I shouldn’t have been looking for people.  I should have been looking for vehicles.  Had I overlooked anything like a truck or a van interior he could be hiding inside?

Now we’re talking.

Or was he still in a location outside of my range?  Or -I wasn’t ignoring the possibility- had Cherish lied or misled us?

This is the kind of thing I do on this blog: Even if I think an option is unlikely (Taylor already mentioned that she doesn’t think Cherish lied), I still try to acknowledge it and keep it in mind.

Damn it!  The extra possibility threw my hopes of finding the man totally out of whack.

You can do it!

My respect for Grue grew a hundredfold as he veered straight for Amy without my asking him to.  We swept past her, and I caught her around the shoulder.

YES

Grue offered one hand, and we lifted her together, kicking and struggling, onto my lap.  I wrapped one arm around her chest, to keep her securely in place.  She was breathing hard, almost hyperventilating.

I really can’t blame her one bit.

Something caught her attention.  A vibration in the road?

Hmm.

Maybe that’s what she’s been stopping to sense for?

Or had she used her power to protect the ground, and sensed some impact as the dogs walked on it?

Which would also work to find Amy.

Either way, she started to chase us.  We could have turned at a right angle, to hopefully throw her off, but both Grue and I knew that if we did, and she continued straight, she’d run straight into Amy.

Well, fuck.

Fast.  She was fast.  Not as much as Battery or Velocity might have been on a good day, but highly mobile.

…maybe the real body isn’t. Like with Genesis, a trigger event involving that kind of thing could result in a power that lets you move around in a separate body with incredible mobility and strength.

Maybe look for wheelchairs and the like?

It is worth noting that Siberian needs to be able to have their real body follow along without it being significantly slower than the Nine overall.

The thought clicked into the blank I was looking to fill.  How was her alter ego getting around?  I’d assumed he was traveling on foot because that was how ninety-percent of the city was getting by.  Very few cars on the road had access to gas and the ability to traverse the broken, flooded streets.  But if there was a range limit to the projection, how was he keeping up with the woman who could ignore air resistance and leap across a city block in a single bound?

Also a really good point! That’s why I’ve suggested trying to get her to the edge of the range, though I’m not sure what it’d accomplish.

With my directions, we looped around the mall and made a beeline for Amy.  Siberian was advancing too, but while she was in the right general area, she didn’t have a means of finding Amy, specifically.  Instead, she leaped from one area to another, pausing for a second or two at a time.

Yeah, gonna be a bit of trial and error here. Hopefully.

What was she doing?

It seems like she might actually have something she expects to be able to detect Amy at a short range, whether it can get past the darkness or not. Maybe something like super-scent?

I swept the area with my power, but I couldn’t find anyone resembling Cherish’s description of Siberian’s real self.

Damn, this is getting kinda suspect. Did Cherish mislead them for some reason?

Or maybe Siberian’s real body has been stowed away in a bug-proof location, anticipating an attack by Skitter somehow?

Was I missing something?  If Cherish had been lying outright, I was under the impression that Lisa would have caught some tell.  There had to be something else to it.

Good point.

Something I could use to identify the man behind the monster.

What was she?  Unstoppable, a deceptively strong, deceptively tough juggernaut of a woman.

And that might be reflected by the other body looking similarly frail but being stronger than one might expect?

And we’re back!

Amy wasn’t in the impact site, and she probably wouldn’t have been even if I hadn’t warned her.  Still, it was a demonstration of power, it was intended to scare an already terrified Amy, and it served both purposes.

“I may not be able to find you right now, but if I have to, I can bring down this entire neighborhood on your head.”

She was running directly away from the site of the devastation, ignoring the bugs I had on her hand.  In her pell-mell run , Amy stumbled into a post meant to keep carts from being taken out of the mall and fell hard.

Whoops.

“Right,” I spoke into Grue’s darkness.  He obeyed.

Siberian was giving chase, entering one end of the mall at the same time Amy made her way out of the opposite side.  Siberian had guessed the most likely hiding spot and then used the falling building to dash Amy’s hopes of safety and get her out of hiding and running.

It keeps coming down to malls…

With the way the roads funneled together into one four-lane road, Amy would either have to take a left, take a right, or go straight.  Chances were good she would take the latter, because it put her the furthest from Siberian.

Makes sense to me.

Faster and easier than explaining with words.

Still, I included one word for good measure:  ‘RUN’.

Honestly I’m not sure you needed more than that.

I could feel Amy making a break for it.  She headed in the wrong direction at first, northwest instead of northeast, and I used a giant arrow to direct her.

“No, that way!”

The building began to collapse only ten or fifteen seconds after I’d transmitted the message.  Grue’s power didn’t do anything to stop the rumble from reaching us.  From what my bugs could gather in the chaos that followed, the building seemed to slump, the lower levels buckling and crackling.

This wouldn’t be nearly as big a problem if the city didn’t have 6+ story buildings around everywhere.

Just when I thought it had settled, the upper portion tipped over, crashing into the small parking lot and the entrance of the mall.

Malls do not get treated well in Worm.

Siberian was on the far side of the two-lane road that stood beside Amy’s hideout.  She didn’t walk straight for Amy, but walked down the street with an almost casual slowness.

Tiger’s on the prowl.

She had one arm out, a hand tracing the side of the building she was walking by, as if to guide her through the effects Grue’s lightless world.

Hm. Can she sense the shape of the building through the part of her power that lets her extend her invulnerability to her surroundings?

My swarm felt dust shower onto them in her wake.  It was unexpected, and it demanded investigation.  I moved them across the wall, and felt a gap. 

Rude. Can’t you use the door every once in a while?

She wasn’t just putting her hand on the wall, but her hand and forearm through it.  What did that mean?

Oh, I see.

It means you’d better hope that wall isn’t too critical to the structure.

My bugs felt more dust fall from above.  A moth was bludgeoned by a rock that fell from above.

And down it comes.

I felt realization hit me like a bucket of cold water.

Her hand was punching through the exterior wall of the building, but it was also tearing through the supports and load bearing areas.  She’d made her way halfway through the ground floor.

Yeah, this wall is coming down, at the very least.

By the time she finished, part of the building was going to collapse and fall.

If the building tipped in the direction of the shattered area, it could easily fall on the mall where Amy was hiding.

Not to mention that there might be people inside.

My bugs formed a picture on a wall near Amy.  A rectangle to represent the skyscraper Siberian intended to bring down, a squatter rectangle to represent the mall, a ladybug for Amy and a moth to represent Siberian.  I demonstrated what was about to happen.

“Get out of there, now.”

Along similar lines, if she depended on him to keep her going, then she had to keep him safe from the other members of the Nine.  There was infighting in the group, apparently, though I’d seen no sign of it with the team thus far.

Which is why I don’t think anyone except Cherish, Bonesaw and maybe Jack know about it. Maybe not even Bonesaw.

Notably, this means the real body must be kept out of the way of the Nine’s general rampage, not just out of the way of members going specifically after Siberian. That’s a point that’s been lurking in the back of my mind for a while, actually.

Keeping the ordinary man safe wouldn’t be a problem if he shared Siberian’s senses like I shared those of my bugs.  She could keep an eye out for trouble and he could slip away or hide if a member of the Nine came around.

I mean, yeah, it’d be less of a problem. There’d still be a lot of Nine to keep track of.

Until Cherish joined the group.  I wonder how that had played out.  Some sort of deal?  Threats, overt or implied?

Hmm. So how long would Cherish be able to manipulate Siberian before she was torn to pieces?

She was heading in Amy’s general direction.

Fuck.

I reached up and pulled on Grue’s right arm.  He veered in that direction.

Couldn’t find Siberian’s real body.  Was it really close, like Cherish had said?  I noted one man who fit the general description, but he was barricaded in his room, surrounded by cans of food.

Honestly, if apocalypse preppers decided to treat the Endbringer attack and subsequent reign of terror by the Nine as an apocalypse like the ones they’ve prepped for, I wouldn’t blame them.

There was no reason for Siberian’s real persona to situate himself here.  Even so, I tested him, attacking him with bugs to see if it got a response.

And yeah, the barricading would be odd for someone who’d need to move around quite a bit.

Not that I was sure that there was a link connecting his real self and her projected form.  It was an assumption, and maybe a dangerous one.

Hmm, true. You’d have to ask Grue, I guess?

I wasn’t sure exactly how much control Brian had managed with his own projection when he’d borrowed that fragment of Siberian’s powers.

No.  My gut told me Siberian wouldn’t operate like this if there wasn’t some link.  There had to be some kind of range limit on the projection, or he wouldn’t have any reason to follow Siberian from city to city.

Yeah, they could just stay at home while terrorizing the world if there wasn’t a range.

The fact that he was supposedly in this area meant it might even be a fairly short range.  If he was an unwilling participant, a recipient of a power with unfortunate side effects, like Labyrinth, then she’d have to direct him from one place to another with threats.

Maybe it’s worth trying to lure Siberian out of range while keeping an eye out for men trying to follow?

It would require more interactions between her selves, and that would mean something would have been given away.

Good point.