“I do.  Listen, I’ve got a cure-”

“Who the fuck are you!?”  Rachel shouted.

Time for some reintroductions, perhaps?

Or maybe you could use the cure right now.

I shut my mouth and turned to face her.

I was secretly glad the dogs hadn’t turned on her, as that probably would have meant the death of a teammate, but I was getting a firsthand look at what our enemies had to deal with.

I am not surprised that something to this effect is happening. A situation with Rachel and the doggos on the other side has been a pretty obvious eventuality for a while. The question was mostly just how it would happen and when.

The dogs were big and vicious enough that if they attacked, there wasn’t a whole lot I could have done.  Heck, Tattletale and I together couldn’t have managed much of a defense against one of the creatures, let alone three.

Yeeah, the doggos are really not something you mess with.

So hey, if Rachel has all her doggos here, why was Bentley alone earlier? Was Rachel close by? Or maybe she had to round them up one by one?

“We’re teammates,” I told her.  “I was just fighting the Nine, I’ve got a cure for this thing.”

I’m not sure people are gonna take kindly to the idea of letting another thing get used in the water if they’re not sure you’re really on their side.

“Or you’re going to kill me the second I let my guard down.”

I’d been conned by the Nine.  Tricked into letting them get access to certain information.  Bitch wouldn’t have fallen for that, but that came with the caveat that she was that much harder for us to reassure.

To be fair, she’s distrustful even on the good days.

“I can put my weapons away.  Or give them to you.”

That means so little in this world, Taylor, when the person you’re talking to doesn’t know what you might be able to do without your weapons.

Tattletale first.  She could help me find Siberian and figure out how to distribute the antidote.

Let’s hope her power does counteract the miasma. That’d make this a lot easier.

I tracked the trails of extermination smoke as I flew.  I was faster than they were, but they were elusive, staying out of sight and moving through awkward positions.  I spotted one mechanical spider moving through a trash-littered alleyway and changed my route to close in on another trail.

One down, eleven to go, and there’s a good chance it’s none of them.

My second confirmation of a mechanical spider left me with the feeling that I’d made the wrong call.

But it was too late to turn back.  It would be faster to go help Tattletale and get her assistance than to turn around and fumble along on my own.

She’d be able to help with the trails too, if you get her quickly.

They were traveling on foot, I hoped, and they still had to find Cherish.  She was bound to be in a remote spot, and they didn’t have many clues to work with.  It would take time.

True. Though when they get really close, she’ll be able to alert them to that fact with her power, so they don’t have to check inside each building.

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.