Skein [Worm Altpower/AU]

[Spiny]

XI.

"You're— you're kidding," Taylor said, at a loss for anything else. Even now, Lisa was still playing the upper hand. Still trying to take control. She felt the anger flare in her gut, melting away the faint pain of the headache and replacing it with prickling heat. "No. I don't care. I— I don't owe you anything." The words still sounded so small, so unsure, grating on whatever shreds of ego she had left. She wanted to stand, at least, to feel like slightly less of an invalid—but then her eyes flicked to the barrel of the gun, still pointed uncomfortably close to her chest, and she reluctantly relaxed.

"I want to leave. Right now." That last sentence was delivered with as much venom as Taylor could muster, and as she stared dead-straight, right into Lisa's eyes, she saw something that might have been the beginning of a flinch. A smirk tugged at her lips.

"I know, I know! I get it," Lisa said, nodding quickly and breaking eye contact. "I'm not exactly handling this well because that's kinda tricky when you're analyzing the best possible approach to a grade-A clusterfuck from four different angles at once and reaching for the one that'll screw over both parties the least because despite surprise surprise, the Evil Villain Lisa actually has a fucking conscience..."

Taylor almost didn't realize what the other girl was saying, she was so focused on the words: they came out in sharp, tumbling bursts of speech, the natural cadence of Lisa's voice just off enough to be painfully noticeable. She was trying to sound obnoxiously airy and carefree, like she had earlier, but it was noticeable this time, almost stilted. She had to work at it, as if distracted by something else—

"But like, I was considering threatening you! Can you believe that?" Lisa laughed, and Taylor's jaw tightened. Had it really been that shrill and grating the day before? Did she even realize?

"That was my first thought, just double down on brute force and stay composed and you'll probably crack, right? But thank God my power's still doing its thing and caught me because, I mean, shit!" Lisa cut in again, the breathless, jerky sentence jarring Taylor's train of thought to a halt with all the grace and subtlety of an emergency break. The blond girl shook her head and smiled, just a little too wide. "You don't work like that, do you? When someone hits, you can't just take it. You wanna hit back harder." She paused for breath, staring at the empty space just above Taylor's head. The gun wasn't pointed at the bed anymore, but she could see Lisa's knuckles around it, squeezing hard enough that they'd blanched to white. "We're both kinda like that, actually. Can't stay down. Pretty fucked, isn't it?" She shook her head slowly, almost in wonderment. "But yeah, so plan number one was out, and then I cycled through six different variations of sedating you and getting you more malleable that way but that seemed even worse—but what about just straight-up earnestness? No way in hell, you're too cynical for that, you'd be suspicious no matter what—"

As Lisa paused for yet another unsteady inhale, Taylor seized her chance. "What are you trying to say?" she snapped, glaring. "You're just... rambling. What do you want?"

Lisa stopped short, blinked, cocked her head, and then gave a matter-of-fact shrug. "Rambling! Right. Yeah, I'm—I'm doing that. Coping mechanism for 26 hours of sleep-dep and counting. Hearing yourself talk is a good way to keep anchored, you know?" She flashed that same strained smile, even as Taylor's eyes widened in shock. "And I know what you're thinking! I did it to myself, so you couldn't wake up first and get the jump on me, right? That's the rational reason." She was pacing now, her path drawing loose, shaky circles in the carpet. "But yeah, no. If I'd had the choice, I probably would've! But I didn't have a choice." The frustration that oozed from her voice was so sudden and venomous it seemed to catch Lisa just as off-guard as Taylor. She paused for a second, composing herself, then continued: "I haven't been able to sleep for the last day and a half because you put a fucking hole in my fucking brain!"

Taylor winced as Lisa's voice rose to a falsetto shriek, pain flaring around the back of her skull. She reached up and pinched her temples, the bacon and eggs in her stomach suddenly feeling more like lead. A hole. Lisa had to be exaggerating, or speaking metaphorically. There was no way—she couldn't have...

"Uh. Sorry," Lisa said apologetically, shaking her head. "Mood swings, emotional outbursts... more fun side effects of sleep dep! You're welcome for the lesson, by the way—but anyway, the favor! I'm getting to that, I swear. But let's make one thing clear first, 'kay? I know what I said before, but I'm kinda done with the whole morality leapfrog thing. You want the high ground? You fuckin' got it, babe. Whatever helps you sleep at night." The glance she gave Taylor was most likely aiming for 'intimidating' but hit closer to 'manic'. "At this point? I don't give a shit who's in the right or wrong. But you, Tay—T-t-teh..." The stutter appeared as if from nowhere, making her pause and suck in an irritated breath through her teeth. "You, Tay-uh-ler H-hee-bert. You did this." Every syllable of the name was overenunciated, like Lisa was forcing each syllable out manually. Taylor felt another swell of something she couldn't describe, that odd Venn-diagram emotion halfway between guilt, satisfaction, and gut-dropping dread...

"So I'm asking you, politely, to fix it." Lisa leaned back against the bedroom wall, folding her arms and keeping that piercing eye contact the entire time. Her mouth opened, like she was about to add something more, then snapped shut again. The lead weight sank a little lower.

This was what she'd wanted, wasn't it? It'd felt so obvious then, the adrenaline and anger making it searing-burning clear. Lash out, hit harder, yank back control, forcing respect the only way she could until something inside of Lisa cracked. It had worked, and it had felt good, good enough that the memory still held embers of satisfaction. But now, as she stared at the gun—the barrel seemed to soak up the Brockton sunlight, tugging it towards its event horizon—all she really felt was irritation, shame, and a slowly rising current of fear.

"And if I say no?" she finally blurted, at a loss for anything else. "You're too good for murder, but I bet you wouldn't mind keeping a hostage, would you?" She gave her lens a cautious tug, just enough to catch a millisecond sliver of coruscating gold— and in an instant, the headache was back, less sudden and stabbing than before but still enough to make her snap the Web shut. She'd have to be careful about pulling something like the alleyway again, that was for fucking sure.

"Is that what you think?" Lisa laughed, shaking her head. "No, no. If you wanna take advantage of my selfless charity and free breakfast and waltz on outta here..." She jabbed a thumb in the air behind her. "Elevator's that way. You want me to call it?" At Taylor's bemused look, she rolled her eyes; they were noticeably bloodshot and seemed to blink just a little too often. "You can get up and go, right here right now! Be my guest! And, like, just to be clear, I'm not gonna hunt you down or work behind the scenes to ruin your life or any of that tryhard Machiavellian bullshit, because even though you're real cute and interesting—fuck me, did I say cute? Just... just imagine another adjective there, Jesus Christ—anyway the point is I have bigger fish to fry. Like, wok-size fish. But that said, if you step outta here without taking me up on that favor, you know what I am gonna do?" She flashed another fraying grin. "I'm gonna act in my own self-interest, as a citizen who now has a debilitating mental health issue from an encounter with parahuman. I'm gonna walk down to the PRT station— don't think I don't have a fat stack of aliases to do that with—report that I'm pretty sure I've been compromised by an unknown Master/Stranger, and then jump through every goddamn bureaucratic hoop they put in front of me until I get someone who can fix it. And before you say it, no, nothing's stopping you from following me and giving testimony too. But if you do that, we're back where we started! Same shit. M.A.D." Lisa tapped her fingers against her palm, emphasizing each letter. "'cept now, we've moved up from TNT to nukes." Her smile faded a little, softening at the edges. "But, okay. That's not a threat, all right? You can't blame me for this, it's for me. I'm acting in self-defense, here, because there is no possible universe in which Lisa Wilbourn dies from fucking lack of REM. Not a chance in Hell."

"You're out of your mind," Taylor snapped, her irritation burning through her dread at the idea that Lisa had a point. "That's it? Your best threat is—is running to the PRT and hope they clean everything up for you?"

"They call me Tattletale for a reason." Lisa was smirking, a fraction of her old smugness shining through. "And I just said it wasn't a threat, but honestly...what do I have to lose? Worst case, I get a cushy cell in a federal pen for a few years until my lawyers chew through enough of my bank account to get me out. But you?" She gave a slow, pitying shake of her head. "You've got a long, long way to fall."

"They aren't stupid," Taylor muttered, trying to sound more convinced than she felt. "It's not like I'm some fucking supervillain, or anything—they'll understand."

Lisa's lips curled, and she seemed to almost relish her reply: "You're going to to bet a lifetime in prison on that?"

It was quiet, then. Taylor swallowed, her mouth suddenly feeling dry. Lisa—or Sarah, she remembered, with sudden meaningless clarity—whoever she was, was an awful manipulative bitch who'd done nothing but take advantage of her and try to ruin her life... but she also might have been right, which made it so much worse. The realization made Taylor almost nauseous, washing over her in a slow, sickening wave. She hadn't meant for the alley to turn out like that. She hadn't. It had just sort of happened; she'd been stressed and scared and desperate to get an upper hand, if only to show that she could, and because all the jagged bitter parts of her had said someone like Lisa deserved it—

Excuses don't matter, anymore. You're fucked. You're fucked. The fear was back, thick and choking, throwing shadowy images of sedative injections and Birdcage cells across Taylor's mind. She fought the urge to let out a frustrated scream, instead settling for kneading the bed's down comforter tightly in her fingers. It was irritatingly soft and fluffy, so wringing it wasn't really satisfying, but it was something else to focus on. Something to steady her. But even if you're fucked, you aren't fucked yet. No point admitting defeat early. She took a deep, cleansing breath and imagined her own Web, in all its glory: every node neatly arranged, gently drifting through her headspace in shimmering clusters of semantic relation as the subshoots drew clean and beautiful lines between them.

As long as she was alive, she still had leverage. She still had control.

A smile crept across her face, making Lisa stiffen slightly. Thoughts flickered through her mind: money, enough for Dad to quit his job. Safety. Security. Making the Trio regret saying a single bad word about her. If Lisa was as well-connected as she said—and the more Taylor learned, the more it seemed like she was—all of that was in reach. All she had to do was ask; there was no way Lisa could refuse. Well, she could— but then Taylor would leave, and Lisa would be gambling her life finding another way to undo the damage she'd caused.

"So if I say yes," she began, keeping her voice quiet and level. "And that's a big 'if'." Lisa nodded vigorously, waving her hand in a 'go on' motion. "You aren't going to turn around and go to the PRT anyway." It was a statement, not a question, as authoritative as she could make it. "Because if you do—"

"We'd throw each other's lives away, MAD, blah, blah," Lisa cut in, rolling her eyes. "Like I said! Jesus, Taeeya... Taa..." She let out a frustrated huff as the mangled syllables ground the sentence to a stop. "...whatever. I'm stupid tired, not stupid stupid. I get it."

"Acting like a condescending bitch isn't a great way to earn favors," Taylor replied, doing her best to only let a sliver of irritation creep into the words. Lisa blinked, processing, then bristled like she'd been physically slapped.

"Oh well ec-fucking-scuse me, your highness, but I think I have every right to be a bitch, especially after someone decided to use my fucking head as a—" She stopped midsentence, closing her eyes and inhaling slowly through her nose. "Look. I just want closure, all right? That's it. A simple answer. 'Yes Lisa, I will help you fix your debilitating neurological degeneration that's also at least 80 percent my fault', or 'no Lisa, I'm going to leave and make you fend for yourself as your mental functions slowly degrade into a horrible sleep- deprived slurry.'" As Taylor's expression hardened, she quickly added, "Fine, call it, like, 60 percent. I think that's pretty goddamn generous, all things considered... but tell you what. You fix me, and I'll even give you a little token of my gratitude. You want stocks? Bonds? Offshore real estate, imported jewelry, fancy-ass wine—whatever. Name it; it's yours."

Their eyes met for a moment; Lisa was the first to look away. "So what's it gonna be?" she said softly, all traces of nonchalance gone from her voice. "Yes or no?"

This was it. Assuming Lisa wasn't lying—which was a pretty big assumption, Taylor reminded herself—she could get up and leave, right now, and start attempting to pull things somewhere back towards normal...

But did she really want normal?

Taylor frowned, unable to push the thought away. 'Normal' meant enduring useless days at Winslow, letting the Trio walk all over her, shrugging off harassment day-in-day-out. She could do better than that, and she'd been on the verge, too, so close to finding a way up and out of the slow-burning chunk of Hell that had been her life... until Lisa had flounced in and forced the world to revolve around her own delusions of grandeur.

Taylor had a right to be upset. She had a right to want revenge.

But there was still that little nub of niggling doubt, tempering her vindication every time it tried to bubble up and consume her. If she left, no matter what happened, she'd have a smirking blonde specter for the rest of her life. The PRT might have been the good guys, but she had an awful, crawling feeling that they wouldn't see things in nearly as sympathetic of a light as she did. And that was if Lisa actually managed to get help. If she didn't...

Taylor stared down at the bedspread. Despite the blackmail, despite the coercion, despite that stupid fucking smug grin...despite everything, she didn't actually want Lisa to die. Swallow her pride? Definitely. Suffer? Maybe a little. But die? She didn't even want Emma, to die, really—well, not by her hand, at least. And Lisa wasn't Emma, as much as her conscience wished she could equate them. She was brighter, sharper, more human. Not much more, maybe, but enough.

"...fine," she said, shattering the silence. "I'll do it. But—"

"Like I said." Lisa's voice was heavy with barely-disguised relief. "name it. I can have it at your house or in your bank account or whatever in a day or two, tops."

Name it. It would be so easy. Taylor nearly blurted out the first six-digit number that came to mind, just to get it overwith—but something held her back, that same bullheaded ideal that had caused this entire fucking mess in the first place. If she took anything from Lisa now, she'd be sinking to her level—taking advantage of a situation she'd mostly caused herself.

Heroes didn't take bribes.

You wish you were a hero, came the thought, rising dark and sticky and unbidden through her brain. Taylor forced it back, shoved it away, tore it to pieces and then to quarters of those pieces and burned the pieces to dust, refusing to acknowledge even a sliver of doubt. She'd made mistakes. Heroes made mistakes. This was her chance to fix them.

"No. I don't want anything." Saying it felt good; seeing Lisa's reaction felt even better. "Not from you."

"Nothing." The blonde cocked her head slightly, face a mixture of amusement and disbelief. "Are you serious? Like— oh." She nodded, as if in realization. "This is some stupid code of honor thing, isn't it?" she said triumphantly, the sentence interspersed with a giggle. "Or you don't want to feel indebted to me? Whatever. You do you, I guess. Makes my life easy."

Taylor wasn't listening. She had her lens half-open again, trying different angles of approach to Lisa's Web as she let the flashes of light flare gradually brighter. The pain was fading, slow and steady—not gone, but at least manageable. She hoped.

"Anyway!" Lisa took a slightly-too-enthusiastic hop onto the bed. The plush mattress, to its credit, didn't let out a peep. She settled herself on the end, bringing the pistol up and fiddling with it for a moment before dropping her hand to her side, fingers loosely curled around the grip. "Go ahead and do your thing, I guess."

"Uh." Taylor frowned, staring at the other girl's hand. "What did you—"

"Popped the safety," Lisa finished, smiling innocently."Just in case you have a change of heart and try to vegify me instead." She drummed the tips of her fingers against the grip. "Not that I'm expecting you to, or anything. But I'm a Thinker; 'Paranoid' is pretty much a synonym. Don't take it personally, 'kay?"

"Try to— how would you even know the difference?" Taylor sputtered. Lisa rolled her eyes.

"I can feel it, dumbass—whoops, sorry," she said, her tone surprisingly close to actually apologetic. "Slipped out! Didn't actually mean it that way, promise. But trust me. I can tell when you're in my head, and there's a pretty big difference between window-shopping, reorganizing, and trying to kick over all the shelves.... wow, that was, like, an actually coherent metaphor! At 27 hours! I should get a prize." Her bloodshot eyes flickered closed as she giggled. "But unless you have any other burning questions, can we get started? We're burning daylight. And neurons."

 

[Spiny]

XII.
"You realize I might not even be able to fix this," Taylor said, leaning back against the headboard. "It could be something that my power can't reach. I don't even know what's wrong, specifically." Or that I even want to help you. She shoved the thought out of her mind. Just get it done.

"Of course," Lisa chirped, unperturbed. "But, statistically—and by 'statistically' I mean 'brilliant pericog intuition', you're also my best shot at ending the day with all my higher functions intact." She clasped her hands together, leaning forward on the bed and giving Taylor an expectant look. "So, y'know, if you wouldn't mind..."

"Mmm."

Little whorls of lambent gold splayed out from her lens' tightly-shuttered aperture, teasing at the storm beyond. Taylor felt the familiar tingle in her scalp, then across her jaw, then down her spine, warm fizzy firefly flashes of exhilaration she hadn't even realized she'd missed until now. The pain was there too, of course—it hadn't left—but now she let it drift, brushing it away to some untended corner of her mind. The lens widened, her view of Lisa's headspace expanding. Slow and careful, not too much, not too fast. More light filtered through, enough that she could see the faint suggestions of nodes, so indistinct they felt almost shadowy as they whiplashed back and forth across the Web. And with them came something else, those same little peaks and lows of feeling and sensation she'd felt back at school. But these were different: where other people had ripples, Lisa had spikes, sudden jagged swells of deep association that teased Taylor every time they crested, catching the pseudolight of her nodes and refracting it like shards of beachglass. Some other facet of the Web, intricate and gorgeous... but still just outside her reach.

She sighed, reaching up to adjust her glasses out of habit, then frowned as her fingertips hit empty air. "Bedside table," Lisa said, pointing. Taylor leaned over and picked them up wordlessly, letting them settle back on her ears and nose. The weight was familiar and soothing, a tiny anchor of normalcy. God knew she could use it.

The keyhole view of Lisa's Web flickered brighter, inviting, no, begging Taylor to pull it open and dive inside. The instinct was there, that was for sure; it felt painfully unnatural to look at things like this, with only a fraction of the scope and depth of information she was used to. But she fought the urge. Slowly, steadily, the shutter gradually lifted, her field of 'view' expanding until she could finally feel the helter-skelter architecture of Lisa's brain. It was tedious, but also better than puking herself into unconsciousness a second time. Most things were, as a matter of fact.

"So, uh." Lisa had the heels of her hands pressed together and was drumming the tips of her fingers against each other. It made just enough noise to be irritating. "Are you doing like, warmups or something? Because—"

"Taking it slow," Taylor replied, only half-listening. "Head still kinda hurts from earlier." It was only half a lie. Her head did hurt, but thankfully, the pain hadn't gotten worse as she'd opened up more of Lisa's We. Even so, she hesitated. Just nerves, maybe, or her morality talking, wondering if this was really the right thing, the Heroic thing... but there was another part of her, small and shameful, that was terrified of what she'd done. What would it look like? Feel like? Did she even want to know?

"Oh! You should've said so," Lisa bounced off the bed, the motion so sudden and energetic she could've been on a spring. "There's ibuprofen in the bathroom, one sec—"

Taylor shook her head. "I'm fine. Can you sit back down?" Lisa gave her an odd look, but didn't argue, settling back on the edge of the comforter and folding her arms. The bits and pieces of Web she could see were flickering, so fast it reminded her of Morse code, and the urge rose again, so strong it was almost a physical need—

Okay. Okay. Deep breath in, deep breath out. One, two...

Taylor exhaled slowly, pulling her lens out wide in a concentrated burst of will—and Lisa's Web snapped into sudden crystal clarity, shimmering and bright, humming with its usual endless tangle of thoughts. From here, nothing seemed glaringly wrong—but her relief quickly soured as she remembered what she'd told Lisa. What if the damage was to deep and pervasive for her power to find at all? Don't, she thought forcefully, her hands squeezing the comforter. That bullshit isn't helping. Just focus.

She pulled in closer, following the ricocheting trails of the outermost nodes and the tantalizing shadows of emotion they brought with them. As a few larger ones streaked by, forming and unforming into nascent chains of prefix-suffix-root, she felt it: there was a distortion in the Web's rhythm, its flow. Warping the path of the words, twisting them away from where they were supposed to go. Once knew she what to look for, it was unmissable and everywhere, enough to make her more and more uneasy with every passing second. Steeling herself, Taylor pushed, jumping from node to node as she guided her lens to where she knew the root would be, where it had to be. Lisa's Web was as mazelike and volatile as ever, but those anxious, twinging course-corrections in her thoughts were much easier to follow. It didn't take long.

Bed→side⦚bed→room→my→sleep→none⦚bed⦚hours→long→wait→wake→now→here...

Taylor.

Her breath punched itself to the back of her throat.

The node was there, suspended in Lisa's headspace, sitting motionless in the center of a vibrating, misshapen rosette of subshoots. They were still moving, Taylor realized, even if the node itself wasn't. There were already so many connections she could barely tell what each one was supposed to be, and yet still more were lashing out, over and over... but just before they reached the node to snap smoothly into place, they'd curl back, twisting and splintering in a burst of golden sparks as the link shattered before it was even fully formed. It was horrifying, mesmerizing—some awful mixture of both at once.

If the Web had been anyone but Lisa's, it would've been different—Taylor was certain of it, almost instinctively, even if she couldn't explain why. Normal people's subshoots would've drifted back into place, steadily guided by self-reinforcing chains of thought until the nodes had unbunched themselves and settled... but Lisa's had never settled, never stopped trying to connect-interpret-infer, and so her chains had caught and tangled, building on top of each other and themselves and broken phantom concepts that weren't even there, trying nonstop to compensate for that ten-second gap from the alleyway over and over—until the node that meant 'Taylor Hebert' had reached saturation, so thick with meaningless association that it began to warp the rest of Lisa's thoughts around it.

Taylor tried and failed to suppress a shudder, looking away as the other girl quirked an inquisitive eyebrow. "This... uh." She paused and took another breath, inhale-exhale, trying to clear her head. "This might take some time."

Lisa snorted. "Thanks for the diagnosis." It sounded playful, but there was still that faint, panicked edge. "Just do what you have to do, okay?" With a nonchalant shrug, she brought her chin down to rest on her folded hands. "Not like I'm going anywhere."

Juddering, twisting, throbbing. The subshoots shied back as Taylor teased her way through, stifling the reflexive urge to uncoil them, snap them back into place—trying that here would very likely only make it worse. Instead, she went by feel, letting her power stretch and unfurl across the pulsating Escherian knot—like the delicate fractal veins of a leaf, copied and imprinted on each other a hundred thousand times. She played along the subshoots, trying not to linger too long on those odd stabbing nubs of emotion that lurked beneath them, snatches of long-faded reactions interweaving with the words. Doesn't matter now, she thought, with an near-unconscious shake of her head. Common associations, matching paradigms, all the points where the undulating un-words had bunched and meshed and snarled—that was what mattered. The places she'd have to avoid. They were too dense to unravel, too deeply nested, too saturated with meaning...

"Any luck?"

The entire Web suddenly warped, some of the subshoots bulging outwards while others were sucked in closer to her node. A few more of the strange emotional needle-surges rolled over Taylor like an aftershock, echoing up from —above? below? neither of those really meant anything here—but it was so much data at once, flooding out and intermingling, that she could feel her headache returning rapidly and with a vengeance. "Don't talk," she hissed, half-shuttering her lens until the chaos settled.

"Why?" Shift, shudder, shine: the connections were twisting away, trying to move, futilely reorganizing themselves just like they had before, slipping out, away, beyond her reach—

"Don't!" Taylor snapped, pushing her power outwards and forcing the subshoots to steady. It was enough to stop the most violent tremors, thank God, but now the pain in the back of her skull was back, searing and undeniable. Gritting her teeth, she waited out the pain—at least this time it seemed to pass a little quicker. Once it had faded to a throb, she exhaled shakily, mixing her words into the breath. "Makes it worse."

Lisa's affirming nod was a brief smudge in Taylor's peripheral; as soon as the headache cleared, all of her focus went back to the Web. The subshoots around her node were calming, their vibrations slowing to the same dull, nauseating buzz as before— but they were also getting tighter, coiling themselves back up too closely for her power to pull apart. The waves were getting slower too, harder and harder to feel, like a chord ringing out and fading into silence. Whatever had changed when Lisa had spoke, it was over with now, reverted by her own Web in a matter of seconds.

With a long-suffering sigh, Taylor let her lens reopen fully, her view of the Web slowly pulling away until her node was a distant blob of brilliant thrashing light, a tumor made of arc lightning. Maybe she she was looking at this wrong; she'd been so intent on the source that she might've missed the bigger picture. At this point, anything seemed worth a shot.

Minutes passed—ten, fifteen, twenty. Lisa, kept her eyes shut the entire time, silent, pale, and visibly tense. Every time Taylor glanced up to breathe or massage her head, she saw her fidgeting on the edge of the bed, fingers curling and uncurling, as if mimicking he subshoots in her head. Without the toothy smirk and razor-bright eyes, she looked listless and wan, a painting with the pigments sucked away. Taylor stared for a little, unable to herself, and felt a split-second prickle of something dangerously close to guilt before viciously stomping it out. She was ready to ruin your fucking life, spat that charred, seething part of her, all the grudges and resentment that she couldn't cut away. No matter what, she's still an arrogant power-hungry manipulative cunt—

Taylor snapped her lens back to the Web, letting the golden light shut out all her other thoughts for what felt like the thousandth time that hour. She'd picked and teased and poked and prodded, trying desperately to siphon off even a single subshoot from the others, but everything she could find was either too weak or too deep to be useful. The more she tried, the more overwhelmed she felt: nearly every synaptic connection to the words 'Taylor Hebert' Lisa had ever made was there, bent and contorted into one massive, fucked-up knot...

A knot. That's what it was. Taylor pushed her glasses back up on her nose, her mind suddenly racing. It made sense—enough, at least, to give her a tiny gleam of hope. All the links were already in place, distorted but intact. She didn't have to fix them one by one.

All she had to do was find the thread.

"Lisa," she said softly, guiding her lens back towards the center of the knot, "...try saying my name." Lisa's mouth opened, the golden storm around the Taylor-clot roaring to life—but she didn't get a chance to speak. "Just my name! Nothing else. Now."

Lisa gave a sort of half-voiced huff, and her brow furrowed in concentration as Taylor felt the tortured mass of nodes bulge and seethe again—but they were expanding this time, pushing outwards from the same point. Predictable, if only a little. A pattern. She could work with that.
"Tayyhh... taaay..." Lisa slurred, her eyes narrowing in concentration. The nodes squirmed, straining to escape their bonds, and Taylor felt her headache rising for the third time, the pain cutting through her focus, blurring her lens. Not now. She bore down on the pain, squeezing it with her mind, compressing it into a single unpleasant but ignorable point. The thread would be close now, hovering somewhere just outside her mental reach.

"Tayyyhh... huhhh...lerrr..."

The nodes strained further, little shreds of light sparking across her headspace as the rest of Lisa's words pressed in, trying to meet, associate, join... and from in between them came more of those flares, sudden polygraph spines of conflicting sensation jabbing up-up-up, so frequent she was almost going queasy from the constant whiplash. Couldn't block them out—too many for that. Didn't need to. Just let them mingle with the nodes and wash over her, like waves on a beach. What were they? Her curiosity prodded at her, made her hesitate, the instinctive urge to parse-understand-follow welling up inside her mind—

"Taayhhhhlurrrrrhheeeebburrrrhht," Lisa slurred triumphantly, a vein pulsing in her neck. Taylor's breath caught as the entire knot ballooned outward, subshoots stretched so long and fine she could finally feel the individual strands of meaning, gossamer-thin...but still too many to process, too many to pull, and the window was already closing. As each node lit up, it also contracted, coalescing back around her name into an ugly, indistinct mass of half-formed thought. Things would only get worse from here. She had to find the thread.

I→place→house→her→live→things→done→is→want→eyes→when→kill→kiss→burn→wake→sleep→don't→sun→set→spade→dark→hair→grin→curl→hiss→sting→hurt→blood→she→me→my...

The nodes were coming as fast as she could find them, barely comprehensible, blurred to semantic white noise in her mind. Faster and faster and yet still faster, head pounding gut twisting words melting—the ripples of emotion were a constant pulse, the strongest they'd ever been, so powerful and mesmerizing they made her heart flutter in her chest...and then something rose within her, a sudden rush of purpose she could only explain as raw instinct.

She gathered up her power and pulled, and the ripples surged, yanking her in and swallowing her up.

 

[Spiny]

XIII.

Taylor's lens shattered.

Something was yanking on her entire headspace at once, pulling it outwards, going—down? in? deeper, Lisa's words surrounding her, falling away, pirouetting glitter-fractures in a slow-motion mosaic. The Web dimmed, strands flashing out like sunbursts, gunshots, here-then-gone—and then she hit bottom, and things slowed, settled. The Web remained, a sky-sized chandelier—but Taylor was somehow underneath it, drifting through a murky expanse of... of what, exactly?

She flared her power, and strands of gold slid across the unfamiliar topography like questing fingers. Waves. That was what they felt like. Waves of... feelings, discrete but bound together, constantly merging and unmerging. A second Web.

It made sense, she thought, her power tracing them reverently. The nodes were just the surface, the immediate meanings, transient and shallow—but they were linked beneath by this, an endless expanse of ingrained sensation that shifted and swelled like the rolling sea, granting every word significance and weight. The tide moved slowly and uniformly, keeping the same, steady rhythm—except for a spot near the center of her lens, where the waves had sort of crystallized, frozen into a bristling epicenter, an inverted whirlpool of long icy teeth. Her node. She recognized it immediately, with the same hindbrain certainty that had pulled her down here, and felt its wrongness, corrosive and biting. As long as it remained, the Web would never heal—but there was a flaw. A path through the knot. A thread.

Taylor didn't hesitate, pulling her lens towards the jagged peaks—and as her power touched them, they surged, flinging a blinding tsunami across the Second Web and slamming her with a facepunch burst of raw unfiltered emotion, so sudden and pure she almost collapsed back on the bed, gasping in shock—

Irritating→frustrating→worry→useless→worthless→hopeless→help...

Fast and relentless, over and over. She felt like she was choking on the whiplash, drowning under the weight of every last little thing Lisa had ever felt about Taylor Anne Hebert and most of it was bad but there were faint flares of good, too, mingling with the torrent, and that somehow made it even worse—

Snarky→smart→useful→close→wish...

And then came other things, things she couldn't name, confusing and overwhelming and disorientingly warm, flooding over her and tearing her into pieces until she wasn't sure if she wanted to laugh or cry or leap up from the bed and slam Lisa's head against the fucking wall—

Lisa! Lisa was screaming, a drawn-out skullpiercing wail of anguish that seemed too loud to be human. Taylor gasped, her eyes hot with tears for reasons she couldn't explain, and half-slid off the bed, moving closer—

Alone→ignore→pity→hide→distance→cold—

Then something in the room EXPLODED and Taylor threw herself to the floor, mouth stretching open in a shriek she couldn't hear. The gun, she realized dimly, crawling along the plush carpet. Lisa had fired, but there was no blood, no numbness, no pain except for her the pounding in her head, steady as a timpani. The barrage of emotions was ebbing, dissolving…

And then it stopped, all at once, and it would've been silent if her ears hadn't been ringing.

Grabbing the bedpost for support, Taylor hauled herself halfway to her feet with one hand, massaging her head with the other. The gun was laying innocuously on the bedspread—only a splintered, button-sized hole above the headboard showed how close she'd come to death. Her stomach clenched. Get it, her vindictiveness hissed, sharp and demanding. Pick it up, before she finishes the job. She took it gingerly, mildly surprised at the weight—heavier than she'd expected for something so small. It wasn't even hot—but it was still in firing mode, right? She'd never even held a gun before, much less needed to potentially use one—but as long as she had it, Lisa didn't. That was good, but she still needed to actually get up.

The rest of the journey to fully standing made Taylor slightly dizzy, but when the room had stopped swimming, she saw Lisa sitting against the back wall, head down, knees tucked nearly to her chest. She was very, very, still—almost too still, Taylor realized with a sickening jolt—but no, her Web—the First Web—was glowing, so brilliantly it was hard to focus on, thousands and thousands of nodes crackling with renewed activity as the ripples of the Second coursed smooth and confident beneath. It felt right, intrinsically pleasing to some sense Taylor couldn't identify. It felt whole.

With a deep, steadying breath, she raised the gun, training the barrel on Lisa's head. The other girl was moving now, her shoulders heaving gently up and down as her hair bobbed with the effort. Subtle, arrhythmic, familiar...

Lisa Wilbourn, the infallible Tattletale, was crying.

For a half a second, the gun drifted lower, then snapped back into place. "Don't move," Taylor said quietly, the words making Lisa stir, then freeze. "I mean, don't... don't move suddenly. Stand up. Slowly."

Lisa complied, rising unsteadily to her feet. She was shaking, and her face was streaked with tear-tracks... but her eyes were shiny and keen, the signature Tattletale spark flaring behind them once again. "Hhhhollyfuck," she breathed, slowly putting both hands in the air as she saw the gun. "That was... what the fuck." She shook her head, eyes wide. Taylor met them defiantly. "What did you do?"

"You tried to shoot me," she said, ignoring the question. It came out raspy. Not as intimidating as in her head. She paused for a moment, trying to think of something better, but Lisa had already jumped in to fill the silence.

"Oh. Yeah. I—" She sighed. "I fucked up, all right? I'm sorry. I didn't—whatever you did, it..." Her face scrunched in a grimace. "It was like my brain was puking. Seriously, what was that?"

Taylor kept her gaze and her voice steady. "So you tried to shoot me."

"I know!" Lisa said, her tone whipping from apologetic to belligerent. "I get it, and I'm sorry, okay? You don't know how it felt—and don't bullshit me, I know you don't, everyone's power insulates them from shit like that—but I thought I was dying. Worse than dying. I—" She paused, taking in a deep breath. "Like I said, I wasn't being rational. It was my fault, and—"

From outside the door, an elevator chimed.

Lisa moved first. She stepped, pivoted, closing the distance—and with an easy twist of her arm, she'd tugged the gun away, so fast that Taylor's fingers jerked a millisecond later to deathgrip the empty air. "Sorry gonna need this stay here!" she hissed, halfway to the bedroom door by the time Taylor lunged to catch her. "Seriously! My security—"

"Drop the gun!" The voice from the room beyond was low and masculine, slightly clipped, palatal relaxation on the 'R'. Spanish, Taylor thought; she couldn't place it beyond that. "I said drop— Ms. Dennehey!" Upward inflection, more aerated than normal. Surprise and shock. Taylor tensed, her eyes flicking around Lisa's bedroom for alternate exits. There were only two doors: the one outside and the one to the closet, which didn't seem like a great prospect. Moving as silently as she dared, she crept away from the door, settling in the corner of the room and keeping her ears perked for the muffled conversation outside.

"We—there were shots, and screaming!" The same voice, somewhere between bemused and annoyed. "Is everything—"

"Fine," Lisa cut in coolly. Taylor could practically hear the eyeroll that accompanied the words. "I was cleaning it. Made a mistake. It startled me."

"...cleaning it." Another voice, still male. This one seemed dubious. Taylor couldn't blame him. "Ms. Dennehey, we need to search—"

"Like hell you do!" Lisa snapped, composure boiling off in an instant. "I'm right here, for fuck's sake! I'm fine! Your job is to protect the Dennehey family interests—more specifically, me. Well, congrats! I'm here, alive and well, so you can all just pile back in that elevator right now and head out for donuts or something, 'kay?"

"This isn't—" The irritation in the guard's voice was plainly audible now, but it paled in comparison to Lisa's ire.

"Oh my God, why is this so fucking hard?" Her voice jumped loud enough to make Taylor wince. "I'm alive, and I don't want you here, so you need to leave. Get it? That's an order. Now get out, all of you, before I drop your contract so hard your asses imprint in the foundation and hire Academi instead!"

There was a tense silence, stretching three or four long seconds... and then a grunt, a shuffling of boots. The elevator chimed a second time.

Taylor heard a deep, shaky-sounding breath, muffled by the door—which was thrown open a moment later, nearly catching her in the face. "Fucking idiots," Lisa murmured, sounding more exhausted than annoyed. The gun was still in her hand. Taylor eyed it warily—then almost stumbled back as the blonde thrust it straight at her, grip-first. "Here," she said, leaving the weapon hanging loosely in Taylor's disbelieving grip. "My gift to you."

Taylor stared down at the gun in her fingers. "I—what am I going to do with this?" You know what to do, her anger and humiliation whispered, needling. She grit her teeth, choking them down. Every time, it got a little harder.

"Nothing!" Lisa said brightly, shaking her head. "You can drop it on the bed if you want, I just figured it'd be a nice show of trust. Symbolic, y'know? A semi-auto olive branch." She opened the bedroom door again, beckoning Taylor out into a chic but sparsely-furnished living area. "Aaaaanyway. I'd love to keep playing hostess, but I'm fucking exhausted, haven't eaten since last night, and feel like I just got the mental equivalent of a pap smear, so party's over. I'll buzz the desk, the elevator will take you down, and there's a bus stop two blocks to the left outside the lobby. It's been fun!"

"No," Taylor said, her voice flat and scathing."No, it hasn't."

"Oh, gosh, really?" Lisa put a hand to her mouth in mock horror. "I could get some room service, if you want—you like subs? How about a nice little body pillow, or some vicodin? Oxycodone? Maybe some bubble bath?" Her chipper tone never wavered, but the truth was in her eyes: sharp and bright and challenging. Taylor's narrowed. Her blood was sparking in her veins, vessels like riven subshoots, pushing her to give in, give up control—

She didn't care anymore.

"I should've let you fucking rot," she hissed, throwing every ounce of pent-up venom she could into the words. The gun rose as if of its own accord, leveling at Lisa's face. She stiffened.

"You don't mean that." Her voice was quiet, her eyes had dulled, her grin had settled—but she was still staring at Taylor. Neutral. Waiting.

"Like hell I don't!" Intuition would've told her to stop, to wait, cut her losses before Lisa could humiliate her again, but she was so far beyond that now, so far past caring...

She strode forward, closing the distance in seconds. Lisa didn't flinch, but took a step back. Just as good. "From the day I met you, you've been blackmailing me, threatening everything I care about, doing everything you can to me think you've got me wrapped around your finger... And why?" She paused with inches left between their eyes, and let her voice drop to a savage whisper. "I know why, you pathetic waste of a trigger event. You never wanted to recruit me, did you? It wasn't about working together. It never was. It was about humiliation and power and revenge, all because I cracked your precious little gilded eggshell of an ego and you couldn't let it fucking go."

Seconds passed. Then Lisa mumbled something, too soft to hear.

"What?" Taylor snapped, holding her glare until Lisa's eyes finally dropped, flicking down to the floor. It probably shouldn't have felt as satisfying—as liberating—as it did, but what the fuck did she care?

This was her right.

"Definition of insanity," the other girl repeated, slowly looking back up. "I'll spare you the quote—but haven't we done this enough?"

"...done what? What the fuck are you talking about?" No jibes, no insults, not even a smile—Lisa just sounded tired. Taylor felt her vicious satisfaction start to shrivel a little, curling at the edges—no. Lisa was just desperate, fishing for a way out. She knew was backed into a corner. That's what it was. What it had to be.

"This!" Lisa said, waving a hand vaguely."This...spiral. You're a social Thinker. So am I. By definition, we're both scary good at making other people feel like shit, but that doesn't mean we have to. We can keep insulting each other, vying back and forth, cutting deeper and deeper until we both want each other worse than dead— or we can just stop. Right now. Defuse." She sighed heavily, with a small, rueful smile. "It's your victory if you want it. I don't care. But I'm done."

Taylor frowned in disbelief, her anger momentarily evaporating—then reigniting in full force. "How stupid do you think I am? You're done? Of course you're done! You started all of this, but now, right after I fixed you, after I realized how much of a spiteful narcissistic cunt you are, you want to start playing nice, because I'm not useful, anymore, am I? So you want to pacify me, make sure I don't go come and bite you later. Just another checkbox on the master plan."

"I don't care if I started it. I'm finishing it," Lisa said. Her smile was broken and torn, only its ghost left behind. "What do you want me to say? 'I'm Lisa, I'm an evil megalomaniacal bitch who gets off to lying to people and ruining their lives'? Will that help? Or are you just stalling before you shoot me, after I've surrendered? Like real hero would." She paused, taking a few unsteady breaths, and Taylor took the silence and seized it, fanning the flames before all those nauseating Maybes could choke them out—

"Go to hell, Sarah. You aren't earnest. You don't care. You've lied and cheated and manipulated people for so long you don't even realize you're doing it anymore, and you expect me to listen to you?" She almost shoved Lisa, then, to punctuate the assault, but something held her back. Shoving was something Sophia did. Something Emma did. She wasn't them. She was a hero. This was her right. So she settled for a sneer, shaking her head as the other girl shrunk against the wall. "You don't have a sympathetic bone in your fucking body."

"You really believe that?" Lisa's voice was small, wavering. "You had a season pass to my inner psyche, for fuck's sake. Front-row Freud on Jung action. I know what you saw, what you felt—I had to relive it too, remember?" She looked up, the hurt in her eyes seeming painfully, terrifyingly real. "Was that all a lie? Another angle?"

Now it was Taylor's turn for silence—and for a fraction of a moment, the gun wavered. She steadied it, but it felt heavier than before, its metal cold against her skin.

"I haven't let anyone see me cry in twelve years. Was that a lie, too?" Lisa said, turning away, her forehead resting on the glass of the window. "...look, you can believe whatever the fuck you want. I'm not the one who can hotwire people's brains. But I don't hate you, Taylor. I never did. And I'm not gonna be your enemy." She turned back from the window and raised a hand, tapping a finger against her temple. "If you don't believe me, believe your power. It's all here." The Web glittered with each word, shining with newly-restored energy and life. Lisa shrugged. "Or just kill me, I guess. I'll be honest, I'm gambling on you being better than that—but maybe I'll lose. That'd be one hell of a first."

Taylor forced her lens to close, shutting out the light. It would've been pointless. Nothing to gain but guilt and hurt, and she didn't want—no, didn't deserve any more of either, not with what she had put her through...

But as Lisa stood there, eyes questioning, hoping, begging... something inside her folded. She yanked the Web back open and dove inside, engulfed in shimmering gold. One way or another, it wouldn't take long—this time, she knew exactly where to look.

First→time→talk→think→match→power→use→now→Taylor. Her node was bright and healthy, all traces of its former warped existence scrubbed clean by the constant pulse of Lisa's thoughts. Subshoots rippled and snapped against it, chaining like fire-flushed chromosomes as she tried to focus further—but this time, for once, she didn't care about the words.

The Second Web wasn't as blindingly clear as the First, but Taylor could still feel it— a turbulent expanse of highs and lows stretching beneath every node, within her scope but beyond her reach. With half her lens submerged, she gave her node a second look, bracing herself for the oncoming torrent of feeling—

Fear→Taylor. Regret→Taylor. Guilt→Taylor. Hope→Taylor. Worry→Taylor. Help→Taylor. Listen→Taylor. Want→Taylor. Trust→Taylor. This time, the emotions were closer to suggestions, muted imitations of the real thing. She could make them out, clear enough to pick apart the nuances, but she couldn't feel them, not like she and Lisa had before. Whatever had happened when she'd snapped the knot had been a fluke. Or, at least, something she didn't know how to replicate. That was probably a good thing, if she was being honest—but those thoughts about her power were just noise, convenient static to stop her from facing what she could already feel, what she already knew.

Trust→Taylor. It wasn't nearly as strong as some of the others, a tenuous ripple of emotion, but it was there, warm and clear, reverberating in time as the nodes danced and flashed above. Taylor studied its shape as it crested and swelled, tracing the currents to other part's of Lisa's mind. The nodes she found were far from her own, though they'd occasionally slip closer, hovering on the fringes but never quite connecting:

Trust→can't→weak→betray→smart→puppet→Thinker→distance→leave→break→promise and on and on and on, a broken-glass spiral of rationalization and fear, twisting and jerking with the currents of Lisa's Web, but never breaking. The subshoots were so thick they must've been years in the making, fortified by a lifetime of manipulation and paranoia and worse...

But the feeling was still there, solid and undeniable, anchored to Taylor Anne Hebert with nothing but hope and raw conviction.

With the Web still stretched before her, Taylor let her lens drift. Everything seemed disjointed. She felt numb.

Lisa trusted her.

Lisa regretted hurting her.

Lisa worried about her.

In spite of every insult, every threat, every sharp-toothed smirk and mocking laugh—through the sparks, past the spines, beyond that deep-set veneer of too-smart-to-feel... by some miracle, she really, truly, actually cared.

The gun clattered to the floor.

"Why?" Taylor said, soft and strangled. "Why wait until now?" The rage was gone, reduced to a vivid burn mark in the back of her head, and in its place came crushing, sickening guilt. "Why not just tell me?"

Would I even have listened? Or would I have brushed her off? To stay safe, to keep control?

"Lisa," she began, still fighting her own throat for breath, "I… I'm sor—"

"Don't." Lisa shook her head. "At this point, either of us apologizing would just—well, things are fucking messy enough. Like, if I knew what I did now? Everything would've been different. Way, way different. But even being a pericog can't correct for ego." Pushing herself off the window, she began to pace, glancing at Taylor every second loop or so. "Right up until that alley, I underestimated you. Not your power—I've known how fucking scary that could be since, like, the second busride—but who you actually were. I looked at you getting off that bus, and all I saw was some punk-ass high schooler with the scariest Thinker kit in the city. Which makes me look just peachy, I know, a real fuckin' paragon of judgement... but I'm not gonna lie to the mind-reader. That kinda stuff happens when knowing what social buttons to press is literally the only reason you're still alive. But, turns out, being really, really good at making people do what you want sorta falls apart when all you want is to make a friend." She paused, her nose wrinkling in abject disgust. "...oh my God. I actually said that. Gag me with a fucking spoon."

They sort of froze after that, Lisa half grinning, Taylor half in shock, both looking not-quite-at each other. The sobriety of the situation teetered on the brink, tipping further with every passing second... and then Lisa cracked, the edge of her smile dissolving into peals of manic, exhausted laughter. Taylor fought for as long as she could, but soon she was laughing too—at Lisa, at herself, at the sheer fucked-up absurdity of the whole ordeal and because it was either that or kill something or cry, and once Lisa saw it spurred her on which just made things worse and it went on and on and on until Taylor's chest began to ache and Lisa's face was streaked with tears again and they'd collapsed on the floor, breathless, still occasionally giggling.

"Fuck...fucking hell," Lisa managed, supporting herself with one hand. "Our own little Hallmark moment." Her frazzled grin waned slightly. "...this doesn't make up for getting shot at, does it?"

"No," Taylor said, her own smile dropping. "Absolutely not." She wasn't laughing—the bubble of overserious teenage tension was gone, already popped—but things still felt lighter. With knives at each other's throats, they'd pulled away, drawing blood but nothing deeper.

"Darn." Lisa slowly got to her feet, looking mournful, then brightened. "What about coffee? Noon, Monday, your favorite place downtown?" Her face was pure innocence, almost masklike, just hopeful enough to be serious. Taylor studied it for a moment, unable to tell, then sighed in exasperation.

"Fuck you, Lisa."

"Not until the second date," she replied, raising her eyebrows. Taylor froze, a biting retort dying on her lips, and the other girl cackled. "Oh my God, I'm sorry, it's just... for someone who can play cat's-cradle with people's synapses on a fuckin' whim, you are really easy to fluster. And don't take that the wrong way—it's actually kinda refreshing." Lisa sidled over to the elevator, pressing her thumb to the sleek silver pad. "Like, so many capes are dead set on being literally anything besides the person they were, but you're just you, y'know? You're genuine."

Genuine. The word hooked itself in Taylor's mind, catching like a burr. Lisa was wrong, she thought, with a flush of shame. She didn't feel genuine. How could she, after years of staying quiet, blending in, enduring, keeping her hatred at a slow tarry boil until that inevitable day when it'd spark and catch and burn and the inferno would rise up and drown her—

"...Sure," she said, stiff and strained, letting her voice dam the tide. "Whatever you say." The elevator doors opened, revealing an interior of polished black marble, and she quickly stepped inside to face the wall.

"Hey, Taylor?"

Against her better judgement, she turned, watching Lisa's Web instead of her face. It thrummed happily, twisting and fluctuating, the nodes and shoots and waves free and alight and alive. With every link, the brightest ones would let off showers of sparks, going from gold to platinum to white…

Taylor→leave→now→broken→friend→try→wait→wish→fix→help→

"Good→luck."

Taylor felt the nodes as Lisa spoke them, the waves of the Second Web shifting beneath her lens, slowly rising into clarity—but the doors shut before they could, and Lisa's Web became a fuzzy, glowing smudge. The elevator began its descent, buttery-smooth, but she kept her lens fixed upward, watching the nodes paint luminescent trails inside her head until every last glimmer of gold had faded away.

END OF ARC I

 

[Spiny]

XIV.

Coming home felt strange.

Whiplash, Taylor thought, staring down at the scarred wood of the table. From insanity to normalcy. Lisa's apartment still seemed more real than her house, than the stale-quiet dining room, than her dad sitting across from her, hands clasped together. A plate of roast beef and carrots sat a little to her right, picked at and pushed around but otherwise ignored. Even the food seemed off, like she was only remembering the taste.

It was just the trauma talking. Things would settle soon. She hoped.

"...a teenager now, and you've got your own things to worry about, your own life... I get it." Dad sighed, and Taylor's brain skipped a gear, click-click-snapping back to the conversation a moment too late. Excuses for her inattentiveness were easy—exhaustion, worry, the seething mob of thoughts chipping at her focus—but every time Danny opened his mouth, they all snapped flat and hollow, arrows to nowhere. She knew what was going on. There was an itch, constant and needling, pricking at her brain, a thousand times worse than the vague urge last week. Seeing people's Webs didn't take thought anymore: it was subconscious and immediate, a low-level reflexive pulse of information that, when she turned it off, left her vulnerable and blind. Was this how Lisa felt?

Taylor stabbed at a carrot, stopping the frown before it hit her face. The memories loomed, then drained away, a hundred conflicting feelings squeezed jostling for position before she squeezed them into a nice, compact ball of Thinking About It Later. And she would, really. Later. When she could focus on something besides not focusing.

"...just want to look out for you, okay? I'm your dad. I love you. I want you to be safe." Click-click-snap. Taylor nodded mechanically, and looked up—against her better judgement—to meet Danny's eyes. Warm but pained, they almost seemed to sparkle, with little flecks of gold that blistered outward as she watched, growing fast and hungry into shoots and bulbs like blooming flowers—

She slammed her lens shut, and the Web winked out. The outlines of the nodes took a few seconds to fade, drifting through her head like the smoke-ghosts of dead fireworks. Head down, eyes low, don't let the guilt paint your face. Stopping her power took constant, conscious effort, forcing a process as natural as breathing to a grinding halt. It felt horrible. Suffocating. But she'd made a promise. Drawn a line. Danny's thoughts would be his own, if only for fear of what would happen if she persuaded herself otherwise.

The spring-loaded pressure in her head lightened—Dad had stopped talking. Her turn. "Yeah," Taylor said, with a second, more emphatic nod. "I understand, Dad. I got... caught up in things. It won't happen again." A sudden flash of fear made her swallow, and the next few words dropped lead-heavy from her mouth: "Am I grounded?"

48 hours of blindness, slow stagnation, trapped in here with nothing to release the slowly mounting pressure. Torture. She'd endure it if she had to—the alternative didn't deserve to be called one—but 'hell' would still be a charitable description. The room pressed in, squeezing smaller, darker. Taylor shifted in her chair. She wished there was more noise.

Danny's mouth turned up at the corners, a snapped-off smile that didn't match the worry on the rest of his face. "Not this time," he said, shaking his head. "Only this time, though. I'm fine with you going out with friends, but you need to let me know earlier."

Taylor smiled back, a much more genuine effort, though her relief was tinged with unease. She hadn't let Danny know at all: Lisa, masquerading as her, had waited until a while after sunset to negotiate the last-minute 'sleepover'. Reading the texts had been an uncomfortable experience—Lisa had mimicked her mannerisms and typing style eerily well—but Taylor was still grateful, despite the violation of privacy and the since-deleted contacts entry of'Tattletale, the Best and Coolest <3.'

"Thanks, Dad." She stood up, the chair scraping away, and braced for a few more seconds of eye contact. "I love you." Bushy brows, capillaries latticing the scelera. Irises, flashing like suncaught pines. A system of links. Parts of a whole. They were leaking stardust, veined with light. Her lens shied closer. She yanked it back. Two more seconds. One more second.

"I love you too." Danny stood, and the constellations winked out. They left little ichor-smudges on Taylor's lens as she turned away, banging the chair with her hip in her rush to escape the dining room. The varnished legs teetered on the carpet, threatening to fall—but she was gone, up the stairs to safety. A guilty retreat. At least the pressure in her head had dulled, the walls and doors between her and Danny's Web melting it to a low, buzzing thrum. Annoying, but not overwhelming. Bearable. For now.

Her room was... her room. Clean but not meticulous, some books on the dresser, some clothes strewn around her bed. A notebook on her desk, open to a page of scribbled Chinese characters. She'd been trying to learn—writing systems didn't come nearly as easily as words did. Everything was exactly as she'd left it, and why wouldn't it have been? The thought made her chuckle. Two days. That was it. A hell of a two days, to be fair. But it was over. Finished. And if she could just convince her brain of that, take those spinning chaotic honey-sticky memories of Lisa and shove them in some unmarked psychological drawer to rot, well, that would be fucking dandy...

Taylor sat down at her computer, fingers running on muscle memory, calling up familiar friends. A news report. A podcast. An article. Two interviews. The words flooded forth, soothing the itch inside her head and crowding away the echoing shock-flush warmth of Lisa's Second Web. A therapist would've scolded her, she thought, pausing one video and opening two others. Repressing negative emotions, leveraging distraction...but it was just a stopgap, a safety valve. She didn't hate Lisa, she didn't hate herself, she wasn't even that upset or scared—things were just jumbled. Taking some time to decompress while they fell into place couldn't hurt that much.

And hey—in a few more hours, she'd be fluent in Mandarin. That had to count for something, right?

 

[Spiny]

XV.

Sunday began at 5:30 AM, with the piercing shrill of Taylor's alarm. It rang for three long wails before finally tugging her up out of bed, messy-haired and groggy and stumbling. She felt fuzzy, but also vaguely grateful—saved from a Mobius loop of uneasy dreams, splinters of shining bone and sinew spinning into impossible fractals that waited to swallow her up. The sleepiness would fade in time, and for now, it was still an improvement on the stormy depths of her subconscious.

Her morning routine skipped by, navigated more by feel more than conscious thought. Clothes, teeth, a spartan breakfast of OJ and a protein bar. The essentials. The house was quiet and still—Dad wouldn't be up yet, not on a Sunday. That was the idea. Taylor eased the front door closed regardless, coaxing the hinges with a ginger hand until the click sealed her away, forsaken to the outside. It was surprisingly cold, even for mid-spring. She regretted not bringing more than a hoodie.

Early-morning Brockton reminded Taylor of a skeleton, the desiccated bones of some long-dead carnivore scattered by the wind until they'd fallen into rough, untidy grids. Houses sat like discarded shells, bleached pale by wan rays of sunlight, and the occasional picket fence did a pretty decent impression of spiky teeth. She kept up the metaphor as she walked, looking for other approximations of anatomy: the trees could be hairs, hard and fossilized, and lonely traffic lights became trios of unblinking eyes, keeping vigil long beyond death. That was silly, she realized, giving the hoodie's drawstrings a tug. The garment shrunk obediently, shielding her from the last dregs of coastal mist, rolled over from the Docks. Eyeballs would've rotted years before anything else, and she wasn't even sure if hair could fossilize—but the whole thing was silly, a fabricated distraction from the everpresent worry. More static. The reason she'd come out here—besides escaping Danny and his buzzing demon—was to think. Just her and her thoughts, surrounded by the dormant husks of buildings. Things needed to be sorted, fitted into place, or she'd never let herself hear the end of it.

The small park was a marked upgrade in eeriness from the city streets, collecting just enough mist to make the houses beyond feel a little less real. "Park" was being generous, really—it was a few hundred feet of limp grass and some haphazard trees, anchored in the center by some kind of art feature—an aggressively ugly production of dark granite blocks—and there were exactly two benches, mirrored on either side. Taylor settled in the nearest one, shifting uncomfortably as the dew quickly soaked her jeans, but didn't get back up. The cold and wetness, they were just more static. This was a good place, a thinking place. The granite statue-thing, or maybe it was a fountain, she wasn't sure, was dead ahead, its blocky right angles stoic and nonjudgmental. They bore her gaze without complaint, letting her focus and arrange her thoughts...

Lisa's countertops were granite, weren't they? Or maybe it was marble.

Taylor sighed, a few shivery puffs of steam drifting from between her lips. Lisa. Sarah. Tattletale. Schrodinger's bitch, simultaneously everything she hated and too many things she wanted to be. Snarky, biting, thin-skinned and manipulative, but confident, too. Self-assured. Assertive like she was born for it. Charismatic, maybe even charming if you squinted right. She wasn't just comfortable as the center of attention, that hellish pit of fight-flight-freeze Taylor had spent her life avoiding—she fucking thrived in it. Big eyes and toothy grins and strategic flashes of blinding mental potency, teased like the contents of a too-short skirt—you noticed her, whether you wanted to or not. It went beyond magnetism; every facet of her persona was precision-cut to refract as much attention and emotion as possible. She navigated people like Taylor did their Webs, pushing and pulling, drawing them in with gravitic certainty until a reaction snapped into place, and did it all despite only having what amounted to very accurate guesses. Meanwhile, she, Taylor, bona-fide honest-to-God don't-say-it-too-loud-or-the-Simurgh-might-get-jealous fucking mind reader, had so far managed to solve precisely zero of her life's myriad problems, and had nothing to show for her horrifying potential beyond a perfect grade in Spanish. Still lonely, check, misanthropic, check, treated worse than dirt by half the student population and the girl she'd called her best friend check check and fucking check. Lisa wouldn't have stood for it. She would've planned and schemed and then staged a quiet coup, slowly laying the seeds and coaxing them to fruition until she had everyone at Winslow eating out of her hand like it was their idea...

Lying and exploiting until she gets what she wants, said that dark and prickly part of her, that bitter blackened sliver of never-letting-go. And you admire her for it.

And she did, that was what stung, though it wasn't admiration so much as envy. Whatever it was that Lisa had, that impregnable aura of flashbang swagger, shiny skintight secrets—she wanted it. Had from the second she'd met her. With someone like that, a constant bright and bubbly reminder of your own personal failings, hate came easy. Scary-easy. And maybe Lisa deserved it, after everything she'd done, picking at the stitches of someone else's life when hers was already so fucking effortless...

Taylor leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees as her hands cupped her chin, and stared moodily at the grass. It was all so goddamn messy. Did Armsmaster and Legend have to deal with this? Traumatized gang leaders, sympathetic terrorists? She'd been thinking about that, these last few days. Reconsidering. Maybe one day she'd work up the courage to visit a station, scope things out. It wouldn't hurt. The PRT's conflicts had higher stakes than hers, but they seemed so simple and clean by comparison:good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains, us and them...

That was bullshit, of course, and Taylor knew it. Her cynicism wouldn't let her convince herself otherwise. Law enforcement anywhere, Parahuman or mundane, was all just one long gradient of justice and atrocity. The fantasy of the shiny-toothed protector, standing tall and resolute against a gnashing tide of evil—well, even the PRT didn't try to sell that. It was a nice thought, sure, a nice ideal, but capes weren't archetypes, they were people. And people had biases, made errors, could be stupid or selfish or snap and buckle under the weight of the world and do horrible, horrible things. The peace they enjoyed had been decades of compromise and reassurance in the making, and even now, there were still rumbles of distrust, slow-swelling earthquakes that propagated through worried headlines and interviews stuffed with loaded questions. And that was for the champions, the best of the best, the shining examples of what capes should be. If Brockton couldn't trust people like the Triumvirate, what the fuck would it think of her? Thinkers were dangerous, Masters were terrifying, and she expected the public to tolerate both? Someone who could, in the space of a blink, subvert their thoughts and twist their perceptions, making their words betray them? Not that she ever would, of course, but it was her existence, not her actions, that posed the threat.

The PRT might accept her, but the city never would.

The thought gave her a surprising amount of relief. She turned it over in her mind, letting it settle comfortably and spread its roots. Taylor Hebert would never, ever, be a member of the Protectorate. Full stop. The longshot dream was dead and trampled, its corpse burned and charred to ash—but that meant she was free of it. There was clarity in absolutes, a concrete stability that gave her direction and purpose. She couldn't be a Hero, capital H, with legions of fans and a plaque on a statue... but she could still make things better. She would make things better. The only question was—

A yappy, high-pitched bark jerked her from her reverie. She twisted around, scanning the park, and quickly found the source: a elderly woman and her tiny dog, one of those fluffy unidentifiable toy breeds with cutesy names and four-digit price tags. It was straining at the leash, each leap forward taking it about a quarter-inch off the ground, a valiant effort to protect its owner from the untold terrors of brooding girls who lurked on public benches. The woman waved at her, an apologetic smile on her face, and Taylor waved back out of subconscious reflex. Her mind was already elsewhere, picking greedily at the beautiful tangle of words behind those pale blue eyes and slowly-graying hair. Nodes and subshoots flexed like fingers, a mass of glowing digits that moved as smoothly as her own, and below, the Second Web pulsed sleek and clear, every peak a new burst of insight. With all the time she'd spent with Lisa, scrambling to match the blistering pace of power-boosted thoughts, she'd almost forgotten how easy it was. As the woman turned away, returning to her walk, Taylor brushed her lens against ten or fifteen nodes at once, offhandedly exchanging them with their neighbors. The Second Web quivered for a moment, then snapped back taut, the woman's emotions retaining their original positions—but there were tiny shifts, bumps in the topography, subtle idiosyncrasies she noticed without even having to look. Sometimes, when she made a swap in the First Web, little bits of the Second would carry over, artifacts of some long-decayed bond between the nodes. She'd noticed it before, on the way home from Lisa's, but had only managed a few covert experiments before exhaustion and residual headaches had forced her to stop. The idea had come then, a nascent glimmer of how things fit together—and what she'd witnessed now confirmed it.

Dog→breed|collar|walk→morning|daily|trip

Walk→morning→now→park→spring→peaceful→happy

Walk→trip→fall→pain→knee→hip→replace→fix→hospital→bill→fee→heal→slow→pain→worry

Walk→happy

Walk→peaceful

Walk→worry

Walk→pain

Taylor leapt from node to node, tracing along the extended sequence of swaps instead of actually carrying them out. She could feel the way the First and Second worked together, how a push here would pull there, swapping this would draw out that. It was so logical, laid out like this, a system of codependent switches she understood as plainly as the words they contained. That one had been easy, of course, two emotions weighing on the same word, but the process would hold for any nodes she wanted, no matter how disparate or opposed. There was no revelation, no explosion of newfound awareness like at the coffee shop or Lisa's apartment. Not something new, but the culmination of everything her power was meant for. Finding patterns, connections, commonalities, and exploiting them. Maybe she had some Tattletale in her after all. A couple fragments, snips and splinters, just like Lisa had of Emma—

Emma. Her stomach dropped as she remembered what she'd done on Friday afternoon, the look in Emma's eyes. Raw, flensing hatred, concentrated and distilled, and Taylor, fucking mastermind that she was, had given it all weekend to stew. All the scheming in the world wouldn't save her from the Monday morning bell, good as an executioner's, and the biblical wrath of the Trio that would follow. No one would defend her; they hadn't once in almost a year of torment. The teachers, the administration, her father, her fellow students—quiet sympathy was as far as they got. They couldn't help. Or wouldn't. Didn't matter.

She didn't need them.

Taylor stood up from the bench, blood pumping in her ears, and restored the woman's nodes in one clean tug, almost as an afterthought. She took off down the sidewalk at a brisk jog, the bonfire crackle of excitement and ambition warding off the chilly air. A plan was forming in her mind, the pieces rising phoenix-bright and meteoric from sixteen years of hopeless ash. All her wants were weaving together, all her aspirations suddenly in sync. It would be slow and arduous and hilariously risky, if it even worked at all, but that didn't matter. Any agency at all was still so much more than she'd ever had, then she'd ever dreamed of. This was her chance. She'd never felt more ready.

Everything was connected, so everything could be changed.

Time to start acting like it.

 

[Spiny]

When Danny came downstairs, Taylor had just finished cooking breakfast. Excitement and adrenaline had buoyed her home from the park, sneakers bouncing off the pallid slabs of sidewalk—but she could only run on fumes for so long. Pancakes and bacon sizzled in their respective pans, the sight and smell pulling her stomach in impatient twists. It was a lot of food. More than enough for her and Dad. She'd eat now and then hole up until dinner, be strategic. minimize the interaction. The temptation. The chance to slip.

"You're up early," said Danny, over the seething pop of bacon grease. "Especially for a weekend. Everything all right?" Every word an incandescent hum, a stretched-out sun, a glowing livewire Taylor fought to insulate. She could already feel the pressure, that awful, swollen itch...

Deep breaths.

"Yeah," Taylor murmured, eyes fixed on the pan. "Couldn't get back to sleep, so I went for a walk." Another pancake on the plate, edges crispy white and center golden brown—then reach for the batter, tip and pour. There was a rhythm to it. Something to focus on, interleaved between the nauseating Morse code flashes of their conversation.

"Ah." Silence for a while, cool and merciful. Nothing but the stove. "Sleepover must've thrown your rhythm out of whack." Danny peered over his glasses at the steadily-rising stack of pancakes. "Still have your appetite, though, huh?"

"Yeah." Two responses in one; nice and efficient. Another pancake flipped onto the plate."I made them for both of us." Taylor upended the bowl, scraping the last dregs of batter from the edges into the pan. "Didn't want to waste them."

Dad nodded wordlessly, taking a plate and spearing the top two of the stack with a fork. "You want anything on them? Butter, syrup, whipped cream?"

The two-step clunk of the fridge opening mingled with the gas burner and the crackle of grease. Sounds. Just sounds. No meaning, no density, empty and hollow, not like—

"Syrup's fine," Taylor said abruptly. "Just syrup." The last pancake fell onto her plate, cratered and misshapen. It would taste fine, at least. She took it for herself, along with three others and a pile of bacon, and headed for the stairs.

She could feel Danny's gaze as she stood up, grasping either side of the loaded plate. "Is it okay if I eat upstairs? There's a really big World Studies project that I haven't really started yet, and it's due Monday..." In her imagination, the words drifted outwards, faltered, and fell, weighted by the greasy kitchen air and a thousand lurking snags of strain and suspicion. In reality, they just hung there, Danny's expression morphing from bemused to frowning to thoughtful. She'd always—hated was too strong a word, but she'd never liked that look. Too circumspect, too hard to read; 16 years in the same house and she still could never quite be sure what he was—

The thought froze, icing over into a slow, sinking chill. Taylor swallowed. Nothing good was down that path, just the omnipresent pulse, the golden wasp of lost potential. Use it. You'll help him. You're crippling yourself. Wasting your gift. Again-again-again, a vicious heartbeat resonating in her head. The high from the park was fading now, almost gone. Nothing left but little static-sparks. Danny's presence was a void, sucking in her light, and as the seconds passed it seemed less and less fair that here, in her own house, was the only place she kept herself chained. Maybe, she teased herself, her power just wanted new data. Maybe it would be satisfied with a quick skim of the First Web—but maybe not. Didn't matter, really. It was the principle. Taylor Hebert would not be broken. Not by Lisa, not by Emma, and least of all by herself.

So she waited, silently, impatiently, as Dad chewed over the papery, low-calorie excuse. He turned down the stove—the bacon settled from a wrathful sizzle to a hiss, placated—and looked back, brows creeping upward. "Taylor?"

"Yeah." The silence felt like it would devour her. Had she—she had. Again. Fuck.

"...I said, that's fine." Danny's frown was back, carved deeper for its absence. "But before you disappear again, I want to know what's going on. You seem... distant. Distracted all the time. It isn't like you." He sat down again, turned the chair to face her with a reluctant creak of wood on wood. "Is it something at school? Relationship problems? ...something else?" There was a small, hopeful pause, which Taylor refused to fill. "I care about you, kiddo. I want to help. I'm not going to judge you."

Her power would've been overkill, here. So much painful earnestness, so much well-meaning concern, she could see it in his face, hear it in every word; this was the closest Daniel Hebert would ever come to begging and it very nearly punched right through her. Emphasis nearly. Something rose up and stemmed the rising tide of corrosive crawling guilt, something dense and steely, and Taylor gave a slow, calculating blink. Don't you dare break your promise, she thought, and for once all the other biting insecurities were silent.

"I'm, uh. I—I mean, it's..." she began, the picture of confidence. "It's not bad, or anything. You know, uh—" Fuck, shit, what had it said on her phone— "You know Anne? The girl whose house I stayed at?"

Danny nodded, eyes showing his interest even if his face didn't. Go on, they said, pleading. Open up. And she was, so she didn't have to feel guilty. She still did.

"Uh, well, we've been hanging out, and I—" Too late, Taylor realized she had no idea how to finish what she'd started. Lisa's involvement had been fresh in her mind and immediately convenient; that had been enough. Now what? Fuck. "I'm not sure, I guess. It's... nice to have a friend outside of school, so I've been thinking about hanging out again, a lot. Trying to figure out schedules and stuff. That's all," she finished, the sheer awkwardness of the delivery strangling its sincerity.

Dad stared at her, pensive and withdrawn, frowning slightly as he digested what she'd said. Pulse-pulse, went the Web, wreathing the unspace around his head in a gorgeous golden halo of temptation. How very biblical. Taylor caught the bitter smile before it hit her lips.

"That's good," he said finally, his face somehow steeling and softening, both at once. "That's really good, Taylor. I'm glad you're making friends." Something lingered at the end of that sentence, like a silent vowel—he wanted to say more. She waited obligingly. "...but if that's really all it is, then I'm really happy for you. And I'll support you no matter what, in whatever way I can, but you're—you should know—" He paused, sighing, "Whatever happens, I want you to be safe."

"I will, Dad," she replied, ingrained and automatic. The halo shined a little brighter. "Don't worry."

That got a laugh, a quiet one that didn't quite reach his eyes. "It's my job to worry," he said, the words leaving his lips as little strands of gossamer, shining like sunlight and close enough to touch. Too close. Taylor's jaw tightened as her lens crumpled reluctantly shut, losing focus on the filaments until they hazed away to nothing. "Just make sure you know that— know what you're comfortable—I mean, if you decide to... limits are—"

The discomfort in the room had long since reached critical mass, and the Taylor of three months ago would've stared at the floor, hating every second of its suffocating presence—but now she tuned it out, more focused on evading the sunspots inside her head. Just a little more.

"...all right," Danny finished, defeated. "I trust you, kiddo." There was her cue, exit stage north.

"I—" The first, easy response died on Taylor's lips, and she summoned up a bland successor to hide the reeking body. "Thanks, Dad." She turned and left, fingers squeezing tight around the now-lukewarm plate of pancakes, and started quickly up the stairs. Her thoughts trailed behind in a tumbling cloud. What had he meant, in those last few words? What was he worried about? Depression? Self-harm? The wrong crowd? Gang inductions? Gang abductions? Drugs, alcohol, se—

Oh.

Oh, my god.

Taylor froze, her free hand squeezing her room's half-turned doorknob in an abrupt death grip. 'Be safe. Know your limits. Don't do anything you aren't comfortable with. Be sure it's what you want. The health-class platitudes swam through her mind, enveloping her in a crush of mortifying magmatic heat. Dad thought she was—that she wanted to—she and Lisa—

Cursing softly, she wrenched the door open the rest of the way, briefly entertaining the idea of going back downstairs and making it clear exactly how she felt about 'Anne'. But that was the panic talking. It was too late now, not after she'd made a show of leaving the kitchen...

Do you even know how you feel?

Taylor snatched a notebook and a pen off her desk, leaving her plate of breakfast to sit neglected in its place. She'd get to it eventually, when she felt less like a dense molten ball of self-contradiction and frustration. Right now, though, she didn't need something to eat, She needed something to do.


************

The rest of the day passed spasmodically—little bits of time skipping by, crackly and disjointed, here and there. Taylor tried to lose herself in videos and podcasts, in the bloodrush thrill of a new language tightening into place, but even that had lost its luster. With what she'd done, what she could do, scraping words off news reports felt hollow. Unsatisfying. Her lens strained at its confines, Some food she barely noticed eating, some more awkward 'conversations' with Danny, finger-quotes because they weren't talking to each other so much as past each other's heads…

And eventually, mercifully, it was late, late enough that she could feel the prickling push of exhaustion behind her eyes. She yawned, dislodging herself from the couch; at least she'd tried to actually follow through on studying. It hadn't been going well—she'd read and reread the same passage in her World Studies Textbook four or five times , retaining just as little the last on skim-through as the first, but now she was free, sentence served. A snap of closing pages, a stretch, a nod at Danny and a cursory good-night, and in another thrum of skip-time Taylor was staring upwards from her bed, sightless, painting the darkened ceiling-space with scatterings of imaginary stars. What felt like hours passed that way, lost a smudgy whirl of thoughts—the plan, the future, the Trio's revenge, Lisa... and still more, later, that she wouldn't remember in the morning.

Morning was a blurry, anxious rush—get some food, some books, pack, bus, don't think about the looming specter of your impending doom and humiliation, bite your nails, consider, then reconsider, what you're actually about to do—is it worth it? Can I really pull this off? What if I hurt someone? Do I care, if that someone is Emma? Should *I care? She spent the busride slumped in her seat, worrying in circles, until Winslow welcomed her with its familiar, soothing deluge of links. The halls were drenched in gold, painted with the hazy early-morning thoughts of the entire student body, and Taylor felt her worries fade as the tide swelled. There was just too much going on to dwell, too many clean connections to bother with her own ugly knots. She trailed past the lockers, lost in everyone's thoughts but hers...

Morning→

Class→

Monday→

Students→

Homework→

Next→

Lunch→

Eat→

Eleven→

And then she'd had two classes, just like that, running half on Apprehension Autopilot. Nothing had happened, not yet, which made it worse. Food soon. Was she hungry? Hard to tell. Her lens was open wide, absorbing Winslow's errant thoughts—warm and thrumming, a black hole sun. Waiting, for hopefully not much longer.

Come on, Taylor thought, eyes fixed front, parting the sea. Make your fucking move. Hundreds of thousands of datapoints, but nothing that mattered: nothing from the Trio. She'd scraped what she could from the orbiters and worshippers, the hangers-on, but they were clueless—vague feelings of premonition, anticipation. Anyone could see that.

The announcement came just before she reached the lunchroom. She felt it reverberate through the meta-Web of students, each one lighting up in microsecond succession. Taylor→office→punish→trouble— The theme was boring, painfully obvious. A few judging stares, a couple casual shoves—they bounced like rubber, wisps of wind in her gathering storm of validation. Numbness blossomed in her stomach, her steps heavy; she didn't feel confident so much as free of fear. Whatever they could do, she could endure. She was above this now. Needed to be, for the plan to work.

The intercom died with a cough of static, and she took the walk to the principal's slow, with cold hands and a dead woman's swagger.