Also, something that just occurred to me: How is Imp taking being forgotten by those closest to her without it being her power’s doing?

Though I suppose she wouldn’t know they were those closest to her.

The topography of the city had impacted where the miasma was spreading.  As far as I could tell, it wasn’t really advancing into the north end of the city.

Huh, neat. I suppose that also contributed to Cherish getting left out.

…and that way, it’d act as another hint for the Nine to find her by.

Bakuda’s bombing campaign and the militarization of the ABB had predominantly focused on the Docks.  Leviathan had arrived in the Docks, and his destruction of the city’s water infrastructure and power had hit that part of the city hardest.  I wondered if this would be the first real instance where the Docks weren’t hit as hard by the ongoing series of disasters and attacks in Brockton Bay.

Let’s not forget Purity’s rampage, and the war of the Docks between Coil and Kaiser following the ABB’s defeat.

Being Docks is suffering.

I descended back to a safer distance, where falling wouldn’t be terminal, and tried to plan.

Finding Tattletale was number one.  With her assistance, everything else would be easier.

Sure, that sounds about right.

As much as I wanted to make Grue my second priority, I knew that there were other things that took precedence.  Siberian was a big one.

Hmm. So still going after the Nine, then.

Finding a way to distribute the cure was another.  Once I started, it would set up a chain reaction, but I had to decide how to start it off.

Hey, do you reckon your bugs can pick up water droplets and fly with them? Maybe you could use that to make it spread from more places.

But if I was wrong, if I went to the harbor to try to get ahead of them and Jack didn’t go that way, then my friends would suffer for it.

Also: you’d risk getting too close to Cherish yourself.

Brian had been through enough, and while Lisa had seemed to deal okay after she’d been scarred, I was willing to bet she valued her mind more than she valued her face.

Fuck yes she does.

I headed downtown.

Let’s go reunite!

No matter which way I chose to go, I’d have that awful feeling of regret in my chest.  I tried to quiet it by telling myself that with Tattletale and the others, I’d actually be able to do something against the Nine.  A gun and knife didn’t cut it, no matter how scattered or few in number they were.

And neither do bugs.

But will you, though? Will you be able to do something against them, or will they be gone before you can, leaving you with a bittersweet victory?

I couldn’t quite manage to convince myself.

As it didn’t cost me anything significant in terms of forward momentum, I let Atlas carry me higher.  I was getting more comfortable flying him, and there was little difference in being a hundred and fifty feet above the ground and being five hundred stories up.

She says that like she’s been in a 500-story building.

To be fair, those may be more common in the Wormverse thanks to Tinkers, but I doubt there are any in Brockton Bay specifically. We’d have heard of it as a landmark by now.

I wanted to assess the situation.  Was my dad one of the people who was depending on this cure?

Oh yeah, that’s quite possible.

I wanted to head back downtown, to help my teammates and friends, but I couldn’t shake the nagging doubt in the back of my mind.

I really do doubt that Jack would bother with trying to free Cherish, but it’s certainly a possibility.

The difference between Jack and Bonesaw going downtown and their going to the coastline was that the former was almost kind, taking care of a teammate.  The latter case allowed them to inflict some terrible torture on an ex-teammate of theirs.

Oh, right. That’s a thing too.

I suppose that increases the chances of them going to the coast compared to Siberian somewhat, but I also think Jack values Siberian as a useful teammate much more than he cares about torturing Cherish.

It was the most inconvenient possibility, but my gut told me they’d go after Cherish.  If I had to put numbers on it, I’d have said there was a sixty percent chance they’d go that route, a thirty-five percent chance they’d headed downtown.

Do you have something for the five percent, or are you just leaving that as “miscellaneous”?

And there was always the possibility I was wrong, that they had something else in mind, so I was leaving room for that extra five percent.

Yep. I’m still thinking that it should be larger, but I appreciate that she does leave the wiggle room.

If I headed away from the downtown area, toward the water, I could put myself in a position to track down Cherish, or to get to another point where the satellite phone would work and make a call to Coil.  If they were checking the harbor for Cherish, going by what she’d revealed on the phone, then I could get there first.

I suppose that’s worth a shot.

Lay a trap, or get in position to shoot them again.  I figured out how to remove the magazine from the gun and checked the number of rounds remaining.  Six.

Trap? You’re in the wrong Arc to be using that word!

The problem was that the whole reason I’d let Panacea keep using her power on me instead of giving chase to Jack was that I was supposed to cure the others.  I could kill and replace the parasites that were carrying the prions.  The sooner I did it, the less damage they’d do in the meantime.

Also: Don’t die. That might be bad for this process, causing you to take a lot of people with you.

Some of the damage would be permanent, and the potential victims included Brian and Lisa.

It’s kinda neat that the story doesn’t pretend all the Undersiders are on the same level of friendship with each other aside from stuff like the issues between Taylor and Rachel. It’s pretty blatant that Taylor doesn’t care about Alec and Aisha quite as much as she does about Brian and Lisa.

It hadn’t even crossed my mind while I was under the miasma’s influence, but I also had to wonder whether Regent would have maintained his control over Shatterbird.

Fuck.

At least I feel like if this was going to be an issue, we’d get it pointed out by seeing it in action, not by Taylor’s idle musings.

I’m sure he’s going to lose control at some point, but probably not right now.

What’s a bigger problem is what he’d use her for while under the miasma’s effect.

The second possibility was that they’d gone after Cherish.  My conversation with Coil had clued them in.

You’re not thinking city limits are an option?

If it were to be one of these two options, my money would definitely be on Siberian.

I checked my phone.  No service.

Damn the Director.  Damn her for making this so hard, and for complicating matters.

Ohhh.

Right.

Some of you were probably quietly screaming when I was speculating on Jack jamming the signal, weren’t you. I forgot Piggot said she was doing it.

We’d been playing by Jack’s rules, more or less, and she’d given him an excuse to pull out all the stops.

…at least I think she did? But it seems Taylor was talking more about the miasma being her fault.

He probably would have anyways, but she gave him an excuse.

Piggot and Jack are kind of similar on that front. Piggot would be inclined to use such excuses herself.

I continued my search for the pair, but my tentative explorations of the trails of extermination-mist made a sweeping search all but hopeless.

This makes a lot of sense as a way to open this chapter. It wouldn’t be like Taylor to just immediately go, “welp, guess they’re gone”, even if the finality of 14.10′s ending line did imply she wasn’t going to hold on to the hope of finding them that strongly.

It felt like I was facing a series of decisions where every answer had some merit, but picking the wrong one would spell disaster.

Them delicious tough decisions.

I’d had to make the call between staying at the school in case Jack and Bonesaw were preparing a trap for Amy and Glory Girl, or leaving in case they’d made a run for it.  I’d left, and I’d been lucky enough to be right.

Unfortunately now there’s no way of telling which way they actually went.

Fuck, can you even be sure they did go? I mean, like I said last time, you’re not supposed to have the ball under one of the shells at all. I meant that they may have dropped the gas to make Taylor not consider the one path they did take, but who’s to say they took one at all?

I don’t think they did stay behind, but it’s a genuine option Taylor is not considering here.

Except the Nine were now covering their tracks with a dozen decoys, mechanical spiders leaving trails of bug-killing smoke, leaving me to guess which direction they’d gone.

Yeah, nice recap.

Two solid possibilities dwelled with me.

The first was that they’d headed back downtown to rendezvous with Siberian.  If I was drawing the right conclusions from what I’d overheard, Bonesaw had drawn together a cocoon for Siberian similar to the one that Amy had created for Glory Girl.

Yeah, seems like it. I do suppose they might go pick Siberian up.

They could be recovering her real body, maybe doing something to recover Mannequin or Crawler.

To do that they’d probably need to head back into the Bakuda Band. That’s probably not at all safe, even now, without the Monochrome going alone or holding the others.