#chapter 14.8

Grue?

Then, without waiting for me to give an answer, Grue stepped back, taking hold of my left hand and pulling.  I followed without complaint.  I couldn’t complain.  If I doubted him now, after this-  I’d be ten times as angry at myself as he was with me.

Looks like it worked.

“Priority number one, we get in contact with Cherish,” Tattletale said, grinning.  “From there, we can decide whether we want to track down Panacea or go after the Slaughterhouse Nine.”

“Right,” I said.

The Undersiders are back in business. Well, part of them.

“Keep checking your cell phone.  The second we have service, call Coil.”

“Coil is?”

“Our boss, and since he’s hidden away, he won’t be affected, so he’ll be able to place the name and fill us in on the details the agnosia has blocked from us.”

That’s assuming he wasn’t out on a grocery shopping trip when this hit.

“Okay.”

“It’s not the end of the world after all,” Tattletale smiled.

I nodded.  I was acutely aware of the gun in my right hand.  I felt like I should put it away, but with the way we were moving and my general sense of unease, I couldn’t stop and do it.  Hated this.  It reminded me of school.

I suppose she couldn’t trust anyone at school either, in case they were in with the Harpies. Like that one girl from before her trigger event.

The reminder made me angry, and it somehow made all of this seem worse.  I muttered, “Sooner we’re fucking cured of this miasma, the better.”

“Hey!”  Tattletale paused, pointing at me with a stern expression on her face.  “Don’t swear!”

...

Are you just messing with Taylor now?

Or did the miasma genuinely make you not like swearing? That does sound like something Bonesaw might do. :p

Ahh, yes, a lightweight, low-intensity dénouement chapter indeed.

Sure.

No, but seriously, this was great. I really love everything about this one, from the aesthetic of the city under the miasma’s effect, to the mad scramble to avoid the effect, to Sundancer revealing how much she’s a dark mirror of Taylor in terms of loneliness and friendship as Taylor is facing her friends giving themselves up to an unknown threat, to Legend and Vista, to the precise effect of the miasma, to Lisa bringing them together but Brian ultimately being the one to make Taylor trust them... Just, everything. This was a damn good chapter and I’m very much looking forward to seeing how this plays out from here.

The final line of the chapter was kinda weird, I suppose. It feels like a joke I didn’t quite get, but there are ways to read it that don’t seem so jokey.

Anyway, next chapter, I guess they’re off to find proper reception so they can call Cherish and find out where Amy is. Man, if Cherish enjoyed trying to sow seeds of discord before... Hell, she might even be jealous at Bonesaw for managing to do this so effectively.

There’s also Coil, who’d be a good resource if Lisa is right about him being safe from the miasma.

Finding Amy isn’t enough. They also need to get rid of the miasma, which would likely require finding either Bonesaw, a fuckton of salt, or both. This ain’t gonna be easy, and I’m surprised it seems we’re doing this in the same Arc. Unless we’re going right into the next one from here, perhaps with an Interlude next chapter. We’ll have to see.

If that’s the case, maybe the next Arc is titled something like Spray (might be a little too close phonetically to Prey), or Cannibal(ism), or... something else that might indicate bugs turning on each other. I don’t know.

I’m guessing she might find herself with a need for some of this stuff later, but having had to leave the things behind on this rooftop.

“Stay down!”  the junior heroine screamed.

I wonder how quickly Taylor’s own paranoia sets in.

If I hadn’t still been reeling from my fall, I might have been able to avoid it.  As it was, the section of rooftop behind me bulged up into a wall and then folded down over on top of me.

Hm. Well, at least if Vista limits it to keeping Taylor down rather than squeezing her, it might protect Taylor from Legend.

It bent to accommodate my shape rather than crush me, leaving only my head and shoulders sticking out.

Hah, nice.

“If you try that trick on me, little girl, I’ll shoot you,” I heard the threat from the air above us.

I suppose she could do it with an arm of asphalt or brick reaching out to grab him, Lapis-style.

This was going south, fast. 

Yeeah.

“I’m going to turn my back and run,” she responded.  “If you try shooting me in the back, I’ll show you what I can really do.”

This is a good way of dealing with this, honestly. Mayking it explicit what she intends to do. Though there is the issue of whether Legend believes her.

“They’re small enough to pass through water filtration and gas masks.

Ah, thus answering Taylor’s question earlier about how the miasma was affecting the people with gas masks to help against smoke.

Badly folded proteins that force other proteins into identical shapes, perpetuating the problem.  If she found a way to guide them, or specifically target the parts of the brain she wanted, she might get results like we’re experiencing.  In a really bad case, it’d cause lesions in the brain and give you hallucinations.”

Makes sense.

I looked around.  “How long does it last?”

“Forever.  It’s incurable and it’s terminal.”

Well, fuck.

I swallowed.  “But Panacea could fix it.”

If you can figure out who Panacea is and get her to trust you.

She nodded, then smiled wide.  “There’s hope, right?”

“Right.”

She jerked her head to one side, then used one hand to brush the hair back out of her face.  “Let’s grab Grue and formulate a plan.”

Or, I suppose, let Grue borrow Panacea’s power to fix it, but if she’s not confident when dealing with brains...

She turned to leave, but I stayed where I was.  After three steps, she turned around.  “What’s wrong?”

“How can I trust that you’re not leading me to the Nine’s clutches?”

I didn’t lower the gun.  “Sorry, a little paranoid.”

She frowned.  “That’s fair, but we’re short on time.  If others are getting lesions on their brain, then that means they could die soon.  Seizures, violent mood swings, loss of motor control…  Creutzfeldt-Jakob was a prion disease, but the progression here’s faster.”

I suppose the mood swings are part of what would make Legend act more irrationally than usual.

I shook my head.  “Crews-what?”

Yeah, I’m not familiar with it either. But I can tell you’re probably saying it wrong, Taylor. It’s clearly a German name, so it’d be pronounced “Croyts-felt (Yah-kob)”.

“Neurological disorder caused by eating the meat of a cow infected with mad cow disease.  You get the prions in your head, and you slowly die while suffering personality changes, memory loss and vivid hallucinations.”

“And it’s faster here.”

Eesh.

Oh nice, so she’s not entirely stuck until this wears off or Vista undoes it.

I’m guessing Vista has run off by now? But Legend is probably still a threat.

What would my mom think to see me now?

“Does my daughter wrapped in concrete count as a sandwich?”

I tried to picture her expression.

Again, that gap, the chasm.  Nothing.

Hm. Can she not remember their faces? Or is it specifically the idea of how her mom would act, designed to make her not know if she could trust her mom not to take advantage of the situation in some way?

I could have been hit by five more of those laser blasts on ‘stun’ and it wouldn’t have hit me as hard as the realization that I couldn’t remember my mother.  Couldn’t remember her face, the details, her mannerisms.  Even the happy memories we’d shared, the little moments I’d clung to over the past two years, they were gone.

All she has is the name.

And even that might slip soon.

There was only an empty void where they should have been.

I couldn’t remember my dad, either.

This is a really heavy chapter and I love it.

The other Undersiders, their faces, their costumes, their personalities and mannerisms, all gone.  I could remember what we’d done: the bank robbery, fighting Purity’s group, lazing around in the old loft, even the general progression of events from the moment I’d met them.  But the people were blanks waiting to be filled in, and I couldn’t go from thinking about one name to thinking about the events that were related to it.

In other words, she has no idea who anyone is. And by the sound of it, she’d know there are enemies in town, but not who any of them are. The way this all leads to the reaction of “that’s what they would say!” is becoming clear.

I felt a rising panic as I struggled to work myself free.  I didn’t know the people who were on the rooftop with me: the man who floated in the air, wearing a sturdy hazmat-style firesuit and a blue and silver mask that left only his mouth, chin and wavy brown hair exposed.  I couldn’t recognize the girl he was shooting in the back.

Ah, shit, he did it. I guess it’s time for Legend vs Vista, full power.

I saw her fall face first and writhe with pain.  He shot her two more times, and she went limp.  Out cold.

...or that can happen.

And there goes the knowledge that Bonesaw is behind this.

Maybe the space girl did it! Or the pew pew guy! :o

I did a series of multiplication, addition and subtraction in my head and found no problems on that front.  Not general brain damage, apparently.

Amnesia?

Sort of, yeah. Very specific amnesia, targeted to make you feel a certain way about everyone around you.

My name is Skitter, I thought, Taylor Anne Hebert.  Sixteen.  Born in Brockton Bay.

Oh hey, got some new information here. Taylor got a middle name after, presumably, her mom (Annette to Anne is not a big leap), and apparently she’s sixteen rather than fifteen like I’ve been thinking. I suppose it makes sense she would be, considering this started in the later half of the school year and the school year how I worked out the age. My mistake on that part.

Also, I like how she’s putting her cape name before her civilian name now. It fits with the way her cape life has taken over.

Student at Winslow High.  Ex-student.  Member of the Undersiders.

Yeeah, I don’t think you can really call yourself a student there anymore. It’s been at least a month or two since you were last there, and you don’t seem to have any intentions of going back.

No problems on that front.

My line of thought continued absently, as if I wanted to reassure myself that I was mentally intact.  My parents are Dan Hebert and Annette Rose Hebert.

Heh, I see what you did there.

I could feel a piece of armor crack beneath my weight, hear my things spilling to the ground.

Taylor’s armor is pretty sturdy, so that says a lot.

I coughed out half a lungful of air and involuntarily sucked in another breath to cough again.  It was humid, tasting slightly off, almost stagnant.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, did she just breathe in the miasma?

When I opened my eyes, I was seeing red, and not in the metaphorical sense.  I was in the midst of the miasma.