Chapter 32 - brave

Lighting some more candles, Ruth's dad looked a little embarrassed.

"I'm sorry I can't really offer you much. I've pretty much had to scavenge everything I've got, and I wasn't really expecting to have visitors."

The room was warming up. It sounded like he'd put the tubes down and then covered them with tile. The floor was getting warmer already, and it was making the air heat up. Looking around, it seemed as though he'd went to a lot of trouble to get the place as comfortable as possible.

"I'm impressed you've accomplished as much as you have."

"It gets hot in here in the middle of the day. The walls aren't well insulated, and so it loses heat when it's nighttime over there. There are other places in town that are better insulated, but they're too far from the portal; I'd have to spend a lot of time cutting wood, and that would take time from hunting and looking for portals out."

The existence of other portals would mean a possible escape; even if they didn't, they might offer other resources, like more food and things not available here.

"Is it Brockton Bay here?" I asked. "I haven't seen outside."

He shook his head.

"This is a small town; there's a sign outside the city limits that says there were 4500 people here, or at least I think that's what it says. They use our kind of letters, but the closest I can figure for a language is Dutch maybe? I think I might have been able to figure out at least some of the words. I don't know where the hell the ocean is; we're on rolling plains as far as the eye can see. The tech level seems similar.

"Any bodies?"

Bodies would give us an idea about why the town had been abandoned, at least in the absence of something obvious like a permanent underground coal fire, or the entire city being destroyed by an earthquake or by fire. Seeing the bodies dead of a horrible disease would mean that we really would need to remain in containment. Seeing them all executed in a pit somewhere would have a different flavor to it.

He shook his head.

"It looks like they left suddenly, which worries me. If there's some kind of contamination, I haven't noticed any effects yet, but maybe I wouldn't. It looks like the place has been abandoned for a couple of years, and while there are some radios, I haven't been able to get anything other than static."

A paranoid part of my mind wondered if the people here had been taken by the Fae, but that was stupid. The human mind tended to think that things followed patterns, even when they didn't. It was the reason people believed in magic, or that vaccines caused autism. Since the first signs of autism showed up at around the time childhood vaccines were given, there were parents who'd made the logical conclusion that one caused the other. That gut feeling wouldn't go away no matter how many scientists told them there was no connection.

Humans tended to remember things that confirmed their beliefs and forget those that didn't. If a member of the Empire believed that blacks were rude, and sixteen times out of twenty they were polite, he'd only remember the four times they weren't. If he thought he had a lucky lottery quarter to scratch lottery tickets off with, he'd remember the winning tickets and forget about all the losers.

"No signs of struggle?"

He shook his head.

"Well, it's not something that we can worry about now," I said. "If we ever get to come back, maybe we could explore a little more."

"So you really have a plan?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said. "I can do what you can do, but I can also open portals to any world I've been to."

"Oh," he said.

He stared at me for a moment.

"My Dad told me stories about… things that could do that from the old country."

"You should watch out for those," I said. "Look in mirrors or at their shadows. They can conceal that, so it's not perfect, but they forget. We think they may have been the ones who attacked the electric grid."

He glanced at my shadow, but I'd pulled my tentacles in before I'd said anything.

"All right," I said. "I need you to step back. I'm going to open a portal into the floor."

He hesitated, then stepped back. I think most of my peers would have forgotten that we were three hundred feet above the surface, but he hadn't. He'd likely been back to check the ziggurat several times considering that I could see the remnants of old burns on his hands now that he was pulling his gloves off.

"I'd wondered if they could be horizontal. They tend to be vertical, although sometimes you get some that kind of lean."

I glanced at him. "They lean?"

"Yeah. It's rare, but you see it."

"It probably has something to do with gravity. These things are wormholes, really, since the timelines don't match. Given the speed that planets, solar systems and galaxies move, you hit a universe that's a few hundred million years back, and…"

"And that's a lot of space covered," he said. He frowned. "So if you could get into space on one of those worlds and open a portal straight across…"

"You could effectively have FTL travel," I said. It was a pretty exciting thought, even if the likelihood of another stellar system being even remotely close to the part of the universe Earth had been in a hundred million years ago was remote. Still, the solar system moved a light year every twenty three hundred years or so around the Milky Way. The galaxy itself was moving 70 miles a second, or something like a light year every twenty six hundred years. If we were able to control portals to the extent of untethering the connection with Earth, then we might be able to learn things about the universe we'd never seen before, seeing it from a different angle, and with some kind of dimensional radio transmitting back to the universe that was in the past, and then to our world through a portal.

We might even be able to find a world a few hours behind us, or a few days and move space probes out more cheaply if we could do a direct jump that wasn't attached to the world. If we had to leave the atmosphere there it would be just as expensive, but could still do things like reach interstellar space faster.

"That's pretty cool," he said.

I would have liked to say that Ruth was pretty cool, but the last thing I needed was for him to tell the PRT that I knew Ruth. It was bad enough that I'd already admitted that I knew she was working for them, but it was unavoidable if he was to get in contact with her. I could hardly leave him wandering his way around the city as it was.

"All right," I said. I pointed at the floor. "Here we go."

He could see the portal as well as I could. I braced myself against the floor, then put my head through to the other side.

We were three hundred feet above the train tracks, in Merchant territory. I could hear the sounds of a pitched gun battle in the distance, and the sounds of explosions in other parts of the city.

"Take a look," I said, "But don't fall in."

He skirted the portal, then found a spot where he could lay flat on his stomach so that he couldn't lose his balance and fall. Dipping his head through, he stayed under for at least ten seconds.

"I can't see anything," he said. "Except some flashes from the explosions. They haven't fixed the lights yet?"

"They managed to bring down more than just the Eastern Seaboard. It's half the country, and we're not exactly first on the list when it comes to resources."

He bit his lip in a gesture that reminded me strongly of Ruth.

"So the problem is to get down to the surface, and then get through town."

"If we get to the surface, there's worlds we can go that are safer," I said. "The problem is getting there. We're above the train yard, and it's around three and a half miles to Arcadia."

"Do you have any worlds with a higher elevation?" he asked.

I thought about it.

"Twenty, thirty feet maybe. I don't suppose you have three hundred feet of rope."

"I was lucky to find all the hose at a hardware store," he said. "It's good stuff, better than what we've got back home, but it's not really designed for the kinds of heat I'm subjecting it to. I really doubt it would hold our weight, even if it wasn't too hot to hold right now. There were some tie down straps, but it looked like some of that kind of stuff had been sold out while nobody gave a damn about the hose."

"All right," I said. "What's the highest point in the city?"

"Medhall?" he said. "It's maybe twenty stories."

"So ten feet a story..," I said.

"Sometimes it's as much as fourteen feet," he said. "It varies."

"So it could be as little as a twenty foot drop, or it could be a hundred foot drop. We're going to need to take a look."

He glanced down at what he thought was the edge of my gown.

"There's two feet of snow out there. I can give you some of the furs I'm using for my bedding. They… don't smell great, but they'll keep you warm. I doubt they'll have any boots in your size, and even if they do, they'll be frozen solid."

I nodded.

"I can handle the cold better than a normal person. I'm not immune, but I'm unlikely to get frostbite."

I could just discard any dead flesh after all.

"We should wait until the morning," he said. "It's just three more hours, and it'll be warmer and we'll be able to see better."

"You were out hunting deer at three in the morning?"

"I had to use the restroom," he said. "It happens when you get old. You don't go our without a weapon, and when I spotted one… well, you've got to gut it when you kill it, and you don't want to do it next to your camp. I'm willing to lose a few hours of sleep for a whole deer."

"Well, I've got great night vision, and I'm on a schedule," I said. "People are dying all over the city, and there's an invasion coming where nobody is going to be safe. The sooner we get this done, the sooner I can get back to saving people."

He gave me a measured look, and then started working to fashion the blankets into something that I could actually wear instead of just draping them over me uselessly. The solution he came up with was ingenious and wasn't something I'd have come up with, involving fishing line, a fish hook and some quick sewing. It didn't look pretty, but it would do the trick, which seemed to be his usual measure for handling things.

"I wouldn't have thought you'd have done so well, with all of these alien environments."

"Well, it's not like I'm really on an alien planet; they're all Earth. Some of them just diverged farther back. Besides, my Dad trained me for this since I was a kid. He wanted me able to survive if I was dropped naked anyplace on Earth… maybe not anywhere north of Alaska. Anyplace that'll kill you in ten minutes or less nude is pretty iffy, but short of that… My people have been handing down the things we learned from our travels from father to son since we've had powers, and that's been a long time. Some of those lessons were hard learned, and every new world has surprises, sometimes really nasty ones."

He was being pretty open about his family, but then I knew who he was and who his daughter was. Still, it surprised me.

"I'm surprised that you don't pretend to be a parahuman," I said.

"Well, you aren't," he said.

I stared at him.

"What makes you think that?"

"Powers get stronger the more you use them," he said. "At least for our kind. At first I thought you were one of them, the Fair Folk, but none of them would have tolerated putting my dirty bedclothes on their backs. If you do what I do long enough, you can sense the portals directly, and parahumans all carry a little one inside their heads. You don't have one."

"All right," I said slowly. "But I could just be some weird alien."

"One who knows my daughter?" he said. He shook his head. "She knows better than to go through strange portals. A bold Walker is a dead Walker."

I didn't wince, although I wanted to.

"I'd prefer it if you didn't tell the PRT that I know your daughter," I said, not looking at him as I slung the blankets over my shoulders. It ended up being more like a toga than a cloak. "They don't really know about me."

"Especially not that you're a Wendigo."

"What?" I asked.

He blew out the lanterns he'd lit, and then he grabbed an electric one and slung it over his back.

"We only get one power, ever," he said. "And you can open doors, see in the dark and ignore the cold, and maybe other things. I knew a man once who had such a power. He had to look at our brains to gain the abilities; he was a Cree Indian, and he was convinced that he was a Wendigo after he… killed a couple of people. He couldn't stand what he'd become, and he ended it. I guess his kind doesn't teach their kids; maybe they hope if they never see a brain they'll be free of the curse."

"We don't have to kill people!" I said, shocked. "Just being around them is enough. It's not as… satisfying as getting a look, but it works."

"Really?" he asked. He frowned. "Damn. I wish I'd known that. Maybe I could have saved him. Have you around that many of our kind?"

"Well, no," I admitted.

Why was I talking to him?

It was stupid of me, a threat. There was a good reason for me not to talk to anyone about what I was. He had no reason not to turn around and tell the PRT everything he learned about me, especially if he needed to pressure me somehow.

Why wasn't he judging me?

It made no sense for him to be so sympathetic toward someone who he had to know was tempted to crack open his skull, especially now that he'd admitted that he had powers that were better than the ones that Ruth had. I could use infrasound to detect portals, but only when they were open. If he was telling the truth, and my power said he was, then he could detect them even closed.

"The first time was an accident. I tried to save someone, and I saw inside their head. I picked up worldwalking from Ruth just spending time with her, and the rest of it I've picked up from animals, and monsters."

"And one of the Fair folk?"

I shrugged uncomfortably.

"They never forgive a slight," he said. "It's why people in the old country called them Fair, because saying they were anything less risked insulting them."

"Well, we're at war with them, and they attacked first," I said. I scowled. "How else were we going to fight them if they could just go where they wanted and leave us behind?"

"Still, someone of your age shouldn't have to kill, or be in a fight at all."

"How do you know how old I am?"

"You've spent a lot of time with my daughter, and she trusted you enough to tell you about me and about working for the PRT. That wouldn't happen with a teacher, and you've said you weren't part of the PRT. She's unlikely to have spent a lot of time with adults…"

"Right," I said.

He didn't have intuitive aptitude; our kind only got one power, and Ruth had inherited hers from him. How was he this quick?

The silence afterward was uncomfortable as he began to gather things for our journey. He had a backpack; it was pink and had bright decorations that looked as though they had colorful cartoon characters on them, although I didn't recognize any of them.

As he reached for the door, he hesitated.

"Is my daughter really all right?" he asked.

He'd been waiting to ask the question since I'd told him that she was working with the PRT. It worried him for a lot of reasons; would the PRT stick her in a stupid costume and put her out in the middle of parahuman battles with guns? Would they force her to explore dangerous thinnies? Was she actually all right.

"She's only working as a consultant for the PRT, and they're treating her with kid gloves. They've got her and your wife under guard, the same as with all the families of the PRT, and they're probably some of the safest people in the entire Eastern United States at the moment. Emotionally… she misses you."

He didn't look at me, but his gloved hand tightened on the door.

"She started taking some risks," I admitted.

He glanced at me sharply. He knew exactly what I meant without my having to spell it out.

"Shit," he said. "I thought I taught her better."

"You didn't want her to look for you?"

"All the training in the world won't help you if a giant praying mantis snaps your head off the minute you enter a portal," he said. He grimaced. "My family tends to have a lot of kids, and it's not just because we're Catholic. We lose people, every generation."

"So why not just… not go exploring?"

"It's how my ancestors did better than their neighbors," he said. "Everybody else could be starving, but if you could find hunting grounds that had never been touched… well, you'd survive when everybody else didn't."

"So stick to the ones you know."

"We had to move a lot," he said. "If everybody else is emaciated, and your family looks healthy, people start to talk about witchcraft. And whenever you go somewhere new, it's smart to know who your neighbors are. You have to know what threats might be coming across from the other side to keep your family safe. And then we've got the ones with the wanderlust, the ones who just have to see what's on the other side. They all eventually die, unless they settle down, but they're the ones who figure out new tricks."

I didn't have a watch, but I was aware of the passage of time. Someone could shake me awake at any moment, and I'd have to try to discard this body before it could attack him in my absence. After that, it'd be tough to get to this elevation unless I took Vicky into my confidence, which would mean that Amy got the full story. They might be trustworthy, but it would affect how they saw me, and for some reason I didn't want to just be the slime girl to them.

"Let's get going," I said. "People to save after all, and things to do."

He nodded, and a moment later we were out and into the snow.This place seems to be pretty standard as far as the wildlife goes," he said quietly as we stepped out into the snow. "There's a few nasty exceptions though, so keep an eye out."

The moon was full, indicating that there was a certain amount of time dilation here as well; it had been a new moon at home a few days ago. I couldn't smell the sea, even with enhanced senses. We were surrounded by small storefronts covered in snow, their fronts shrouded in darkness. Despite that, I could see that it looked like at least half the windows had been broken at one time or another, letting the wildlife inside.

We looked to be on a main street, at least if the distance between storefronts was any indication. The snow covered everything, but there was no wind. I could see snowshoe tracks leading down the center of the street headed off into the distance.

"It's not smart to leave offal near your campsite," he said. "There's a nasty species of giant bear here, bigger than a grizzly. The last thing you want is for one of them to be waiting for you outside your door. It's hard enough to get away from them at the best of times. There's also a couple of species of nasty marsupials than can swarm if you aren't careful."

A glance behind me showed that he'd boarded up the windows and doors of the post office much more carefully than he'd constructed the outhouse behind the office. I suspected that carpentry wasn't his strong suit.

I reformed my lower body into legs and feet, and then I created heavy scales on the bottom of them. The cold would still seep through, but not nearly as badly as on my unprotected flesh, and this would make it easier for me. I widened my feet to as large as I reasonably could within human limits; he seemed like the kind of person who would notice things like weird tracks coming from behind us.

"Unfortunately, that's the direction we need to go, unless you want to go around," I said.

"Road will make it easier, anyway."

"How much of this place have you explored, anyway?"

"Ten mile radius," he said. "Looking for thinnies. If it was summer I'd have gone a lot further, especially with a good road, but traveling in the middle of winter in a place like this… it's not smart."

"Easy to get hurt," I said. "Fall into a crevice, break your leg. I had a neighbor who broke her hip on her own driveway in Brockton Bay, slipping on the ice."

"Place like this, a broken bone can be a death sentence. He was moving fairly quickly, moving on top of the tracks that he'd already made, presumably because it would be less work. The tracks got deeper about a hundred feet away, and there was a splash of blood.

"I'm surprised the deer get this close."

"It's not all that common," he said. "I'm guessing that people haven't been gone for that long, maybe five years or so; the population of deer looks like it's exploded, and their food sources are getting thin due to overpopulation. The bear will eat them, but they tend to be solitary hunters, and I haven't seen any sign of anything like wolves to thin the herds."

"I'd imagine you're craving some fruit or something other than meat."

"Pizza," he said. "With vegetables."

"I'll excuse the heresy because of your unique circumstances," I said. "Meat and cheese is the way to go; the more of both the better. With the power out the PRT is likely going to be the only place you'll be able to get pizza, and it's cafeteria crap… or so I hear."

I'd always been like that, but even more now that I was enjoying meat far more than I had in my previous life. At least he hadn't tried talking about pineapple or desert pizzas. I'd never tried sardines, and there had been a time I would have been horrified by the though.

The track got easier, and I took the opportunity to widen my feet so it would be easier to walk. As long as I stayed behind him I should be all right, following along in his double set of tracks.

I could smell the offal before we reached the end of town.

"You didn't bury it?" I asked.

"The ground is hard as a rock. Normally I'd bring it farther out of town, but it's in the middle of the night, and going out into the woods is somewhat more dangerous than attracting something to town."

Really he just hadn't wanted to, and he didn't want to tell me that. It made a good excuse though.

"The woods that we're about to enter?"

"Yeah," he said. "You sure that's the way we have to go?"

The road was going to take us perpendicular to where we needed to go.

"I'm pretty sure that neither of us could survive a three hundred foot drop," I said. "And that way leads out of Brockton Bay."

"All right," he said. "But normally I wouldn't go into the woods even on a full moon like tonight. The foliage is thick enough that you can barely see your hand in front of your face at the best of times."

I'd have expected the leaves to have fallen as it was winter, but the forest in front of me looked to be evergreen. I didn't recognize the species, but I didn't know whether that was because they were alien or because I hadn't ever really paid attention to trees that weren't native to the area. The trees were thick enough that they'd killed off most of the undergrowth. The good side was that meant that we'd be able to move through it easily; the bad thing was that so would large predators.

"There are some ravines nearby," he said.

We were already going down a steep slope.

"Any that might take us to ground level? Or close enough anyway?"

I didn't care if we ended up in somebody's living room; we could always shift over to another dimension as long as we got to the ground.

"Three hundred feet? No. Deepest I've seen is fifty, maybe seventy five feet."

"We get there, I'll take a look. Maybe we'll get lucky. If we can get somewhere that I can get down, then I can probably find a way to get you down too."

Heading down the ravine wasn't particularly easy, especially in the snow, but even encumbered with snowshoes he scrambled down the slope nimbly, avoiding places where the ground dipped unexpectedly. He'd been here for months, and it looked like he'd learned the topography, at least in the areas near town. I doubted that he knew every protruding branch in the woods, but it seemed as though this was the spot he typically left from to get to this part of the woods.

I followed him carefully. With my feet being an unnatural size and the snow making it hard to see dips in the surface, several times I had to use tentacles to keep myself from falling.

When we finally reached the bottom of the ravine, we started following what I was assuming was an old creek bed. I didn't really know much about nature; it wasn't like I had much experience with it other than that one summer at camp before Emma had gone bad.

"I'm surprised you weren't afraid of me," I said after we walked for a little while.

"Oh?" he said.

He wasn't really paying much attention to me. He was holding the lantern up, and he was listening for any sounds of things approaching.

"I mean… Wendigo kill people, right?"

"You knew who I was, which meant you were likely from back home, and that meant that you probably already had a power at least similar to mine… and from what I've heard, hunters don't really go for duplicates."

"That's a lot of suppositions," I said.

"If you were a hunter, I'd have been dead the minute I told you who I was. I'm not a member of whatever community of our kind might exist in Brockton Bay, and I can't tell you who anybody else is. You've got nothing to gain by keeping me alive."

He'd told me that his powers were better developed than Ruth's though; maybe it hadn't occurred to him to worry about that.

"Still…"

"Maybe it's just been so long since I've seen anybody that I just hoped."

That… made sense actually.

People weren't designed to live alone. They needed other people, even if it was to varying degrees. Mountain men in Alaska might only need to see someone once a month when they came in to buy bullets and toilet paper, but take that contact away, and it would eventually start to bother them too. I'd heard that prisoners left in solitary confinement for long periods would sometimes start to hallucinate and have lifelong psychological problems.

"You didn't have a volleyball named Wilson did you?"

"It was a Basketball, and his name was Spaulding. He was an asshole though."

I grinned at him, even though he wasn't facing my way.

"I'll bet he'd dribble a lot and just bounce whenever an argument got to heated."

"Don't quit your day job," he said.

"I can hear movement three hundred yards to the west," I said. "Whatever it is sounds like about a half dozen things the size of large dogs. They aren't coming any closer, though."

My bet was that my scent was what was scaring them off. It likely wasn't like anything they'd ever smelled before. The sounds of their movements were skittish and uneasy.

"You can hear that accurately?"

"I can see in the dark, too and I've got a great sense of smell. I wouldn't have suggested that we go out in the dark if I wasn't ready."

It was a sign of how desperate he must have been to get home that he'd jumped up to go the moment that I'd asked despite the danger.

"Good," he said. "Let me know if anything's coming. I don't really like moving around in the dark."

We entered the woods, and I started to see what he meant by it being dark. Even with enhanced vision the place looked dim, and I could smell scents that seemed weirdly alien.

"You never figured out what made everyone leave?" I said after five minutes of stumbling through the woods.

"Whatever it was hit pretty quickly," he said. Despite my assurances that I had enhanced senses, he was on high alert and didn't even bother looking at me. "They had time to gather some equipment and to pack, but they left a lot of stuff that they probably would have taken if there had been more time. They left guns and ammo, money, all kinds of stuff. I was less worried by the fact that they'd left than the fact that they didn't come back."

I thought about that for a moment.

"Because that meant that either they all died, or whatever made them leave was still here," I said.

"Right," he said. "But I haven't seen anything in the past several months. I usually don't go out at night, but I check for tracks."

He used a pee bottle he meant. It made sense, given that going out in the cold would be a major undertaking. For him to have gone out, it likely meant that he'd needed to use the outhouse. There'd been a time when it had been like that for everyone, and if things didn't get better back home, it would be that way again.

We reached a clearing, and things brightened up a bit as I could see the sky.

"Hey," I said. "Can you lift that lantern a little more? What do you make of those tracks?"

They were familiar tracks; it took me a moment to recognize them.

Shit.

"Those are Fae tracks," I said grimly. "They're not what they look like…. More like giant preying mantises than anything."

"It looks like there were six of them," he said. "The snow didn't stop falling until shortly after I shot the deer, and there's no sign of the tracks being obscured."

"You think they heard the gunshot?" I asked.

"Maybe," he said. "It doesn't look like they knew the area very well, but we weren't covering our tracks either. It won't take that long to find us once they get into town."

"We'd best get moving then," I said. I glanced around. "The Fae can't become invisible, but they could disquise their sounds and smell as something else, and maybe make it sound like something smaller."

"The things you heard earlier?"

"They moved off, but I'm hearing them now at the edge of my hearing," I said.

I opened a small portal beneath my illusionary dress, and I sent a tentacle through to get my bearings in Brockton Bay.

Medhall was still a mile away, slightly southwest of our current location.

"We need to get moving," he said. "I don't like our odds of fighting six enemies with human intelligence and illusion powers, as well as unknown weaponry."

"Right," I said. "We need to go that way."

He stared at me and I shrugged.

"Powers."

"Right, let's go."

What I didn't mention to him was that reaching Brockton Bay wouldn't be enough. They'd be able to track us to the point where we left through a portal, and then they'd be able to open a portal there as well to follow us. Hopefully I'd be able to handle the drop better than they would, but it was possible that they had worlds that I knew nothing about and could simply choose ones in sequence that descended, leaving them with a relatively gentle slope compared to our terrifying fall.

As we struggled to move over the snow and over the uneven ground, even he started stumbling over hidden roots and unexpected depressions where the snow wasn't thick enough to support our weight. I could hear from his breathing that moving by snowshoe wasn't particularly easy, although he was in a lot better shape than most people.

The Fae were moving faster than we were. Doing the calculations in my head, I could see that they'd catch up to us before we reached our point.

Mr. Walker was breaking our trail. I'd heard that it took fifty percent more energy to break a trail than it did to follow behind in one that was already broken.

I couldn't worry about my tracks, not if we were going to be caught. I wasn't carrying a gun and it wasn't like I had any kind of weapons other than teeth or claws. For all I knew, the Fae would be carrying machine guns or laser rifles; we still didn't know enough about their technology to even begin to guess. Would the effects of six different glamours be able to overcome whatever resistance I might have with the glamour of my own?

At least back home we'd be moving over concrete and asphalt; there would be plenty of terrible smells to cover our scent, and at ground level I'd be able to move through a number of different worlds and it would be hard for them to know which universe I had ended up in.

Extending my feet covered with scales, I said, "They're catching up. We need to move faster."

"I'm doing the best that I can," he said.

"I know. I'm going to have to carry you."

"What?" he said, finally turning toward me.

"I've probably got a minor brute rating, and I can see, hear and smell better than you can. I can handle the snow too."

I was expanding my feet under the dress as we spoke. They'd have to be larger to handle both of our weights. Without a template to work from, they'd look like hell, but hopefully I'd be able to get them large enough to hold us both up.

"Letting a teenage girl carry you isn't very manly," he grumbled.

"Neither is getting your head eaten by giant bugs because you're stupid," I paused for a moment. "Oh, right. That's actually very manly."

He sighed.

"How are we going to do this?"

"I'll throw you over my shoulder. Don't drop the lantern and keep an eye out for anything unusual."

He nodded.

If we'd had more time, and the ground hadn't been so hard, we could have simply dug a hole to get closer to the top of Medhall. As it was, we weren't going to have much luck making up that hundred foot drop. I could probably latch a tentacle to a tree and drop us thirty feet, but the last seventy feet or so were more than enough to kill him, and possibly me.

My mind went over a hundred scenarios before settling on one that was unlikely to work, but not as much a disaster as the others.

I could feel my thighs start to burn as I struggled to skate across the snow. Things got a little better as the trees above us got thicker; the snowfall here was less and I started to make up time. But it didn't matter. I could hear them behind us, getting closer and closer.

Every once in a while I paused a moment to get my bearings, creating another eye into Brockton Bay under the illusion of my dress.

"Shit," I heard him say, even as I set him down and was opening the portal. "They're here."

I wrapped tentacles around him, and I was already changing my body as quickly as I could. If I was wrong about this, we were both dead in less than three seconds. Unfortunately, I'd wake up and he wouldn't.

How big did the wings of a parasail have to be anyway? I'd heard of people wearing wingsuits, but did they have to have parachutes too? I had no idea.

I was doing the math the best that I could, and if I'd touched any birds I might have a better idea of necessary wing to weight ratios and everything else. As it was, all I could do was stretch myself as thin as possible and hope for the best.

"Wait," he said. He was looking away, but he felt the tentacles wrapping around him as though it was the arms of a human girl wrapping themselves around him. We tipped over the edge and I closed the portal behind us a moment later.

It was only then that I realized that in my haste I had opened the portal a good hundred feet from the top of Medhall.This had been a terrible idea, although I wished I'd realized that before I'd jumped out into the middle of the air several hundred feet above the hard concrete.

I knew it the moment I felt the air under me as I spread out and tried to keep from spinning wildly out of control. I wasn't remotely successful, and if I'd been human, I would have been nauseous. Mr. Walker was, and I felt substances hit my underside that I didn't want to think about, especially as my skin was absorbing them.

The rate we were falling was too fast. I managed to stop our spin in time to catch an updraft as the wind was forced between nearby buildings. It didn't buy me much time; instead it just gave me enough time to stabilize myself and get us oriented to head down the street instead of into a wall. Everything was moving quickly; too quickly for me to calculate much or do anything but try to guess how things were to go.

I smashed into the side of a building and I immediately tried to extend tentacles to grab onto it, but we'd already bounced away. Mr. Walker was now hanging limply, and there wasn't time to assess his condition as I was desperately trying to keep us from simply plummeting to the ground like a stone. I extruded part of myself to hold his neck steady and to protect his head as well as I could.

Smashing into the side of another building, I opened a doorway in front of us, and as we plunged through, there was an updraft coming off the ocean as we were suddenly closer to it. I used it to gain a little altitude, but only for a moment. It took a moment to stabilize into a glide, but I finally managed to get it under control. Medhall was at the west end of the city, and we were heading east toward the Bay.

This was the world with the poisonous giant crayfish, or whatever it had been, and the last thing I needed to do was to get him safely to the ground only to have him eaten by an insect as big as a car. Landing on sand was probably in our best interest, though I was under no illusion that it was going to be an easy landing. Falling from a sufficient height, water would kill you as easily as concrete.

Opening another portal, we slid through, and the wind picked up, giving me a little more elevation. This wasn't as bad as I thought, even if we were still moving toward the ground at an absolutely alarming rate.

This was the world that Mr. Walker had taken Ruth camping in, the one she'd used to get to school. If there were only normal animals here, then we wouldn't have to worry about giant scorpions or monsters. The animals here wouldn't have the fear of humans that the animals in our world had, but I doubted that we'd get attacked by a mountain lion on the beach.

The important thing was to reach the beach and to make sure that Ruth's dad was protected. There were shrubs and ground cover before we reached the beach; with my luck, I'd end up with a branch stuck through his lung.

I wrapped more of my mass around him now that he was unconscious, and when we finally hit, we'd barely cleared the shrubs. I could feel myself losing mass as we skidded over thirty feet at more than twenty five miles an hour.

Releasing him, I tried to pull myself together, but it was strangely difficult. I allowed my tentacles to range over his body through his furs; hopefully it was the G-Forces that had made him go unconscious instead of something worse, like a concussion or bleeding in his brain. He had simple fractures in both legs, his arm was broken and his ribs seemed to be cracked. It didn't smell like he'd had internal bleeding, but that wasn't a sure thing either.

I felt really strange, as though the world around me wasn't really real. It was like I was standing outside my body, looking down on it, and the tentacles that had been gently checking him for injury were tightening on him even as the rest of my mass was sliding over him.

Shit.

I fought against whatever was pulling me away, forcing myself back into my body. It hurt; it felt like my entire body was on fire, but I managed to withdraw from Mr. Walker, and pull myself away.

I barely had time to open a portal and throw myself through before I jolted awake.

"What's wrong with her?" Vicky was demanding.

Somehow Amy and Vicky were in my room, standing over me. They were lit in red; it took me a moment to realize that it was the emergency lights. Something might have happened to main power.

"I don't know," Amy said. "Her biology is utterly alien by now. She doesn't even have a brain, or bones, really. I gave her enough to keep an elephant awake for a week, but I'd have to study her biology to see if it even…"

"What the fuck are you doing in my room?" I said groggily.

Whatever Amy had done was making my head throb, and if I'd still had a heart I had no doubt that it would have been pounding in my chest. Amy reached out to touch me again and I jerked my wrist away.

"Somebody set fire to the upper levels of the building," Vicky said. "We're evacuating."

"Shit," I said.

"Yeah."

I needed to get back to Mr. Walker as quickly as possible. I hadn't had time to close the portal before I'd been yanked back and it was only a matter of time before the slime noticed him and turned him into a warm slurry of meat. Even if it just got distracted and wandered away, it was likely that he would go into shock. I hadn't noticed any excessive bleeding, but I'd been distracted at the time.

Slipping out of the bed nude, I headed for the dresser to slip my clothes on.

Vicky looked away, but Amy didn't. I supposed she'd seen more nudity than she'd ever wanted at the hospital. She was probably wondering if all my physical details were the same since I was mostly slime on the inside.

"Do we know who did it, or how?"

"They aren't sure yet, but the guy on the radio has been accusing us of hoarding gas and food, and medications and they think it might have been Squealer. Some of the PRT guys are saying that they heard that Skidmark was killed by some nobody on the streets and Squealer is going apeshit."

I pulled a sweatsuit on, slipping on my shoes without any socks. It wasn't like I could get a foot fungus now; if anything my feet would just eat the fungus.

"Where are we heading?"

"The Rig."

I hesitated.

The smart thing would be to just leave him behind. I had secrets that had to be kept and while Amy could probably keep my secrets, I wasn't as sure about Vicky. I'd really liked Mr. Walker, but the chances of me losing everything because of this were high. I knew what happened to Tinkers who made self replicating organisms; they usually didn't even get the Birdcage. It was a kill order.

I was a self replicating organism.

For all that the PRT wanted what I had to offer, there was a not inconsiderable chance that they'd just burn me out if they knew what I was.

Ruth was my friend, and she needed her father. I knew what it was like to need a parent and not have them there, either due to death or because they were just absent. It was worse for Ruth because in her mind, he was in limbo, neither dead nor alive. She wouldn't have a chance for closure. I'd at least gotten to go to Mom's funeral, as little comfort as that had been.

I'd once decided that my rational mind would try to avoid doing anything I couldn't live with when I came back to normal. I had a feeling that this was one of those things. I couldn't just leave him to die because it would be inconvenient or even dangerous to me. I was going to have to trust the two of them with at least part of the story and then try to manipulate them into keeping my secrets. I probably should have been trying to do that to Mr. Walker the entire time.

The cameras would be down and nobody would be listening to us at the moment. All I'd need to do was to trust two people who didn't have all that many reasons to keep my secrets. After all, I'd endangered Vicky and gotten them in trouble multiple times. If there was another way I could heal him, I wouldn't even consider asking for them for help. My original plan had been to present him to the PRT much like I'd presented the body of the Fae. He'd have been containment foamed, but he'd have reported being saved by the silver fairie.

"We need to take a detour," I said.

"What?"

"It's not that far," I said. "But we need to save Ruth's dad."

"You know where he is?" Vicky asked.

"Yeah. He's on the beach, and he's hurt."

We headed for the emergency stairs, and Vicky said, "That's a lot more Thinker ability than you've shown in the past. Do you have a crystal ball or something?"

"Something like that," I said. "Can you fly with both of us?"

If she couldn't, then I'd claim that the Silver fairie had contacted me while I was sleeping. I wouldn't have to admit to anything more than knowledge that I should not have had.

"Yeah," Vicky said. "It won't be comfortable though."

Reaching the first floor, we found a flood of agents heading for the parking garage. Someone had already blocked off the door; if we were under attack a lot of people would attack from the front. There were people who were carrying computer equipment along with them, likely storage containing PRT secrets.

"Let's go out the top," Vicky said, holding the door to the stairs open so it didn't close behind us.

She grabbed us by the waist and started flying up the winding stairs. All the doors were locked and reinforced. Halfway up, we had to go through a hallway that was filled with employees gathering everything they could. I could only imaging that the chaos would have been worse if it hadn't been in the middle of the night. The bad thing was that it was all hands on deck as most people had no other place to go and a lot of people had been sleeping in their offices. After all, their loved ones were locked away, and it was better to be here than out in the chaos outside.

No set of stairs was allowed to go to every floor; the PRT had had to balance fire safety against the idea that a flying brute would simply rip a door off the roof, then fly down to murder all the Wards. The risk of fires was the only reason we only had two sets of stairs to maneuver through; otherwise I had a feeling that it would have been a maze designed to keep attackers confused.

Reaching the top, we were stopped by a Tinkertech door. It was reinforced to be able to survive attacks by brutes. With main power down, most of the Tinkertech security features were also down, but it was reinforced by an old fashioned lock.

"Let me take this one," I said.

Leaning over the lock, I kept my body between them and the door, and I stuck my fingers into the lock, feeling for the tumblers. I could feel them and my my mind immediately began working through the patterns. The problem wasn't figuring it out; it was easily creating structures solid enough to turn the lock. I couldn't exactly make bones the exact shapes of keys, and so I was limited to using flesh. It took me a moment, and it was painful, but I managed it.

It was only as I pulled my hand out and stuck it in my pocket that I realized I could have just used a tool. I didn't have a hairpin, but maybe one of the others did.

In any case, we were out and in the air without any questions, and it look less than a minute and a half to reach him near the underbrush.

I could see that my other form was slowly enveloping him, and Vicky dropped us in the sand and darted forward.

"I can't hit it without hitting him!" she said.

"You've used your powers on these things before," I told Amy. I had a suspicion that she already suspected that there was a connection between me and the slime, but there wasn't much I could do.

She nodded and leaned down toward it. I saw a pseudopod lash out toward her, and I reached out and grabbed it before it could wrap around her and try to crush her.

I didn't think the tentacles were a natural part of slime behavior; they were capable of it, but most didn't have the intelligence to even try.

The moment my hand touched the slime, I started to absorb it; I quickly covered it with a glamour, and a moment later I could feel the whole thing freezing as Amy did something to it. She was a lot faster this time, and I felt my hand go numb before I could disengage contact.

Vicky grabbed the edges of it and threw it almost a hundred feet, where it landed quivering in the sand.

"Fuck. How are these things getting out?" Vicky demanded. "I thought the only portal was in our house?"

Amy was already kneeling down to help Mr. Walker.

"Wayfarer sometimes uses multiple portals to the same world to go to school," I said. "One close to her house and one in Arcadia. I'm pretty sure they've blocked that one off; nobody wants a mountain lion to attack a janitor."

"So those cave things could be running around somewhere in town?"

"Maybe," I said. "Or whatever made them hide in the caves."

Amy was completely focused on Mr. Walker, ignoring the smell of blood and body odor.

"How did you know about him?" Vicky asked. "I mean, you were asleep?"

"I get dreams sometimes," I said, shrugging. "Powers have aspects, right?"

She stared at me suspiciously, but I carefully controlled my expressions until she relaxed. It would have been easy to give the whole game away, and Vicky was decently good at gauging people's expressions and body language. It was part of being popular and negotiating the labyrinthine maze of high school social networks. But as a social thinker, I could spoof all that.

"Maybe don't tell the PRT though," I said, making myself look uncertain.

"Why?"

"Well, it's pretty inconsistent, and I really don't want to spend two weeks in power testing, which would involve adult men staring at me as I sleep, hoping that I somehow get a vibe or something."

She thought about it for a moment.

"That does sound pretty creepy."

"It's hard enough to get to sleep right now, what with everything that's going on."

Vicky looked away.

"Yeah. I worry about my family, out in the middle of it all. It's not like fighting crime. That was kind of like a game, but people are getting crazy now. There was this one guy that set his whole family on fire. I didn't see it, but Mom said it was really bad. It's not so much when they're out fighting, but when they're sleeping it would be pretty easy for somebody to come in and cut their throats."

"They aren't staying in the Rig?"

She shook her head.

"Mom's worried that the PRT would use that as an excuse to try to make us less independent. I don't really understand her line of thinking. I'd think that staying safe would be more important than…"

"He's going to be all right," Amy said after a moment. "He had some nasty parasites that I'd never seen before, and a ton of broken bones, but I'm fixing those now. He had some radiation exposure too, but I'm clearing that out before it causes anything nasty."

Radiation exposure tended to be cumulative. I wasn't sure what percent of radiation remained with you for the rest of your life, but some did. If for example it was ten percent, then being exposed to 100 rads of radiation would leave 10 remaining. The next time you were exposed to 100 rads, it would be like being exposed to 110. Over time the effects would snowball.

"Is his brain all right?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. "He had a fractured pelvis and a lower back injury, multiple breaks in his arms and legs and some organ damage. I've seen injuries like this in car accidents where someone didn't wear their seat belt."

"I don't know what to tell you," I said. "I think we should get him to the Rig as soon as we can."

"I can't carry three of you," Vicky said. She looked apologetic.

"Take him and Amy," I said. "I brought my stun pistol."

"I'm not leaving you here by yourself, especially with that thing still here," she said.

"There are PRT vans on the way," Amy said, rising to her feet. "They're headed for the Rig anyway. We can just say that we spotted him as we were flying over, and you recognized him from Wayfarer's family pictures or something."

I looked at her, surprised.

"I've been living with Vicky all my life," Amy said. "You think I haven't figured out how to tell a decent lie?"

Vicky was already pulling out a PRT issued phone. Armsmaster had set up a communications network for agents city wide; essentially, the PRT now had it's own radio cell tower that only worked for PRT phones and would allow communication between them and home base. It wouldn't allow calls outside the radius of the city, and nobody else's phones worked, but it allowed the PRT agents and heroes to communicate and coordinate which was the important thing.

Vicky started calling it in.

I glanced at my slime body. It was going to be a problem if the PRT collected it to study.

"Why don't you sit down?" Amy asked. "Take a nap if you need to. You look tired."

I stared at her.

How much did she know?

Was she encouraging me to get my slime to escape?

"We need to talk later," she said. She smirked at me, and then said, "But for now, just take a seat."

Damn.

Was I going to wake up with a Kill Order?"

I slowly sat on the grass and stared up at her. She was really enjoying this, for some reason; my discomfort must have shown on my face and she was enjoying having me at a loss.

I scowled at her, and it only made her smirk more.

"So you're connected to all of them," Amy said.

"If they're big enough," I said. "I can sense that there are more of them, but they have to reach a certain level of complexity to… accept my consciousness I guess."

We were sitting on the beach watching Vicky argue with some PRT agents as they were putting Mr. Walker on a stretcher. Other agents had spread out, presumably to guard us. Strategically we probably should have been in the van, but I'd made a few comments to make them think we might be in more danger inside than outside. After all, Squealer was using missiles, and the van would be a perfect target.

None of the agents were close enough that they could hear us; the sound of the waves helped with that as did the fact that they were keeping the vans running. We were both speaking quietly, and I was watching all the agents looking for signs in their body language that they were hearing anything that we said.

"Can you control them?"

Amy sounded a little anxious. This was probably exactly the kind of thing her mother would have warned her about, the kind of thing that would give someone a kill order, would give her a kill order. She wasn't exactly my friend, but she didn't resent me the way she once had and felt a sense of camaraderie toward me. It bothered her that she didn't know whether those were natural feelings or the result of social manipulation.

"I can control them. Individually. If I'm asleep."

"Why would you let them just expand like that?" she demanded. "You know how dangerous that can be!"

She'd already managed to work out the fact that there was a connection between us, even if she hadn't yet quite managed to figure out exactly how it worked. If she hadn't, I wouldn't be discussing this at all. The fact that she already knew far more at a single touch than I could have wanted her to know meant that my best chance was to be reasonably honest with her. That didn't mean that I had to tell her everything, but this was the most damning thing.

If I didn't do some damage control, she was likely to go straight to the PRT, which meant that my only chance was to kill her or to convince her to stay silent. I liked her, which meant that I didn't want to kill her, and she was too important to the upcoming fight, which meant that I only had one choice.

"I… don't know," I admitted. "They just feel like me, you know. I could make them suicide, jump in a fire or something, but it'd be like cutting off my foot. Even if you can grow a new one it just seems wrong to discard a perfectly good foot."

It was true, but I made myself look absolutely miserable. It was a risky strategy; Amy could see this as my being not in my right mind, and it could push her over the edge into telling the PRT for my own good. That would likely mean that the PRT would try to contain me, and they'd waste resources trying to burn the other parts of me out of the sewer when they should be trying to get the city back to normal.

"They aren't likely to go after humans," I said. "They're mostly scavengers, and the only reason they'd come out of the sewers is if they run out of food, and that's not likely to happen anytime soon. There's enough crap down there to feed a million slimes. I might be worried about the sewer workers, but nobody's going down there right now."

"What about homeless people?"

"New York's got the subway system, and a few places that are pretty good for the homeless to stay. Here, not so much. You'd have to be really desperate to go down there, and there's things down there that aren't safe; old biotinker creations, Case 53s, deadly gas emissions… the homeless know that it's death to go down there and they avoid it. They prefer the Boat Graveyard."

"Even endangering one person is too much!" she said. "Is this some kind of slime instinct maybe? It's got to be affecting your thinking; you don't even have a brain anymore! No recognizable glands!"

I made myself look even more miserable.

"So because I don't have a brain, that means that I've got to be crazy? How is this any different than some of the Case 53s? You can't tell me that Weld in Boston has a normal brain."

"I'm not saying you're crazy," she said. "It's just… how sure can you be that you're thinking the way that you used to."

"Do you?"

"What?"

"Parahuman powers are due to an extradimensional alien parasite in your head," I said. "And I'm pretty sure that they influence how parahumans think. Your sister is taking college classes about parahumans; ask her about parahuman aggression. Powers want to be used; how many people actually manage to stay out of the game? How many rogues are there?"

"That's due to societal pressures," she said, but she didn't sound sure.

There was a lot of truth to that; the PRT didn't really like rogues, and so it did what it could to make life hard for them until they slipped up and could be pressured into joining. Rogues were too likely to buck the party line. Villains gave the PRT a reason to exist. Heroes fit the narrative too, and inevitably most of them made a mistake sooner or later that would bring them into the fold.

"You've had plenty of reasons to feel depressed," I said. "But I think that one of them was that your power felt bored."

"Powers can't want… really?"

"Look at Leet. Have you heard of any Tinker ever who had Tinkertech catastrophically fail like that before?"

She thought about it for a moment.

"No."

"So why him? Maybe his power didn't like what he was doing, and it was punishing him for it. I'm not sure what it wanted from him, and clearly he didn't but it's an anomaly that has to have a reason behind it."

"So what could it be?"

"Why grant people powers in the first place?" I asked. "Then make them aggressive? People get powers when horrible things happen to them, and most of the people who have horrible things that happen to them are already unstable. They tend to come from lives where bad things happen anyway, and that has an impact on how you think. It's like the powers are selecting people who are already predisposed to being aggressive and then giving them the power to make everything worse."

"So I'm aggressive?"

"Maybe you aren't aggressive enough. Maybe your power is bored. You can't tell me that healing back problems and pneumonia every day is rewarding. You've been a lot happier since you've gotten to look at all of this alien stuff."

She frowned.

"It's the only thing that's really changed. It's not like you're getting along with your Mom any better, and you've still been doing shifts at the hospital. There's people trying to kill you, and you're still more cheerful than you were when this all started."

"So you're saying that my powers want me to do… interesting things. But Mom says people hate biotinkers… that I'd end up in the Birdcage."

There was a weird sort of longing there, and I didn't think that it was all related to her power. It had to stink being the only person in her family who didn't get to go out and kick ass. Her role was important, but I wouldn't have been surprised if she didn't think that the others looked down on her a little for not being on the front lines.

"After that whole thing about people freaking out that I was some kind of Master, I looked up the law and how Masters are treated. For once I think your mom is right."

"You told me to start making rat unicorns and start doing plastic surgery for money!" she protested. "Mom gave me crap for that."

She was an idiot for telling her mother was my first thought; a closer examination showed me that it had been something that Vicky had blurted out while trying to defend her. That fit, I supposed.

"Yeah," I said. "That was before I really looked into how parahumans are treated. No parahuman gets a fair shake in a criminal trial. Villains know the score, and they know how to get a slap on the hand. But if you're just a guy trying to live your life? They'll throw the book at you. It's actually a PRT recruiting practice; join up and they'll make your legal problems go away. And if you're a Master or a biotinker? Forget it."

Her shoulders slumped.

Had she thought I'd be able to tell her something different?

"I still stand beside what I said about plastic surgery. People know that you're a healer, so it wouldn't surprise them, and if you've got a good lawyer, there's a way around NEPEA laws. They'd probably make you have a human doctor supervise you or something; they're really big about having humans on top. Rat unicorns was probably a stupid idea anyway…"

"Yeah."

"Gerbil unicorns would probably be friendlier," I said.

She snorted.

"Still."

"Other than the Kill Order I'm likely to get? You know the Director was in Ellisburg, and she's got a real complex about the whole creations breeding out of control thing. Also, I don't really want to be known as the slime girl."

"You can turn yourself back, right?"

"Why wouldn't I want to."

"But you just said…"

"I can get a bullet through the head, and be only mildly inconvenienced. If my body is blown up, I just move on to another one. If the whole city was hit by a nuclear weapon, I've got a couple of backup bodies in other dimensions. Why would I want to go back to being defenseless and… normal?"

"You were never normal," she said dryly.

"Thanks."

"Most people would be thrilled to be able to talk everybody around them into anything."

"So you think my hero name should have been the Diplomat or the Ambassador? Nobody would ever let someone with my powers into either position. People hate thinking that they're being controlled. Maybe if I'd kept my powers secret, I might have been able to do some good, but maybe not. We'd have still had all this crap with the Fae whether I'd gotten into the PRT or not."

Even if Uncle Gabe hadn't eaten a Fae war party, this would have probably just happened later. He wouldn't have had the opportunity to attack them if they hadn't already been in this dimension, and that meant that they were probably already here to hunt or make war. It would have taken them longer to learn enough about us than Gabe had been back anyway; this kind of attack took years to set up without powers like mine. They'd have had to learn enough about the gangs to figure out how to destabilize them, enough about our technology to not only use it but to destabilize the electric grid. I wasn't even sure that they'd spoken our language before this.

Even the best Thinker in the world would need months at minimum to teach their spies our language, to infiltrate our defenses, to move the troops to where they were needed, set up supply lines and prepare for war. It took time to mobilize.

I'd initially suspected that this was going to be a simple raid, a Wild Hunt in Brockton Bay, but the world that Mr. Walker had settled in changed my mind. All we'd seen was a small, empty town, but a Fae patrol had been there. That suggested to me that they were either taking advantage of a known empty location, or that they were patrolling for stragglers. He hadn't seen anything for the majority of the winter, but it would have been easy to miss things when the snow had been falling and covering tracks.

They'd likely been looking for any sign of smoke; without power, humans would have been forced to use fire to stay warm. They couldn't have known that he would use some other method for keeping himself warm. Given the fact that he'd had a lot of dried meat, I suspected that he'd been using the portal to cook his food on the other side of the portal whenever the sun rose. That would have reduced the smell of cooking meat and signs of habitation. Unless they'd been close enough to smell him or hear a rifle shot, they wouldn't have seen him.

Had they stripped an entire world of its people, or were the humans still fighting somewhere. I couldn't imagine they'd be able to maintain any kind of battle lines, not when the enemy could simply open a portal nearby and throw bombs through, or pop into barracks while people were sleeping and slaughter or kidnap them all.

People had fled, which meant it hadn't been a simultaneous attack everywhere. They must have had some kind of advanced warning if they'd taken at least some of their goods with them.

"I want to help people, and that's not going to happen if I don't have power, or if I let myself get killed before I can do anything. Also, I can now actually enjoy a Fuggly Bob's burger without getting a stomachache from all the grease."

Vicky was floating back toward us.

"They say we need to take the second van," she said. "Even though I told them Amy healed him."

"All right," I said.

I rose to my feet and slapped sand off my pants. I was starting to regret my decision not to wear socks; sand had gotten in my shoes, and it was one of the things I actually wasn't capable of eating.

Idly I wondered whether I could form a protective barrier around it like an oyster and make pearls. It didn't seem likely, not until I could eat a live oyster, but I might be able to make some money that way.

Were pearls even still expensive?

I had no way of knowing. I hadn't actually seen real pearls, just fake ones.

"Wayfarer is on the way," one of the agents said. "We've been told to hold off; they're five minutes away."

"The faster we get to the Rig, the better," another agent muttered. He was watching the surroundings suspiciously.

"We're all going to have to bunk together," Vicky said. "You, us and Ruth. It's going to be crowded as crap what with everybody doubling up, at least until they get the situation at headquarters under control."

"I didn't even smell any fire," I said as I leaned against the PRT van.

"They're telling us that there were Tinkertech chemicals in the mix," one of the agents standing by the door said. "And possibly devices designed to destabilize the building."

"Squealer had that kind of tech?" Vicky asked. We were standing beside the van; "Who the hell knew she had anything like that. Her stuff looks like crap, and it's three times bigger than it has to be."

"I'm sure that pisses Armsmaster off," I said dryly, considering that miniaturization was his whole gig. "My question is who put her up to it. Blaming the guy on the radio sounds fine, but he didn't have any powers that I noticed. Was she hired, or was she manipulated. I'm feeling a little anxious at the idea of everybody crammed into one building; that sounds like a perfect way to kill all of the opposition in one fell swoop."

"What, really?"

"They can create portals at will, as long as the elevation is right, and there's ways around that."

With enough time, I could have dug a hole or build a ladder or a structure for a height differential easily enough, especially if I had an army to do the labor for me.

My mind went over what I knew of the Rig, of the best places to put explosives to bring the whole structure down.

Worse, that wasn't the only way they could attack us, depending on how extensive their information was. If I'd wanted to attack us, I'd have hired hackers through intermediaries, parahumanly powerful ones, or maybe one of the evolved to break into the computer systems. Or I'd simply catch and master one of the maintenance crews, or one of the plants from the gangs and gotten them to do the legwork for me.

There were precautions against foreign agents in the air, but they could be reprogrammed or physically replaced by someone who knew what they were doing. There were mercenary villains who would be happy to do something like that for money as well as for a change to get back at the PRT.

Bombs would be a lot easier than wasting troops, and they'd be great at killing most of the parahumans in the Brockton Bay branch; Aegis might survive, but if we were caught by surprise, I doubted that anyone else would be.

The only thing that would keep them from bombing us now would be the fact that we were deploying the parahumans mostly at night. They'd want to kill as many of us as they could in a single blow, which meant that if they knew anything about out schedules meant that they'd probably launch the attack three or four hours after sunrise. Even if they missed a few parahumans, without the ability to communicate and coordinate, we'd be helpless against the attack.

People could be dying three blocks away, and unless they were using guns, we might not ever know.

"When we get there, there's about ten different places we need to check," I said. "They may not have it planned for today, so they might not have put them down yet, but eventually they will."

Where they were most likely to put the bombs was largely dependent on the universes they had access to. Universes that had land higher in elevation than ours would probably have bombs placed in the higher spots. I wasn't sure how they planned to get around the security systems, but they'd likely had access to some of the moles from the gangs, and there were technicians who would have been able to give them the information that they needed to find blind spots in the system.

Of course, that depended on how dangerous they thought parahumans really were. They might see the PRT as the real danger and if that was the case, they'd wait until the evacuation was complete to…

"Give me your phone," I said.

Vicky handed it to me.

The PRT general phone line wasn't working; there was no point given that the phone lines were down, so I called Armsmaster directly.

"Armsmaster," I said. "I don't think the attack on Headquarters was a coincidence. I think they're planning a bombing to kill us all at the same time."

They could have attempted to attack both bases at the same time, but the chances of being caught grew exponentially. Headquarters was relatively easy to escape from, but the Rig was surrounded by water, and I suspected that they'd have put something in the water to finish off any stragglers.

"Do you have any…" he began.

The sound of the Rig exploding sounded like the end of the world.My mind was as clear as it had been in a long time, even though everyone around me seemed to be in shock.

"Do we have communication with everyone?" I demanded.

In retrospect, telling Armsmaster over an open line might have tipped the enemy off that we were about to unravel their plan, causing them to detonate early. However, that might have saved lives; I was sure there had been a lot of people heading for the Rig.

I could see vans that had splashed into the bay when the force field bridge had gone down, and we could hear the sounds of screaming in the distance.

"Vicky!" I snapped. "There are people dying in the Bay. Get as many of them to shore as possible, and we're going to get as close as we can to the spot where the bridge met the road. We're going to set up a triage station, and Amy will cure as many as she can. I'll help those who are less injured, and we're going to see what we can manage to salvage out of this."

"Right," she said.

"I think there's something nasty in the water. Be careful."

She nodded, and a moment later she was in the air.

"Let's get in the trucks and get moving people. The closer we are to the rig, the easier it's going to be for Glory Girl and Panacea to save your friends and coworkers."

They stared at me, the fires from the Rig shining off the smooth surface of their masks, then they nodded.

"What about the people on the Rig?" Amy asked.

The Rig was collapsing as we were speaking.

"They're dead," I said. "Vicky's got no protection from smoke inhalation, and she can save a lot more people out of the Bay than she can looking around in the fire. There's a few reinforced locations inside where there might be people; as soon as we're ready and the fire goes down a little we'll try to see if we can find any survivors. It's not likely that anybody is going to survive though."

"Fuck," she said, climbing in the back of the van.

"You two stay here," I told two of the agents. "Wayfarer and her team should be here in three or four minutes. Rendezvous with them and then meet us at the bridge entrance. Communications are down and so it's important to have central points to meet. I wouldn't be surprised if we might not take fire, so be on your guard."

They nodded grimly, and a moment later we were inside the van moving as quickly as we could.

"You think they'll attack us?"

"Yeah," I said. "The vans are armored, so my plan is to circle them, like people circled the wagons back in the old days. I'm going to have the agents use containment foam at the top of the vans closest to the city; hopefully that'll be enough to keep snipers from seeing us while we're helping people. As soon as we're finished saving as many people as we can, we're going to need to take stock of the people we have, and we're going to have to find a place to hide."

She was staring at me, but my mind was racing. How many people had relocated already, and how many casualties had there been?

There were seven hundred or so police officers in Brockton Bay, and the PRT had about a third that number of agents. We'd had about two hundred and forty agents. Usually that had been split between three eight hour shifts, and a third of that number had been assigned to guard the Rig and Headquarters full time. We'd had an equal number of support staff; computer technicians, maintenance workers, scientists and the like.

The good side was that we'd had agents working twelve hour shifts so that we could maintain a presence out in the community; that suggested that there were likely eighty agents who were out in the middle of city alive, working their shifts, and those who were further in the city might not even know anything was wrong until they realized that communications were down.

Only about sixty percent of the people who had been moving into the Rig had likely made it, which meant that including the people in the Bay, we might have as many as another fifty agents or so, along with an equal number of civilians available.

Logistically, feeding almost two hundred people was going to be problematic without the freezers and food storage of the PRT. We were now in the same situation as everybody else in the city, and that was going to be a growing problem. It was going to critically slow down our ability to repair the city's infrastructure, and it meant that we were likely in a lot of trouble.

Well, the smartest thing to do was to take one thing at a time. There was no point in worrying about dying tomorrow if it was all you could do to survive today.

The van stopped, and I reached for the door.

One of the agents stopped me.

"I'll go out first," he said.

He opened the door, and gunfire struck him.

I dragged him back inside, closing the door and ignoring the bullets that him me. I kept the door cracked and sent a tendril through with an eye so I could see where the shooter was shooting from.

The sound of gunfire was coming from all around us. The PRT had made sure to keep the nearest buildings a half block away, and there were people attacking from the rooftops there.

I closed the door, and I said, "Let's go."

Opening a portal, I reached out with a psuedopod and pulled Amy and the PRT trooper behind me, closing the portal behind me.

"Keep him asleep, would you?" I asked.

I then changed forms to taken on the form of a fast alien creature, and I sprinted up the beach.

The buildings near the beach were all one story tall. I moved to the point where I thought the side of one was, and I stepped through another portal. I send tendrils upward, and I lifted myself up and over the side of the building.

Ignoring the PRT bullets that were hitting me, I reached out with tentacles and snapped the necks of the three snipers who were prone on the roof, and then I ran and leapt off the roof I was on to the next one. They heard the sound of my landing, even over the noise of all the gunfire. It was too late, as I ripped the heads off of two of them and I was shot in the stomach by the thirds. I bit his face off, and his screaming attracted the attention of the other two teams.

They started firing at me, and I ignored it, smashing into them with another leap. I bit and clawed at them, and then I went for the last one.

A grenade landed at my feet, and I barely had time to open a portal underneath it so that it fell and vanished into the universe with the blood vines. A moment later I had leapt across the gap between the buildings. I hadn't taken on any more mass, and with three times the strength of a normal person my size, it could jump further. I reached them, and they were fumbling with their guns; they'd seen that normal bullets didn't hurt me.

I sent out a tendril and opened a gate beneath them; they fell onto the beach, and I watched until the giant water bugs bit into them, filling them with poison and melting them from the inside out.

I probably should have kept one of them alive for interrogation, but it wasn't like we really had the facilities to hold them, and killing them would be the kind of moral decision that would bother some of the PRT agents. It was better to avoid that.

The vehicle Amy and I had been in was on fire. It looked like they'd used at least one anti-tank missiles. Those weren't easy to get, but armories weren't designed to defend against extradiminsional invaders. If they'd defeated the people of the world I'd found Mr. Walker in, then they'd have weapons, although I suspected that they were still in the process of pacifying that world.

I didn't notice any smoke from the nearest police station; the police stations would have been a waste of effort to destroy, given that most of the cops would have been on patrol, and the average police station didn't have the kind of infrastructure and information that they'd destroyed when they'd destroyed the two buildings from the PRT. The police stations were decentralized as well, which meant that they'd get less of a result for effort expended with more of a chance of being caught.

Opening a portal back to the dimension I'd left Amy in, I dropped down fifteen feet and returned to her.

"They blew up the van," I said. "I took care of the snipers."

"What?"

"It was a rocket attack. I don't like the fact that they knew which van we were in; they had to have been listening in on communications to identify our likely position."

Communications had gone down the moment the Rig was destroyed, but our previous location had been known, and it wouldn't have been hard to figure out where we were heading, especially with Glory Girl in the air.

I picked the agent up, and then I took five steps to the right, opening a portal. It was possible that someone would have moved positions and seen us appearing behind the burning van, but I doubted that they were convinced that the snipers were all down yet, and no one would have wanted to change positions until they were sure.

Amy followed me, and we were both struck by the heat of the burning van next to us. I should have moved over another three steps.

"Wake him up," I said, setting the agent on the ground after moving another couple of steps.

She did; it required finding her way through his armor to his neck, but she seemed more than familiar with how to do it. A moment later he jolted awake.

"Watch out, Agent," I said. "There are snipers, so keep your head down."

It was even possible that it was true. The buildings that I'd taken out had been the most logical places to attack from, but they weren't the only ones. The others would require accuracy from long distances, but that wasn't altogether out of the realms of possibility.

"Amy!" Vicky yelled.

She dropped toward us, two people dangling limply from her hands by one arm. Presumably she assumed that Amy would repair any damage that she did, and she didn't seem all that concerned about them at the moment.

Although the van was burning beside us, it hadn't exploded into shrapnel. The armor on PRT vans was exceptional.

"I'm fine," Amy said.

Other agents were approaching us.

"Circle the vans," I said. "Provide a line of defense. Bring the wounded here, and once Wayfarer and her father get here, we'll escape."

There was a chain of command in the PRT; unfortunately none of the commanders were here yet. After a moment, they deferred to me, with one set of men getting into the vans and another set keeping weapons drawn. The man in the vans leapt out as quickly as possible; it must have felt like they were death traps given that someone had already hit a couple of us.

"They'll provide cover," I said as the men returned.

"Get back to saving people," I told Vicky. "Amy's fine, and we'll do everything we can to protect her."

The number of vans approaching was depressingly small; I could see only six of them, and another six were out in the Bay.

Vicky was quick and efficient and within ten minutes, everyone who hadn't already drowned was in the circle with us.

I had thirty surviving PRT agents with me; none of the commanders had made it, at least not yet.

Two more vans came, and a moment later I saw Ruth emerge from one of them with her father, who had finally awakened. Ruth was pale. The moment they made their way inside the circle, I started to speak. The agents who were keeping watch were faced away from us, but I could tell they were listening.

"We're outnumbered," I said. "Faced by an enemy that isn't parahuman and it isn't even of this world. I wouldn't blame you if you wanted to just go home and give up. The thing is that the location of our friends and family is the one thing that they don't know, and if we go to get them, we'll be dooming them to the same hell that the rest of us are living, the hell that the enemy has deliberately turned our world into. We can't trust that help will be coming; for all we know they may have hit every major city on the east coast, in which case people are going to be a lot more worried about New York and Boston than they are about us."

I had their attention. There were ways of speaking that had been used by preachers and politicians for decades; some of them were parodied by comedians, but they were used because they worked.

"We could just fade into the background, let the enemy swarm into our world, and take what they want. They swarm entire worlds and strip them of people; I've seen it. I don't know what they want with them, but whether it is as slaves or as lunch, either way, it's not acceptable! I know that some of you think that parahumans are just clowns in costumes; even if we aren't, we're so few that it doesn't really matter against an army. The military has no way of knowing where we are. The police have thrown in the towel and gone home. Even the gangs are scattered to the wind. Who is left if it isn't you? You are the only ones standing between the city and the people you love and total annihilation."

All of them were afraid; they'd be stupid not to be, but a few of them were too afraid.

"We won't be alone," I said. "We can gather the police to our cause; not all of them could be cowards, and there are citizens who would fight back if they were just given a little direction. I'd bet that even old prejudices would be dropped, temporarily if the choice was fighting beside each other or annihilation. We see villains and heroes fighting together all the time when the Endbringers come. These aren't Endbringers, but they may as well be. I will call for the Endbringer truce to be enforced."

"How will people even know?"

"Just before I went to bed last night, I'd heard that the leadership was planning a raid on the radio station that has been causing so many problems. As it happens, I know the address, and I've got the skills to not just just keep it running but to expand its range. I'm going to call on people to stop fighting, to rise up and defend their cities."

"Will that work?" Amy asked. "If you can't see their reactions?"

"Not as well as if I individually tailored them. There's ways to get people to go along with things that aren't in their best interest; politicians use them all the time. This isn't one of those times. People can fight, or they can kneel or die."

"So what do we do now?"

"We raid," I said. "My guess is that they'll have ambushes set up on some of the routes in town, so we'll have to take a different route."

I thought about it for a moment.

The biggest portal I could create was a little taller than a man on horseback; around nine feet tall and equally as wide. That was enough room to move the vans through a portal single file; although it wouldn't be good for moving an army since it created a bottleneck, it would be fine for the group here.

"Our best bet would be to avoid all of that; fortunately there's a portal nearby that leads through to another world. Wayfarer or her father can open it for us, and it'll take us through to another world. My advice would be to not get out of your van, to stay close to the group, and to follow the rest of us. Do not get lost; although the route will be safer than people wielding rocket launchers, that does not mean that it's safe. We will lead you through to a portal that leads back here."

Ruth was staring at me, confused, but it was her father who was looking at me with his eyes narrowed. The wheels were turning in his head.

The number of people who could open portals was limited, after all.

"We will attack with surprise, and we will use the radio station as a base."

"Where is it?" one of the agents asked.

"The Medhall building," I said. "It's the highest building in the city, and they still have power, although they're keeping light from the windows. The last thing they want is to reveal where they are. We'll hit the parking lot in the other world, and then we'll make our way inside. We can expect that there will be guards; the broadcasts have been made by Enemy; whether they are working for vestiges of the old Empire or are propaganda by the Fae, either way, they are actively working to topple the United States. We are at war… and not the modern notion of war where it's a powerful nation attacking a weak one with kid gloves. This is the kind of war where we are fighting for our survival. The gloves are coming off."

And once we got control of the station, I was going to have to give the speech of my life to convince an entire city of people who had given up years ago that now was the time to be brave, to stand up for their families and friends, for their way of life and for their lives themselves.

The whole idea should have made me nervous; instead, the idea of speaking to an entire city made me feel a tingle of anticipation.

This was what my power was meant for.