If I headed away from the downtown area, toward the water, I could put myself in a position to track down Cherish, or to get to another point where the satellite phone would work and make a call to Coil.  If they were checking the harbor for Cherish, going by what she’d revealed on the phone, then I could get there first.

I suppose that’s worth a shot.

Lay a trap, or get in position to shoot them again.  I figured out how to remove the magazine from the gun and checked the number of rounds remaining.  Six.

Trap? You’re in the wrong Arc to be using that word!

The problem was that the whole reason I’d let Panacea keep using her power on me instead of giving chase to Jack was that I was supposed to cure the others.  I could kill and replace the parasites that were carrying the prions.  The sooner I did it, the less damage they’d do in the meantime.

Also: Don’t die. That might be bad for this process, causing you to take a lot of people with you.

Some of the damage would be permanent, and the potential victims included Brian and Lisa.

It’s kinda neat that the story doesn’t pretend all the Undersiders are on the same level of friendship with each other aside from stuff like the issues between Taylor and Rachel. It’s pretty blatant that Taylor doesn’t care about Alec and Aisha quite as much as she does about Brian and Lisa.

It hadn’t even crossed my mind while I was under the miasma’s influence, but I also had to wonder whether Regent would have maintained his control over Shatterbird.

Fuck.

At least I feel like if this was going to be an issue, we’d get it pointed out by seeing it in action, not by Taylor’s idle musings.

I’m sure he’s going to lose control at some point, but probably not right now.

What’s a bigger problem is what he’d use her for while under the miasma’s effect.

The second possibility was that they’d gone after Cherish.  My conversation with Coil had clued them in.

You’re not thinking city limits are an option?

If it were to be one of these two options, my money would definitely be on Siberian.

I checked my phone.  No service.

Damn the Director.  Damn her for making this so hard, and for complicating matters.

Ohhh.

Right.

Some of you were probably quietly screaming when I was speculating on Jack jamming the signal, weren’t you. I forgot Piggot said she was doing it.

We’d been playing by Jack’s rules, more or less, and she’d given him an excuse to pull out all the stops.

…at least I think she did? But it seems Taylor was talking more about the miasma being her fault.

He probably would have anyways, but she gave him an excuse.

Piggot and Jack are kind of similar on that front. Piggot would be inclined to use such excuses herself.

I continued my search for the pair, but my tentative explorations of the trails of extermination-mist made a sweeping search all but hopeless.

This makes a lot of sense as a way to open this chapter. It wouldn’t be like Taylor to just immediately go, “welp, guess they’re gone”, even if the finality of 14.10′s ending line did imply she wasn’t going to hold on to the hope of finding them that strongly.

It felt like I was facing a series of decisions where every answer had some merit, but picking the wrong one would spell disaster.

Them delicious tough decisions.

I’d had to make the call between staying at the school in case Jack and Bonesaw were preparing a trap for Amy and Glory Girl, or leaving in case they’d made a run for it.  I’d left, and I’d been lucky enough to be right.

Unfortunately now there’s no way of telling which way they actually went.

Fuck, can you even be sure they did go? I mean, like I said last time, you’re not supposed to have the ball under one of the shells at all. I meant that they may have dropped the gas to make Taylor not consider the one path they did take, but who’s to say they took one at all?

I don’t think they did stay behind, but it’s a genuine option Taylor is not considering here.

Except the Nine were now covering their tracks with a dozen decoys, mechanical spiders leaving trails of bug-killing smoke, leaving me to guess which direction they’d gone.

Yeah, nice recap.

Two solid possibilities dwelled with me.

The first was that they’d headed back downtown to rendezvous with Siberian.  If I was drawing the right conclusions from what I’d overheard, Bonesaw had drawn together a cocoon for Siberian similar to the one that Amy had created for Glory Girl.

Yeah, seems like it. I do suppose they might go pick Siberian up.

They could be recovering her real body, maybe doing something to recover Mannequin or Crawler.

To do that they’d probably need to head back into the Bakuda Band. That’s probably not at all safe, even now, without the Monochrome going alone or holding the others.