I tore at the straps connecting my armor to my back as I ran upstairs, taking the steps two at a time, pulled the zipper down as I ran down the hallway.

Ah, okay, so she is taking the whole costume off. Fair enough.

Getting my arms free of the sleeves, I tied the inside-out arms around my waist.  It wasn’t nearly enough to seriously hide my costumed identity, but I wasn’t about to delay for another second.

It might’ve been easier to explain why she was in here as Skitter than as Taylor, but I think she wants to have her true face out, not have the barrier of secrecy that is Skitter’s mask in between her and Danny.

Almost none of which matters if he’s dead, of course.

I pulled open his bedroom door and hurried to his side, glass crunching under my feet.  I gingerly peeled away the layers of blankets that had draped over my dad as he was thrown from the bed.

That is bad news. To be thrown from the bed, he would have to be hit hard by the glass.

I don’t have high hopes for what Taylor is about to find under those shrouds, uh, I mean, blankets.

The moment I was sure it was over, I was on my feet, running around the back to the kitchen door.  I tore off my mask as I made my way there, and some bugs helped guide my hand to the latch as I reached through the broken window of the kitchen door and opened it.

It’s been a long time since we last saw Taylor enter here.

Also, she has clearly thrown away all concern for her secret now, going in to check on Danny while wearing the costume but not the mask.

Unless she stops to take off the costume and devise an explanation for why she’s all of a sudden in the house, this is probably going to end one of two ways: Either Danny’s about to find out – or have confirmed – that Taylor is Skitter, or Taylor is going to find her dad badly hurt or dead.

I’m somewhat leaning towards the latter as far as what I think is going to happen, but I can’t deny that I’m hoping for the former. Not just because I like Danny, either, but because I think there’s more interesting story potential in Danny finding out what sort of life Taylor has made for herself, while him dying would’ve been more interesting four or five Arcs back.

There was a cloud to the east, where the beaches were, reaching up to the cloud level, like some pale wall.

I pulled my knees up against my face and my hands up around the back of my head to shield myself where my mask didn’t have coverage.

Good thinking!

The alarm clock was in the midst of tipping over when Shatterbird used her power.

Oh cod.

Don’t tell me the timing of the tip just made it even more likely to hit Danny.

It was as though the glass broke in response to some invisible tidal wave, caught in the nonexistent ‘water’, carried along, shattering on impacts with surfaces, slashing anything that would cut, piercing deep into any surface soft enough.  I could feel it roll past me, south to north.

Huh, interesting. So a quick-thinking team of heroes with radio communication that happened to be spread out in the city could attempt to follow it to find where Shatterbird was when she released her “song”.

Loud.

I suppose it’s gotta be to travel as far as it does. Very loud, even though most people don’t hear it.

The sound seemed to come a second later, like the sonic boom following a jet.  I’d halfway expected a boom, but it sounded more like a heavy impact, as loud and powerful as a bullet the size of the moon striking the city, followed by the sound of trillions of glass shards simultaneously falling like rain across the cityscape.

…interesting. Is the wave of glassplosion faster than the sound that unleashes its power?

I needed more bugs to wake him, still more to write a message.  I began drawing them up to his bedroom.

I might not have noticed it if I hadn’t been listening through the bugs.

Oh boy. What is it? Shatterbird’s “song”?

I primarily heard it through the moths and beetles, a sound like someone running their finger along the rim of a wine glass, painful to hear, only it kept getting sharper and higher pitched until it was well beyond the limits of anything my human ears could hear.

Yeeeah, here we fucking go.

It was coming from the windows.

There were enough bugs in place to wake up my dad.  I could have disturbed him from his sleep… but would he react fast enough to any message I left?

Is she considering what I think she’s considering? That it might be kinder to let him go in his sleep?

Or would he sit up and put his head and upper body in harm’s way of the windows?

Okay, yeah, that’s a good point. He’d be making himself a bigger target and exposing vulnerable areas.

I couldn’t risk it.  Instead, I took the bugs near him and threw them against his alarm clock, a miniaturized version of what I had attempted to do with the temporary fence.

Shaking it off the table? Ahh, right, glass display cover.

It was thin, a tilted capital ‘L’ shape with a digital display.

Huh, that’s an interesting shape for a clock.

And then my dad’s house.  I dropped onto my hands and feet the second I was in range, my legs aching.

My bugs swept over the interior.  I knew the layout, so it was quick.  Dad was in his bed, bundled up in the covers.

Oh, okay, she did arrive at least slightly in time!

He was taking up only one side of the bed, leaving the space that mom had once occupied empty.

Aww.

It was like a punch in the gut, a reminder of how alone he was.  How alone I had left him.

Yeeah, the dude doesn’t have much left but his work. And he doesn’t even know why you left, or why you haven’t returned.

Though it is possible he has suspicions. He’s probably given a lot of thought to it, to all the little things you did before you left, and to how exactly you would’ve heard the Slaughterhouse Nine were in town.

I heard sirens nearby.  Not just from one vehicle, but several, all getting closer.

Anyone who’s in a car when Shatterbird hits is fucked.

So are they coming to assist after reports of Skitter’s rude awakenings and bug text?

I could sense my neighborhood, and the black widows that were still where I’d put them.  Every step brought more bugs into my focus.

Oh yeah, the black widows that wove the costume I just mentioned!

Ants beneath people’s lawns, earthworms in gardens, pillbugs and earwigs under stones and objects in garages and carports, cockroaches in the darkest corners of cabinets.  I woke the people I could and left them their warnings.

I think this makes for the second chapter of Worm to explicitly feature actual worms, after 7.2.

I knew the time had to have run out.  But I was so close.  I could sense the block my house was on, the neighbor’s house.

Taylor’s house is still there, right? Didn’t she at some point mention checking on it?

I get the sense that she’s about to arrive just in time to sense her house getting glassploded, possibly with Danny inside.

Danny’s death flag isn’t catching anywhere near as much wind as it was during Buzz and Extermination, but him potentially dying and Taylor having to deal with that is not an idea I’m willing to dismiss offhandedly.

I’m not sure whether the fact that he’s currently Taylor’s only real tie back to her civilian identity makes that more likely or less likely. It can be argued either way.

Then I couldn’t look anymore. I threw it aside, trusting my bugs to nudge it into a storm drain where it wouldn’t be found.  The time wasn’t exact; I couldn’t be sure exactly how much time had passed since Jack had told us about Shatterbird’s attack.

Fair.

Bit of a waste of a useful phone, though – not because of cost but because she might still need one – but I can’t blame her for wanting the clock out of her arm’s reach.

…oh wait, right. It’s not about emotions, it’s that the phone is going to explode along with everything else.

I couldn’t say if Shatterbird’s clock was a few minutes fast or a few minutes late.  There was no point on dwelling on the final minutes, and keeping my cell phone on me was dangerous.

Yeah, that.

That, and I wasn’t sure I could bear to watch the clock hit zero.

This is the part I was thinking of. Well, not just watching the clock hit zero, but nervously watching the clock in those last few minutes rather than focusing on warning people and getting to shelter herself.

Oh yeah, by the way, Taylor, you may want to do that. Spidersilk costume or not.

Judging by how far down the page I’m getting, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that this chapter ends right when the figurative fireworks go off, or at most a minute later.

The window of opportunity for getting to the house and getting my costume off and getting dad somewhere safe was long gone.

You’d probably be better off going to him in costume, honestly.

But I’m guessing there’s no time for that either.

Even the window for doing all of that without taking the time to get my costume off was long past.  I was too far away.

Yeah.

That left only one option.  Could I save him with my power the same way I’d been trying to do with everyone else that fell in my range?

Better hope the range boost is big enough. How far away is he?

I still needed to get closer, fast.

Too far away for now, at least.

I held my phone in one hand, sneaking glances as I made my way from one block to the next.  The six-minute mark came all too fast.  The clock on my cell phone ticked to 12:36.  Four minutes left.  Three.