I didn’t add the question about toes for no reason. It’s very much possible to have a spinal injury that causes you to lose feeling in and fine control of some or all of your toes but not the legs/feet they’re attached to. That is the case for my dad.

His hands fumbled blindly for my wrists, seized them.

DANNY! 😀

Hiya, man, how you doing?

He couldn’t see me with the blood in his eyes.  That fact didn’t make me happy or relieved in the slightest, however it might have kept him from discovering my costumed identity.

…maybe.

“Taylor?”

“I’m here.  Don’t move too much.  I’m going to see what I can do.”

“I might have to call in help from this one guy I know who’s really good at burning people’s faces off. He should be done burning off Lisa’s by now.”

“Are you okay?”

“Not even scratched.”

“How?”

“I was protected by some widows down the street.”

I could see him sagging with relief.

“You were right,” he said.  He tried to stand, and I pushed him back down.

That she was – somehow…

“Stay still,” I said.  “At least until we can be sure there’s nothing more serious.”

“Right,” he mumbled.  “You took that first aid class.”

You have no idea how handy that’s been these last few months, Danny!

So much blood.  Two thirds of his face was covered in blood that looked more black than red in the gloom.  Darker lines marked where the blood was welling from.  Cuts across the side of his head, the edge of his forehead, his temple and cheek.  His ear had been almost cut in half.

Hm. Looks like we need Greenfire again. Dude’s taking regular trips to Brockton Bay these days. Tells his teammates he’s going to “practice medicine”, to their confusion.

So we’ve established that things are looking bad. But is he breathing?

There was a rattling from the window.  I looked and saw strips of shredded duct tape.  It looked like the tape had been taped around the edges, then taped in an asterisk-like pattern.

Yes! Good man, Danny, taking his daughter’s warning seriously and doing his best – if perhaps not enough, as foreshadowed in 11.1 (Taylor commenting on Danny’s glasses not being that much safer in his pocket) – to make things safer.

He’d taken my warning seriously.

I investigated further.  More blood at the back of his head.  Had the glass penetrated into his brain?  No, I could feel the edges of the glass.  It had stopped at his skull, maybe splintered under the surface of his skin.  I had no way of telling.

It doesn’t sound like he might be alive from the way Taylor is acting. But this is also not how I expected her to behave if she found him dead, so??

I tore at the straps connecting my armor to my back as I ran upstairs, taking the steps two at a time, pulled the zipper down as I ran down the hallway.

Ah, okay, so she is taking the whole costume off. Fair enough.

Getting my arms free of the sleeves, I tied the inside-out arms around my waist.  It wasn’t nearly enough to seriously hide my costumed identity, but I wasn’t about to delay for another second.

It might’ve been easier to explain why she was in here as Skitter than as Taylor, but I think she wants to have her true face out, not have the barrier of secrecy that is Skitter’s mask in between her and Danny.

Almost none of which matters if he’s dead, of course.

I pulled open his bedroom door and hurried to his side, glass crunching under my feet.  I gingerly peeled away the layers of blankets that had draped over my dad as he was thrown from the bed.

That is bad news. To be thrown from the bed, he would have to be hit hard by the glass.

I don’t have high hopes for what Taylor is about to find under those shrouds, uh, I mean, blankets.

The moment I was sure it was over, I was on my feet, running around the back to the kitchen door.  I tore off my mask as I made my way there, and some bugs helped guide my hand to the latch as I reached through the broken window of the kitchen door and opened it.

It’s been a long time since we last saw Taylor enter here.

Also, she has clearly thrown away all concern for her secret now, going in to check on Danny while wearing the costume but not the mask.

Unless she stops to take off the costume and devise an explanation for why she’s all of a sudden in the house, this is probably going to end one of two ways: Either Danny’s about to find out – or have confirmed – that Taylor is Skitter, or Taylor is going to find her dad badly hurt or dead.

I’m somewhat leaning towards the latter as far as what I think is going to happen, but I can’t deny that I’m hoping for the former. Not just because I like Danny, either, but because I think there’s more interesting story potential in Danny finding out what sort of life Taylor has made for herself, while him dying would’ve been more interesting four or five Arcs back.

There was a cloud to the east, where the beaches were, reaching up to the cloud level, like some pale wall.

I pulled my knees up against my face and my hands up around the back of my head to shield myself where my mask didn’t have coverage.

Good thinking!

The alarm clock was in the midst of tipping over when Shatterbird used her power.

Oh cod.

Don’t tell me the timing of the tip just made it even more likely to hit Danny.

It was as though the glass broke in response to some invisible tidal wave, caught in the nonexistent ‘water’, carried along, shattering on impacts with surfaces, slashing anything that would cut, piercing deep into any surface soft enough.  I could feel it roll past me, south to north.

Huh, interesting. So a quick-thinking team of heroes with radio communication that happened to be spread out in the city could attempt to follow it to find where Shatterbird was when she released her “song”.

Loud.

I suppose it’s gotta be to travel as far as it does. Very loud, even though most people don’t hear it.

The sound seemed to come a second later, like the sonic boom following a jet.  I’d halfway expected a boom, but it sounded more like a heavy impact, as loud and powerful as a bullet the size of the moon striking the city, followed by the sound of trillions of glass shards simultaneously falling like rain across the cityscape.

…interesting. Is the wave of glassplosion faster than the sound that unleashes its power?

I needed more bugs to wake him, still more to write a message.  I began drawing them up to his bedroom.

I might not have noticed it if I hadn’t been listening through the bugs.

Oh boy. What is it? Shatterbird’s “song”?

I primarily heard it through the moths and beetles, a sound like someone running their finger along the rim of a wine glass, painful to hear, only it kept getting sharper and higher pitched until it was well beyond the limits of anything my human ears could hear.

Yeeeah, here we fucking go.

It was coming from the windows.

There were enough bugs in place to wake up my dad.  I could have disturbed him from his sleep… but would he react fast enough to any message I left?

Is she considering what I think she’s considering? That it might be kinder to let him go in his sleep?

Or would he sit up and put his head and upper body in harm’s way of the windows?

Okay, yeah, that’s a good point. He’d be making himself a bigger target and exposing vulnerable areas.

I couldn’t risk it.  Instead, I took the bugs near him and threw them against his alarm clock, a miniaturized version of what I had attempted to do with the temporary fence.

Shaking it off the table? Ahh, right, glass display cover.

It was thin, a tilted capital ‘L’ shape with a digital display.

Huh, that’s an interesting shape for a clock.

And then my dad’s house.  I dropped onto my hands and feet the second I was in range, my legs aching.

My bugs swept over the interior.  I knew the layout, so it was quick.  Dad was in his bed, bundled up in the covers.

Oh, okay, she did arrive at least slightly in time!

He was taking up only one side of the bed, leaving the space that mom had once occupied empty.

Aww.

It was like a punch in the gut, a reminder of how alone he was.  How alone I had left him.

Yeeah, the dude doesn’t have much left but his work. And he doesn’t even know why you left, or why you haven’t returned.

Though it is possible he has suspicions. He’s probably given a lot of thought to it, to all the little things you did before you left, and to how exactly you would’ve heard the Slaughterhouse Nine were in town.