Moonmaker 10 - The Freedom of Birds is an Insult
GraftingBuddha
Retired Pooh-Bah
10 - The Freedom of Birds is an Insult
"So, keep an eye on the bus. Clean the interior for dust at least once a week, vacuum as well. Make sure no insects are infesting the inside, if there are, tell your father and he'll see to the rest. If anyone tries to break in, apologise to their families for me, but don't feel guilty - the signs are up for a reason. If they couldn't follow basic instructions, they deserve what they get. And take care of Little Lady."
Irina nodded rapidly.
"Ostrakova's already been paid for the rent, covering the next few months, so don't believe her if she starts asking for more. If I'm not back within three months, then just lock the bus up and challenge her to try and move it. Take Little Lady home with you in the meantime. And if I'm not back in a year, then you can assume I'm dead and move on with things. There's a store of cash your father should know about, he knows to use that to clear the bus off Ostrakova's land... and there's a bit left over as an apology, for both your father, and for Ostrakova. Remind him if he forgets. And if you steal anything, I will know. And there will be consequences."
Irina cradled Little Lady close to herself, the prairie dog sniffing curiously at her latest hoodie, flinching at the scent of the bizarre, profoundly unnatural chemicals involved in its production. She tilted her head to one side, thinking...
Oh dear. The spawn is thinking. Never good.
"But if you're dead, how will there be consequences?"
Taylor glared.
"I've died before."
Technically true.
"Uh."
"I got better. And for all you know, I might get better again. Now, death, when it gets close, it feels like you're sinking down into a huge black beach, too heavy to break out. And if I want to shed some weight, I might end up losing something like pity, mercy, or my ability to care about whether or not I permanently damage a child who's stolen my things. Am I understood?"
Irina blinked.
"Yes."
"Are you going to steal anything?"
"No."
"Good. Now, I do have a small present for you, just to make sure you don't feel underappreciated. You did good work with that visitor, both I and your dad are proud of you."
Irina sneered.
"Don't need you to be proud in me, I'm proud of myself. Always am. Always will be. Pride's not a sin, that's something only piss-jizz drainholes think, that, or colossal gaylords. I'm enlightened, Miss Tatiana, I know how to be proud in myself, and I don't need no bus-dwelling rodent-owning bug-controlling gun-toting eye-missing leg-limping cardigan-wearing piece of smegma to tell me that they're proud in me, and I might actually take that as an insult, and maybe you should just let me have whatever the fuck I want so my angers are soothed and I don't feel like biting off your fucking tits and stapling them to your head like fucking Mickey Mouse ears."
I've read the Bible, you know. I'm aware God cursed people with childbirth. They didn't mean the pain of childbirth, I think they just meant children. I think children are proof that we live in a doomed world, that we dwell in the Kali Yuga. Fetch a belt and beat her with it, I beg of you.
Taylor poked her. Hard. She wasn't beating anyone today. Probably. Never knew. She wasn't going to beat a child, at least. Irina stumbled pack, scowling like an angry bulldog, clutching Little Lady tightly to her chest. Already used to having her around. Made sense, she was a splendid pet. Downright delightful. And Taylor was already missing her.
"Do you want a present or not?"
Irina considered this question with the intensity usually reserved for philosophical ponderings.
"Yes please."
Well, that was a better outcome than most philosophical ponderings, at least. Good for her.
"Just one more thing, before you get it. You know Daniil?"
"Oh yeah! He's your dad, right?"
Of course she'd figured it out.
"Right. Leave him alone. He likes his peace and quiet, and he won't enjoy being bugged excessively."
Irina raised her hand solemnly.
"I will not bug him excessively."
I despise this creature. But I respect its tenacity.
"Right. So. Here you go. Have fun."
She tossed a small package over, crudely wrapped in brown paper - the same stuff she used for sending her little pieces on old languages to a few professorial contacts. She kept that little practice up both because it was... well, interesting generally, and because it made her dad happy to hear about. He understood very little, but he clearly liked the idea of Annette's daughter doing something academic. Plus, Chorei enjoyed showing off. Irina tore open her package with vicious abandon, using one hand to tear, her teeth to hold it in place, and the other hand to keep Little Lady nestled close. Wow, she really did look like a small goblin when she did that. Uncannily similar to Ellen when she had no hands and needed to be creative. Her eyes widened. Then narrowed. Widened again. Half-squinted. Peered. Pondered. Assessed. Analysed. And finally, widened to terrifying extremes.
"A knife!"
"An ancient knife excavated from a Scythian burial mound by a cult which wanted a special tool for sacrificing people, yes. Don't worry, they didn't succeed. It's very delicate, and quite blunt. Don't damage it. Use it as a wall decoration, ask your dad about it."
The girl was barely listening.
"I'm going to mug someone!"
"It's made of solid gold, you can't mug someone with it, people will mug you for it. And it's an inflation-resistant bit of cash for when you grow up. Some kids get bank accounts or trust funds. You get a golden Scythian knife which is worth quite a healthy chunk of change. So if you damage this, you're just burning your own money. Am I clear?"
Irina was grinning madly.
"Yes. You are very clear. I understand every word you say. I completely comprehend every statement you have made up until this point in time."
"You listened to nothing."
"No. I love my knife."
Her grin expanded to face-bisecting proportions.
"I got Little Lady and a knife in one day. This is fucking amazing."
Taylor's eye narrowed.
"Little Lady is on loan, and the knife is an investment in your future. Now clear off. You're welcome, though."
Irina paused... then wrapped Taylor in very brief, embarrassed hug. Didn't reach high enough to do a proper one, so just wound up clinging to her waist while juggling a priceless Scythian gold ceremonial knife and a prairie dog all at once. Alright, the kid was good at multitasking, she had that going for her. The hug was very, very brief, and when Irina drew back her face was the shade of a fresh cranberry. Red, hair bleached a shocking platinum, and very dark brown hair... huh, she looked almost like a Neapolitan ice cream. The kid did nothing else for a second, just stared upwards with a mixture of embarrassment, sorrow, gratitude, a few other emotions thrown in for good measure, most of which Taylor barely recognised before they vanished and were replaced by others... and then, without a word of warning, she turned on her heel and started marching briskly down the mud-slicked hill, down back home, where Turk was waiting for her.
Taylor had said her goodbyes. Shatterbird was off, for, as she described it 'a lovely week in Kazan that no-one shall interrupt on pain of flaying. And I'll pick you up Foucault's Pendulum if I find some copies'. Turk had been curt and brusque, but... kindly, in his own way. Retirement would suit him, she thought. Having met his brother in Gallup, Turk was... definitely better-off by leaving the mercenary business behind him. Honestly, she felt a bit bad that his work with her had led to the Grid terminating all his bank accounts, even the very well-hidden ones. Oh, and the whole tea shop burning down thing, that was... yeah, felt guilty for that. Grafting him a new arm and giving him a fair chunk of the Butcher's Hoard only felt right, given all they'd been through together. And her dad.... was doing alright. Doing fine. He'd be wandering, soon enough. Might come back to this place, might not, but... her dad had a new lease on life. No union, no old house, no familiar city, just... himself, and a shit-tonne of termites. He was doing great.
"Hey, come on!"
Ah.
Her ride.
Vicky's bike growled like a living thing. It was a brutal mess of metal and trophies, no part of it really resembling something safe to ride. And yet Vicky was sat amidst the tangle of growling engine, scarred chassis, and endless, endless trinkets taken from her tours out in Mongolia and elsewhere. Sometimes Taylor wondered what Glory Girl would think if she saw Victoria Dallon charging around dressed like a lunatic barbarian, riding an insane motorcycle, while cutting away people's powers if they simply didn't deserve them. Punishment for being given incredible power and then using it to inflict pain on others over and over and over again. Would Glory Girl be horrified in general? Or horrified at how she was playing God to other parahumans? Or would she support this mad crusade, in her own way? Probably a mixture of all three. Discomfort, and additional discomfort at her own support for this.
To be fair, out of all her friends, Vicky was the only one who didn't call it 'the Geneva Suggestion'.
So that probably meant something was still fine inside that weird head of hers.
"Hop on the back, hold on tight, and tell me if you feel like you're slipping."
"Helmet?"
Vicky grinned.
"Nah."
"There's no road. We're driving over rugged terrain. I think a helmet might be an idea for me, at least."
Oh, thank every god that-
"Who said we were driving?"
Uh.
Vicky engaged the engine... and then kicked. And Taylor saw, with a budding feeling of alarm, that Vicky had attached straps to the bike - many straps, almost all of which now formed a harness around her. Taylor clocked what was going on, and immediately wrapped her arms around Vicky's waist, hanging tight... as the motorcycle launched forwards... and upwards. Held aloft by the harness, which looked tinkermade, and carried forward by a combination of its own momentum and Vicky's own unnatural strength.
They were in a flying fucking motorcycle.
Taylor screamed in Vicky's ear.
"When did this happen?"
Vicky roared back.
"Mongolia! Not many roads, motorcycle wasn't handling well, got a tinker to make sure this thing would work!"
"Why would you do this?! You can already fly!"
Vicky grinned.
"I can only fit so many trophies on my costume! This way I get to carry more stuff!"
This made sense. Taylor didn't want it to make sense, because then she started to agree with Vicky's decisions, and no set of decisions which led to flying motorcycle was remotely good. Yes, it made sense to have a way to carry lots of stuff, tools, weapons, supplies. Yes, it was good to have a way of carrying multiple people or objects at once, when just using hands wouldn't quite work. Did that mean Taylor liked it? No. No she did not. In fact, she was telling her heart to slow down, forcing her lungs to operate normally, instructed a number of organs and systems to start behaving like nothing remotely odd was happening. Step by step, she was demolishing her own panic response. Mostly.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-
Chorei wasn't good with heights. It was a medieval thing, her brain had never been wired for anything of this sort. Flying while clinging to Vicky was bad enough, flying while in a motorcycle attached to Vicky using a harness was much fucking worse. Sure, the harness was tinkertech. But surprise of all surprises, tinkertech decayed. And maybe it would decay now. In the next two seconds. It was snapping, she could feel it snapping, she could - no, that was her own joints popping as the tension increased. Vicky didn't notice. Vicky had a fucking forcefield. She was getting complacement, too content with sitting in her bus reading and writing and occasionally going out to hunt or fish, she was not acclimated. Through her swarm she vaguely saw Irina staring up with wide eyes while having a substantial mental breakdown at the sight of Taylor flying away on a motorcycle like something out of a particularly weird children's book.
"Hey, Taylor!"
"What?"
"Witches!"
Taylor glared.
"No!"
"We're flying!"
"You fly anyway!"
"We do magic!"
"Superpowers!"
"And actual magic!"
"Exploitation of weird natural principles!"
"No, we're witches! We're totally witches and nothing can convince me otherwise!"
Taylor growled. She didn't want to die on this hill, but she very much wanted to distract herself from the rushing earth beneath them, and her own quiet realisation that, yeah, this method of transportation had some legitimate advantages.
"Tell Patience to stop feeding you jokes. It's cheating."
Vicky's grin widened.
"What, like you don't get jokes from Chorei?"
"No. Never. Chorei isn't funny."
aaaaaaaaaaa- hey! I am funny! I certainly have the potential to be funny, a potential I frequently fulfill, so don't you dare run around saying I am not a deeply humorous individual. I can even recite the full tale of the Child with the Long Name, that was a cracking bit of humour back a few centuries ago, very popular amongst the other nuns and even a few monks! Here we go, ah, once a mother decided to name her child Anokutarasambyakusambodai, and one day her son fell into the river, so she yelled for help, yelling 'help! My child, Anokutarasambyakusambodai has fallen in the river!' but alas, by the time she finished saying his very long name, the child had already drowned. There, that's hilarious,
"She's telling you a bad joke in retribution, isn't she?"
It's a wonderful joke, it's innocent, it's playful, so what if it doesn't involve your modern debaucheries?! It involves dead children, you sick little creatures ought to enjoy that sort of humour.
"Yes."
Hate both of you.
**`*
Taylor had nothing to do but wait, and use the insects on the ground to try and get a picture for anything happening around them. To Vicky's credit, they weren't flying like actual wtiches, cackling while soaring in front of the moon. They flew like... well, like people hauling around a motorcycle. Not too far off the ground, just enough to keep from having to worry about silly things like 'terrain' or 'potholes' or 'small creatures which were understandably surprised at getting presented with an enormous flying motorcycle in the middle of nowhere'. Hell, at one point they had used a road briefly, and Vicky had let the motorcycle rumble along like an actual motorcycle. She was faster these days, capable of getting to about a hundred miles an hour, and with her casual dismissal of terrain difficulties, they were making admirable progress. Been a while since she let Vicky take her anywhere on this thing, usually it was more expedient to get carried - but in this case, she could see the advantages. Many of them. The fact that she could literally instruct her body to calm the fuck down was a big help in reaching that conclusion.
One advantage presented itself after a few hours. They were heading to Estonia, and would be crossing through multiple different 'states', in the modern Russian sense of the term. From what she'd read, after Moscow had been erased from the face of the earth by Behemoth in 1995, things had become... strange. Very strange. Most countries had started a long process of decentralisation, anything to stop them from getting their entire economy knocked out in a single Endbringer attack. And Russia had been the pioneers of that method, eight years before another country reaped the rewards of not following the post-Moscow playbook. The UK had gone from being a fairly relevant place to... a backwater, a shivering, foggy backwater staring in frightened suspicion at the rest of the world, and all because of a single Simurgh strike on London. City gone, economy collapsed, government decapitated, bureaucracy obliterated, population scattered... one attack, and all that had happened. From something to next-to-nothing. Russia had the luxury of surviving losing its capital, at least. Big enough, and most industry was located far away from Moscow to begin with. But the government was gone, and it vanished when things were at their messiest for the former Union.
Things were already moving apart to protect from Endbringers. Combine that with the loss of most central institutions, a colossal loss of life in general, and an economic collapse... well, turned out that most places got it into their heads to push for more leeway in terms of self-governance. Republics left right and centre, all with their own Constitution, their own legislature, even their own currency. All organised under the guiding hands of decentralised PMCs, particularly Red Gauntlet. The military-indsutrial complex became Russia's biggest export, biggest employer, biggest investors, biggest customer for almost all manufacturers. Army carved up, gradually becoming nothing more than the training centres for more PMC troops, fanning out to fight in the rest of the world. Parhaumans would never stop emerging, Endbringers would never stop attacking, so there would always be a need for individuals capable of inflicting intense violence on whoever they were paid to inflict it on. Most countries had fought a war or two in Central Asia and Africa in the last few decades.... even if they usually never sent a single soldier.
Turk's brother had said it well.
'The Soviets have won, I think. I mean, we've got ourselves a red world, haven't we? A Russian world, too. Red with blood, and Russian because it's Russians doing half the bleeding. Hey, maybe Lenin had a monkey's paw or something, you know?'
And then he'd laughed, that awful, coarse laugh, exposing the bullets he'd shoved into his gums to replace his lost teeth, and a tongue turned jet-black from whatever the hell he consumed to keep himself energised when everything in him wanted to shut down. She barely noticed as they started to go through a few borders, where she generally paid her way through by flashing a paper or two she'd obtained from a few of her contacts in the Russian underground. According to them, she was a very important person who knew other, very important people. Which wasn't untrue. The Grid considered her important. And she did know the important people named in her documents. Yeah, that guy... she'd waited for him in his house, grafted to him, and used what she found inside his little head to blackmail him with things he'd forgotten about. And that lady, well, Taylor had been nice. Took her out for dinner at a very nice place in St. Petersburg, and charmed her with tales of how she'd detonated a nuclear device on US soil.
That lady had been weird. And had promptly cackled her head off upon realising that Taylor was the one who'd caused that little display outside Gallup. Very willing to give her all the influential signatures she needed, though.
She barely noticed it. Was running on autopilot, even turning over most speech duties to Chorei, who knew Russian as fluently as Taylor did, if not more so. Taylor indulged in memory. She was travelling over familiar territory, towards an unfamiliar destination. And she was thinking of things. The steppe, the rolling hills, the boundless forests and the windin concrete tapeworms laid across the Russian countryside faded from her mind, and all she could remember was a little place in the middle of the desert, surrounded by an enormous wall, and ringed by the howling of strange hairless dogs.
***
WELCOME TO HELL.
Those had been the words scrawled over the wall. And a younger, more alarmed Taylor couldn't help but remember them over and over and over as the breach behind them was sealed up by mounds of containment foam, before they could start moving in with the expanding concrete, the steer rebar, all the things to plug the gap properly. The wall was too high to really see the sun at the moment, all that reamined was a blood-red sky and a heat that Taylor wouldn't feel once she left. Three years in Russia to come after this, and never again would she feel the heat of Gallup's invisible sun, the burning oven of its red, ragged sky. Dogs howled around the edges of the place. Tinkers experimented here - tinkers who had no interest in playing by most rules, who wanted a place where meat was cheap, and no-one cared if they killed their test subjects. The dogs fed on the dead, and were changed. The lobos, they called them in Gallup. Acidic spit, skin hard enough to block bullets, swams of biotinker-made insects boiling in their stomach-hives, tails which extended to vicious stingers, or minds which frothed with too much intelligence for the brain to handle. No idea what they were capable of. All Taylor saw, most nights, was glowing eyes staring out of the dark, and animals that paid no attention to the stings of her insects.
But they knew to fear the light of the town.
And they knew that the people would be giving them more bodies soon enough.
In Gallup, the lobos never went hungry.
The streets were torn up. Too many fights. No-one maintaining them. The buildings smoked and steamed unpleasantly in the heat, everywhere was the stink of roasting food, crude fuel being burned in huge piles, and spent ammunition. Plus, the strange steam which emanated from the tinker workshops, that people were warned to steer clear of by those interested in their health... and encouraged to inhale by everyone else. The latter was a much larger category. Here, Taylor had felt strongly that parhaumans were a curse. Nothing restrained them here, nothing but the rule of retailation - if they hit someone, that person was entitled to hit back, so either you kill them quickly or hope you could take their punch. And on that single axiom, a town had been built. And it earned the title of 'hell'. With the smoke, with the blood red sky, with the heat, with the fumes, with the howling lobos at the frontiers, with the writhing ruin and soft decay of the place...
Yeah. Hell was about right.
She was watching from the balcony of a half-ruined house, crudely repaired with soft mud hardened to a shell, like the world was scabbing over. No fancy building materials out here, no-one would import something that useless. You had what you could scavenge or you could harvest. And there was plenty of mud. Out of a cantina, a group of toughs strode out, pushing aside the dried dog-hide they used for a door. Unnaturally large. Unnaturally thick. And covered in spines which left the hand smarting with tiny red wounds if you rubbed them the wrong way... and based on the hissing from one of the toughs, he'd done precisely that in a fit of drunken stupidity. The pain didn't give Taylor any pleasure - pain meant annoyance, and annoyance meant outlets. No idea which outfit they were with, there were no uniforms. They were a mix of Americans and Mexicans, mostly men, but one woman who had no nose and had her mouth deformed by a scar crossing over her lips. A piece of melted flesh that dragged the corner of the mouth down into a clown's scowl. Eyes that glittered like coals in a rainstorm. They stank, she could tell that much through her insects. Stank to high heaven and back. Wore heavy clothes, reinforced with metal or kevlar where they could find it, and around their waists were scalps with blue-black hair, blonde hair, red hair, brown hair...
Old enemies. Or just for fun.
They saw an older man. Old hand. One of his arms gone, consumed by a biotinker in exchange for enough money to buy safety and comfort and pleasure for a couple of weeks. Or a night. Or nothing at all, and he arm was taken by force. In its place was a single switching tentacle, red as a tongue, moving without any command. The man kept batting it away - he couldn't control he thing, and his neck was lined with hickey-like marks where the tentacle's suckers had kissed him sweetly. Eyes were hollowed by lack of sleeping. He hunched over a charcoal fire, staring senselessly down at the strips of blackened, anonymous heat sizzlewd and spat, slowly turning to the consistency of leather. Cook them long enough and you might avoid anything the biotinkers put in them, or they snapped up from the refuse pile outside the labs. Meat, and a piece of corn. White and near-luminous, transparent as a jellyfish's body. Either washed out by the sun and rain, or something unnatural.
She turned away with her stomach sinking.
But her swarm could see them starting to prod him, getting some entertainent out of the old freak. He had a millipede-like scar along his head... probably an old tough himself, wounded in the head by something, and reduced to selling parts of himself to the doctors in exchange for enough cash to afford food. When he couldn't steal it, anyway.
She walked inside when the low moans of pain started.
And Turk's brother waited.
His face was a mockery of Turk's. His smile, his clothes, his bearing, his accent, everything mocked all the things she liked most about Turk. His bullet teeth gleamed in the candlelight. His fingers, those he had left, drummed on the wooden table and sweat trickled from every pore. His whole body weeping at what his soul had become. Felina, his latest wife, stood nearby, toying with the gold they'd handed over in exchange for shelter. She glanced up at Taylor, and opened her mouth in a wide grin, showing her half-gone tongue. Liked doing that. Knew it made people uncomfortable.
They'd talked for hours. Talked about everything and nothing. And all of his war stories.
The Congo. A parahuman warlord tried to seize control of the cobalt mines. PMCs called in to stop him from doing that, because the current warlord had much nicer policies towards tariffs. He knew the score, the new guy didn't. So they'd fought him, gunned down his men with lazy ease - starved ex-farmers and people with nowhere else to go, desperate for the light and food near the mines. At that, the brother had laughed raucously.
"Idiots. Those lights, that food? For us. For the guards. For the bosses in charge. The miners get darkness and smoke and machines for them to operate. They get barracks and what food they need, not a bite more. Some of them surrendered. Wanted to cut their losses. So we grabbed them and shoved them in the mines, and they thanked us. Thought they'd be getting all the things they wanted. Loved doing that to them, sometimes."
A grin.
"Now, I sell guns to the new parahuman warlords. Those ex-farmers are using some good, good weapons these days, I tell you that much. A warlord wins with my guns. Then he needs more. But me, I don't like selling once they've won, you know? 'Cause then I attract attention from big boys... so no, I just find the next warlord who wants the mines, and sell to him instead. Or her, I'm not prejudiced against the ladies, trust me, if I was, Felina wouldn't let me wake up tomorrow. Not with a cock attached to me, that is."
Felina smiled with uncannily sharp teeth, eyes glittering strangely.
"Oh, she loves me. She loves me. But trust me, girl, you want to make money, you never play for the winners. Not the final winner. Because if someone wins, they don't need you anymore. So you play for the losers, and for the people who want to be winners. Do that, you'll never run out. Out there, in the town, someone comes in. They want something, they want everything, and they don't stop until they've got it. So I sell them guns - what does it matter if they pay for them, huh? They've got everything to fight for, but a big guy in charge, he's only got things to lose, he thinks about price and quality and quantity and reliability and everything. The new guy? He'll do anything for a few guns. Then he dies. His guns are wrecked. And the next new guy steps in to buy. Did the same in the Congo, nice and simple, have to say."
Taylor glared at him silently.
"All about parahumans. Old days, you kick a guy, he either kicks back or he stays down. Now, maybe he kicks back, maybe he stays down... maybe he gets superpowers because you kicked him too hard, then blows your head off with a laser. Maybe he thinks he might, so he fights back a little more anyway. Maybe he still dies, but he still hurts you, maybe enough for the next guy. Everyone could get superpowers, so everyone becomes a martyr to his future self, the future with all the powers in the world. Everyone's a Christ for their future self, when that future self could be powerful enough to own a country."
He grinned, bullets shining like little metal slugs.
"We stand in a land stained with the blood of a thousand Christs.
Taylor growled internally.
"Fine. Sure. Parahumans ruin things. I get the message. Now, what I need is a way out of here. Out of Gallup, out of America."
"Then you want Smoking Mirror. Works with the cartels, but out here... well, he works for everyone. What are the cartels going to do, kill him? Lose Gallup and all it makes and takes? No, no, no... he works for everyone if they can pay. But you, you've no respect. You've got friends, though. Good friends. Powerful friends. Maybe I work something out."
A gun was placed on the table.
"Kill a man for me."
"No. Out of the question."
"Wound him. Badly. Put him in a coma."
"Not happening."
"Then do something else. Kill some lobos, and hope you kill enough to make some rich guy happy. Maybe you go and fuck one of the big players in town, but trust me, they're used to lovers like Felina, might need to find a pidoras or something. But in Gallup, you make nothing until you can kill."
"I have gold. Money."
"Money? Meaningless. Gold? Yeah, yeah, sure. Means nothing. People here, they sell diamonds for bullets, melt down crosses and sell the metal so they can afford a blanket or some food. I can't shoot gold, I can't eat gold, and I definitely can't drink gold or fuck gold. Gold's useless. Need reputation. Credit. Debt. All of these things."
They were alone in their circle of light, and for a second Turk's brother (who she refused to name out of spite), seemed large enough to become the entire world. An ugly planetoid of bullets and scars and ageing muscles sagging down and a nose swollen by liquor until it looked like the bulbous stomach of a fresh-filled tick. Taylor had decided something, in that moment. With Turk's awful brother in front of her, feeling, through her swarm, a man being torn apart by a group of parahumans in the street outside, in a place which had to be quarantined, because the problems it represented were unsolvable, all the world could manage was to confine it here and stop it from affecting others. And her thought wasn't about the killing, or morality, or something as prosaic as that.
It was about parahumans.
It was about parahumans and capes and powers. It was like... the world had once been a rotten place, sure. But it was a place of regulated rot. There were limits to the rot, because if it spread, the system would need to correct for it. Things like war, especially nuclear war... reduced, made smaller, the system couldn't take endless total war between major players of the great game. Peace was preferable. Great cruelties? Awful, but people would resist them, react against them, and always a general world picture endured. Humans were humans, animals were animals, the world was the world. Misery was a failure of the system. The Totem Lattice, as she'd later call it, existed in a kind of... equilibrium, she supposed. If Bishas were cropping up left, right and centre for all of human history, she doubted there would be any humans left at this point. Angrbodas, too - the world had existed for a long time, and there was only one Sleeper, one Angrboda. Surely there'd be... dozens, maybe hundreds? Equilibrium, homeostasis, nature finding some form of balance.
And parahumans had changed that. Like when humans found out they could burn things, tame things, grow things, invent things, and form larger and larger groups. The switch had been made. And that balance was destroyed.
Enough trauma, and you could leave humanity behind. Maybe. If you were lucky, or unlucky as the case may be. Nuclear weapons, meaningless in the face of powers. Cruelty created traumatised godlings who could go and inflict more cruelty. If superpowers were parasites, which she thought they might be, then they'd want a world of endless conflict and escalating cruelty, making minds right for their ascendancy into proper hosts. The Endbringers would then be shepherds, making sure the world remained as awful as possible to encourage the growth of more and more and more powers. And the number of parahumans was rising, so... well, it was clearly working.
Once, a cruel world was a sad thing. Mournful.
And now, a cruel world made men and women into gods.
And people wondered why things had gone so very, very wrong in the last few decades.
When gods were invisible and formless, people would need to have faith. When that faith declined, we found faith in other things, didn't we? Money, sometimes. Science. The nation. The ethnic group. Progress. History. Ideology. All manner of systems which could fill the hole left behind by god, because faith is a human craving and rises up inevitably, and must find something to act on. Whether or not the human in question likes it, they must have faith in something. I've lived for a long time, and I've never found a truly faithless person.
And now, in a parahuman world, the gods are real. The gods are us. The gods are the Endbringers. The gods are in the powers people like you and your blonde friend possess. We have miracles happening every second of every day every year from now until the end of the world.
The world has gone mad because we have all become gods or gods-in-waiting. A wordless faith has appeared, and we are all zealots for it. And when we become gods ourselves, we define a new faith, support an old one, build a religion around ourselves and then reinforce it with a thousand miracles. Each parahuman a saint. Each parahuman a prophet. Each parahuman the leader of their own cult of personality. And the people who aren't zealots for this faith seem like blinkered, bigoted, blind idiots who can't understand the tide of things. Even this little snarling mongrel in front of us, he's a product of this faith, he's a zealot for it. He prays to the chaos it causes, and feeds on the boundless miracles that flow into him. And thrives in the void left behind when intangible faith died off and was replaced by an age of absolute, inexplicable, reproducible and verifiable miracles.
You're a goddess. In your own way. Victoria is definitely a goddess, the sort some tribe somewhere would worship. We try to convince ourselves otherwise, but the point is... in the old days, someone who could command the swarm would be an untouchable deity, an idol worthy of worship, a saint, a bodhissatva, a great sage respected for power if not for wisdom. And even if you call yourself a 'parahuman' or a 'superhero' or a 'cape', the core of your brain knows what you are.
And it knows you're a goddess.
And that's not something someone with your sort of power should ever feel.
***
"Taylor?"
Taylor snapped back. They'd stopped. End of the road, for today. Vicky had dismounted from the bike, and was walking around rolling her shoulders. Had her head over her own shoulder, peering curiously with a single ice-blue eye. Taylor followed her, struggling very slightly with a limp she'd very suddenly developed after her little... well, her little surprise for the next agent she came across. Vicky gave her a considering look.
"You've got a memory look. Gallup, right?"
"Some of it. Yeah."
Vicky strolled over, helping her to her feet from the bike. All her limbs fallen asleep from too long on the road. Wild chamomile played around her legs, and huge fields of fescue grass rolled off into the sunset, staining the sky the same shade of blood-red that Gallup was perpetually bathed in, at least in her memories. The sun turned the grass a shade of pink usually found inside seashells, and it soothed her. The light was cooled by the grass, and the world seemed calmer. Dark soil underneath the plants, dark and healthy. In another country this would be farmed to hell and back out of necessity. But here... they could find another thousand acres of the stuff if they walked, then another thousand, another thousand. Russia was short on a lot of things, but land wasn't one of them. In the distance, she thought she could see the scars of an old railway, which had tried to cross over land too boggy to really be built on. Swamps and peat-bogs... built fast and cheap. Rotten now. But the scars lingered, dykes and wells, ripping up the earth to drain the water to let the train go further and further. And now... well... the railways were gone, replaced by more secure routes, and irrigation systems remained. Feeding farms that no-one would use, because there was easier-to-access land somewhere else, with more houses, more roads.
Out of the ruin, this untouched place had risen up.
"It wasn't your fault, what happened out there in Gallup. We did what we had to to survive."
Taylor grimaced, the beauty of the world dimming very slightly.
"For a year. Yeah."
"They had us hostage out there. Only one way out, and we didn't command it. And if we fucked around, we'd have lost everything. Smoking Mirror could just leave. Gallup could've been our prison. So we did a bit of work. Stole a few horses."
Vicky was rambling, talking faster. Nervous of her own memories. Taylor could understand.
"Did more than that, Vicky. But... alright, just calm down."
She squeezed Vicky's shoulder. Always like this, especially after Gallup, but also before. They were like... some weird toy. A string with two weights. A bola, that was it. Thrown, one ball leading and thowing the other out. And the first ball would fall back, spinning, for the second to advance in front and lead the whirling comet into the distance. That was the way of it, she supposed. One would fall back into memories or doubts or sadness... and the other would drive on with the justifications and purpose and wisdom. Then the stronger one would become weaker, the weaker would become stronger, and they'd keep going forwards. They were one person while together, and while apart they never seemed to do the other's job quite correctly. Strength not strong enough, weakness not tender enough. Only together could they really explore the extremes of each, and not some awkward grey place in the middle.
Vicky jerked back to reality.
"...yeah, yeah."
But one more memory.
"Sanagi. How is she?"
Etsuko Sanagi. Now there were some memories... good ones, largely. A friend. A good ally. Ahab's best friend, too. Guilt over her triggering at all, losing everything... becoming less and less human. She shut off those memories when she reached Gallup. Sanagi and Gallup... the two in conjunction had been some very, very dark recollections indeed.
"Wouldn't know. She's still... doing her wandering, I think she likes being alone. For now."
"You need a tough. Like in Gallup. One strong, one smart."
Taylor smiled wearily.
"A warrior and a thinker. A king and a philosopher. Arthur and his Merlin. Yeah, I remember the conversation. I'll find her if I need her, for now we should let her sleep."
"...should apologise."
"I will. If I find her. If I need to."
Vicky paused, and abruptly leaned over to her bike, fiddling for something. Another reason why she wanted a bike, and not just a backpack with all the things she needed to survive. There was a big thing there, welded into the metal, and... oh. Oh God, Patience was giving her some ideas, wasn't she? Bad ideas... very, very bad ideas... she flicked a button. And sound sprang out of the surprisingly high-quality speaker of a bizarrely good disk player she'd decided to put in her damn bike. What song... oh, American. Not Russian. She wasn't a music person, didn't listen much... a bit newer than the stuff she usually listened to, though. Some girl. Not very familiar. Vicky grinned.
"She's a parahuman."
"Hm?"
"The singer. Bad Canary. American, had some early hits, never really went anywhere... then she started doing some other songs, moved into new genres. Cult following."
"Are you a cultist?"
"...bit strong. But I like her. Find her entertaining, just... kinda fun, I guess. Come on, you look out of practice."
Taylor groaned.
"Vicky, I'm tired, I don't think I want to-"
"You've been dozing all day on that bike, you're rested enough. Come on."
There was a weird look in her eyes. Right. Patience was probably geeing her up, making her interested. Well, Patience had always been weird about this sort of thing, about music. Helped drown out the voices in her head. Maybe it helped Vicky as well. Chorei was silent save for a light grumble which was more good-natured than Taylor had anticipated.
"Come on. Dance, you massive clumsy jock."
Taylor glared.
"Fine. You complete nerd."
And the two started to dance, while Vicky hummed along with the tune, with the odd lyrics spilling out of the speakers. Vicky had started insisting on this a while ago. Said that Taylor was going to be relearning to walk after she got a leg back, so she ought to use that chance to drill some dancing instincts in. She was relearning anyway, she was working from a blank slate. So have fun with it. Try and dance. They'd danced in a dusty, smoky cantina in Gallup, the bartender killed earlier that night. They'd been the first to hear, so they had first dibs on the liquor, the space... and the jukebox. And they'd chosen to dance in that dusty little place. They'd danced then, and they danced now, contentedly if a little awkwardly, neither of them quite as... graceful as they'd like. Vicky with her busted knee, Taylor with her replacement knee.
Taylor smiled very, very faintly.
"It's good to have you back."
"Good to be back."
'I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / by the false azure in the windowpane... / other men die, but I am another, therefore I'll not die...'
"What's the song?"
"Blood-Ripe Lives."
"...it's odd. I like it."
"Thought you would."
And in Taylor's head, Chorei quietly mimicked Taylor's movements with Patience, a graft extending between the two dance partners. Two pairs of dancers in perfect tandem.
Happy to have reunified.
And in the distance, the interminable distance...
Tallinn.
Information.
A song for the unravelling of the world was beginning, and the first notes were cast in pale fire.
"So, keep an eye on the bus. Clean the interior for dust at least once a week, vacuum as well. Make sure no insects are infesting the inside, if there are, tell your father and he'll see to the rest. If anyone tries to break in, apologise to their families for me, but don't feel guilty - the signs are up for a reason. If they couldn't follow basic instructions, they deserve what they get. And take care of Little Lady."
Irina nodded rapidly.
"Ostrakova's already been paid for the rent, covering the next few months, so don't believe her if she starts asking for more. If I'm not back within three months, then just lock the bus up and challenge her to try and move it. Take Little Lady home with you in the meantime. And if I'm not back in a year, then you can assume I'm dead and move on with things. There's a store of cash your father should know about, he knows to use that to clear the bus off Ostrakova's land... and there's a bit left over as an apology, for both your father, and for Ostrakova. Remind him if he forgets. And if you steal anything, I will know. And there will be consequences."
Irina cradled Little Lady close to herself, the prairie dog sniffing curiously at her latest hoodie, flinching at the scent of the bizarre, profoundly unnatural chemicals involved in its production. She tilted her head to one side, thinking...
Oh dear. The spawn is thinking. Never good.
"But if you're dead, how will there be consequences?"
Taylor glared.
"I've died before."
Technically true.
"Uh."
"I got better. And for all you know, I might get better again. Now, death, when it gets close, it feels like you're sinking down into a huge black beach, too heavy to break out. And if I want to shed some weight, I might end up losing something like pity, mercy, or my ability to care about whether or not I permanently damage a child who's stolen my things. Am I understood?"
Irina blinked.
"Yes."
"Are you going to steal anything?"
"No."
"Good. Now, I do have a small present for you, just to make sure you don't feel underappreciated. You did good work with that visitor, both I and your dad are proud of you."
Irina sneered.
"Don't need you to be proud in me, I'm proud of myself. Always am. Always will be. Pride's not a sin, that's something only piss-jizz drainholes think, that, or colossal gaylords. I'm enlightened, Miss Tatiana, I know how to be proud in myself, and I don't need no bus-dwelling rodent-owning bug-controlling gun-toting eye-missing leg-limping cardigan-wearing piece of smegma to tell me that they're proud in me, and I might actually take that as an insult, and maybe you should just let me have whatever the fuck I want so my angers are soothed and I don't feel like biting off your fucking tits and stapling them to your head like fucking Mickey Mouse ears."
I've read the Bible, you know. I'm aware God cursed people with childbirth. They didn't mean the pain of childbirth, I think they just meant children. I think children are proof that we live in a doomed world, that we dwell in the Kali Yuga. Fetch a belt and beat her with it, I beg of you.
Taylor poked her. Hard. She wasn't beating anyone today. Probably. Never knew. She wasn't going to beat a child, at least. Irina stumbled pack, scowling like an angry bulldog, clutching Little Lady tightly to her chest. Already used to having her around. Made sense, she was a splendid pet. Downright delightful. And Taylor was already missing her.
"Do you want a present or not?"
Irina considered this question with the intensity usually reserved for philosophical ponderings.
"Yes please."
Well, that was a better outcome than most philosophical ponderings, at least. Good for her.
"Just one more thing, before you get it. You know Daniil?"
"Oh yeah! He's your dad, right?"
Of course she'd figured it out.
"Right. Leave him alone. He likes his peace and quiet, and he won't enjoy being bugged excessively."
Irina raised her hand solemnly.
"I will not bug him excessively."
I despise this creature. But I respect its tenacity.
"Right. So. Here you go. Have fun."
She tossed a small package over, crudely wrapped in brown paper - the same stuff she used for sending her little pieces on old languages to a few professorial contacts. She kept that little practice up both because it was... well, interesting generally, and because it made her dad happy to hear about. He understood very little, but he clearly liked the idea of Annette's daughter doing something academic. Plus, Chorei enjoyed showing off. Irina tore open her package with vicious abandon, using one hand to tear, her teeth to hold it in place, and the other hand to keep Little Lady nestled close. Wow, she really did look like a small goblin when she did that. Uncannily similar to Ellen when she had no hands and needed to be creative. Her eyes widened. Then narrowed. Widened again. Half-squinted. Peered. Pondered. Assessed. Analysed. And finally, widened to terrifying extremes.
"A knife!"
"An ancient knife excavated from a Scythian burial mound by a cult which wanted a special tool for sacrificing people, yes. Don't worry, they didn't succeed. It's very delicate, and quite blunt. Don't damage it. Use it as a wall decoration, ask your dad about it."
The girl was barely listening.
"I'm going to mug someone!"
"It's made of solid gold, you can't mug someone with it, people will mug you for it. And it's an inflation-resistant bit of cash for when you grow up. Some kids get bank accounts or trust funds. You get a golden Scythian knife which is worth quite a healthy chunk of change. So if you damage this, you're just burning your own money. Am I clear?"
Irina was grinning madly.
"Yes. You are very clear. I understand every word you say. I completely comprehend every statement you have made up until this point in time."
"You listened to nothing."
"No. I love my knife."
Her grin expanded to face-bisecting proportions.
"I got Little Lady and a knife in one day. This is fucking amazing."
Taylor's eye narrowed.
"Little Lady is on loan, and the knife is an investment in your future. Now clear off. You're welcome, though."
Irina paused... then wrapped Taylor in very brief, embarrassed hug. Didn't reach high enough to do a proper one, so just wound up clinging to her waist while juggling a priceless Scythian gold ceremonial knife and a prairie dog all at once. Alright, the kid was good at multitasking, she had that going for her. The hug was very, very brief, and when Irina drew back her face was the shade of a fresh cranberry. Red, hair bleached a shocking platinum, and very dark brown hair... huh, she looked almost like a Neapolitan ice cream. The kid did nothing else for a second, just stared upwards with a mixture of embarrassment, sorrow, gratitude, a few other emotions thrown in for good measure, most of which Taylor barely recognised before they vanished and were replaced by others... and then, without a word of warning, she turned on her heel and started marching briskly down the mud-slicked hill, down back home, where Turk was waiting for her.
Taylor had said her goodbyes. Shatterbird was off, for, as she described it 'a lovely week in Kazan that no-one shall interrupt on pain of flaying. And I'll pick you up Foucault's Pendulum if I find some copies'. Turk had been curt and brusque, but... kindly, in his own way. Retirement would suit him, she thought. Having met his brother in Gallup, Turk was... definitely better-off by leaving the mercenary business behind him. Honestly, she felt a bit bad that his work with her had led to the Grid terminating all his bank accounts, even the very well-hidden ones. Oh, and the whole tea shop burning down thing, that was... yeah, felt guilty for that. Grafting him a new arm and giving him a fair chunk of the Butcher's Hoard only felt right, given all they'd been through together. And her dad.... was doing alright. Doing fine. He'd be wandering, soon enough. Might come back to this place, might not, but... her dad had a new lease on life. No union, no old house, no familiar city, just... himself, and a shit-tonne of termites. He was doing great.
"Hey, come on!"
Ah.
Her ride.
Vicky's bike growled like a living thing. It was a brutal mess of metal and trophies, no part of it really resembling something safe to ride. And yet Vicky was sat amidst the tangle of growling engine, scarred chassis, and endless, endless trinkets taken from her tours out in Mongolia and elsewhere. Sometimes Taylor wondered what Glory Girl would think if she saw Victoria Dallon charging around dressed like a lunatic barbarian, riding an insane motorcycle, while cutting away people's powers if they simply didn't deserve them. Punishment for being given incredible power and then using it to inflict pain on others over and over and over again. Would Glory Girl be horrified in general? Or horrified at how she was playing God to other parahumans? Or would she support this mad crusade, in her own way? Probably a mixture of all three. Discomfort, and additional discomfort at her own support for this.
To be fair, out of all her friends, Vicky was the only one who didn't call it 'the Geneva Suggestion'.
So that probably meant something was still fine inside that weird head of hers.
"Hop on the back, hold on tight, and tell me if you feel like you're slipping."
"Helmet?"
Vicky grinned.
"Nah."
"There's no road. We're driving over rugged terrain. I think a helmet might be an idea for me, at least."
Oh, thank every god that-
"Who said we were driving?"
Uh.
Vicky engaged the engine... and then kicked. And Taylor saw, with a budding feeling of alarm, that Vicky had attached straps to the bike - many straps, almost all of which now formed a harness around her. Taylor clocked what was going on, and immediately wrapped her arms around Vicky's waist, hanging tight... as the motorcycle launched forwards... and upwards. Held aloft by the harness, which looked tinkermade, and carried forward by a combination of its own momentum and Vicky's own unnatural strength.
They were in a flying fucking motorcycle.
Taylor screamed in Vicky's ear.
"When did this happen?"
Vicky roared back.
"Mongolia! Not many roads, motorcycle wasn't handling well, got a tinker to make sure this thing would work!"
"Why would you do this?! You can already fly!"
Vicky grinned.
"I can only fit so many trophies on my costume! This way I get to carry more stuff!"
This made sense. Taylor didn't want it to make sense, because then she started to agree with Vicky's decisions, and no set of decisions which led to flying motorcycle was remotely good. Yes, it made sense to have a way to carry lots of stuff, tools, weapons, supplies. Yes, it was good to have a way of carrying multiple people or objects at once, when just using hands wouldn't quite work. Did that mean Taylor liked it? No. No she did not. In fact, she was telling her heart to slow down, forcing her lungs to operate normally, instructed a number of organs and systems to start behaving like nothing remotely odd was happening. Step by step, she was demolishing her own panic response. Mostly.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-
Chorei wasn't good with heights. It was a medieval thing, her brain had never been wired for anything of this sort. Flying while clinging to Vicky was bad enough, flying while in a motorcycle attached to Vicky using a harness was much fucking worse. Sure, the harness was tinkertech. But surprise of all surprises, tinkertech decayed. And maybe it would decay now. In the next two seconds. It was snapping, she could feel it snapping, she could - no, that was her own joints popping as the tension increased. Vicky didn't notice. Vicky had a fucking forcefield. She was getting complacement, too content with sitting in her bus reading and writing and occasionally going out to hunt or fish, she was not acclimated. Through her swarm she vaguely saw Irina staring up with wide eyes while having a substantial mental breakdown at the sight of Taylor flying away on a motorcycle like something out of a particularly weird children's book.
"Hey, Taylor!"
"What?"
"Witches!"
Taylor glared.
"No!"
"We're flying!"
"You fly anyway!"
"We do magic!"
"Superpowers!"
"And actual magic!"
"Exploitation of weird natural principles!"
"No, we're witches! We're totally witches and nothing can convince me otherwise!"
Taylor growled. She didn't want to die on this hill, but she very much wanted to distract herself from the rushing earth beneath them, and her own quiet realisation that, yeah, this method of transportation had some legitimate advantages.
"Tell Patience to stop feeding you jokes. It's cheating."
Vicky's grin widened.
"What, like you don't get jokes from Chorei?"
"No. Never. Chorei isn't funny."
aaaaaaaaaaa- hey! I am funny! I certainly have the potential to be funny, a potential I frequently fulfill, so don't you dare run around saying I am not a deeply humorous individual. I can even recite the full tale of the Child with the Long Name, that was a cracking bit of humour back a few centuries ago, very popular amongst the other nuns and even a few monks! Here we go, ah, once a mother decided to name her child Anokutarasambyakusambodai, and one day her son fell into the river, so she yelled for help, yelling 'help! My child, Anokutarasambyakusambodai has fallen in the river!' but alas, by the time she finished saying his very long name, the child had already drowned. There, that's hilarious,
"She's telling you a bad joke in retribution, isn't she?"
It's a wonderful joke, it's innocent, it's playful, so what if it doesn't involve your modern debaucheries?! It involves dead children, you sick little creatures ought to enjoy that sort of humour.
"Yes."
Hate both of you.
**`*
Taylor had nothing to do but wait, and use the insects on the ground to try and get a picture for anything happening around them. To Vicky's credit, they weren't flying like actual wtiches, cackling while soaring in front of the moon. They flew like... well, like people hauling around a motorcycle. Not too far off the ground, just enough to keep from having to worry about silly things like 'terrain' or 'potholes' or 'small creatures which were understandably surprised at getting presented with an enormous flying motorcycle in the middle of nowhere'. Hell, at one point they had used a road briefly, and Vicky had let the motorcycle rumble along like an actual motorcycle. She was faster these days, capable of getting to about a hundred miles an hour, and with her casual dismissal of terrain difficulties, they were making admirable progress. Been a while since she let Vicky take her anywhere on this thing, usually it was more expedient to get carried - but in this case, she could see the advantages. Many of them. The fact that she could literally instruct her body to calm the fuck down was a big help in reaching that conclusion.
One advantage presented itself after a few hours. They were heading to Estonia, and would be crossing through multiple different 'states', in the modern Russian sense of the term. From what she'd read, after Moscow had been erased from the face of the earth by Behemoth in 1995, things had become... strange. Very strange. Most countries had started a long process of decentralisation, anything to stop them from getting their entire economy knocked out in a single Endbringer attack. And Russia had been the pioneers of that method, eight years before another country reaped the rewards of not following the post-Moscow playbook. The UK had gone from being a fairly relevant place to... a backwater, a shivering, foggy backwater staring in frightened suspicion at the rest of the world, and all because of a single Simurgh strike on London. City gone, economy collapsed, government decapitated, bureaucracy obliterated, population scattered... one attack, and all that had happened. From something to next-to-nothing. Russia had the luxury of surviving losing its capital, at least. Big enough, and most industry was located far away from Moscow to begin with. But the government was gone, and it vanished when things were at their messiest for the former Union.
Things were already moving apart to protect from Endbringers. Combine that with the loss of most central institutions, a colossal loss of life in general, and an economic collapse... well, turned out that most places got it into their heads to push for more leeway in terms of self-governance. Republics left right and centre, all with their own Constitution, their own legislature, even their own currency. All organised under the guiding hands of decentralised PMCs, particularly Red Gauntlet. The military-indsutrial complex became Russia's biggest export, biggest employer, biggest investors, biggest customer for almost all manufacturers. Army carved up, gradually becoming nothing more than the training centres for more PMC troops, fanning out to fight in the rest of the world. Parhaumans would never stop emerging, Endbringers would never stop attacking, so there would always be a need for individuals capable of inflicting intense violence on whoever they were paid to inflict it on. Most countries had fought a war or two in Central Asia and Africa in the last few decades.... even if they usually never sent a single soldier.
Turk's brother had said it well.
'The Soviets have won, I think. I mean, we've got ourselves a red world, haven't we? A Russian world, too. Red with blood, and Russian because it's Russians doing half the bleeding. Hey, maybe Lenin had a monkey's paw or something, you know?'
And then he'd laughed, that awful, coarse laugh, exposing the bullets he'd shoved into his gums to replace his lost teeth, and a tongue turned jet-black from whatever the hell he consumed to keep himself energised when everything in him wanted to shut down. She barely noticed as they started to go through a few borders, where she generally paid her way through by flashing a paper or two she'd obtained from a few of her contacts in the Russian underground. According to them, she was a very important person who knew other, very important people. Which wasn't untrue. The Grid considered her important. And she did know the important people named in her documents. Yeah, that guy... she'd waited for him in his house, grafted to him, and used what she found inside his little head to blackmail him with things he'd forgotten about. And that lady, well, Taylor had been nice. Took her out for dinner at a very nice place in St. Petersburg, and charmed her with tales of how she'd detonated a nuclear device on US soil.
That lady had been weird. And had promptly cackled her head off upon realising that Taylor was the one who'd caused that little display outside Gallup. Very willing to give her all the influential signatures she needed, though.
She barely noticed it. Was running on autopilot, even turning over most speech duties to Chorei, who knew Russian as fluently as Taylor did, if not more so. Taylor indulged in memory. She was travelling over familiar territory, towards an unfamiliar destination. And she was thinking of things. The steppe, the rolling hills, the boundless forests and the windin concrete tapeworms laid across the Russian countryside faded from her mind, and all she could remember was a little place in the middle of the desert, surrounded by an enormous wall, and ringed by the howling of strange hairless dogs.
***
WELCOME TO HELL.
Those had been the words scrawled over the wall. And a younger, more alarmed Taylor couldn't help but remember them over and over and over as the breach behind them was sealed up by mounds of containment foam, before they could start moving in with the expanding concrete, the steer rebar, all the things to plug the gap properly. The wall was too high to really see the sun at the moment, all that reamined was a blood-red sky and a heat that Taylor wouldn't feel once she left. Three years in Russia to come after this, and never again would she feel the heat of Gallup's invisible sun, the burning oven of its red, ragged sky. Dogs howled around the edges of the place. Tinkers experimented here - tinkers who had no interest in playing by most rules, who wanted a place where meat was cheap, and no-one cared if they killed their test subjects. The dogs fed on the dead, and were changed. The lobos, they called them in Gallup. Acidic spit, skin hard enough to block bullets, swams of biotinker-made insects boiling in their stomach-hives, tails which extended to vicious stingers, or minds which frothed with too much intelligence for the brain to handle. No idea what they were capable of. All Taylor saw, most nights, was glowing eyes staring out of the dark, and animals that paid no attention to the stings of her insects.
But they knew to fear the light of the town.
And they knew that the people would be giving them more bodies soon enough.
In Gallup, the lobos never went hungry.
The streets were torn up. Too many fights. No-one maintaining them. The buildings smoked and steamed unpleasantly in the heat, everywhere was the stink of roasting food, crude fuel being burned in huge piles, and spent ammunition. Plus, the strange steam which emanated from the tinker workshops, that people were warned to steer clear of by those interested in their health... and encouraged to inhale by everyone else. The latter was a much larger category. Here, Taylor had felt strongly that parhaumans were a curse. Nothing restrained them here, nothing but the rule of retailation - if they hit someone, that person was entitled to hit back, so either you kill them quickly or hope you could take their punch. And on that single axiom, a town had been built. And it earned the title of 'hell'. With the smoke, with the blood red sky, with the heat, with the fumes, with the howling lobos at the frontiers, with the writhing ruin and soft decay of the place...
Yeah. Hell was about right.
She was watching from the balcony of a half-ruined house, crudely repaired with soft mud hardened to a shell, like the world was scabbing over. No fancy building materials out here, no-one would import something that useless. You had what you could scavenge or you could harvest. And there was plenty of mud. Out of a cantina, a group of toughs strode out, pushing aside the dried dog-hide they used for a door. Unnaturally large. Unnaturally thick. And covered in spines which left the hand smarting with tiny red wounds if you rubbed them the wrong way... and based on the hissing from one of the toughs, he'd done precisely that in a fit of drunken stupidity. The pain didn't give Taylor any pleasure - pain meant annoyance, and annoyance meant outlets. No idea which outfit they were with, there were no uniforms. They were a mix of Americans and Mexicans, mostly men, but one woman who had no nose and had her mouth deformed by a scar crossing over her lips. A piece of melted flesh that dragged the corner of the mouth down into a clown's scowl. Eyes that glittered like coals in a rainstorm. They stank, she could tell that much through her insects. Stank to high heaven and back. Wore heavy clothes, reinforced with metal or kevlar where they could find it, and around their waists were scalps with blue-black hair, blonde hair, red hair, brown hair...
Old enemies. Or just for fun.
They saw an older man. Old hand. One of his arms gone, consumed by a biotinker in exchange for enough money to buy safety and comfort and pleasure for a couple of weeks. Or a night. Or nothing at all, and he arm was taken by force. In its place was a single switching tentacle, red as a tongue, moving without any command. The man kept batting it away - he couldn't control he thing, and his neck was lined with hickey-like marks where the tentacle's suckers had kissed him sweetly. Eyes were hollowed by lack of sleeping. He hunched over a charcoal fire, staring senselessly down at the strips of blackened, anonymous heat sizzlewd and spat, slowly turning to the consistency of leather. Cook them long enough and you might avoid anything the biotinkers put in them, or they snapped up from the refuse pile outside the labs. Meat, and a piece of corn. White and near-luminous, transparent as a jellyfish's body. Either washed out by the sun and rain, or something unnatural.
She turned away with her stomach sinking.
But her swarm could see them starting to prod him, getting some entertainent out of the old freak. He had a millipede-like scar along his head... probably an old tough himself, wounded in the head by something, and reduced to selling parts of himself to the doctors in exchange for enough cash to afford food. When he couldn't steal it, anyway.
She walked inside when the low moans of pain started.
And Turk's brother waited.
His face was a mockery of Turk's. His smile, his clothes, his bearing, his accent, everything mocked all the things she liked most about Turk. His bullet teeth gleamed in the candlelight. His fingers, those he had left, drummed on the wooden table and sweat trickled from every pore. His whole body weeping at what his soul had become. Felina, his latest wife, stood nearby, toying with the gold they'd handed over in exchange for shelter. She glanced up at Taylor, and opened her mouth in a wide grin, showing her half-gone tongue. Liked doing that. Knew it made people uncomfortable.
They'd talked for hours. Talked about everything and nothing. And all of his war stories.
The Congo. A parahuman warlord tried to seize control of the cobalt mines. PMCs called in to stop him from doing that, because the current warlord had much nicer policies towards tariffs. He knew the score, the new guy didn't. So they'd fought him, gunned down his men with lazy ease - starved ex-farmers and people with nowhere else to go, desperate for the light and food near the mines. At that, the brother had laughed raucously.
"Idiots. Those lights, that food? For us. For the guards. For the bosses in charge. The miners get darkness and smoke and machines for them to operate. They get barracks and what food they need, not a bite more. Some of them surrendered. Wanted to cut their losses. So we grabbed them and shoved them in the mines, and they thanked us. Thought they'd be getting all the things they wanted. Loved doing that to them, sometimes."
A grin.
"Now, I sell guns to the new parahuman warlords. Those ex-farmers are using some good, good weapons these days, I tell you that much. A warlord wins with my guns. Then he needs more. But me, I don't like selling once they've won, you know? 'Cause then I attract attention from big boys... so no, I just find the next warlord who wants the mines, and sell to him instead. Or her, I'm not prejudiced against the ladies, trust me, if I was, Felina wouldn't let me wake up tomorrow. Not with a cock attached to me, that is."
Felina smiled with uncannily sharp teeth, eyes glittering strangely.
"Oh, she loves me. She loves me. But trust me, girl, you want to make money, you never play for the winners. Not the final winner. Because if someone wins, they don't need you anymore. So you play for the losers, and for the people who want to be winners. Do that, you'll never run out. Out there, in the town, someone comes in. They want something, they want everything, and they don't stop until they've got it. So I sell them guns - what does it matter if they pay for them, huh? They've got everything to fight for, but a big guy in charge, he's only got things to lose, he thinks about price and quality and quantity and reliability and everything. The new guy? He'll do anything for a few guns. Then he dies. His guns are wrecked. And the next new guy steps in to buy. Did the same in the Congo, nice and simple, have to say."
Taylor glared at him silently.
"All about parahumans. Old days, you kick a guy, he either kicks back or he stays down. Now, maybe he kicks back, maybe he stays down... maybe he gets superpowers because you kicked him too hard, then blows your head off with a laser. Maybe he thinks he might, so he fights back a little more anyway. Maybe he still dies, but he still hurts you, maybe enough for the next guy. Everyone could get superpowers, so everyone becomes a martyr to his future self, the future with all the powers in the world. Everyone's a Christ for their future self, when that future self could be powerful enough to own a country."
He grinned, bullets shining like little metal slugs.
"We stand in a land stained with the blood of a thousand Christs.
Taylor growled internally.
"Fine. Sure. Parahumans ruin things. I get the message. Now, what I need is a way out of here. Out of Gallup, out of America."
"Then you want Smoking Mirror. Works with the cartels, but out here... well, he works for everyone. What are the cartels going to do, kill him? Lose Gallup and all it makes and takes? No, no, no... he works for everyone if they can pay. But you, you've no respect. You've got friends, though. Good friends. Powerful friends. Maybe I work something out."
A gun was placed on the table.
"Kill a man for me."
"No. Out of the question."
"Wound him. Badly. Put him in a coma."
"Not happening."
"Then do something else. Kill some lobos, and hope you kill enough to make some rich guy happy. Maybe you go and fuck one of the big players in town, but trust me, they're used to lovers like Felina, might need to find a pidoras or something. But in Gallup, you make nothing until you can kill."
"I have gold. Money."
"Money? Meaningless. Gold? Yeah, yeah, sure. Means nothing. People here, they sell diamonds for bullets, melt down crosses and sell the metal so they can afford a blanket or some food. I can't shoot gold, I can't eat gold, and I definitely can't drink gold or fuck gold. Gold's useless. Need reputation. Credit. Debt. All of these things."
They were alone in their circle of light, and for a second Turk's brother (who she refused to name out of spite), seemed large enough to become the entire world. An ugly planetoid of bullets and scars and ageing muscles sagging down and a nose swollen by liquor until it looked like the bulbous stomach of a fresh-filled tick. Taylor had decided something, in that moment. With Turk's awful brother in front of her, feeling, through her swarm, a man being torn apart by a group of parahumans in the street outside, in a place which had to be quarantined, because the problems it represented were unsolvable, all the world could manage was to confine it here and stop it from affecting others. And her thought wasn't about the killing, or morality, or something as prosaic as that.
It was about parahumans.
It was about parahumans and capes and powers. It was like... the world had once been a rotten place, sure. But it was a place of regulated rot. There were limits to the rot, because if it spread, the system would need to correct for it. Things like war, especially nuclear war... reduced, made smaller, the system couldn't take endless total war between major players of the great game. Peace was preferable. Great cruelties? Awful, but people would resist them, react against them, and always a general world picture endured. Humans were humans, animals were animals, the world was the world. Misery was a failure of the system. The Totem Lattice, as she'd later call it, existed in a kind of... equilibrium, she supposed. If Bishas were cropping up left, right and centre for all of human history, she doubted there would be any humans left at this point. Angrbodas, too - the world had existed for a long time, and there was only one Sleeper, one Angrboda. Surely there'd be... dozens, maybe hundreds? Equilibrium, homeostasis, nature finding some form of balance.
And parahumans had changed that. Like when humans found out they could burn things, tame things, grow things, invent things, and form larger and larger groups. The switch had been made. And that balance was destroyed.
Enough trauma, and you could leave humanity behind. Maybe. If you were lucky, or unlucky as the case may be. Nuclear weapons, meaningless in the face of powers. Cruelty created traumatised godlings who could go and inflict more cruelty. If superpowers were parasites, which she thought they might be, then they'd want a world of endless conflict and escalating cruelty, making minds right for their ascendancy into proper hosts. The Endbringers would then be shepherds, making sure the world remained as awful as possible to encourage the growth of more and more and more powers. And the number of parahumans was rising, so... well, it was clearly working.
Once, a cruel world was a sad thing. Mournful.
And now, a cruel world made men and women into gods.
And people wondered why things had gone so very, very wrong in the last few decades.
When gods were invisible and formless, people would need to have faith. When that faith declined, we found faith in other things, didn't we? Money, sometimes. Science. The nation. The ethnic group. Progress. History. Ideology. All manner of systems which could fill the hole left behind by god, because faith is a human craving and rises up inevitably, and must find something to act on. Whether or not the human in question likes it, they must have faith in something. I've lived for a long time, and I've never found a truly faithless person.
And now, in a parahuman world, the gods are real. The gods are us. The gods are the Endbringers. The gods are in the powers people like you and your blonde friend possess. We have miracles happening every second of every day every year from now until the end of the world.
The world has gone mad because we have all become gods or gods-in-waiting. A wordless faith has appeared, and we are all zealots for it. And when we become gods ourselves, we define a new faith, support an old one, build a religion around ourselves and then reinforce it with a thousand miracles. Each parahuman a saint. Each parahuman a prophet. Each parahuman the leader of their own cult of personality. And the people who aren't zealots for this faith seem like blinkered, bigoted, blind idiots who can't understand the tide of things. Even this little snarling mongrel in front of us, he's a product of this faith, he's a zealot for it. He prays to the chaos it causes, and feeds on the boundless miracles that flow into him. And thrives in the void left behind when intangible faith died off and was replaced by an age of absolute, inexplicable, reproducible and verifiable miracles.
You're a goddess. In your own way. Victoria is definitely a goddess, the sort some tribe somewhere would worship. We try to convince ourselves otherwise, but the point is... in the old days, someone who could command the swarm would be an untouchable deity, an idol worthy of worship, a saint, a bodhissatva, a great sage respected for power if not for wisdom. And even if you call yourself a 'parahuman' or a 'superhero' or a 'cape', the core of your brain knows what you are.
And it knows you're a goddess.
And that's not something someone with your sort of power should ever feel.
***
"Taylor?"
Taylor snapped back. They'd stopped. End of the road, for today. Vicky had dismounted from the bike, and was walking around rolling her shoulders. Had her head over her own shoulder, peering curiously with a single ice-blue eye. Taylor followed her, struggling very slightly with a limp she'd very suddenly developed after her little... well, her little surprise for the next agent she came across. Vicky gave her a considering look.
"You've got a memory look. Gallup, right?"
"Some of it. Yeah."
Vicky strolled over, helping her to her feet from the bike. All her limbs fallen asleep from too long on the road. Wild chamomile played around her legs, and huge fields of fescue grass rolled off into the sunset, staining the sky the same shade of blood-red that Gallup was perpetually bathed in, at least in her memories. The sun turned the grass a shade of pink usually found inside seashells, and it soothed her. The light was cooled by the grass, and the world seemed calmer. Dark soil underneath the plants, dark and healthy. In another country this would be farmed to hell and back out of necessity. But here... they could find another thousand acres of the stuff if they walked, then another thousand, another thousand. Russia was short on a lot of things, but land wasn't one of them. In the distance, she thought she could see the scars of an old railway, which had tried to cross over land too boggy to really be built on. Swamps and peat-bogs... built fast and cheap. Rotten now. But the scars lingered, dykes and wells, ripping up the earth to drain the water to let the train go further and further. And now... well... the railways were gone, replaced by more secure routes, and irrigation systems remained. Feeding farms that no-one would use, because there was easier-to-access land somewhere else, with more houses, more roads.
Out of the ruin, this untouched place had risen up.
"It wasn't your fault, what happened out there in Gallup. We did what we had to to survive."
Taylor grimaced, the beauty of the world dimming very slightly.
"For a year. Yeah."
"They had us hostage out there. Only one way out, and we didn't command it. And if we fucked around, we'd have lost everything. Smoking Mirror could just leave. Gallup could've been our prison. So we did a bit of work. Stole a few horses."
Vicky was rambling, talking faster. Nervous of her own memories. Taylor could understand.
"Did more than that, Vicky. But... alright, just calm down."
She squeezed Vicky's shoulder. Always like this, especially after Gallup, but also before. They were like... some weird toy. A string with two weights. A bola, that was it. Thrown, one ball leading and thowing the other out. And the first ball would fall back, spinning, for the second to advance in front and lead the whirling comet into the distance. That was the way of it, she supposed. One would fall back into memories or doubts or sadness... and the other would drive on with the justifications and purpose and wisdom. Then the stronger one would become weaker, the weaker would become stronger, and they'd keep going forwards. They were one person while together, and while apart they never seemed to do the other's job quite correctly. Strength not strong enough, weakness not tender enough. Only together could they really explore the extremes of each, and not some awkward grey place in the middle.
Vicky jerked back to reality.
"...yeah, yeah."
But one more memory.
"Sanagi. How is she?"
Etsuko Sanagi. Now there were some memories... good ones, largely. A friend. A good ally. Ahab's best friend, too. Guilt over her triggering at all, losing everything... becoming less and less human. She shut off those memories when she reached Gallup. Sanagi and Gallup... the two in conjunction had been some very, very dark recollections indeed.
"Wouldn't know. She's still... doing her wandering, I think she likes being alone. For now."
"You need a tough. Like in Gallup. One strong, one smart."
Taylor smiled wearily.
"A warrior and a thinker. A king and a philosopher. Arthur and his Merlin. Yeah, I remember the conversation. I'll find her if I need her, for now we should let her sleep."
"...should apologise."
"I will. If I find her. If I need to."
Vicky paused, and abruptly leaned over to her bike, fiddling for something. Another reason why she wanted a bike, and not just a backpack with all the things she needed to survive. There was a big thing there, welded into the metal, and... oh. Oh God, Patience was giving her some ideas, wasn't she? Bad ideas... very, very bad ideas... she flicked a button. And sound sprang out of the surprisingly high-quality speaker of a bizarrely good disk player she'd decided to put in her damn bike. What song... oh, American. Not Russian. She wasn't a music person, didn't listen much... a bit newer than the stuff she usually listened to, though. Some girl. Not very familiar. Vicky grinned.
"She's a parahuman."
"Hm?"
"The singer. Bad Canary. American, had some early hits, never really went anywhere... then she started doing some other songs, moved into new genres. Cult following."
"Are you a cultist?"
"...bit strong. But I like her. Find her entertaining, just... kinda fun, I guess. Come on, you look out of practice."
Taylor groaned.
"Vicky, I'm tired, I don't think I want to-"
"You've been dozing all day on that bike, you're rested enough. Come on."
There was a weird look in her eyes. Right. Patience was probably geeing her up, making her interested. Well, Patience had always been weird about this sort of thing, about music. Helped drown out the voices in her head. Maybe it helped Vicky as well. Chorei was silent save for a light grumble which was more good-natured than Taylor had anticipated.
"Come on. Dance, you massive clumsy jock."
Taylor glared.
"Fine. You complete nerd."
And the two started to dance, while Vicky hummed along with the tune, with the odd lyrics spilling out of the speakers. Vicky had started insisting on this a while ago. Said that Taylor was going to be relearning to walk after she got a leg back, so she ought to use that chance to drill some dancing instincts in. She was relearning anyway, she was working from a blank slate. So have fun with it. Try and dance. They'd danced in a dusty, smoky cantina in Gallup, the bartender killed earlier that night. They'd been the first to hear, so they had first dibs on the liquor, the space... and the jukebox. And they'd chosen to dance in that dusty little place. They'd danced then, and they danced now, contentedly if a little awkwardly, neither of them quite as... graceful as they'd like. Vicky with her busted knee, Taylor with her replacement knee.
Taylor smiled very, very faintly.
"It's good to have you back."
"Good to be back."
'I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / by the false azure in the windowpane... / other men die, but I am another, therefore I'll not die...'
"What's the song?"
"Blood-Ripe Lives."
"...it's odd. I like it."
"Thought you would."
And in Taylor's head, Chorei quietly mimicked Taylor's movements with Patience, a graft extending between the two dance partners. Two pairs of dancers in perfect tandem.
Happy to have reunified.
And in the distance, the interminable distance...
Tallinn.
Information.
A song for the unravelling of the world was beginning, and the first notes were cast in pale fire.
Hope she can get out of this alive and (relatively) sane.