I really hoped I wouldn’t have to use them.

I give it a 92+% chance she’ll have to use them.

Entering the alley, I swept through the area with my bugs, directing them to extend outward with lines of silk between them.  They were gathered close enough to one another that Mannequin wouldn’t be able to avoid them.

Nice.

I found Mannequin and the black smudge of Grue’s form at the opposite end of the alley.

Having one’s body described as a “smudge” sounds somewhat concerning, even if it’s because he literally makes a cloud of darkness around himself.

Sirius and Bitch were a distance away, both sprawled at the base of a building, covered in rubble.  I wondered how this scenario had unfolded.

Hm. Maybe Mannequin managed to get a hit in on Sirius and control was lost, causing him to tumble into the wall. Perhaps Grue managed to jump off just in time.

How had Mannequin hit them that hard?  Grue had reached the roof, the last I saw, and I’d missed what came next because I hadn’t wanted to lose precious bugs from my swarm by getting them gassed.

I suppose the alley walls make it difficult for Mannequin to really swing his chain arm.

Whatever had occurred, Mannequin had turned the tables and brought them back to the ground, hard.

Oof.

(When I first read this sentence, I briefly thought he’d brought the tables back to the ground.)

A spear of darkness soared towards the sky.  When it lost momentum, it began billowing outward and drifting slightly with the wind. A signal.

A dark beacon!

What’s up, Grue? Did Mannequin catch up?

Did Timmy fall down a well?

If so, good. Timmy is responsible for all the deaths in Extermination, after all. He can stay down there for a while.

“Come on, Bastard!” I ordered.  I bolted for Brian’s location.  I crossed the street, glancing at the fallen Bentley, and I headed toward an alley.

RIP Bentley.

My bugs crossed paths with me, and the items made their way into my hands.  A cheap plastic lighter and a packet of matches.

Got it in one!

Well, not the matches, but they follow the same basic idea.

I stashed the matches between my belt and my hip and slid the lighter into a small pocket in my utility compartment.

The matches are probably more useful than the lighter, since they can be lit and then thrown. To do the same with the lighter, she’d probably need to bind the button somehow. (I suppose she could do that with spider silk, but the silk doesn’t handle heat very well. Which is one of several reasons Taylor should avoid getting into a fight with Sundancer.)

Could I even take advantage of that?  The amount of gas he seemed to be putting out would make for a devastating explosion.  It could potentially hurt him, but I couldn’t say if the shockwave or the blast itself would kill me or any nearby innocents.

You’ll also need a way to set it off from a safe distance while he’s in a gas-loaded position, or a way to trick him into doing it for you.

If there was enough gas, it could even damage or destroy nearby buildings.  Some of the structures around here weren’t exactly sound.

And yeah, true. The collateral damage could be devastating.

If nothing else, it gave me a clue about what to watch for.  It also gave me a last-ditch weapon if things really went south.

I guess that’s a fair way to look at it.

I ordered my bugs into the building I’d designated as my people’s barracks and collected some small items with silk and clouds of bugs working in unison.

Oh, what are you doing now? Looking for lighters or things you can fashion into one?

The gas.  If the gas was coming from his mouth, and he was being careful in how he moved, that meant there was something about the gas.  I even had an idea about what it was.

Hm, perhaps moving quickly in the gas might cause it to harm him somehow?

Maybe he hadn’t wanted to blow himself up.

Yeah, I was honestly still more on that train.

He’d been invested in terraforming, once upon a time.  Making inhospitable environments hospitable.  Chances were he was loaded down with custom-made organisms that were primed to generate the gas he was using, maybe even storing it in a compressed form.

Ohh, yeah, that makes sense. Now how do you use that to stop him?

Given his tinker abilities, they could be advanced enough to account for the sheer volume of the gas.  It could even be how his guns operated: with compressed, combustible gas used to fire the shot.

Sounds legit.

There was no way to say for sure, but my gut told me I was right or I was pretty close to the mark.

Taylor is usually right when it comes with an explanation like this, though that’s more of a narrative thing than an in-universe gut feeling.

His actions, both the obvious and minor ones, make a complete, logical sense if I assumed he was spewing out massive volumes of flammable gas.

Yay!

And yeah, it also answers one question Taylor hasn’t asked: Why does he have a mouth now in the first place?

Okay.  So Mannequin was shooting now, when he hadn’t been before.

There goes the conserving bullets hypothesis.

Were there other clues?  What had changed after he’d closed his mouth?

Less gas?

He’d started running, for one thing.

…hm. Is he running from something, too?

Or maybe he’s running because he’s out of gas and therefore less protected?

So he hadn’t been running, he hadn’t been shooting…  What had been holding him back?  It could have been him trying to look intimidating, but he could have achieved the same ends by shooting Bastard and making me watch Bitch die.

Another explanation re: not shooting might be that the gas could ignite.

He could have been just as scary running towards us as fast as he’d sprinted from the ambush site to my territory.

Probably more scary, honestly.

We split, and Mannequin broke off, chasing Grue.

…huh. I guess maybe he wants to get rid of the interlopers first so he can really focus on Skitter when the time comes.

I headed the opposite way.

Think, Taylor, think!  Mannequin was a smart guy.  Everything he did would be calculated to achieve some specific goal.

Sounds about right. Right now, the overall goal is revenge, but his more specific way of going about that seems to go deeper than just plain killing Taylor. I think he wants to get her on her own so he can make her suffer first.

Why was he here?  He wanted to hurt me.  He wanted to hit me where it hurt, and he’d done it.  He’d killed no less than ten of my followers.  Charlotte and Sierra could easily be among them.

I certainly hope not. They both have great potential and I’d like to see their characters expanded on further in the future.

He had let us find him because he wanted to bait us into a trap.  It had worked against Bitch, for the most part.  She wasn’t dead, I hoped, but she was out of action.

Yeah, I don’t think Bitch is going to get taken out permanently just like that. She’s at risk due to her involvement in the nomination plot, but that involvement also seems to give her plot armor. If it kills her, it’s too early.

Besides, it would be an anticlimactic way to go for such an important character, though that didn’t protect Kaiser.

What about the small stuff?  The little things?  After he’d caught Bitch, he hadn’t shot her, and he hadn’t shot Bastard when the puppy was making its rescue attempt.

I think this makes sense, since I think it would be a faux pas to deliberately kill her before she failed his test.

He growled again, vicious.

I was taken aback for half a second.  Then anger set in.  I barked, “Enough!” and I snatched up the chain.

Well, I suppose there is that whole firmness thing.

He growled again, and I hauled on it.  The way it was rigged, it looped around his snout so it would tighten around the end of his nose when the chain was pulled.

…huh. I guess that’s one way to make up for the fact that the doggos can easily overpower Bitch.

It was like a choke collar, but focused more on the sensitive snout than on the throat.  He recoiled and tried to pull away, and I tugged again.

I’m not gonna lie, though, it doesn’t sound particularly nice.

This time, he went still, resisting less.

“You’re with me, puppy,” I said, pulling on the chain as I backed away from Mannequin.  “Grue, take Bitch and get to cover.  I can’t see inside your darkness so long as that gas is wiping out my bugs, and he isn’t bothered by it, so remove it as fast as you apply it, but try to push the gas away or displace it or whatever.”

And on that day, darkness quite literally swept across the neighborhood. Repeatedly.

“We need a plan to win this,” he said.

Right now, she’s at least doing what she can to help you all survive this.