasses she was wearing to make it harder to get details of her face. "What's this about? Why have you contacted us? And who the hell are you, that you can overrule Costa-Brown?" Because everything she'd ever heard about the Chief Director of the PRT indicated that the woman wouldn't lightly delegate such a meeting to three teens.

"It's a very, very long story," Panacea said, her tone flat and uncompromising. "Suffice to say, there's an extremely important thing that we've got to accomplish, and your tech is essential to its success."

Lil hesitated. "Just how essential? What is it that you want us to do? What are you even trying to do?"

"Well, we're trying to save the world," Tattletale explained cheerfully. "What we need you to do is implant a given set of memory patterns, as well as a specific personality, into a bunch of clones of the same person. Once they're grown, of course."

Panacea looked at Dodge. "And we understand that you're good at pocket dimensions. Do you think you could come up with something that closes openings between universes? Shuts them down?"

He frowned. "Universes or pocket dimensions? There are differences, you know."

She waggled her hand in the air. "Call it … a pocket universe. Created and maintained by powers. If there was a hole between that and Bet proper, could you rig up something to close the hole? Make it so that anything on the other side had to re-open the hole to come through."

Dodge pulled a complicated-looking calculator from his pocket and started tapping the buttons. "Well, it shouldn't be too hard … if I reconfigure the G and P dimensions, I should be able to get something that works reasonably well …" His voice trailing off into a mumble, he kept crunching numbers.

Lil took the opportunity to dive into the conversational gap. "You want me to implant the same memories and personality into multiple copies of the same person? Are you talking about trying to make clones of a cape trigger in a certain way? Because it's been tried before, and never turned out well." She would've added something along the lines of how the PRT was likely to frown on such experimentation, but then she recalled that it was Rebecca Costa-Brown who had arranged the meeting in the first place.

The kid spoke up for the first time. Her tone wasn't loud or boastful, but it was still filled with a certain amount of surety. "That's because it wasn't me trying it."

"And who are you, again?" asked Lil. With an attitude like that, the kid was guaranteed to be a cape, but that didn't narrow it down at all. "Hero, villain, rogue?"

Just then, the waitress got back to the table with the slice of pecan pie. "Oh, hi!" she said to Tattletale. "Is there anything I can get you and your friends?"

Tattletale and Panacea shook their heads, but Riley nodded. "That pie looks nice," she ventured. "I'd like a slice, please."

The waitress beamed. "Coming right up!"

"You know, I could've given you my piece," Lil said. "I was just going to eat it to pass the time." She paused. "And you never told me who you were."

Riley gave her a direct look. "You'll be a lot happier not knowing who I used to be. Just take it as given that I know more about the mechanics of trigger events than any person living."

That, right there, sounded ominous as fuck. Fortunately, Lil had made somewhat of a living ignoring the itchy-back-of-neck feeling of being near a scary cape. The second rule of Toybox was, "we get paid" after all, (the first rule was, "don't do anything that might piss off the Triumvirate", while the third rule was, "never accept any job to do with an Endbringer") so she didn't care how ominous they were, so long as their money was legal tender.

Though if she was being honest, she'd never been intimidated by a middle-schooler before.

So she did her best to shut down her curious streak—how many kids of that age had amassed the experience as a cape to be able to make such a statement with that kind of authority, anyway?—and nodded agreeably. "Okay, then. So, um, who's going to be paying for all this?"

Tattletale grinned. "I was assuming that you'd pay for your own coffee and pie, and we'd pay for Riley's." Her grin widened at the expression her flippant comment engendered on Lil's face. "The PRT should be good to cover your prices. We'll let you know when and where we need you, and they'll pony up the cash. Sound good?"

Lil had honestly heard of worse arrangements, but there were still a few details to be worked out. "So, uh, the specific memory set and personality …?"

Panacea spoke up, her voice firm and measured. "We'll send you the requirements for the memory set. As for the personality, we'll need it to be a little bit narcissistic, empathetic enough to want to save the world, but with a mean streak a mile wide. The sort of asshole who finds an acceptable target, sinks their teeth in, and never, ever lets up."

Lil shivered. She'd met a few people like that in her career, and it was never a good idea to get on their wrong side. The idea of creating someone like that—worse, several someones—seemed deeply wrong, and unfair to inflict on the universe as a whole.

"Here's your pie, sweetie." The waitress placed the plate on the table and skated it a little toward Riley. "Just sing out if you need anything else."

"We'll do that," Tattletale assured her. She waited until the woman had moved off, then returned her attention to Lil and Dodge. "So, is it possible in concept?"

Dodge frowned. "Well, I could make a generic broad-spectrum door-slammer keyed to the local space-time fluctuations, and tune it in via the phi-alpha wavelengths—"

Lil held her hand up to interrupt him. "She just needs to know yes or no."

"Sorry, sorry, it's just that the technical aspects are so interesting." Dodge took a deep breath to pull himself back from the edge. "Yes, it's definitely possible in concept."

"I think so, too," Lil agreed. "It's absolutely doable." She was certain about that aspect, though not necessarily the rest of it. Long-dormant ethical standards, awakening from their slumber, were starting to blink and look around. "But I have to ask … just how necessary is this?"

There were many things she was willing to turn a blind eye to, but creating a bunch of potential capes with that particular mindset gave her the feeling that she was swimming in deeper waters than she was entirely comfortable with. Even the fact that the PRT was (most likely) underwriting it didn't make her any happier; viewed from the outside, the PRT occasionally pulled off stunts that weren't the most ethical. The very existence of the Birdcage bore that out, in spades.

(She was aware of the legislation that made the Birdcage legal; however, as civilisation got more and more complicated, 'legal' and 'moral' had ended up with only the vaguest of relationships.)

Tattletale met her gaze, the bottle-green eyes suddenly as hard and sharp as flint. "Utterly. There is literally nothing more important to the well-being of the world."

A chill ran down Lil's back. The ominous feeling she'd had before was now jumping up and down, shouting for her attention. "What … what is all this supposed to accomplish?" she asked through suddenly-dry lips.

"Sorry." Tattletale didn't look or sound at all sorry. "Need to know only."

And that was all there was to that.

<><>​

The Streets of York, United Kingdom

Kevin Norton

"A few pence for the most powerful man in the world?" Kevin rattled his cup at the passers-by. It was getting dark, now, but if he could get just a little more money he could buy a nice treat for Duke before they went scavenging in the fast-food dumpsters for himself.

As usual, most of them avoided his gaze and hurried on, as if just being near him would contaminate them with poverty and homelessness. One or two lingered and dropped coins in his cup, but never many, and they still didn't want to meet his eyes. Doing a spot of good to get over their guilt.

What they were feeling guilty about, he didn't care, but everyone had a load of guilt on themselves these days. It was the way of the world. Everyone was walking wounded, and only a few of the wounds were visible to the world.

"A few pence—" he began again, before Duke growled. He looked around to see what his faithful companion was responding to, and nearly tripped and fell when he saw the three girls standing not six feet away. Unlike the passers-by, all three were looking at him intently, which was probably what had triggered Duke.

"Hi," said the tall blonde with the messy hair. "You'd be Kevin Norton, the most powerful man in the world. We've heard a lot about you." Oddly enough, she had an American accent.

Kevin blinked. This was not how the conversation usually went, given that it usually didn't go at all. "I … you can't be from social services. Are you doing some sort of charity work?"

"In a very broad sense," her frizzy-haired companion said. She was also definitely American. "We have a request for you, and we're willing to pay for it. Riley, diagnosis?"

The smallest of the trio, also blonde but with her hair in ringlets, frowned as she looked him over. "Hepatitis, chronic malnutrition, a laundry list of minor complaints that would be settled by a week of good care. To be honest, the dog's in better shape."

"What?" He blinked, startled all over again. "How did you—how could you possibly know that? How old are you?"

"Twelve." The little tearaway stared him down with the authority of someone twenty years older and a hundred pounds heavier. "I've been a cape since I was six."

He shook his head. Nothing was making sense anymore. "Who are you people? What do you want from me?"

"The golden man," the frizzy-haired girl said. "Zion. You're the one who talks to him, and occasionally he listens. You want to pass on that responsibility." She stepped forward. "I'm Panacea, the healer. You may have heard of me. I'm willing to give you a total reset, fix all your health problems."

Kevin had definitely heard of her, but he'd never paid much attention to the news about her. How much could one girl heal, anyway? And it wasn't like she'd ever come across the pond to heal one Kevin Norton of all that ailed him.

Except that she was right there in front of him, offering that very thing.

"But why?" He was still lost in the fog. "What do you get out of it? Do you want to be the ones to talk to him?"

"Not us," Panacea—if it was really her—said. "But we'll bring someone to you, soon. Someone who knows exactly what to say, and will make sure that the golden man doesn't hurt anyone by accident, and that everything that needs to be done, gets done."

"And if I say no, you won't heal me?" He could see where this was going.

Panacea snorted. It was the first 'teenage' thing he'd seen her do. "Hardly. I'll heal you anyway. And Lisa here's going to set you up with enough cash to get you and Duke a place to stay together out of the rain, at least for a while. And when we bring our friend to you, you can take him to see the golden man, okay?"

By now, Kevin's head was spinning. "You're going to heal me and give me money? Just to introduce your friend to the golden man? The one I haven't spoken to for years?"

"But you keep wanting to go back to where you used to talk to him, don't you?" It was the tall blonde. "Just to see if it's still there. Well, once our friend is ready, you can go back and do what you need to do. Do we have a deal?"

He made up his mind, and pointed to the frizzy-haired girl. "If she's really Panacea, if she can really heal me, then we've got a deal."

"Absolutely." Panacea stepped forward. "I presume I have your permission to heal you?"

"You've got it." He looked down at his filthy hands. "Maybe I should wash—"

"Yes, you should, but it doesn't matter right now." She reached out and took his hand, her clean skin pale against his grime. "This might feel a little strange."

'Strange' wasn't the half of it. The aches and pains throughout his body just … stopped. His nervous system felt like someone had just flushed a few gallons of ice water through his veins. Even the grucky feeling in his mouth went away.

When it was over, he was standing taller and feeling about twenty years younger. There was no doubt in his mind that he'd been healed of everything that was wrong with him. Duke, sensing his mood, looked up at him and whined.

"It's fine, Duke," he said, and ran his hand over his dog's head. "It's going to be just fine." Tears filled his eyes as he tried to assimilate the fact that he had another chance now, that he wasn't going to be dying in a few years to leave Duke all alone in a cold, cruel world.

"This card's got a hundred thousand US dollars on it." Lisa held it up, then handed it over. "The sticky note on the back's the PIN code. It should work in any major ATM. I figure you should be able to stretch that out quite a ways."

Quickly, Kevin pulled the note and card apart. He tucked the card into an inside pocket of his shabby jacket, then stared intently at the note to memorise the numbers. He felt like someone had just handed him the Crown Jewels, except that he could spend this money. "I can, yes." There were rooms for rent that he knew of; cheap, but they didn't care if Duke slept beside (or on) the bed.

Panacea looked at him steadily. "So, do we have a deal? When we bring our friend, you'll introduce him to Zion?"

Kevin knew there were details they weren't telling him. Why their 'friend' should be the one to talk to Zion in his stead, and not them, for one thing. But Panacea was a hero. He'd seen her on TV through shop windows. Heroes wouldn't lend themselves to something that was underhanded or malicious, would they? And besides, it wasn't like anyone could hurt the golden man.

"Yes," he said. "We have a deal."

<><>​

Chief Director Costa-Brown's Office

Panacea

Even on a good day, it was possible to see that Rebecca Costa-Brown was not a woman used to unbridled success. Amy knew she was Alexandria, and proof against virtually all manner of damage, yet the stresses of the job weighed heavily on her. She eyed the group before her, then focused on Amy. Or rather, on Amy's involuntary passenger.

"So, all negotiations have gone well?" Implicit in her tone was the willingness to be totally unsurprised if things had gone badly at any point in their venture.

In Amy's inner eye, Mike shrugged and gestured in Lisa's direction. "Don't look at me," Amy translated. "She's the one with the plan. We're just getting behind it and pushing really hard."

"Everything looks good so far, touch wood." Lisa leaned forward and rapped her knuckles on the genuine oak desk. "Have the materials to build the extra cloning chambers been delivered to Blasto?"

"Yes, but the man is not thrilled with his treatment at our hands." Costa-Brown's expression became even more forbidding than it had been before. "Had I known he was going to be relaxing with a joint and a glass of cheap alcohol, I may have been a little less overbearing in my approach."

Lisa spread her hands. "However, given the problems you ran into when you last took on a Tinker in their base, I can certainly see the need for extra caution."

"Exactly. You understand." Costa-Brown switched her attention back to Amy. Not once, Amy noted, had she looked directly at Riley. "And Bakuda? You can trust her to build your doomsday bombs without any treachery?"

This time, Mike was shaking his head and scissoring his hands over one another, probably to indicate 'not just no but FUCK no'. Fortunately, Amy had already figured that one out.

"Security and I both agree that that's a hard no. So, I will be checking in on her before and after each time she goes into the lab, and making damn sure she's not pulling any shit on us. The slightest hint of deception, and I'll disable her ability to lie in any way at all."

One perfect eyebrow inched upward. "I thought you couldn't do brains. Or rather, didn't do brains."

"I don't, not as a matter of course." Amy took a deep breath, noting the correction. She probably knew all along. "However, I've been learning that hardline approaches often lead to bad situations. There are degrees of 'doing brains' that I have fewer problems with, and ensuring that a mad bomber doesn't blow up the city I'm currently living in gives me zero problems whatsoever."

"Good to hear it." She looked back at Lisa. "Are there any other issues that need to be dealt with?"

"Just one," Lisa said. "You no doubt know the account attached to the card I gave to Mr Norton. If the PRT could slip another ten thousand into it each time it drops below ten K, that would allow me to sleep just a little better at night."

"Easily done." The almost disdainful sniff told Amy that paying for one homeless man's daily expenses wouldn't even be a line item when it came to the PRT's budget. "Was there anything else?"

Lisa glanced at Amy and Riley. "Did we miss anything, guys?"

Amy shrugged. Mike didn't seem to have anything to add. Riley was already shaking her head.

"Good." Costa-Brown bestowed a smile—acerbic and brief, but a smile all the same—upon them. "Keep me posted."

Lisa, the wild and crazy thrill-seeker that she was, did what no other cape in the history of the PRT had likely done in Costa-Brown's presence, and threw finger-guns. "You got it, boss."

Costa-Brown just shook her head. "Get out of here."

"Going."

<><>​

A Few Days Later

Blasto's Base

Tattletale

"So … how's it going?" Lisa, with Riley at her side, strolled in from the back of the base. She'd called ahead to say she was coming over—she wasn't an idiot—but now that she had access to the 'Doorway' command, things like front doors were a mere suggestion to her now.

"What the fuck?" Blasto, soldering goggles pushed up on his forehead, turned from his workbench and glared at her. "Don't you fucking know how to knock? I could've been doing something delicate! I could've been in the bathroom!"

"Dude. Chill." Lisa raised her eyebrows. "The PRT is bankrolling this particular venture, and I'm the inspector to make sure you aren't half-assing it."

He didn't bother arguing with that, but then he nodded toward Riley. "And what's the creepy munchkin here for?"

"I'm also here to make sure you're not half-assing it," Riley replied. "Also, you might think that's an insult. Where I've been, what I've done, being called 'creepy' misses the mark by several miles. So thank you for that."

Lisa had to admit, she was pulling herself together after the rough and ready total-therapy stunt Amy had put her through. She was still a bit clingy, but she was able to leave Amy's side for a few hours at a time without falling into a helpless mess. It was a work in progress.

"Well, I'm not. Half-assing it, I mean." Blasto gestured at what he was working on. "Just putting the last one together. They gave me enough parts for twenty."

"And how's the actual cloning going?" asked Riley. "You are working on a viable version so you can get straight into it once all your clone tubes are ready to roll, right?"

"Jesus Christ, I never knew ball-busting was a superpower," he muttered, then put the soldering iron down. "Yes, I'm working on getting a viable clone. Yes, I'm about done. Come see."

As they followed him to another part of the workshop, Lisa glanced around. Even with her power working at full capacity, she couldn't see anything that added up to duplicity on Blasto's part. It seemed the stint in the interrogation room had given him the required incentive to not play fuck-fuck games (as one of the PRT troopers had said within her hearing, making it her new favourite saying).

The clone in the tank looked like every other picture of a foetus that Lisa had ever seen, so her power didn't have much to go on with. However, Riley was in her element. She examined the nutrient flows going in and peppered Blasto with questions, some of which apparently pushed his expertise to its limits.

"Okay, are you satisfied?" he demanded at last. "How does anyone fucking stand you for more than five minutes at a time?" It seemed he wasn't a member of the 'aww, kids asking questions are cute' brigade.

Riley froze, her face paling dramatically. Before Blasto could notice this, Lisa stepped in. "Because she asks the questions we need answers for," she explained smoothly. "And we've all seen what happens when someone doesn't make damn sure everything is up to spec, all the way."

To her relief, he turned his attention fully to her. "Are you saying I do shoddy work?"

"I don't know if you do!" she shot back, willing to argue all day if it gave Riley time to regroup. "But this, right here, is the most important thing you're ever going to do, so we are going to be checking, and asking all the questions under the sun, until you deliver. Is that totally understood?"

"But it's so fucking annoying to have a grade-schooler acting like she knows more than I do about nutrition and shit!" he burst out.

"Well, let's face it. She fucking does." Lisa gestured at the building around them. "We're coming to you, to ask you questions in your base, because it's less likely to disrupt what you're doing. Now, if you keep arguing with us, Director Armstrong could decide that it's more convenient to drag you in every time he wants to check on your progress. And we'd still require that you deliver on time. We can totally do it the other way, if you'd prefer. Your choice."

He tried to stare her down, but in the end he had to look away. "What else do you want to know?"

She wasn't done. "Before we get to that, you need to apologise to Riley for treating her like an annoying kid."

"But she is an—"

Lisa cleared her throat meaningfully.

"Fine. You know what you're doing, kid."

It was about as grudging an apology as Lisa had ever heard, but she knew it was the best they were going to get.

Riley drew in a shuddering breath, rebuilding her façade as Lisa watched. She didn't look directly at him as she spoke. "More than you'll ever know."

<><>​

Undersiders' Hideout

Panacea

As the Doorway opened into the main room, Amy looked around from a discussion she'd been having with Brian about the difference between hand-to-hand combat at ground level and when the combatants could fly. She was not even a talented beginner at either one, but she'd seen Vicky in action more than once. Brian, on the other hand, had never had to take on a flight-capable opponent but was considerably skilled in the ground-bound aspect. It made for an interesting exchange of views.

"Oh, hey," she said as Lisa and Riley stepped through the portal. "Bakuda's still not trying anything. Mainly because she knows I'd catch her out. How'd you—whoa, Riley are you okay?"

"No, she's not," Lisa reported through gritted teeth. "Blasto is an asshole who needs his butt kicked across his lair and back again."

"Why, what happened?" Amy was on her feet by now, and going over to Riley, whose face was drawn, with tears standing in her eyes. "What did that bastard do?"

Riley grabbed her, clinging tightly as Amy rubbed her back in slow, gentle circles. Examining Riley's mental state, she subtly increased serotonin production, then just held her comfortingly while it took effect.

Lisa growled, deep in her throat. "Riley was giving him the third degree about how he feeds his clones and ensures their health, and it was clear she knows more about that sort of thing than he does, and then he snapped at her and asked how anyone stood her presence for more than five minutes."

"Sonovabitch." Amy could tell Mike was just as pissed as she was. "I should go there and—"

"Not a great idea." Lisa made a cut-off motion. "I already read him the riot act. If we keep badgering him over this, he might just say fuck it and dump the whole deal."

"Mmm." Amy grimaced. Lisa was right, of course. "Riley, how are you feeling?"

"Better, now I'm back here." Riley's voice was muffled but understandable. "But he's a dick. He knows how to do his stuff, but he can't stand that someone else might know more. Especially a—a kid."

"Whoa, none of that." But Lisa's voice was warm and parental rather than harsh and judgemental. "You're not just any kid. You're the expert on this sort of thing, and Blasto needs to learn not to let his precious fee-fees get hurt over it."

"Exactly correct." Amy hugged Riley tighter. "We all know Blasto's a dick. But right now he's useful. So we're gonna let him be useful, and as soon as we're done with him, we never see him again. Never talk to him. Never even think about him. Sound good?"

Riley drew a long, ragged breath, then let it out again. "Yeah. Sounds good."

"Excellent." Amy let Riley go, and gestured at the big-screen TV. "So, how do you feel about kicking back and watching one of Lisa's pirated chick-flicks until you feel better?"

"Can we watch the one where Mouse Protector makes a cameo?"

"Totally."

"Hey, I'm in the middle of a game here," Alec protested.

Lisa locked eyes with him. "Save it."

For a miracle, he didn't even try arguing. "You got it."

[A/N: Next half will follow shortly.]



End of Part Thirty-One

 

I, Panacea

Part Thirty-Two: Tattletale Saves the World (Part Two)

[A/N 1: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
[A/N 2: This chapter was so big I chopped it in half. Now for the grand finale.]
[A/N 3: In case it wasn't clear, the Zion scene was adapted using a certain amount of dialogue from canon.]



A Few Days Later, in a PRT Sub-Basement

Skitter

Taylor looked at the row of sleeping clones. Each one dressed in a hospital gown, they were so alike it was creepy as fuck, like looking at a series of first-aid dummies; albeit, each one wearing a headset with a cable that led back to where Cranial was setting up her apparatus. "They do look a little bit like him, don't they?"

Riley, walking between Lisa and Amy, nodded. "Little bit, yeah. But younger. We decided to decant them at effective age sixteen."

"Because you didn't want to look an adult version in the face?" snarked Alec. Like Taylor and Brian, he'd opted to come along in case things went wrong. And Taylor had to admit, dealing with a whole bunch of Jack Slash clones was the textbook example of a situation where things could go very badly wrong indeed.

"Well, that was one aspect," Riley admitted. "But also, teenagers are right in the middle of the skewed risk-reward phase of brain development. They'll do anything to fuck up someone or something they don't like, even if they don't get anything out of it. The spite levels are amazing."

Taylor shuddered, thinking of Emma and Sophia. "Yeah, I can totally confirm that. If you think they need pointers, I've got a bunch of truly nasty emails we can give them to read."

"Well, first we'd need to teach them to read," Lisa observed accurately. "But I'll definitely keep that in mind." She raised her voice, addressing Cranial. "So, how's it looking?"

"I managed to put together the memory set that Panacea described," Cranial answered. Now that she was 'on the job', as it were, she was wearing her costume and goggles, featuring brain-scan graph lines. "Locked away, betrayed by parents, discovery that the world wasn't what he'd expected. But I'm still not sure it'll be enough to trigger them."

"Let me see," Riley said, breaking away from Amy and Lisa and heading over to where the apparatus was taking shape. "You need certain brain conditions, otherwise the whole thing flops."

Taylor lowered her voice as she spoke to Brian. "I'm truly, honestly glad that I'm on this side of this setup and not the other side."

"Mm-hmm." He nodded in agreement, looking at the whole arrangement. "I keep thinking this looks like some Aleph idea of how mad-scientist Tinkers work, and then I realise that we're working with one ex-mad scientist and one reasonably sane one. And it's the sane one who's going to be implanting memories and personalities into these guys."

"Actually, that's another thing I was wondering about," she murmured. "What happens after this? To the clones, I mean? In science fiction, they usually conveniently break down into mush or something after they're no longer needed in the plot, but if these are living, breathing human beings … what do we do with them?"

"That's definitely a good question," Lisa said from right beside her. "What do you do with the person—or people—who were strong enough to beat the Big Bad and save the world, after the world doesn't need saving anymore? What if they're seen as a threat? Do you shoot them in the back of the head, or let them go live a fulfilling life elsewhere?"

Brian and Taylor looked at her. After a few moments, Taylor ventured, "Uh … I don't know?"

"Nor do I." Lisa gestured at the row of clones. "But that's not the question we need to be asking right now. It's one we won't even have to face unless we're successful. Right now, we need to be focusing on the important aspect. That is, making sure what we're doing here works."

"What?" Cranial's voice was raised, though she was talking to Riley rather than responding to Lisa's statement. "Why would you change the settings that way?"

"Because that's how we get what we want." Riley had certainly come a long way since Taylor first met her. Between Amy's careful fostering of a stable mental state—something absolutely to be desired in someone with Riley's gifts—and Lisa's snarky but equally thoughtful treatment of her, the younger girl was nowhere near as uncertain of herself as she'd once been. "See, if you do this and this, you make them much more likely to trigger. The brain's primed for it."

"I guess, but … geez …" Cranial ran her fingers through her hair. "I always calibrate my gear to minimise stress on the subject. Allows for better memory retention if they don't have all that adrenaline bouncing around in their system. And yeah, I know we need stress for this, but it feels so much like we're deliberately doing a bad job."

"If you didn't want them to trigger, yeah, this would be a terrible job." Riley sounded almost cheerful. Amy was already headed in that direction, but it looked like she wasn't needed this time. "But that's what we need, so this is how we have to do it."

"Of course, once we're done here, we're going to need you to wipe those settings off your system," Amy said as she got to them. "I don't know about you, but I don't think the PRT would appreciate it if you started deliberately triggering people with powers."

"Serious question here: can they actually ban me from doing it?" Cranial gestured at where Riley was still fine-tuning the adjustments. "If someone specifically pays me to help them trigger with powers and I'm able to give them what they want, is it illegal?"

"I'd have to check with Brandish on that one," Amy admitted. "However, it's not the legal side you should be thinking about. I have it on very good authority that triggers are going to become more unstable in the near future. Do you want to cause someone to trigger with a power that causes them to burst uncontrollably into flame, incinerating you and all your gear? Because that's a distinct possibility with unstable triggers."

Cranial paused. "… ah. That is definitely something to think about. Thanks for the heads-up. No causing trauma with implanted memories. Got it."

Amy smiled dryly. "Thank you. We appreciate your discretion in the matter."

<><>​

A PRT Interview Room

Tattletale

Lisa eyed the clone, who looked back at her curiously. "Hi," she said. "Can you understand me?"

"Sure, I can understand you." His voice held a Midwestern accent, but otherwise seemed normal enough. He wore a white T-shirt and jeans, and looked in all ways like a perfectly average teenage version of Jack Slash. "Who are you?"

"I'm Lisa. You're Jacob One, am I right?" She reached out her hand; he shook it without squeezing too hard. Good; she implanted basic common courtesies, at least.

"That's what the lady called me. We've all got numbers because we're all clones of someone called Jacob, right?"

Well, Jack Slash hadn't been stupid, just overconfident. "Correct. Do you have any questions?"

"Just a few." He glanced down at himself, then at his hands, before looking back up at her. "Are there other Lisas, or are you the only one?"

"The one and only," Lisa replied, girding herself for what was coming next.

"Then why are we clones? What's different between you and us? What happened to Jacob Zero?"

"That's a series of questions with some difficult answers," she admitted. "There's a great danger overshadowing the world, and we specifically needed a particular super-power to defeat it. You possess that super-power. As for what happened to your progenitor …" There was no way to sugar-coat this, especially as he would be intuitively aware of any deception. "… he was a bad man, who would've caused the world to burn for his own amusement. He would never have surrendered, and he'd murdered many people, so he was executed." She paused. "You do know what the world is, yes?" The last thing she wanted was to make fatally wrong assumptions at this point.

"Yes." He nodded. "It's very large and has a lot of people. There are many nations, and we live in the United States of America. We are supposed to protect it. I don't know many details past that."

"Well, that's a start." She gave him a smile. "Did you have any more questions?"

"Just one." He squared his shoulders. "What is the danger facing the world, and how are we supposed to defeat it?"

She took a deep breath. Here goes nothing. "The danger is a creature calling itself Zion. It looks like a golden man, and it has all the powers that it can possibly have. Its one weakness is its emotional state. Simply put, it can't handle being made to feel bad. That's where you come in. Once we introduce you to it, it will think it has to listen to you. That's when you and your brothers all start undermining its confidence. It will be able to hear you when you want it to." She leaned forward. "You have to make it want to die. That's the only way we can beat it."

For the first time, Jacob One smiled. It was a light, easy smile, but it reminded Lisa so much of images she'd seen of Jack Slash that she shuddered.

"Oh," he said. "I think we can manage that."

<><>​

Panacea

Amy and Riley watched as, on the screen, Jacob One rejoined his brothers in the recreation lounge that had been sequestered for their use. The door opened behind them, and Lisa slipped into the room.

"Hey," said Amy. "How'd it go?"

"Just a little scary, actually." Lisa sounded shaken. "He's extremely switched on for someone with his minimal knowledge of the world. Asked all the right questions. And when I told him the game plan, he was almost terrifyingly enthusiastic."

Now why doesn't that surprise me? asked Mike. They're basically attack dogs, and you've waved red meat in front—oh, hey. Now that's interesting.

What? Amy stared at the screen, wondering what she'd missed. "Mike says something interesting is happening."

Lisa didn't look happy at that. "With the Jacobs, 'interesting' is not a good thing. Let me see." She leaned in between Amy and Riley to peer at the screen.

"I don't get it," Riley complained. "What's supposed to be happening? What did he see?"

"Motherfucker," whispered Lisa. "Can you see it?"

Amy peered at the milling group on the screen. Jacob One was moving around the room, and quite clearly conversing with them; there were occasional nods as people grasped what he was saying. But then she realised what Mike had noticed and Lisa had picked up on. Despite the sound pickup being active, Jacob One's voice wasn't audible.

At least, not to them.

"Broadcast is making them effectively telepathic," Amy whispered, as if to not be heard by the clones on the screen. "We just created a hivemind."

"Well, not totally, but close enough," Lisa agreed. "With practice, there's a good chance that they'll get to the point where communication will be near-instantaneous between them. I'm already seeing signs of it right now."

"A bunch of high functioning telepathic sociopaths who can gang up on any cape they decide they don't like and basically influence them into suicide? And who can't be picked off one by one without alerting the rest?" Riley looked troubled. "I'm not so sure this is such a good idea after all."

"Oh, it's totally not a good idea," Lisa said soberly. "However, it's still better than the alternative."

Amy nodded grimly. "Every alternative."

<><>​

Blasto's Base

Muttering to himself, Rey took the last bit of the genetic sample out of the storage chiller.

He'd separated it out early on, when growing the first clone, and stored it away separately. Not that he'd had any particular intention of doing something specific with it; it was just something that he did. Every new sample was a good sample, and if the PRT thought it had all been used up, then that was their bad luck.

But after his treatment by Tattletale and that little know-it-all shit, he'd gotten pissed off. And that was when the stunning amount of money the PRT had been willing to pay for him to grow them twenty clones had started to tweak his curiosity. Who had the sample come from that they wanted twenty clones of him?

It had occurred to him that if he grew a clone of his own, he could figure out what they were up to, or at least make an educated guess. From there, while it was probably a bad idea to directly blackmail the PRT (he'd never heard of anyone succeeding), there was a better than average chance that someone out there in the villain cape community would be interested in paying for the information. And if it happened to be the clone itself that was special, then he'd have that too.

Putting the sample into the cloning tank along with one of his seeds, he started the process running. Rather than stop it when the clone was a teenager, he decided to push it all the way to adulthood and figure out what was going on from there.

One way or the other, he'd get some satisfaction out of this.

Treat me like your little bitch, will you?

<><>​

Director Emily Piggot, PRT

"What do you mean, they're a hive mind?" Emily stared at Tattletale, horrified. "They can Master any cape just by talking to them, and they're a telepathic hive mind? What the hell were you thinking?"

Panacea cleared her throat firmly. "We were thinking, Director, that we needed a weapon that Scion can't dodge or suborn. A weapon that hits him in his weakest point. And the Jacobs are that weapon. Whatever else they can do, they can't murder millions in just a few seconds."

"They're still cloned from Jack Slash's tissues!" Emily had been read in on this, as an essential part of the project being based in the PRT ENE building. This wasn't to say she was in any way happy about it. "And now you've got twenty of them! Why do you need twenty?"

"I don't know that we need twenty," Tattletale admitted. "But as it would apparently have only taken Jack Slash about one minute to talk Scion into murdering every human being in every universe everywhere, I'm going with overkill here. We need to beat him, and this is our best shot."

Emily could feel the conversation getting out of her control. "At least tell me you coded in a kill-switch. Brain bombs like Bakuda had with the ABB. A genetic virus. Something that lets us press a button and end them if it ever becomes necessary." By 'us' she meant 'me', and by 'if it ever becomes necessary' she meant 'as soon as possible after Scion dies'.

Tattletale shook her head. "Sorry. We literally couldn't. Remember his power. He can read any cape like a book. If we'd done that, every time we interacted with him while knowing this had been done, he would've picked it up. Right now, he's on our side. We do not want him turning against us, for whatever reason, viable or otherwise. Just remember: Jack Slash took over the Slaughterhouse Nine when he was four years younger than the Jacobs are right now."

Emily pursed her lips, seeing the loophole. "As capes, you can't make plans against them. But I'm not a cape, and neither are any of my troopers …"

Panacea facepalmed. Emily paused, wondering if she'd just misread the situation somehow.

"No!" snapped Tattletale. "Do not go there! Whatever you're planning, drop it right the fuck now. All it'll serve to do is turn them against us."

"What?" Emily glared at her. "What are you talking about? You all but told me that my troopers and I were the only ones who could plan anything against them!"

"Uggghhhhh." Tattletale dragged her hands over her face, then took a moment to compose herself. "Yes, but so long as you said and did nothing to make us think you going to act on that information, we could've walked out of here with no awareness of your intentions. But now that we've heard it, we're going to know about it, and the moment we meet the Jacobs they're going to figure out that something's up. Unless you can convince me, here and now, that you're not going to go through with it."

Shit. Once it was pointed out, Emily saw the trap that she'd just stepped into. Panacea's odd passenger could theoretically shield her from the Jacobs and their power … but still, they'd know she was hiding something. And there was no way Emily could conceal her intentions from Tattletale's power.

There was only one thing for it. "Very well, I'm standing down from any such plans. I won't attack the Jacobs, I won't order anyone to attack them, and I won't participate in any plans to do so." It was the truth; it had to be, to pass the world's ultimate lie detector.

The irritating part was, she couldn't even blame Tattletale for setting the trap. The information had been there all along; she'd just neglected to consider that one tiny aspect. Every cape in the building, in the city, is an unwitting mole for them. She just thanked her lucky stars that they couldn't read non-capes the way they could capes.

Tattletale peered at her, then nodded. "Thank you. I've known people who couldn't do that." She turned to Panacea. "Let's go. She's telling the truth."

Emily made herself sit calmly until the door shut behind the two girls, then carefully counted another twenty seconds before she stood up and punched the desk. Nursing her stinging knuckles, she sat down again, then hit the intercom. "Renick, could you come in here a moment, please? There's some information I need to fill you in on."

<><>​

The Streets of York, United Kingdom

Jacob One

Jacob thought the strange doorway was very interesting. It hadn't been there earlier, and when he stepped through with Lisa, it felt as though his connection with his brothers had been greatly stretched out. "How does this work?" he asked, once they were on the other side.

"It's a power thing," Lisa explained. The explanation didn't actually tell him much, but he also got the impression that she wasn't going to tell him any more than that. This was fine. It was more fun to figure out things for himself, anyway.

There were things Lisa and Amy and Riley were hiding from him, he knew. Some of these things were no doubt innocuous; merely attempts to not confuse or overwhelm him with the complexity of the world. But there were other things they weren't telling him that he felt he really should know.

He didn't have enough experience of the world yet to be sure, but he suspected that there were people he couldn't listen to or speak to with his power. After all, he could occasionally feel the vaguest hints of other minds he could communicate with in the building, but they were far too few to be everyone who lived or worked in a building so large. What decided him was how he was sure Amy and Lisa were too young to be in charge of the building, yet neither he nor his brothers had ever been introduced to an older authority figure.

It followed logically that if these non-communication people knew of him, they would be scared of him. After all, no matter how they tried to hide it, Lisa and Amy were definitely scared of him. Riley wasn't, but she didn't like him much either. When she looked at him, it was like she was seeing someone else. He suspected that she had known Jacob Zero, and knew how bad he'd been.

The people his power could affect weren't a real danger to him. Despite their fear, they never gave so much as a hint of ill intent toward him. Even if they had, their plans would've been easy to anticipate.

Those his power couldn't hear or speak to, on the other hand, were a very real potential danger to him, because he could neither anticipate their decisions nor suggest a less dangerous course of action. He and his brothers had already discussed this, and everyone knew that when and if the time came, they would have to be ready to act.

Until that time, of course, they still had a job to do.

Standing on the street, looking around at the odd sights, Jacob One began to accept that the world was indeed a much larger and stranger place than he'd first surmised. The few movies they'd been given to watch had given them this impression, but this verified it beyond all doubt.

For one thing, it was raining. He had seen rain in movies, but this was his first time in person. Water just falling from the sky seemed counter-intuitive, but still, it seemed to happen. While the water was cold, and his clothes were getting wet, it didn't bother him overly much. He knew that if he caught cold, Amy would heal him.

Looking around, he also verified that there were people whose intentions he couldn't hear, and whose actions he couldn't influence, hurrying here and there to get out of the rain. "Who are those people?" he asked, as if discovering them for the first time.

Lisa glanced at him; he didn't need her dry expression to know she was aware of his small deception. However, she said nothing about it.

"Those are just normal people," Amy said. "Non-capes. They don't have powers like we do."

"Ah, I see." That filled in a gap in his understanding.

The only ones he could communicate with were capes, but it seemed there were many more non-capes than capes. Unless he was severely misunderstanding the matter, non-capes made up the majority of the people in the world. People he needed to save by killing Zion.

Which made the situation a little more problematic. If non-capes feared and hated him and his brothers, how was he supposed to save them?

"You're going to need to lock your thoughts down hard," Lisa warned him in an undertone. "When we meet Zion, if he gets any impression of what you're actually here for, he's likely to shred us all where we stand. From me and Amy, all he hears is our voices. But he can hear your thoughts, just like you and your brothers can hear each other. Do not give this away if you can possibly help it."

"I'll be careful," he assured her. He could scarcely contain his excitement; in just a little while, he was going to be seeing their target for the first time. His brothers would share what he was seeing, of course, if he tuned the transmission just to them.

He felt a strong urge to make some subtle joke, foreshadowing Zion's eventual doom, but repressed it. Lisa had explained how powerful the golden entity was, how any kind of physical confrontation would end in defeat and death, so he knew to be careful. Screwing up now would kill us all. And I'm not ready to die just yet.

As they walked down the street, splashing through the occasional puddle, he tried hard not to be overwhelmed by everything. He'd watched the movies as avidly as his brothers had, but the action had distracted him from the everyday background. Here, he was in the background. The sidewalks were made of concrete, cracked and grimy with tiny weeds growing through here and there. What few cars he saw weren't slick and glitzy, but tired looking with faded paint. The people weren't … pretty, was his best word for it. They looked drab, uninterested. And wet, but that was due to the rain.

They turned a corner, and Lisa pointed. "There he is."

Jacob followed her pointing finger, and saw an older man with a neatly trimmed beard and clean clothing, with a scruffy-looking dog on a leash. Apparently more prepared for the rain than anyone else around, he was holding an umbrella. He saw them at the same time and started forward, the dog trotting in his wake. If Jacob recalled correctly, this was Kevin Norton, the man who spoke to Zion.

"We meet again," Lisa said by way of greeting. "You're looking well."

"I am well," Norton said, spreading his free arm wide and chuckling. "Thanks to Panacea, of course. And your largesse." He came closer. "I can't possibly thank you enough. You've given both Duke and me a new lease on life." He spoke oddly, with accents on different words than Jacob was used to. It was yet another reminder that the world was bigger and stranger than he'd ever imagined.

Lisa smiled. "Well, that's good to hear. Are you ready to carry out your end of the deal?"

"Of course." He beamed at them through the falling raindrops. "And this young man is to take up my burden?"

Jacob nodded. "I am. My name is Jacob."

"A good, strong name." Norton frowned a little, looking at him. "But are you sure you want this? It's a terrible responsibility. If you misspeak and say something wrong, he may not stay long enough for you to correct yourself."

"I know what to say." Jacob had found his joke. "He will hear what he needs to from me."

"Well, alright then." Norton looked at Lisa and Amy. "I think I'll be going back to London after this. After being the most powerful man in the world, I think I need to bring myself back down to earth." He chuckled at his own joke as he led the way through increasingly disreputable back streets, until he reached a small stream, spanned by a quaint stone bridge. The stream was starting to swell from the water running into it, but Jacob didn't think it would get too deep or wide. "It was raining when I first saw him here, too."

"What happened?" asked Amy softly.

Norton approached the bridge and ran his hand over the wet stones, as though recalling the events by touch. "Time was, the golden man spent his time wandering, floating here and there, observing but never doing anything. In a daze. Naked as the day he was born. Everyone had different ideas on who he was. Some thought he might be an angel, others thought he was a fallen angel, and still more thought there were scientific explanations. Only thing they ever agreed on was that he looked sad."

Jacob didn't care that Zion was sad. It would just make the task easier.

"But he's not, is he?" Lisa guessed.

"No," Norton said. "He doesn't look anything. That expression never changes. But whatever's underneath, that's what's giving you that feeling. He looks sad because he is sad. Except you take out the 'looks' part of it."

That made sense, Jacob decided. He knew when any of his brothers, or other capes, were sad, without ever seeing their faces.

Norton hadn't finished his story. "I was sleeping under that bridge just there, or trying to, when he stopped near here. I was still feeling so sorry for myself I couldn't look anyone in the eyes. When I realised he was the same golden man I'd seen on the news, I ran up to him and hit him and yelled at him. Swore at him. I was so angry that he had all that power and still dared to be more miserable than me. Somewhere in the yelling—that was as much at myself as at him—I told him to go help people, and he did."

"Huh." Lisa's eyes were raised to the sky, water drops running off her face, and it took Jacob a moment to realise she wasn't commenting on the story. He looked up as well, and saw Zion descending soundlessly, smoothly from the cloud cover above.

Norton looked up as well. "Hello, old friend."

Zion didn't answer, or react visibly, but Jacob felt some of his attention shift to Norton.

"Wondered if I would see you here," Norton continued. "Been a long time. I'd nearly convinced myself I'd imagined you. This old dog here, he wasn't even born when I left, and he's had a good long run. Twelve years old."

Zion continued to hover just over the streambed. The water was six inches below his feet, but occasional splashes touched them. However, like the raindrops themselves, the stream water sublimated off his white bodysuit, as though pushed by pressure from within.

"The only person he listens to is me. He'd come when I was alone, when the weather was bad or in the dead of night, and however he comes, nobody ever followed him here."

"That's probably because he can't be tracked by satellite or cameras," Lisa observed. "Word of mouth only."

"Huh. That could be it." Norton sighed. "I should've told him to help more people, sooner. One time I saw a clip showing that first Endbringer, the Behemoth, and in the background, he was flying past, coming to visit me. So, I told him to fight them. Maybe I should've told him to kill them."

"Trust me," Amy said, "hindsight is always twenty-twenty. You do what you can with what you've got." She reached up and pushed her wet hair back off her face.

Norton shook his head. "Golden man!"

That got a lot more of Zion's attention; he floated around to face Norton square-on.

"I've screwed up, waiting so long to talk to you. But I'm here now and there's something we got to discuss."

There was no response, only the motionless stare. However, Jacob could feel the vague curiosity behind it.

"I nearly waited too long. I was dying, but now I'm well again. No idea how or why you picked me to listen to, but you can do better than me. I want you to keep doing what you were doing. Help people. Try to communicate with the good guys more. I told you to do that before and you didn't listen, but you should. And if there's a problem, if you need someone to listen to, someone to visit from time to time, look for this young man here, Jacob. He's willing to pick up where I'm leaving off. He's probably smarter than me, knows more about the world."

The golden man hovered in place, so still it looked like he was frozen in time, standing in the air. Part of his attention moved to Jacob, questioning, querying. Jacob debated letting Zion see his power, but chose to keep it down. He even cut off his connection with his brothers, in case Zion could detect that.

"I hope you're listening to me, because it'll break my heart if I found out you came looking for me in the wrong place. If you ever need guidance, someone to tell you what to do, you come see Jacob here. You understand me? I'm out of the game. I'm leaving. Talk to Jacob."

Slowly, Jacob took a step forward. "Hello," he said, using his voice only. When he spoke, he felt Zion's attention intensify on him. Fortunately, it was not a hostile scrutiny; merely a full-body scan.

At no time did Zion actually look toward him, but the golden man didn't have to. While his eyes worked, they were in no way a major aspect of his sensorium.

"And you, Jacob, you think about it, figure out what you need to, decide what he needs to be told." Norton's expression was intense. "Don't wait too long. There'll never be a right time, a good time. Just do it."

Jacob nodded sincerely, feeling the pressure from the golden man's not-gaze. He could tell Zion was listening to his words. "I will. I'll do it."

Norton shrugged. "Don't know why he picked me to listen to, but he did. I could've reminded him of someone he used to know. Or he just up and decided we were friends, maybe. With luck, he can be your friend too." He sighed. "You two got it? You're partners now."

There was a long pause. Jacob didn't know what to say, and Zion had made a career of being silent. The powered scrutiny went on for a few moments longer, then it cut off. A second later, Zion took off vertically again, almost faster than the eye could follow.

Norton shaded his eyes, looking skyward, but Zion would've already been out of sight in the clouds. "Well, that's done," he said, sounding a little sad. "I hope he listened. Come on, Duke. We've got a train to catch."

"What are you going to do in London?" asked Amy.

"Enjoy not being the most powerful man in the world, I imagine." Norton nodded to Jacob. "Bear the burden lightly, young man. It'll be heavier than you can believe, in time." Turning, he made his way back up the road. They stood there by the stream and watched him go, the umbrella keeping himself and his dog dry.

"Do you think he suspected?" Amy spoke just loudly enough to be heard over the sound of the gurgling stream and rain hitting rooftops, even though he was too far away to overhear.

"I doubt it." Lisa shook her head. "He's too relieved that he got back one last time."

"I feel sorry for him." Amy found a bench and sat down, ignoring the fact that she was sitting in a puddle. "He spent years being scared to go back, and then when he does, he turns over responsibility for what he thinks is a hero to … well, us." She went silent and introspective then, almost as though she were listening to an inner voice.

"There's no doubt that he saved lives when he told Zion to actually be a hero rather than just float around aimlessly." Lisa shrugged. "He deserves what peace he can get. But Zion needs to go."

Amy shook her head. "I just can't get it out of my head that Kevin will be watching the news, soon, and he'll see that Zion is dead, and he'll feel responsible. He'll blame himself for not staying here and keeping on as the Zion whisperer."

Lisa raised her eyebrows. "Unfortunately, when you need to make a Zion-scale omelette, eggs do get broken. And Kevin Norton's happiness is something I'm willing to sacrifice, at least temporarily."

Jacob had been silent while they spoke, mulling over what he'd learned during the encounter with the golden man. Kevin Norton had been correct about one thing; Zion was deeply sad, almost irretrievably broken. He needed direction, or he'd start drifting again. Or he might just decide to blow up the world, starting with where Kevin Norton lived. Jacob could tell he was that sort of asshole.

He understood Amy's concern over Norton's happiness (or lack thereof) but he also agreed with Lisa. When it came to saving the world, one man's happiness just didn't measure up, especially if that happiness was based on a lie.

"I guess," Amy conceded. "So, Jacob. Do you think it worked?"

Jacob smiled as he reopened the connection to his brothers and shared all he had learned. "Yes."

<><>​

Blasto's Base

"Okay, let's see what we've got here." After making sure that all the exits were securely locked, Rey ducked into the back room, pulled the tarp off the cloning tank, and peered through the viewing window to observe the occupant.

It was a healthy adult male Caucasian, he could tell at first glance. Average height, a little on the lean side, with a fuzz of dark hair on the scalp. Nothing spectacular or abnormal.

He frowned, aggravated. So it wasn't the genetic structure, but the person himself. Someone with a particular talent, perhaps? Maybe an actor or a singer?

"Okay," he said to the clone. "Who are you that the PRT needed twenty copies of you?"

The clone didn't answer, but neither had he expected it to. Nor did anybody come to mind.

Getting more frustrated, he sat down at his laptop and began a search for all celebrities who had died in the last few months. Nobody of note popped; it had apparently been a slow period, vis-à-vis celebrity mortality.

Going further afield, he checked up on anyone special who had died in the most recent Endbringer attack. Still nobody. Okay, fine. How about the Nine?

The Nine, he belatedly realised, had been wiped out comprehensively after themselves depopulating a small town. There had been nobody in the town worthy of notice, or of cloning … but the images of the members of the Nine themselves came up on his screen, and Jack Slash's face grabbed his attention.

Jumping up, he darted back to the cloning tank. The clone still drifted there, dreaming clone dreams. But its face, even in repose, bore a more than striking resemblance to the notorious leader of the Slaughterhouse Nine. And when he held up his fingers to simulate Slash's beard, the likeness became eerie.

"Fuuck," he muttered, standing up straight and running his fingers through his already-disarranged hair. "The PRT has twenty goddamn clones of Jack Slash running around out there. What the hell did they want that for?"

There was no good answer for that. He wavered back and forth; destroy it or keep it? Destroy it or keep it?

Whatever he did, he knew, his time had just run out in Boston, and indeed on the East Coast. He pressed a series of buttons to put the clone's development on hold, then hustled around the base, grabbing those things he couldn't do without. I've got to get out of here before anyone finds out what I've done. Once I'm far enough away, I can use this guy as leverage to leave me the fuck alone.

He had a beat-up truck at the loading bay in back. Shuffling a hand-truck under the cloning tube, he carefully disconnected the nutrient feeds—he could reconnect travel ones in the truck—and the power supply. The battery pack would keep it for quite some time.

Panting, he rumbled the hand-truck across the concrete floor and then across the gap into the back of the truck. The attachment points for the tie-down straps were fiddly, but he knew he had to make sure it wouldn't shift in transit.

The familiar voice came from behind him. "That's far enough."

Slowly turning, he looked at Alexandria, framed in the rear opening of the truck. Shit, as the saying went, had just gone sideways in a major way. "I don't suppose there's any way I can get out of this without you punching me?"

There may have been a look of pity on her face as she shook her head, but he knew it wouldn't change a damn thing. "No."

Her fist was a blur, and then the lights went out for good.

<><>​

Bakuda

"Okay, so what happens now?" Alice spread her hands as far as the cuffs allowed her to, as she was escorted back to her cell. "Do I get my fair trial?"

"You do," Director Piggot confirmed, walking alongside the escorting officers. "Once Armsmaster has examined the bombs to ensure there are no hidden tricks or traps, you will be allowed to enter into a plea bargain."

"But you wish I couldn't, don't you?" Alice couldn't help the jab. "You wish you could throw me into the Birdcage, me and every other villain out there, even the ones who haven't done anything that bad."

Piggot looked as though she'd just bitten back a retort. When she spoke, her voice was harsh but controlled. "My wishes don't come into this. So long as you've done your bit, I'll do mine."

"Well, I didn't do anything stupid with the bombs." It was even true. If she'd had any kind of opportunity to, she may have, but with Panacea visiting daily to ask a series of questions that would've ferreted out any bullshit she was trying to pull, her options had been locked down tighter than a PRT trooper's sphincter with Behemoth in town.

"Good." Piggot didn't smile; Alice would've bet good money that she didn't know how. Or that she only saved it for special occasions, like the Annual Puppy Kicking Competition.

"So, do I get any kind of special consideration for doing the bombs?" Alice knew how she sounded, and didn't give a crap. For someone in her position, any concession was a good concession.

Piggot didn't give an inch. "The trial is the special consideration. Good day to you."

As they took her away to the cell, Alice reflected that it definitely could've gone worse. Supermax beat out the Birdcage any day of the year.

Though one question still nagged at her: What are they going to be using those bombs for?

<><>​

Armsmaster

"So, can you use them?"

Dragon's robotic suit looked around from its examination of the bombs Bakuda had constructed. "Oh, yes. I can fit these onto missiles, or fire them from howitzer tubes just fine. And with the timers, I can do a delayed burst volley."

"Good." Colin was pleased, not least because Dragon also seemed to be happy. "How quickly can you get them retrofitted?"

"It shouldn't take me long, especially if I don't have to add smart seeker-heads onto them. I'm just wondering, though; with the sheer damage capability inherent in these devices, what are we going to be firing them at? Did we declare war on someone that I didn't get the memo about?"

"Technically, yes," he admitted. "This is going to be a first strike, because if we miss, we won't have the option for a second strike."

Her electronic avatar in his HUD widened her eyes. "Colin … what's going on? Who are we fighting?"

He hesitated; she wasn't read in on the details, but it wasn't like she was untrustworthy.

"Okay, so this is what's going on …"

<><>​

The Warrior

The being self-designated as Zion for this iteration of the Cycle paused in its long flight around the planet it was currently monitoring. Over a significant period of the last planetary orbit, the amount of overall conflict had reduced instead of increasing, and showed no signs of altering that trend. There was no indication that any of the Conflict Engines were stirring; the next one should be the hydrokinetic, but it was dormant at the bottom of the ocean.

This was something that would have to be addressed sooner or later, but another matter was starting to take precedence. There were voices, never quite audible enough to be understood, as though a dozen or more similar entities had arrived on the planet and were concealing their presence from it. Their presence might have been a good thing for the Cycle, but it could sense from the tone that they were hostile to it.

While it had no way of pinpointing the location of the hostile entities immediately, it intended to narrow down the possibilities and then strike at each one as soon as it had a definite location. It was the Warrior, after all, and killing was what it did best. Coasting over the upper atmosphere of the planet, it began its search …

<><>​

Tattletale

Jacob One's voice came out of the intercom. "Zion suspects something. He's looking for us."

She jabbed the button to reply. "Gotcha. Get your brothers up and ready. I'll be with you in a second."

Without waiting for his reply, she grabbed up her phone and hit the speed-dial for Director Piggot's office.

The answer came through promptly; the woman must have been waiting on her call. "You've got Piggot. Sitrep me."

"The Jacobs just told me that Scion suspects something, and that he's searching for them."

"Copy. Get them prepped for the preliminary assault. I'll alert the Chief Director."

"Got it." Lisa ended the call and hit the intercom button again. "We've got a green light. I'll come through and start spreading you out around the world."

Jacob chuckled. "Don't worry about it. I figured out your little 'doorway' trick a while ago. We can handle our own transportation. See you on the front lines."

"Shit!" Lisa jumped to her feet. "Doorway to the Jacobs' quarters!" The portal opened in front of her, and she stepped through … just in time to see the main room empty of all but Jacob One, and even he was stepping away through his own portal, on the other side of the room. He turned and gave her a lazy salute, along with the easy grin that always put shivers down her spine.

And then the portal closed, and he was gone.

"Fuck!" She thought quickly, then sent a text to Costa-Brown's private mobile number.

Jacobs know Doorway, are going for the assault. Out of my hands.

The answer came back much faster than she'd expected.

SFGDI. No surprise. We'll deal after. RCB

The acronym gave her a brief smile. Shit Fuck God Damn It. But on the upside, the Jacobs going independent cut her loose to help elsewhere. "Doorway to Flechette."

<><>​

New York Protectorate Building

Flechette

"Hey, Flechette, there's a call for you."

Lily turned at the sound of Jouster's voice. "Yeah? Who?"

"Pretty sure it's important. All the way from DC."

That definitely got her attention. Only one person in Washington DC had much in the way of professional interest in the Protectorate and Wards, and that was Chief Director Costa-Brown. More to the point, they'd told her to be ready for a ten-minute scramble alert starting a week ago; as part of this, she'd been taken off patrols and allowed to sleep and eat whenever she felt like it.

About two seconds after she stood up from the sofa, a portal opened five feet to her left and a purple-clad cape stepped through. Alarms blared, almost loud enough to be painful, and lights flashed. Lily jumped away from the intruder, hurdling the sofa and going for the nearest chair that she could easily throw. Out of the ceiling dropped foam-sprayer turrets, rotating and lining up on the girl.

"Whoa, whoa, friendly, friendly!" The girl dropped to her knees, clasping her hands to the back of her neck. "I'm Tattletale! The Chief Director knows about me! This is not an attack!"

"Don't move." Lily picked up the chair she'd been going for. "I will concuss you with this if you make me."

"I know you will." Tattletale was holding position. "I'm the reason you're on ten-minute call-out. This is the call-out."

Across the room, Jouster was on his phone, talking in a low tone. Nothing happened for a good twenty seconds, save for the sprayer turrets shifting alignment with millimetric precision. Then Jouster looked up. "I just contacted Director Wilkins, and she verified it. 'Purple costume, annoying attitude, way too smug' is what I was told. Thinker seven, acts like she's thinker twelve."

"Seven, my ass," Tattletale groused as she got up from her kneeling position. Above her, the sprayer turrets retracted into the ceiling. "Should be eight at least. I'm that good."

"Yeah, that remains to be seen." Jouster came over, looking her up and down critically. "You're her call-out contact? Aren't you a bit young for that?"

"I'm the one with the plan, I get to update it the way I see fit. Doorway to Flechette's arbalest." Another portal opened beside her and Lily could see the arbalest, just sitting there. "Well, what are you waiting for? Get it."

Wondering exactly what had happened to the brakes on this ride, Lily did as she was told. "Where are we going?"

Tattletale grinned at her, which didn't make her feel any less apprehensive. "All the way to the scene of the crime."

<><>​

Jacob One

The world was very big indeed. One of the things that Jacob hadn't known was that people spoke different languages in different places, and they even looked different. More so than men and women normally looked, even.

This was something they would have to explore later, but right now they had a god to kill. He looked up as a streak of white and gold flashed overhead, then opened a channel to his brothers. The target just passed over Mexico City.

Good, Jacob Two sent back. Let's get him. One by one, his other brothers chimed in with their agreements. It was unanimous.

Jacob One, as the nominal leader, opened the ball. Directing his thoughts strongly at Zion, he assumed the most cutting, sneering voice that he could. You suck. You're a failure.

Immediately, even as he sensed Zion pulling a seventy-gee U-turn, he damped down his power to the point that he could only hear his brothers. Jacob Seven spoke next, from somewhere in Australia (which he'd said was a fun place to be). You should've died, instead of her. You should still die.

Zion swerved again, and etched a hole through the atmosphere in the direction of Australia. Jacob Twelve chimed in from England, not far from where Jacob One had met Kevin Norton. Why don't you just give up? You're weak, and an embarrassment. Fuck off and die in a hole.

Lisa had explained the concept of the game 'whack-a-mole' to Jacob One, and he'd been impressed and intrigued. While he'd never seen a mole, he could certainly understand the concept. Carefully keeping track of Zion's location and direction, they kept taunting him, digging at his weak points, working to see what had the best effect.

After a while of this, he slowed down and started turning, apparently looking for them in ways they couldn't match. Jacob Seven took the initiative. You're a fucking crybaby loser. Why don't you just crawl—

At the first few words, Zion was arrowing straight toward him, around the curve of the Earth. He was moving faster than ever before … and then he vanished, to reappear over a small town in eastern Russia. Jacob Seven had time for one startled fuck- before he vanished from their awareness.

One of their number was dead.

Jacob One flashed a message to the other eighteen. Jump jump jump! Then he envisaged a portal to downtown Los Angeles, and darted through.

This isn't working, Jacob Eighteen sent. We've got him sad, but he's also mad.

I know, Jacob One agreed. We're going to have to dogpile him.

I thought we were going to hold off on multiple taunts, to make him think we're just one person, objected Jacob Two.

Well, single taunts aren't working. We need to overwhelm him. And jump between words. Don't give him time to fix on your location.

Fuck him, Six said grimly. Seven was my brother.

He was everyone's brother. Okay, Two through Five on my mark, then Six through Ten, and so on. Let's make this motherfucker pay.

Assent came back from his brothers, and he jumped to a different location before communicating with Zion in the most insulting tone he could muster. Missed me, you evolutionary mistake.

At the same time, Two unleashed a cutting insult, as did Three, Four and Five. Zion, who had been drifting upward again, apparently looked around wildly as the sneering words lashed at him. The anger was still there, but as they attacked his choices and the fact that he'd gotten his partner killed (Amy had given them some choice details in that regard) he began to falter. Still, he was definitely trying to kill them, so they kept jumping randomly from location to location.

Jacob Twelve made the mistake of taking a portal into a city that Jacob Fourteen had just vacated, and he died in a firestorm that consumed three city blocks. Jacob One heard his death-shriek, and clamped his teeth together. That's two, you sonovabitch.

You killed your partner! he screamed into the ether. You had no idea what you were doing, and she died because of you! Then he jumped again, because Zion had just blazed over the horizon.

Minutes slowly became hours, as they gradually wore him down. His movements were now visibly less sure, and the anguish radiating from him was almost palpable. All over the United States, cape teams were on standby, nobody engaging Zion in case they brought his wrath down on them.

Overseas, it was a different matter. The CUI brought their vaunted Yàngbǎn into action against him after he scorched a town into ruin half a second after Jacob Nineteen left for greener pastures. Their most powerful moves barely affected him, and his retaliation shredded their entire structure. Then he flew on, seeking to end the voices that tormented him endlessly.

But he was done; that was his last surge.

Hands clasped to his head as the surviving Jacobs bellowed their contempt and hatred into his head, he came to a hover over the baked earth of central Australia and howled his despair and agony to the sky. As tiny crystals precipitated from thin air, generated by the sheer power he was radiating, Jacob One opened a portal to Lisa. "It's time."

With her was another girl in a similar-coloured costume, this one carrying a formidable-looking string-tension weapon. He wanted to call it a crossbow, but wasn't sure.

Lisa nodded to the other girl. "You're up."

Taking a deep breath, the girl ran her hand along a slender-looking arrow, then set it into the weapon. She knelt on the floor where she was, then aimed and fired in a single motion, sending the arrow through the two different portals.

In less than the blink of an eye, it crossed the intervening distance and struck Zion in the throat. His body popped like a party balloon, leaving a hole in space.

Jacob One had no idea what that was about; his entire job had been to get them to this point in time, and he'd done it.

"Doorway to Dragon," Lisa said next. Yet another portal opened, showing a courtyard with a mechanical dragon-shaped robot. "You're up!" she shouted.

The robot clomped nearer, bringing a very large weapon barrel to bear. Jacob stepped back out of the way, giving it time to take aim. The hole that Zion had left behind just hung there in mid-air, looking like an error in reality. In a way, he supposed, that was what it was.

"Clear!" bellowed the robot. Jacob One reflexively stepped into the same space as Jacob Fifteen, who was watching through a small portal from southern Argentina. They saw the launcher fire three times, generating a massive cloud of smoke, and sending the projectiles through the man-shaped hole into the space beyond.

"What are those?" asked Jacob Fifteen.

Jacob One shrugged. Zion was dead. They were off the clock. It wasn't their problem.

<><>​

Tattletale

Lisa knew the bomb timers wouldn't last much longer. "Doorway to Dodge!"

The portal opened, and Dodge peered through. "I heard something was going on. Is it time?"

"Yeah, it is, unless you want Australia depopulated."

"And kill off all those cute platypuses? No way." He hefted what looked like a typical Tinker device, complete with blinking lights, a spinner, and a spark-gap. "Okay, that looks like … huh. A Type Six portal. Maybe six point five. G and P are within specs … hmm." He tapped numbers into the keyboard built into the thing.

Lisa was acutely aware of the timers counting down. "Any time now …"

"I've got it, I've got it." He hit a button. The device hummed, lights flashed, the spinner spun, the spark-gap sparked … and the hole Zion had left behind vanished, as though it had never been.

Lisa held her breath, watching her phone as the numbers ran down. They hit zero and stopped; the bombs, in Zion's pocket universe, would be going off around now. Hundreds of thousands of cubic miles of space whale, maybe millions, would be getting shredded.

Nothing else happened. The tiny crystals twinkled where they'd fallen on the dry red dirt.

Mike hadn't had much data on how long it would take Zion to reboot his fake body, but she decided to give it five minutes. At six, she took a deep breath. "Okay, I'm calling it. People, we just saved the world."

<><>​

Office of Chief Director Rebecca Costa-Brown, PRT

Panacea

"Well, apart from all the other problems facing it, yes, we can assume that you've saved the world." Chief Director Costa-Brown didn't seem thrilled about the news, but Amy suspected she didn't get thrilled about much. "Scion killed about fifty thousand people from taking pot-shots at your little homegrown clone army, so we've got to deal with the fallout from that. And Ellisburg. And Eagleton. And Sleeper. They're all still around, if you hadn't noticed. As is your little clone army."

"Oh, I noticed." Lisa seemed determined to be cheerful about it. "But that's not what the plan I made was for. It said so right there on the packet: Plan to kill Scion. Right, Amy?"

Amy nodded. "Right. The question is, how much of a problem does everything else pose?"

"Less of one, now that the Endbringers are in time-out and Scion's dead," Costa-Brown admitted reluctantly. "So yes, well done."

"Oh, good." Tattletale beamed. "Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week."

Hey, uh … Amy?

Amy blinked. Mike sounded unsure, which was totally unlike him. What?

It looks like Tattletale's plan actually did the trick. Not just Zion. Me, too. It feels like I'm going somewhere. His voice was starting to fade.

What? But I haven't had the chance to say goodbye properly!

He chuckled, faintly. Everything he said was faint now. I don't think it works that way. Take care of yourself, and say goodbye to Taylor for me …

And with that, the sensation of his presence in the back of her mind popped like a soap bubble. She sat there, stunned, while Tattletale bantered with the singularly unimpressed Chief Director.

He'd come into her life in a most unexpected fashion, and she hadn't wanted him there for the longest time. But she'd gradually become used to his presence, and his advice had helped her out on more occasions than she could count. Her life now was far better for his intrusion into it.

And he had helped her (and Tattletale) save the world.

She knew she would have to share his absence with the others he'd helped her make friends with, but for now all she wanted to do was sit and remember the good times.

She'd never met the eldritch creature who called himself Michael Allen, and she never would.

But he'd been a good friend.

She just hoped that this time, he'd made it home.



End of Part Thirty-Two
End of I, Panacea

[A/N: Thank you for reading.]