She’d healed him frequently in the previous weeks, enough to know that he was remarkably alert in a body that refused to cooperate or carry out the tasks he wanted it to.

Much like the chimera components, though in a very different way.

Not so different from Bonesaw’s creations in that respect.

Hey, that’s my comparison, dammit!

She’d healed everything but his brain, had altered his digestive system and linked it to his circadian rhythms so he went to the bathroom on a strict schedule, to reduce the need for diapers.

Clever.

Other tune-ups she’d given him had been aimed at making him more comfortable, reducing stiffness and aches and pains.  It was the least she could do.

Yeah, even if you wouldn’t heal his brain, it sounds like he was lucky to have you.

Now she had to focus on his brain.  The needle had drawn ragged cuts through the arachnid layer, had injected droplets of acid into the frontal lobes.

Arachnid layer? Sounds like Skitter’s domain…

More damage, in addition to what Leviathan had inflicted with the head wound, and it was swiftly spreading.

Yeeeeah, acid to the brain? I think that might be bad.

Amy’s screams joined his.

“I’m doing you a favor, really!”  Bonesaw raised her voice to be heard over the screams.  “You’ll thank me!”

Oh, sure, she totally will.

Amy rushed forward, hauled on the metal leg to pull it from Mark’s nostril, pulled at the other legs to tear it from him and then hurled it away.  Lighter than it looked. 

I suppose it makes sense that the robots would need to be light, in order to walk on walls or move quickly across the floor.

“Now fix him or he’ll probably die or be a vegetable,” Bonesaw told her.  “Unless you decide you’re okay with that, in which case we’re making progress.”

So no matter what Amy does here, other than continue to pretend she can’t manipulate brains until Mark dies or becomes even more disabled than he already is, Bonesaw will see it as a victory.

Amy tried to shut out Bonesaw’s voice, straddled Mark’s lap and touched his face.

There are a lot of ways to touch someone’s face, but I can’t help but imagine Amy’s palm applied directly to the middle of the face.

“Please,” Amy said.  “Don’t.”

Bonesaw reached into her apron and retrieved a remote control.  She pointed it at Mark, where he sat on the couch.  A red dot appeared on his forehead.

Welp. Here we go.

“No!”

One of Bonesaw’s mechanical contraptions leaped across the room, its scalpel legs impaling the suede cushions on either side of Mark.

Time to cut him open?

One leg, tipped with a syringe, thrust into Mark’s right nostril.

Ahh. Let me guess, this is going to be deadly or at least highly detrimental to the brain if Amy doesn’t fix it?

He hollered incoherently, tried to pull away, only for two mechanical legs to clutch his head and hold him firm.

Yeah, this ain’t pleasant.

“I don’t want to break it,” Amy said, her voice hushed.

“Ahhh.  Well, that just makes me more excited to see how you react when you do.  See, all we have to do is get you to that point of peak stress.

This sounds a lot like something that has been suggested about the Manton effect before – that breaking it might require something similar to a second trigger event.

Your power will be stronger, and you’ll be able to push past that mental block.  Probably.”

While I’m on the topic of Manton, what would a Manton-unlocked Panacea even be capable of? Repairing objects? Manipulating their structure? Or is her power just so innately biological that it wouldn’t make a difference?

Maybe it would allow her to revive the dead. We’ve seen formerly-living material count as non-living for the purposes of the Manton effect (wood vs green wood). Maybe part of why Amy can’t revive people – besides the biological difficulty of getting everything working again at once – is that the Manton effect won’t let her manipulate the biology of corpses?

Bonesaw does seem to know what she’s talking about, but it’s still unclear whether or not she knows about the Dandelions. I don’t think she does, and as such, I’m taking the “accidents” part with a pinch of salt. The rest seems fairly reliable, though.

Amy stared.

“And then, before it can destroy us, before we can hurt ourselves with our own power, before that spark of potential burns out, it changes gears.  It figures out how to function with us.  It protects us from all the ways our power might hurt us, that we can anticipate, because there’s no point if it kills us.

Resulting in required secondary powers, like Lung and Burnscar being fireproof.

It connects with our emotional state at the time the powers came together, because that’s the context it builds everything else in.  It’s so amazingly complicated and beautiful.” 

It really is.

Bonesaw looked down at Amy.  “Your inability to affect brains?  It’s one of those protections.  A mental block.  I can help you break it.”

Is the Manton effect the same way?

And are you suggesting that Amy “can’t affect brains” because the power doesn’t want to risk her messing up her own brain using her power on herself?

Ohhh. She meant if Amy specifically was touching someone during their trigger event, using her power to sense the biological changes as they happen.

Twenty or thirty people she’s taken apart.  However many others she’s tortured to death.

She didn’t say “to death”, but I wouldn’t put it past her.

Bonesaw smiled, “And I know the secrets.  I know where powers come from.  I know how they work.  I know how your power works.

Okay, but does she actually? Has she figured out the involvement of the Dandelions and managed to take notes on them?

You have to understand, people like you and me?  Who got our powers in moments of critical stress?  The powers aren’t meant for us.  They’re accidents.  We’re accidents.  And I think you could see it if you were touching someone when they had their trigger event.”

Hmmm.

I’m not sure I buy that. With the way Hana’s trigger event was depicted as involving the death of a Dandelion, maybe, but Scrub’s trigger event made things seem premeditated by the Dandelions.

But Taylor wasn’t touching Scrub at the time. She was quite a distance away from him, in fact. So maybe touching does make a difference in what you see.

Or maybe it lets you remember, for some reason?

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to.  What you need to know is that the subjects of our power, the stuff it can work on, like people?  Like the fish lady in Asia?  The boy who can talk to computers?  Our powers weren’t created to work with those things.  With people or fish or computers.  It’s not intentional.  It happens because the powers connect to us in the moments we have our trigger events, decrypt our brains and search for something in the world that they can connect to, that loosely correlate with how the powers were originally supposed to work.

Okay, yeah, this makes sense. Bonesaw is suggesting that, for example, Bitch’s power was originally meant to empower something, and only after connecting to Bitch did it become a power to empower wolves.

In those one to eight seconds it takes our powers to work, our power goes into overdrive, it picks up all the necessary details about those things, like people or fish or computers, sometimes reaching across the whole world to do it.

Interesting. In Bitch’s case, it would “learn” things about wolves, and dogs because they’re closely related.

Then it starts condensing down until there’s a powerset, stripping away everything it doesn’t need to make that power work.”

But how do these things relate to Taylor? How did Taylor’s brain in the moment cause the power to latch onto “bugs”? Was it because of the uncomfortableness of the situation?

And how do you explain powers like Scrub’s? Did it latch on to “nothingness”? ”Destruction”?

Amy shivered.

“Who is he?”

“My dad.”

“Why not fix your dad?”

I doubt Bonesaw is going to have any patience for Amy’s reasons, really. I mean, she’ll probably hear her out, but she’s not going to respect them.

“My power doesn’t work on brains,” Amy lied.

Oooh, nice call, lying there. If she’d told her that she was afraid to use her power on brains, Bonesaw would probably be like “Oh come on, we can overcome that. Here, let’s try!”

“You’re wrong,” Bonesaw said, stepping closer.

Hm. Well, at least she didn’t take it as the lie it was.

“No.”

“Yes.  Your power can affect people’s brains.  You have to understand, I’ve taken twenty or thirty people apart to figure out how their power works so I can put them back together again the way I want them.

Oh yeah, I suppose that would make it easier for her to tell how powers work.

I’ve learned almost everything about powers.  I’ve induced stress of all kinds on people until they had a trigger event, while I had them on my table and wired to computers, so I could record all the details and study their brains and bodies as the powers took hold.”

Jeez.

Well, at least if she gets caught, her data might prove useful to the scientific community, amorally obtained or otherwise.

Maybe she could divulge some interesting factoids to us while we’re here?

“No,” Amy said.  Then, just to make it clear, she added, “No, it’s not going to happen.  I won’t join you.”

Bonesaw really doesn’t seem the type to take “no” for an answer…

“You will!  You have to!”

“No.”

…but unlike Shatterbird’s way of not taking “no” for an answer, she’s more inclined towards “Yes you will!” or “Why not, we can change that!”

“I have to do like Jack said.  He said I won’t be a true genius until I’ve figured out how to get inside people’s heads.”

Uh oh, back to this again. Are we going more literal with it, like I thought earlier?

“Maybe- Maybe you won’t be inside my head until you realize there’s no way I’m going to join the Slaughterhouse Nine.”

Heh, yeah. Not in the figurative way, at least.

Bonesaw frowned.  “Maybe.”

Hm, is she beginning to accept it? Or just thinking up a different approach?

Amy nodded.

“Or maybe I need to figure out your breaking point.  Your weak spot.  Like that man there.”  Bonesaw pointed at Mark.

…yeah, it was the latter.

“Cherish said you sleep here, and you’ve been around him for a while… so why haven’t you healed him?”

Oof. Sore subject.

She’s gotten enough of this from her family. Now she’s getting it from the one who wants to be family too.