I’d known that using the decoys would provoke Siberian.  She wanted to drive home that inevitability of her target’s fate, and that meant she would stop playing around the second she thought Amy might really escape.

Ah, yeah, wouldn’t want the target to get any funny ideas about having a chance of Siberian attacking a decoy instead.

That was the bad.

The way you say that makes it sound like there’s “a good”? Maybe even an ugly?

I suppose the ugly would be Siberian’s real body.

The good side of things caught me by surprise.  As though a switch was flicked, my power suddenly surged back to its normal strength.  Amy was killing the bugs she’d fucked up, so they weren’t scrambling my power anymore.  She’d realized I was trying to help.

Nice!

Now let’s see if we can’t find the ugly and put an end to this.

“Should I attack?”  Sundancer asked.

“No,” Grue almost barked the word.  “You’ll give away our location.”

Yeah, I suppose it’d be hard to miss where the literal miniature sun came soaring from.

Sundancer is going to prove useful by the end of this, somehow.

“Let me,” Trickster said.

While Trickster unclipped grenades from the belt of his costume, I focused on Amy.  She was standing, slowly, masked by a swarm.

What are the grenades supposed to accomplish, exactly? Or the sun, for that matter?

Distractions? Making the ground a little less runnable?

If I sent a decoy running in one direction, I was almost positive it would get Amy killed.  She couldn’t run faster than Siberian, and however much I scattered the decoys, Siberian could dispatch them all and get her hands on the real Amy in a matter of seconds.

Bad idea.

If I moved a decoy too fast, it would be a dead giveaway as a fake.

Because the real Amy would not be able to run fast enough for Siberian to not catch her immediately.

With a throwing motion, she whipped one section of the truck over her head, hurling it forward so it crashed through no less than five of my decoy swarms.

Damn, nice shot.

She did a tight spin as she stepped forward and made the second throw into a smooth continuation of the first.

She’s done this plenty of times before, clearly.

Her accuracy wasn’t quite so good for the second hit.  It crashed through the water and hit the ground before it rolled out of my line of sight.  It was only through my swarm that I felt it hit Amy and my decoy swarms.

Oof.

Wait a minute.

Did I ask Amy to get out of the water, earlier? In Brockton Bay??

I’m sorry for demanding the impossible, Amy. I meant getting up and away from the particular spot in the water you were at.

Most of the momentum was lost in the initial impact, and it didn’t pulverize her.  She was in one piece, at least.

That’s good. A start.

In retrospect, that might have been intentional on Siberian’s part.

Don’t want to break her chewtoy that quickly!

Also, “in retrospect”… is that Taylor in the moment realizing that just long enough after the fact to call it “in retrospect”, or are we briefly dealing with the Taylor who’s telling the story of her past here?

“She’s advancing,” Tattletale reported.

“Yeah,” I replied, absently.  I was focusing on getting my bugs on site.  The bugs that had surrounded Amy and formed the decoys in her immediate vicinity were still there, and I gathered them into humanoid shapes again.

Fortunately, bugs are good at avoiding big things that are coming towards them.

I didn’t have line of sight to her, but I could feel them rising in what must have looked like a very human way.

Niice.

I had to cover her, though, so having my bugs near her was unavoidable.  Amy needed to be one-hundred percent out of Siberian’s sight before we acted.

Why? What are you planning?

As if she was actively seeking to make things harder on us, she took a route that carried her out of sight of our binoculars, behind a building.  Not that she knew we were there.  It was bad luck.

Yeah, she’s probably just trying to escape the bugs.

And Siberian, of course.

I focused my binoculars on Siberian, instead.  Her hair drifted in the wind.  The length she wasn’t holding in her hand fanned out, briefly.

You need wind to get the badass hair in the wind effect? Amateur.

“If the wind moves her hair like that, is that a clue?” I asked, looking at Tattletale.  “Like the dust on Glory Girl’s clothes hinting that she wasn’t covered by her forcefield?”

I dunno, is there any particular reason for it to be?

“Ninety-five percent sure I’m right on this score, but her power probably copies her real body’s physiology to some degree, molding all the internal organs and whatever else with whatever reality-scrambling-stuff she’s made of.

So the hair… is probably so that it can be blown by the wind because the same applies to their real body?

Her call about what parts of her are affected by what, so I don’t-”  She stopped, “Heads up.” 

Ahh, which means they do have some control. For example, they could decide that their form shouldn’t reflect their secondary sexual characteristics (it already doesn’t reflect the primary ones, if Grue’s monochrome form is anything to go by, unless that’s optional too).

Is it weird that I wonder whether or not Monochrome Siberian has nipples, about whether those are removed because the form is sexless? Honestly, I’m inclined to think they wouldn’t be, because female nipples aren’t naturally sexual.

just sexy

My head was starting to pound, my power getting more sluggish.  Where possible, I used my bugs to find, catch and kill the bugs Amy had altered with her power.  It wasn’t enough; my power was still getting steadily weaker.

“God d’Amyt!”

Amy fell again, climbed to her feet and swatted her good hand through the swarm, disabling those bugs who stayed on her skin for any longer than a second.

Quick work!

Man, Siberian is being downright civil at this point by not seizing this opportunity.

Maybe they’d see letting Skitter help her catch the prey as a form of cheating.

It was also making it harder to sweep the area for Siberian’s real body.  There were pockets of people here and there.  I needed to keep tabs on the ones who fit Cherish’s description; middle-aged, male, probably unkempt, thin.

Found anyone fitting that yet?

Unfortunately there might be multiple. That ought to throw a spanner in the works a bit.

What made it trickier was that I had to find him without him catching on and sending Siberian after us.  There was one man nearby, but he was fit.  Another there: fat, startling and trembling at the distant sounds of Siberian tearing through the landscape in her pursuit of Amy.

Clues like that last thing would be useful for telling them apart from the other middle-aged thin men around, though.

I found another, but he was clutching a small child to him, and she clutched him back.  Father and daughter, no doubt.  The little girl wasn’t Bonesaw, either.  Too small.

Aww.

In the next cluster of people-  I had to stop and press my fingers to my temples.  It hurt.  Damn that girl. 

Use your ability to talk through the swarm, Taylor! Tell her that you’re trying to help!

Maybe not loud enough for Siberian to hear, though.

Her second reaction, beyond the knee-jerk fear, was to use her power to start shutting mine down.

Wait, you meant you put a swarm on Amy? She’s got touch range to the bugs, that’s way closer than I was imagining.

“Idiot,” I hissed the word.

Seriously, Taylor, what are you even doing? Are you going to put decoys around, make it a shell game?

You’re not selling the “trust me and stop fighting me” very well.

“What?”  Tattletale asked.

“I’m trying to save her life, and she’s turning my power against me.”

Really, Taylor, look at what you just did from Amy’s perspective.

Two ways this would go.  Either she clued in that I was trying to help, or she died.  I was really hoping it wouldn’t be the latter.  I didn’t like her, but she didn’t deserve to die.

I do!

So maybe make it a little bit clearer to her what you’re doing.

There were very few people in the world who deserved to die like this.

That’s true, even in a world like the Wormverse.

Or maybe Siberian was waiting for Amy to break, mentally.  How long could she put up with this before she lost all hope and surrendered herself to a fate of being eaten alive?

Fuck, that’s also quite possible.

Using my power, I began to gather a swarm around Amy.  Her initial reaction was to freak out.

Reasonable.

Not everyone’s super used to having swarms of bugs flying around and automatically thinking “oh that’s just my friend Skitter messing around”.

And right now, for all she knows, Skitter might be trying to mess her up for some reason, and she really can’t afford to get messed up.

She thrashed, stumbled, and fell.

Y’know, like that.

She landed in the shallow water with her good hand thrust out to prevent herself from landing face first.

Hoo boy, better get out of the water quickly.