Mannequin.

He’d repaired himself this fast?  Did he have spare parts lying around?

I mean, he expects to get into fights. It’s only reasonably to keep spares around if you can make them.

But if all his parts contain pieces of his old regular body, there’s a limited stock of true Mannequin pieces.

Anyway, it’s probably a good sign that Taylor is thinking about this rather than “ow ow my neck”.

I reached up and tried to wind my arm, wrist and fingers around the chain, to alleviate the pressure on my throat, and to give me a grip in case he decided to let go.

I think there’s a good chance he will. Not only is that the obvious course of action, but dropping Skitter from a height isn’t too different from his previous M.O. of launching her into stuff.

Mannequin hauled himself to his feet and the chain that stretched from his arm to the rooftop and back down to me made me bounce with every small movement.  He advanced on Amy, who backed away.

Ah, right. Testing her is another thing on his agenda. Bitch, too – speaking of which, are Bitch and Grue still watching?

I struck behind me, hoping to catch my attacker, but there was nobody there.

I realized what was happening too late, when my feet were hauled off the ground.

…

Hmm. Is this Mannequin using his chains to put his hand away from the body Taylor would otherwise have struck?

In the span of a second, I soared up six or seven stories, the counterweight to a nine-foot tall man in featureless white armor who plunged downward to land in a heap on the ground.

Hiya!

I doubt there’s much Panacea can do against Mannequin so long as his casing stays intact.

Taylor mentions being “counterweight”. Does that mean Mannequin wrapped the chain over some form of construction beam up there?

Also, if I’m not mistaken with my calculations, Mannequin just pulled Taylor with a force of around 1500 newtons by her neck, while choking her. That kind of lifting probably ought to be deadlier than the dropping from that height. There’s a good chance Panacea will be very necessary after this.

“More burdens, more pressures and demands,” she said, her voice quiet.

Yeeah, sorry. Nobody likes this except the Slaughterhouse Nine.

“Yeah.  That’s the way things play out.  But we can help to protect you in exchange.  You watch our back, we watch yours.”

This really does sound like it’s heading towards her staying at the Hive.

I am so in favor of that.

“I don’t know if my conscience can handle taking that final step over to the dark side.  Or if I can handle being in Tattletale’s company.”

Well, you’re in luck!

“We’re operating as two distinct groups.  Tattletale’s with Regent and most of the Travelers.  It’s me, Grue, Imp, Genesis and Bitch here in the north end of town.  Absolute-”

Absolute(ly) what? Absolute separation from Tattletale? Absolutely fine?

I didn’t finish my sentence.  Something constricted around my throat, fingertips digging into the windpipe, and the air ceased to flow.

What.

Bitch, is that you?

I didn’t have a reply to that.  I couldn’t pry, and I couldn’t elaborate.

Yeah, seems wise. She may be more open than usual, but I doubt she’d appreciate being asked about the Glory Girl situation.

“So you’re the supposedly good person who was pretending to be a crook, and I’m the monster who was pretending to be a hero, but when the dust settled, we both wound up being villains.  Funny how that works.”

Actually, I’m pretty sure the “monster who was pretending to be a hero” would be Shadow Stalker. To be fair, though, she did start out as a villain and wasn’t pretending very hard.

Meanwhile, Madcap/Assault seems to actually have become a hero, even if he was just pretending to begin with.

“Maybe because doing the right thing is hard,” I offered.

Amen to that.

She shrugged.

“But you can do the right thing.  We need your help.  I don’t know your circumstances for leaving home.  I won’t pry.  But I think you’re one of the few people who can stop Crawler, maybe even Siberian too.

Hmm. I do suppose it makes sense that the way to stop someone with freaky biology, like Crawler, is to use someone who can manipulate biology. And if Siberian can’t be beaten from the outside, beat her from inside.

The main problem is that Panacea’s got a Striker power. In direct combat, it’s going to be easy for Siberian to avoid getting Struck by an otherwise mundanely moving Panacea. Though Siberian would have to avoid tactics like she used on Bitch, locking the victim in place with her immobility.

But the question of course becomes “would Siberian know about Panacea’s power?” …I suppose that’s likely considering Panacea is a candidate, and especially considering she’s Bonesaw’s candidate. Bonesaw would probably talk about her candidate to the others, especially Siberian.

We need you around in case they start winning and we wind up with injuries or death, and we need you in case we start winning, and they decide to use that plague out of sheer spite.”

Ah, yeah, that’s another good point. Under these circumstances it would absolutely be good to have a healer on board.

…man, I hope this results in Panacea staying at the Hive.

It caught me off guard, hearing it, but I managed to get my mental bearings.  “You didn’t ask for your powers.  I’m sure even doctors get worn out, they hate their job, they have bad weeks.  Except doctors have fellow staff members, they have friends and everything to go back to, and they’re adults.  You’re still a teenager.  You started doing what you were doing at a time when most people didn’t.

That’s it. Give me that “bad at picking the right thing to say” badge, Taylor.

You didn’t have the maturity and the defenses against the pain you were seeing that doctors pick up over the course of the first twenty-five years of their lives.”

I’m sure people regularly underestimate how much mental pressure doctors deal with on a daily basis.

She shook her head.  “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t make me feel better, I deserve to wallow in misery”?

“Don’t make me out to be a good person.  Bonesaw has a better idea of who I am than you do.  Maybe I wouldn’t have thought so, three days ago, when she first met me, but then I fucked up.  I proved her right.  Every fear I had about being like my dad came true.”

Ah, yes, the final piece – the Glory Girl situation.

She laughed briefly, and it was a dark utterance with no humor in it.  “No?”

“Everyone knows how you visit hospitals.  How many people have you helped over the past three years?

Uh-oh. Sensitive topic.

How many lives have you saved, how many people have you rescued from a lifetime of misery?”

Taylor has a point, but she should try turning her own logic towards herself. Yes, she failed to save four people when Mannequin attacked. But she did save a lot of other lives. Maybe if she thought to ask herself this question, she could start looking at her own accomplishments positively.

“I hated it,” she said.  “It was such a burden.  So many long hours spent around sick people, and I got numb to it, I stopped caring.  Do you know how many hours I’ve spent awake at night, wishing my powers would just go away, or that some circumstance would come up where I’d make some excusable mistake where they would eventually forgive me, but where I couldn’t visit the hospitals anymore?”

This is something Amy has needed to admit to someone for so long. She did, once before, but she still needed it.

And it’s one thing to open up to Gallant. He was the kind of guy who just forces you to open up by looking past your defenses in the first place. Now she’s opening up to Skitter, a villain who doesn’t have that quality and whom Amy hated up until a minute or two ago.

Maybe it does make it easier that she’s already abandoned that life, but still.