“I do.  I know a lot of things,” Jack spoke, his voice smooth, almost seductive.

Stop it, none of these girls are even remotely within the range of ages you should be seducing.

I think.

“Don’t.  I know you’ve got a silver tongue.  I don’t want to hear it.”

I get the sense that Amy has been able to avoid the miasma. Good.

“You prefer the alternative?”  Jack asked, his voice cool.

“It’s a silver tongue or a silver blade cutting out yours.”

I could picture him holding that knife of his, the threat all too clear.

There was a long pause.

He spoke, “I suppose not.  So let’s dialogue.”

Time for some talk, huh. Well, at least this buys Taylor some planning time.

Though we really do not want Amy reluctantly joining the Nine right now.

“Go ahead,” Panacea’s voice was small, almost defeated.

“What’s holding you back?  You’re capable of so much, of changing the world, of destroying it, but you’re so very small, Amelia Claire Lavere.”

Oh boy, pulling out her birth name, reminding her of her villainous father…

His voice was almost mocking as he said her name.

“That’s not my name.”

I’m with Amy. It doesn’t matter what’s on her birth certificate, what her name is is her choice.

That she’s not old enough to make it legally official does not matter.

“It’s the name you were born with.  Imagine my surprise when I found out your relation to Marquis.  In my last visit to Brockton Bay, I crossed paths with each of the major players.  I met the man.  I must tell you, Amelia, he was a very interesting character.”

Oh yeah, didn’t we hear about this already? Or was that about Allfather… Oh, no, it was Kaiser, wasn’t it. I think that was in Interlude 11b, Jack talking about having met Theo’s dad.

“Did- did you do that to yourself?  Make yourself young?”

I doubt it. She acts the age, so if she did this, it’d be because she felt like this is how young she actually was on the inside.

“No.”  A male voice.  “Rest assured, Bonesaw’s immaturity is genuine.  Both an asset in how it makes her that much more creative, free in her ways.  A detriment in other ways.”

It’s the core of the Slaughterhouse Nine. The heart that drew them together. Jack may be the leader, but that’s because he’s the one who brought structure to the team, preventing it from collapsing in on itself. Bonesaw brought them together, Jack kept them from clashing.

“Doesn’t… that bother you?  Him saying that about you?”

It seems like she’s trying out some of Lisa’s tactics, to some extent. Stalling for time with talk, and trying to sow some dissent between the opponents in the process.

Either that or this is just a question that naturally comes to mind and she has no ulterior motives behind asking it. Could go either way.

“Jack knows what he’s doing.”

One nice thing about these lines: Taylor now knows Bonesaw’s name, and also got a reminder of Jack’s just in case.

I backtracked and picked a different route.  My pace slowed to half of what it had been as I searched for other telltale details.  Twice, I found similar traps, both with that odourless smoke, and twice I had to change my route.

I guess that’s just what it is. Traps set up by Bonesaw or Amy.

Hopefully the latter, so the Nine might run into them.

I paused outside the bug-killing zone.  Flies had ferried spiders to me, and I started organizing them to produce lengths of silk cord.  I left them behind while I creeped closer and listened in.

Don’t you know it’s rude to eavesdrop? 😮

Then again, it’d be appropriate for Skitter to be the fly on the wall.

“…minds do think alike.  I did something very similar for Siberian.”  A girl’s voice.

Hm. I assume she’s talking to Amy – what has Amy done for Victoria that Bonesaw has (to some extent) done for Siberian?

Or maybe it’s “done to”. Bonesaw doesn’t see the difference.

Could it be something about the mind rape? Did Bonesaw make Siberian love her, like a daughter or otherwise? I don’t see why she’d do that.

There’s also the issue of when Bonesaw did whatever this is. Did she do something to/for Siberian before or after Siberian got injured by Taylor’s swarm and the Bakuda barrage? The latter is more akin to Victoria’s current situation. Maybe it has to do with patching someone up using resources from other beings?

We still don’t know whether or not Siberian is still alive, “alive” or dead, for that matter.

“Shut up.  We’re nothing alike.”  Another girl.

That’s Amy, all right.

I guess they’re putting off killing her in case she’s changed her mind about joining them.

“We could be!  Haven’t you ever wanted to start over?  I could make you younger!  We’d be the same age!  And wear matching outfits!  Oh!  I could do plastic surgery, we could be twins!”

I love her so much.

I was a short distance away from the Nine when I saw a wet spot on the wall, complete with discoloration of the paint.

Something Bonesaw planted?

I sent bugs in, and they felt shards of glass on the floor around the patch.  I wouldn’t have said that the swarm smelled anything, but there was something heavy in the air as flies beat their wings, the muscular action simultaneously drawing oxygen in.

Probably not anything good, if I were to guess. Miasma?

Whatever it was, it was dense, cloying, odorless and colorless, only extending a dozen feet around the spot.

Except Taylor should know how the miasma feels to the bugs by now.

And it’s certainly not colorless.

Could this perhaps be something Amy did to keep the miasma away if it should happen to make it into the school?

Another thing this sounds like is Brian’s darkness, but I’m not sure I’d describe that as colorless either, even though black is physically a lack of color. “Colorless” carries more connotations of transparency, which the darkness very pointedly does not have.

But if it were to be Brian’s darkness… why? How would he have ended up here?

…Lisa and Trickster, at the very least, may have gotten down from the building they were left on. Bentley was roaming the streets, but he was not ridden down by “Lisa” and “Brian” like they claimed (hey look! another hint I didn’t think hard enough about – it makes little sense for Lisa to bring specifically Brian on Bentley), so why would he be down there? Either Lisa brought him down or he’s affected by the miasma and ran off on his own.

There were two hallways and three classrooms my bugs couldn’t enter without dying on the spot. That marked out a relatively small area that the Nine could be.

I take it they’ve still got the anti-bug vials.

The biggest issue was that I couldn’t find Panacea.  Did that mean she was in close confines with the enemy?  It wasn’t a good thought.

Hrm.

I suppose that means she can’t find anyone, considering she’d have to question if every female in the building except for Bonesaw could be Amy. She knows Panacea is the healer, but she doesn’t know what she looks like.

There’s also the issue that Amy might resist help this time, affected by the miasma or otherwise.

As I laid silk lines across possible entryways to alert myself about enemy movements, I was careful to check each area before I advanced further into the building.  My eyes searched for details while my swarm scanned the walls and the ground.

Gotta watch out for traps and security measures and such. This is a school, but it’s one that’s a likely target for some villains due to the superhero population, so they need to be especially secure, and they’ve got the PRT on their side.

Then again, we just saw how the roof door was secured.

Just past the door was a set of stairs that led down into the top floor of the building.  It looked like a janitorial closet.

I suppose that’s a reasonable place to stick the roof access.

I sent Atlas down to check before venturing down myself, and I began distributing my swarm through the school.  I prepared silk lines across doorways and hallways to inform me of others passing through, placed ants, earwigs, centipedes and pill bugs on the walls to give me a sense of the layout, and sent flies to scan the interiors of each room to see if I couldn’t find anyone.

The swarm has taken the building.

Again, I repeated the refrain in my head, reminding myself about who was in the building.  I wasn’t sure it was helping, but I didn’t want to get tricked again.

Neither do I. :p

Panacea is the healer, she’s on the top floor, Jack is the slasher, the blond girl is the chemist-tinker.

I tenderly touched the cut on my face.  Jack must have pulled back as I used the tinker as a shield, because the cut was fairly shallow.

Do not mistake that for him caring if she gets hurt, though.

It was long, though, and my fingertips were wet with blood after I touched my hand to it.  I couldn’t distinguish the blood from the black fabric of my gloves, so I couldn’t tell how much it actually was.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

Perhaps not.

At least it didn’t spray all over Lisa’s face.

There was a door on the rooftop, and I used my knife to pry the doorknob partially off, then gave it a firm kick to remove it.

Nice work!

The lock was built into the handle, and it didn’t take long to figure out how to open it when I could see the internal mechanisms.  It wasn’t exactly high security, more intended to keep kids from getting onto the roof than keeping people on the roof from getting in.

That would make a lot more sense if this world didn’t have a bunch of villains who could fly and this school didn’t have several students who would benefit from roof access for reasons the school is supposed to support.

Jack and the tinker would have gone in through the ground floor.  I decided to land on the roof.

Oh right, flight is a thing. I gotta get used to that.

This is a good idea. She avoids direct confrontation and gets closer to Amy, probably faster than Jack and Bonesaw do in spite of their head start.

The second I was on terra firma, I reached for my phone to check.  No signal.

I suspect Jack is jamming the signal with some sort of jamming device (possibly of Bonesaw’s making – as the real Lisa pointed out, she’s a tinker in general, after all). In 14.9, he was the one to ask Taylor if there was signal when there was. I’m thinking he had just turned off the jammer then.

I needed to signal someone about what was going on.  I was woefully underequipped, and I doubted my ability to win this alone, especially when my opponents weren’t as disadvantaged as I was.

Bug beacon?

I could use something like a giant nine crafted out of bugs floating over the school to signal that the pair was here…

That might work, but it might also make people think you’re one of the Nine, putting the 9 up there like the Dark Mark above a magic murder scene.

but there was no guarantee that someone would come.  There was also the possibility that it would lead to the good guys dropping another bomb on us.

Oh yeah, good point.

That would get the healer and maybe even me killed.  Panacea had to survive, or everyone in the city would die in the aftermath of Bonesaw’s miasma.

Unless Taylor ends up coming up with some other solution (Othala? but Taylor can’t find her easily with Jack jamming her ability to ask Cherish, and that’s if she even remembers what Othala’s power is), I’m considering Amy’s survival a foregone conclusion. Because what Taylor says here is true – if Amy dies, Wildbow’s gonna be nearly out of characters.

The school was on a hill, meaning the water that was producing the miasma was far enough away that only traces of it reached this far.

Huh, that’s helpful.

The little vapor that got to the school was held at bay by the stone wall that ringed the school.  The design suggested it had been intended more for aesthetics than for utility, but it was serving a purpose nonetheless.

Let’s hope as many people as possible out of the ones who are inside have stayed inside and are therefore unaffected, then. 

On the other hand, lets hope there are few people inside, because Jack is definitely going to slash at everyone he sees on his way to Amy. It’d be stupid of him not to.

Panacea’s the healer, top floor, Jack is the slasher, the blond girl the chemist-tinker.  Panacea is the healer, top floor, Jack is the slasher, the blond girl is the chemist-tinker.

Good, “tinker” is back.

It seemed like the mechanical spiders had lost track of me.  They would probably give up the chase and return to their master, but it was one less thing to worry about for the time being.

I mean, aren’t you following their master anyway?