“Bastard!” I said.  He whipped his head around to look at me.

Bitch doesn’t like it when Skitter orders her doggos around, but this is kind of a special circumstance.

Here’s hoping that Bitch trained him well.

Yeeeeah… I’m not sure.

She hasn’t had him all that long, for one thing.

“Get your master!  Go!  Fetch!” I pointed at Bitch.

Bastard turned, started forward, and then stopped.

“Uh. Should I be taking orders from her?”

“Go!  Fetch, fetch!”

He bolted.  Mannequin continued walking slowly towards us.  He didn’t move as Bastard approached and picked Bitch up by the back of her pants.

“Yeah, that’s fine, you can have her.”

It would be so easy for him to simply shoot Bastard and slow him down long enough for the gas to take effect.  He didn’t.

I guess he doesn’t particularly care about the dogs.

Gas.  Colorless, scentless, swift to spread and it incapacitated in seconds.

…oh yeah, that makes a little more sense.

If my bugs were any indication, it also killed its victims shortly after.

To be fair, their bodies are small, so they might not be able to handle as much as bigger victims? I guess? But yeah, not worth risking that.

Also this explains the lack of blood and the access to people who shouldn’t be in his reach. It’s coming together now.

I looked around, hoping and praying for some sort of outside assistance.  Nothing.

Sorry, you haven’t been that lucky since Gestation. Back then the deus ex machina was excusable as the story was still in the setup phase. Right now, not so much.

It was down to me, Grue, Sirius and Bastard.

Hm. Maybe Bastard could have some sort of added benefits from being a wolf instead of a dog, to reinforce the idea that it’s what her power is really meant for?

Probably not enough to take down Mannequin on his own, but enough to help.

Bastard looked unnerved.  His master and alpha were out of action.  He took a step forward, then back.  He was unnerved by Mannequin, and I suspected he could smell the gas.

Aw, poor doggo.

She turned to look over her shoulder, and Bentley took some cue from that, because he turned slightly.  Maybe that helped, because she hauled him into a hard left turn, wheeling around.

Nice, she’s actually listening.

Whatever it was that Mannequin was doing, it spread fast, knocking my bugs out of the air and reaching out past Bitch and Bentley before they realized the threat and started running away from him.

Though perhaps a little too late?

“Get back!” I shouted.

Bitch urged Bentley into a run.  They made it four steps before Bentley collapsed.

Well, fuck.

Tumbling to the ground, Bitch landed and couldn’t sustain her own weight with her injured leg.  She landed flat on her stomach, and then began making retching sounds as she gasped for air and continued to crawl forward.

Air… is he somehow removing the air around the possibly fake Mannequin (the mouth might just be an addition he decided to make to his new head), causing the bugs, Bentley and Bitch to suffocate?

I do suppose managing the air in and around his casing falls under the coverage of a biosphere specialty.

Mannequin’s mouth continued jittering up and down, and he took a step closer to us, his hands upturned at his sides.

Okay, yeah, I think this is real.

I’m honestly surprised he’d add the mouth. Isn’t he interested in looking inhuman, that being part of why he didn’t have facial features?

It seems like he might’ve added it specifically so he could “laugh” in Skitter’s face like this.

Very little of the silk I’d laid on him was still intact.  My bugs settled on him, and began to draw out more silk, binding him.

Is “he” not doing anything about that?

Though any of the silk being on him at all does muddle it a little further. I don’t know, guys, I just… don’t trust this.

He turned our way, and his mouth opened like a ventriloquist dummy or a christmas nutcracker.  It jiggled up and down, silently, mocking.  Laughter without sound.

…mouth.

What mouth.

“Fucker!” Bitch screamed.  Then she whistled, with a volume and pitch that could make crowds stop in their tracks.  Bentley charged.

Welp, time to see what happens when you run into this trap.

The bugs I had on Mannequin began to die.

Probably not a good sign.

That took me a precious second to process.  “Bitch!  It’s a trap!”

And there we have it!

And hey, if you don’t count the Interlude, I was right about how long it would take before a trap came into play, too! “Perhaps we’ll see that take shape within the next two chapters,” I said, at the end of 13.1. I’m going to count that as a win.

“There!” I called out to my team.  We changed direction and charged toward the street in question.  We stopped when he came into our view.

Oh, right, she found him via the bugs. That implies that he wanted to be found.

Mannequin stood in the center of the road, his back to us.  Half a dozen of my people were lying on the road, unconscious or dead.  I couldn’t see any blood.

Hmmm.

Hmmmmmmm.

I don’t trust this.

There were a couple more people in nearby buildings that had fallen as well.  How had he reached them?  Why hadn’t Genesis and Sierra been able to get everyone out?

Yeah, how and why indeed.

I don’t think this is real. I’m not sure how he pulled this off, but I think he’s staged the whole thing (although the corpses might be real?) and that’s not actually him standing there.

A quiet horror ran through me like ice water.

Genesis, too, was on the road, in the process of dissolving.  She’d taken on the form of something like a stegosaurus crossed with a scorpion, all brawn and armor plating, with a long, prehensile, wickedly spiked tail.  He’d beaten her.

…okay fair enough, that’s a little harder to fake than most of the other stuff. The dissolving, I mean.

I valued my ability to come up with answers, but my mind was empty.  I wasn’t sure how I’d deal, and the worst part of it was that it wasn’t me that was necessarily going to pay the price.

And that’s exactly why he’s taking this approach instead of just killing you.

If he really is taking this approach, anyway.

As we entered my territory, I felt strangely composed for the anxieties that tore through me, a little detached from things.

That’s a common coping mechanism for intense situations. I’m sure the emotions will wash over you again once it’s done.

That doesn’t mean she doesn’t care. Quite the opposite, in fact.

My bugs swept through the territory, and I did my best to recall where tripwires had been set and figure out which had been broken.  I checked on my people, using bugs to make sure they were standing and that they were somewhere safe.

Nice.

Could I sweep through my territory using squadrons of flies with dragline silk stretched out between them, to the point that he couldn’t slip past them?  It would take time to set up.

Ooh, that sounds like a really cool way to catch him!

No.  There was no need.  As I approached the heart of my territory, near my barracks, I found him, standing in the middle of the road.

Ah, hi there.

Sierra was the first and only contact I’d entered into the phone beyond the ones Coil had put in prior to giving them to us.  I contacted her next.

Charlotte’s not on the list?

“Sierra here, boss.”

“Clear people out of the area, and contact everyone you gave a phone to, telling them to hide and take cover.  Mannequin’s coming back to make trouble.”

I suppose they decided Sierra and Charlotte should just have one phone, since there was a limited supply?

“Got it.”

I hung up.  With the jostling movement of the dog’s running, I didn’t trust my ability to put the phone away in the compartment, so I held it in one clenched fist.

Yeah… I haven’t ridden a giant dog, but I have ridden a horse, and a gallop really doesn’t make for ideal conditions to start putting something like that away properly.

During the six or seven minutes it took us to cross from Ballistic’s territory to my own, my teeth were clenched so hard I thought I’d break something, my neck and shoulders so tense they felt more like stone than flesh.

Wait.

What?

Didn’t she say her territory was the last place they saw Mannequin, implying they’d already chased him out of it once offscreen (because the last place we saw Mannequin was in Ballistic’s territory)… and then Mannequin went back in the direction he came from, with the Undersiders on his trail, and now they think he’s going for the territory again? Also, only now does Skitter warn Sierra and Genesis?

It sounds like everyone’s running in circles.

I get the feeling something’s not right here and I suspect it had to do with Skitter’s territory being the “last place they saw Mannequin”.

Maybe it’s that it’s in the direction Skitter last sensed Mannequin going? That would make so much more sense.

That was without factoring in any additional weapons he had.

One arm around Grue’s waist, I drew my phone from my utility compartment and dialed Genesis from my contact list.

Hey, at least this time she’s not the one driving.

“Genesis here.  What?”

“Mannequin en route to my territory for some kind of revenge against me for our last fight.  How fast can you pull a body together?”

A minute or so, judging by last time?

“Two minutes.”

Yeah, that’s fair.

“He’ll be there in five.  Clear people out of the way, and put together a form that can take a beating and hamper him.”

“On it.”

Sounds like a plan.