He stepped back, and I realized his foot had been on Grue’s chest.

I don’t blame Taylor for having a hard time keeping track of Mannequin’s various appendages.

I watched as Grue stood and then began limping toward me.  Bastard growled and tugged on the chain I held.

Somehow I feel like Bastard is going to be important to whatever solution this situation has? I’m not sure how, though.

I was in the process of reaching out for Grue to help steady him when I saw Mannequin move.  He closed his mouth, raised one hand, and I could see a hole appear in the base of his palm.  The barrel of a gun.

Here we go again!

Wait. Is he threatening to do it himself, implying “come on, like I wouldn’t survive that better than you”?

“No!” the word was as much a grunt as anything else as it came from my throat, too choked for me to say anything normal.  I grabbed for Grue as I’d planned and I shoved him to the ground.

Good move if he’s actually doing it.

Hmm… What if Bastard being a wolf means Bitch’s power makes him more bulletproof than the other doggos?

But Grue?  Grue had surrounded himself in a thick cloud of darkness, to the point that I couldn’t make out his arms and legs in the midst of it.  From what I could gather, he was getting some benefit from it, and was pushing the gas away.  How long could he sustain that, though?

Hmm.

We haven’t really seen any limit to how much dark gas he can produce, but there might be a time limit on how long he can match the pressure from Mannequin’s gas, as Mannequin continues to produce more of it. However, Mannequin’s gas is affected normally by fluid dynamics, while Grue can control his darkness.

Was the darkness filtering it out, or was he holding his breath, slowly suffocating?

…right, that would be bad too.

“Mannequin,” I said, sounding a million times more calm than I felt.  “You’re going to back off and you’re going to let him go.”

Let’s see if Taylor can bluff convincingly and make him think she’s going to throw a match into his cloud. (At least I think that’s where this is going.)

Although, knowing the cloud is small, she actually might do it.

He cocked his head to one side.

“I am?”

I raised the matchbook and, after checking again that my bugs were gas-free, lit it.  A handful of my bugs carried it into the air.

I said “throw”, but this possibility did occur to me a little bit back. I just forgot to acknowledge it.

This is basically Taylor’s way of “throwing”, anyway.

Mannequin looked at me, and his mouth was open, engaged in that same shuddering up and down movement as before.

Shake it!

I raised one hand to the fabric that covered my nose and mouth and backed away. 

Probably a good call.

Were Bitch and Sirius close enough to be getting gassed too?  I could feel bugs crawling on them.  Both were breathing, though Bitch’s breaths were rapid and hoarse. 

The bugs remaining alive is a good sign too.

My bugs were alive, as well, which meant they were safe where they were.

Yes, I already said that.

A quick test with my bugs told me the cloud around Mannequin was small, with a radius of about four or five feet.

I guess he already spent most of his built-up gas for the initial cloud that Bitch ran into.

There was no gas around me, either.  The bugs on me weren’t suffering, and they’d be the first to die or feel symptoms.

Smaller bodies, more susceptible. Makes sense to me.

I really hoped I wouldn’t have to use them.

I give it a 92+% chance she’ll have to use them.

Entering the alley, I swept through the area with my bugs, directing them to extend outward with lines of silk between them.  They were gathered close enough to one another that Mannequin wouldn’t be able to avoid them.

Nice.

I found Mannequin and the black smudge of Grue’s form at the opposite end of the alley.

Having one’s body described as a “smudge” sounds somewhat concerning, even if it’s because he literally makes a cloud of darkness around himself.

Sirius and Bitch were a distance away, both sprawled at the base of a building, covered in rubble.  I wondered how this scenario had unfolded.

Hm. Maybe Mannequin managed to get a hit in on Sirius and control was lost, causing him to tumble into the wall. Perhaps Grue managed to jump off just in time.

How had Mannequin hit them that hard?  Grue had reached the roof, the last I saw, and I’d missed what came next because I hadn’t wanted to lose precious bugs from my swarm by getting them gassed.

I suppose the alley walls make it difficult for Mannequin to really swing his chain arm.

Whatever had occurred, Mannequin had turned the tables and brought them back to the ground, hard.

Oof.

(When I first read this sentence, I briefly thought he’d brought the tables back to the ground.)

A spear of darkness soared towards the sky.  When it lost momentum, it began billowing outward and drifting slightly with the wind. A signal.

A dark beacon!

What’s up, Grue? Did Mannequin catch up?

Did Timmy fall down a well?

If so, good. Timmy is responsible for all the deaths in Extermination, after all. He can stay down there for a while.

“Come on, Bastard!” I ordered.  I bolted for Brian’s location.  I crossed the street, glancing at the fallen Bentley, and I headed toward an alley.

RIP Bentley.

My bugs crossed paths with me, and the items made their way into my hands.  A cheap plastic lighter and a packet of matches.

Got it in one!

Well, not the matches, but they follow the same basic idea.

I stashed the matches between my belt and my hip and slid the lighter into a small pocket in my utility compartment.

The matches are probably more useful than the lighter, since they can be lit and then thrown. To do the same with the lighter, she’d probably need to bind the button somehow. (I suppose she could do that with spider silk, but the silk doesn’t handle heat very well. Which is one of several reasons Taylor should avoid getting into a fight with Sundancer.)

Could I even take advantage of that?  The amount of gas he seemed to be putting out would make for a devastating explosion.  It could potentially hurt him, but I couldn’t say if the shockwave or the blast itself would kill me or any nearby innocents.

You’ll also need a way to set it off from a safe distance while he’s in a gas-loaded position, or a way to trick him into doing it for you.

If there was enough gas, it could even damage or destroy nearby buildings.  Some of the structures around here weren’t exactly sound.

And yeah, true. The collateral damage could be devastating.

If nothing else, it gave me a clue about what to watch for.  It also gave me a last-ditch weapon if things really went south.

I guess that’s a fair way to look at it.

I ordered my bugs into the building I’d designated as my people’s barracks and collected some small items with silk and clouds of bugs working in unison.

Oh, what are you doing now? Looking for lighters or things you can fashion into one?

The gas.  If the gas was coming from his mouth, and he was being careful in how he moved, that meant there was something about the gas.  I even had an idea about what it was.

Hm, perhaps moving quickly in the gas might cause it to harm him somehow?

Maybe he hadn’t wanted to blow himself up.

Yeah, I was honestly still more on that train.

He’d been invested in terraforming, once upon a time.  Making inhospitable environments hospitable.  Chances were he was loaded down with custom-made organisms that were primed to generate the gas he was using, maybe even storing it in a compressed form.

Ohh, yeah, that makes sense. Now how do you use that to stop him?

Given his tinker abilities, they could be advanced enough to account for the sheer volume of the gas.  It could even be how his guns operated: with compressed, combustible gas used to fire the shot.

Sounds legit.

There was no way to say for sure, but my gut told me I was right or I was pretty close to the mark.

Taylor is usually right when it comes with an explanation like this, though that’s more of a narrative thing than an in-universe gut feeling.

His actions, both the obvious and minor ones, make a complete, logical sense if I assumed he was spewing out massive volumes of flammable gas.

Yay!

And yeah, it also answers one question Taylor hasn’t asked: Why does he have a mouth now in the first place?

Okay.  So Mannequin was shooting now, when he hadn’t been before.

There goes the conserving bullets hypothesis.

Were there other clues?  What had changed after he’d closed his mouth?

Less gas?

He’d started running, for one thing.

…hm. Is he running from something, too?

Or maybe he’s running because he’s out of gas and therefore less protected?

So he hadn’t been running, he hadn’t been shooting…  What had been holding him back?  It could have been him trying to look intimidating, but he could have achieved the same ends by shooting Bastard and making me watch Bitch die.

Another explanation re: not shooting might be that the gas could ignite.

He could have been just as scary running towards us as fast as he’d sprinted from the ambush site to my territory.

Probably more scary, honestly.