Agrippa
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Wake-up Call – Chapter 85 – Vigilante Justice
🕑 Added 2023-05-19 12:05:40 +0000 UTCEmily Piggot
Behemoth has been defeated.
Yes. At great cost. Losing Alexandria will hurt us greatly in the short term, but…
Three Endbringers.
Three Triumvirate members.
That’s a trade I would make any day of the week.
Partly because what kind of hero would they be if they didn’t choose to make that sacrifice themselves, partly because…
Endbringers.
It’s… It’s so hard to wrap my head around it. To finally learn that they can be defeated rather than just staved off. That one of the swords of Damocles hanging over the entire world could really be… solved.
Solved. That’s the word.
“Careful. She may still be around here,” one of the goons from the former E88 mutters, passing by the other side of the wooden crate I’m hiding behind with footsteps that could be considered light.
That would be.
For humans.
It’s taken Amy quite a few sessions to properly calibrate my new hearing. To make it so I’m sensitive to noises that would seem faint to a dog while retaining my capacity to function. To discriminate between sound and noise. To understand speech without getting lost in the elaborate, wet passage of air through bronchial tubes.
So I know there are three of them. I know precisely where they are, how they are spread. I can deduce where they are facing, their stances.
I know the fourth one is bleeding out from when I shattered his kneecap with a thrown ball of steel, not counting on the stupid son of a bitch impaling himself on his switchblade when he fell.
So.
I guess I should hurry.
All right. We are in a warehouse that should have been hosting a meth lab or something similar, given the perpetual stench of solvents embedded in the very walls of this monstrosity of concrete, steel, plastic, and mostly broken glass that lets the streetlights enter in jagged beams of yellow.
Only in Brockton Bay could a drug lab operate without even a proper ceiling or blocked windows.
But something happened between when I cased this place and today. Something that made them empty it of most of the equipment and merchandise. I doubt it was me because I don’t share my plans with anyone who could leak them, so I guess a rival gang—a splinter of the ABB? The Merchants, laughable as the notion may be? Or maybe a rival splinter from the E88—
I’m getting distracted.
Note to Amy: enhanced cognition without enhanced concentration may be detrimental. Possible analogy to attention deficit—wait, would triggering hyperfocus at will be a possibility—
“Joe isn’t moving,” the second-in-command of this band of clowns quietly whispers after quickly turning back to check on the man sitting just outside the wide, open gate to this warehouse.
He’s right. Joe isn’t moving.
Damn it.
I take as deep a breath as I now can and brace my back against the crate I’m hiding behind.
Then I plant my boots on the wall in front of me, and I push.
I know it isn’t empty. I know that by the way it conducts sound, by the time it takes for my push to start having an effect.
I also know the four crates stacked atop it aren’t empty.
So I push hard, and the whole column topples away from the wall at just the right angle for it to also destabilize the column to my right.
Then, before they even reach the concrete floor, I shift the pressure of my push, and I shoot out of my hiding place, the armored pads covering my shoulders and back scratching on the abused floor before I kick up with both legs to roll over, my feet and right knee hitting the concrete at the same time as my gloves’ palms so I can push myself into an upright position as I bleed the momentum of my roll, already turning to face the scene of three men about to be buried in wooden crates filled with what I hope to be enough drugs that it would constitute poetic justice.
Two of them stand still and just stare up in frozen horror.
The third one jumps away.
Always hate dealing with the clever ones.
By sheer reflex, I take out another ball bearing and snap my right hand forward, my middle finger pointing at my target, acting as a rail for my projectile to roll along before shooting at a speed no regular human could ever dodge.
Not with low light, after a sustained campaign of terror and harassment, still recovering from a desperate dodge, and unaware of precisely what they are dealing with.
The sound of metacarpal bones wetly crunching coincides with wood splintering and precedes three sets of screams and the metallic sound of a gun falling on weathered concrete.
I take a moment to process the scene. To make sure that the trapped gangbangers don’t have guns available. That their pained moans are not slowly fading as the life drains out of them.
Then I leave through the open door I had come through, the one no longer hidden behind the crates, and reach Joe just in time to pull a zip tie around his left biceps.
He may still lose his arm, but I’ll make sure that’s the worst of it.
But, now, before I call an ambulance and give the moron more extensive first aid…
I walk back in, my footsteps louder, my heels purposefully clicking on the concrete floor of the warehouse, echoing in the almost empty structure, the sound of my approach silencing the pained moans.
The one whose hand I just mangled tries to weather the pain long enough to reach for his gun with his uninjured hand.
My ball bearing is faster.
Sparks shoot off as metal impacts metal, and the weapon screeches as it gets launched to the other side of the room.
I keep walking. Slowly.
Loudly.
Calmly.
“You have one remaining hand. There are plenty of jobs you can still do with a single hand,” I say to the man kneeling and still staring at where his gun used to be.
“You crazy bi—”
I kick his chest hard enough to lay him on his back, and I press my boot on the burgeoning bruise as soon as he tries to get up.
“One hand. Two legs. Plenty of ribs,” I point out.
“Are you—I’ve got rights! You can’t do this to me! There are rules!”
And now, I smile.
Maybe not so calmly.
“There are, indeed, rules. One of them is the Endbringer truce. And while the rest of the world is celebrating our first real victory in ages or mourning those who bought it for us, you are here, emptying a drug lab that was operating until yesterday, making me suspect that there’s someone new backing whatever remains of your Empire. That you just broke an Endbringer truce that is lasting this much because one of my—associatesis in a coma.”
His eyes widen.
His heart races even faster than it was a moment ago.
I smile.
“You know something. You know who is pulling the strings, breaking the rules. And you’re going to tell me while you still have one hand, two legs, and plenty of ribs.”
Under the low lamplight filtered through the broken glass and weathered plastic sheets, the man pales.
My smile widens.
***
Not that good of a lead, but at least I’ve got a few names.
Not cape names, but there’re plenty of clues that somebody is trying to fill the vacuum recently left by the not-so-dearly departed. Mostly because they are all still alive except for Oni Lee, which is both impressive and infuriating.
But, well, at least it’s something. Most nights, I don’t get much of a lead other than what my new senses and outdated information point me to. It’s easier when there’s a large gathering, when the gangs decide to come out in strength, but, for obvious reasons, that tends to be a rare occurrence.
Criminals tend to like not being on camera committing crimes, in my experience—or, at least, they didn’t before the social media craze.
It’s astonishing how some people manage to reach adulthood alive.
I am rambling. Never a good sign.
So I take a deep breath and hold it long enough to make sure that there’s nobody around this little back alley I’ve chosen for my quick change of identity. The new hearing is a great advantage, but I can’t disregard the sense of smell either.
Amy’s still tweaking it, trying to get me to the point where I’ll be able to smell emotional changes—which will make interrogations far easier, if maybe slightly messier.
May also get me a reputation as a creepy sniffer, but, really, whatever adds to the aura of ruthlessly, methodically insane I’ve been cultivating is a bonus in my book.
I want them afraid.
But, for now… Yes, I’m alone.
So I unlatch my gloves first of all because, no matter how much I’ve modified them to allow for my new manual dexterity to shine, it’s always easier to do things without them, and then I open the luggage case behind my bike’s seat, methodically storing my armor as I take it off piece by piece until I’m only wearing my black leggings, purple sports bra, and white, short-sleeved tank top.
And then I take off my helmet, the last piece of my identity, and shake my short hair loose in a way that would’ve made my neck creak before Amy limbered all of my joints in a way that would’ve prompted jealousy from my twenty-year-old self.
I always take pleasure in it most of all. In the freedom of movement, the ease, the lack of pain.
I owe her far more than a single letter to a woman she’ll never meet.
And, just like that, my good mood is gone.
Because thinking about Amy makes me think about her petty revenge, which makes me think about Sarah Livsey, which makes me think about Colin Wallis.
The fucking jerk.
I close the luggage compartment, change the plates on my bike, and lift my seat to get my civilian helmet out, a black and neon pink thing chosen because I want to project the image of a careless college student who doesn’t quite realize what kind of city she’s recently moved into.
And because I missed being able to wear girly things in public, but that is a secondary concern.
Then I take out my riding jacket and hide my snubnosed 38 in the right pocket. Because I do know what kind of city I live in.
And, finally, after preparations and precautions that take very little time but always feel like they take too much, I ride.
My open helmet allows me to feel the cool night breeze rushing over my cheeks, taking away the remaining fever of the combat engagement as my mind does what it always does when it’s two in the morning and I’m mostly alone on the broken roads of my broken city.
It drifts.
It drifts to Alexandria, somebody I personally talked to enough times for the bitch to make an impression. To the woman trapped in time, eternally fighting a hero’s greatest foe.
To Purity, the one Nazi I likely will never have to worry about, but I wouldn’t be so sure given all the cape fuckery running around these days.
To Dragon, the most reliable cape in the world, who’s finally dropped the ball and let the whole world know just how much we depend on her being stable and focused.
And… to Colin.
To the stupid, self-righteous, infuriating man. To the man who told me that he used to admire me the last time I saw him, after he engineered my fall and set in motion the dominoes that would end up with me riding an agile motorbike through inadequately lit streets, jumping from patch of amber light to deep shadow at irregular intervals as the cool wind keeps me company with its chilling touch and lonely howl.
To Colin. Armsmaster.
To somebody who was never a friend. To a coworker who was arrogant, stuck up his own ass, eager to get himself rid of the responsibilities he deemed to be distractions to better pursue his career, even if those distractions were children.
Children that I was all too eager to take in. To turn into my direct subordinates, even if that ran contrary to how things should work, but I was ready to bend or outright break the rules if that got me closer to a safer city.
The rules I’m now enforcing. Acting as a cape, protecting the so-called ‘Endbringer truce.’
The rules I’m still breaking every single day that I act as a cape and take advantage of a system that was never made to accommodate regular humans defending themselves.
Foor good reason. Vigilantes are terrible. At best, they get themselves killed; at worst, they manage to murder innocents unrelated to the crimes they are supposedly avenging.
But we have institutionalized them. We have given carte blanche to a special class of citizens to flaunt the law even when they are supposedly on the right side of it. We have turned this country into a place where it makes sense to be a vigilante because the law no longer works.
And, without laws, we resort to rules. And when those also fail, we are just left with our own, flawed, personal sense of justice.
A sense of justice that tells me that none of this is fair. That Colin, of all people, shouldn’t have been a casualty of that last fight. Not when he was finally growing from the broken man who could only take refuge in his work and his mission. The man I met and failed to see past.
The man I failed.
Like I failed all of them.
This is when I call Amy.
This is when I take a detour to the boardwalk and stop my bike, leaning my forearms on the handlebars as the engine cools down, and I stare into the black ocean, streaks of old lamplight running over uneven waves before I take out my phone and call her to tell her about how the mission went. How her latest tweaks worked in the field. How I would like something to be different, or how something is finally just right.
And then, after a few minutes of back and forth, this is where we would start talking like people. Like the one thing I never quite saw my own capes as. This is where she tells me how frustrating her latest fight with her mother has been or how she’s steadily gaining the courage to address her father’s depression, but that it’s still a step too far. That, even after all she has done for me—to me—she still fears that directly touching a brain to fix something that was innately there is not something she can yet do.
This is when I tell her that she’s young. That she has all the time in the world to figure things out. That she’s already done far more than most of us will ever do and shouldn’t feel guilty about what she still hasn’t done.
That she’s an extraordinary young woman, and she doesn’t have to prove that to me or to anyone else. She just is.
But it’s two in the morning, and tomorrow is a school day.
Amy doesn’t know I went out because I was supposed to just take another look at the warehouse rather than assault it as a target of opportunity.
So I keep driving straight to my home, skipping this one part of my routine, of my own way to remain as human as Colin had become as of late.
Sometimes, I wish I hadn’t kept an ear on the PRT and Protectorate. I wish I had stopped checking on things as soon as I left. That my break was as clean as I had envisioned.
But I just… I just had to know.
And now I do.
***
My hands are numb with cold as I fish for my keys in my jacket’s pocket, none of my enhanced senses making the chore less of an annoyance as I dig past too many things that I really should keep in a purse.
Except, you know, Brockton.
Purses are a good way for people driving by on a motorcycle to throw you to the ground.
I finally find them, quickly going through the keyring until I identify the one that opens my front door by touch alone, and—
Somebody’s inside my home.
They have picked the lock, disabled the alarm, and left no trace at all of their entrance.
No trace except the thin, broken string of glue that no longer connects the white-painted sheet of reinforced wood to the doorframe.
I keep my keys in my left hand and get my right in my jacket’s pocket.
Around my revolver.
I aim it forward without taking it out, grasping it firmly enough to depress the grip safety.
I could go back around. Take the backdoor.
Break a window.
Call the police.
They know I’m here. They have heard my bike stop. They will know I’ve discovered them if I delay too long.
So. Who are they?
Gangbangers who have tracked me down despite my precautions? Somebody from the PRT acting on a Thinker’s report? No. Illegal entrance. I must assume illegal—
My phone rings.
“Hello, Emily,” a young woman’s voice says as soon as I get it on my ear, before I can ask who the unknown number is, my keys pressed against the back of my phone because I just realized I’m nervous enough not to have dropped them when taking it out of my pocket.
“Auntie Emily isn’t—” I start to reply, repressing the always present urge to raise my voice a few octaves when impersonating my fictitious niece, the farcical impulse that makes no sense now that my vocal folds are precisely the way they were when I was in my twenties.
“Drop it. Amy here has told me everything I need to know.”
My blood runs cold.
“Let her go now, and maybe you’ll live,” I say as I hold my phone with my head against my shoulder and turn the key to slowly open the door just enough for me to check that the light’s off in my house.
“That doesn’t seem like the best offer you can give me. I know that playing hardball is your go-to, but, really, you no longer have the power to back up that kind of aggressive bargaining.”
I abruptly push the door open all the way as I shine my LED flashlight inside, my eyes immediately adapting to the change in light, unlike—
Nobody.
There’s nobody.
I take a moment to breathe, and I get the keys and flashlight in my pocket to put on my hands-free earbuds before I take out the light again.
Then I put my phone in my pocket and finally take out my revolver before closing the door behind me.
“Going for the silent intimidation tactic, Ems? Heh. Sorry, but I’ve met better. You don’t even rate,” the spiteful—
“What do you want, Sarah?” I say, swearing at myself because of how long it’s taken me to make the connection.
“Plenty of things. But, right now? I think I want revenge on the bitch who decided to rub my trigger event in my face.”
I grunt, pretending to answer, as I desperately try to think.
But she’s a Thinker.
She could’ve pretended to come in. It’s highly unlikely she didn’t leave the broken string of glue on purpose, just to get me on edge before calling me. This could all be her making me chase her through my home while she laughs at me from the other side of the street.
Or this could be precisely what it looks like: a trap.
I have no way of knowing. Whatever I guess, she could have already predicted as my likely train of thought. Whatever I try to predict, she already knows.
So. Don’t guess.
Act.
“Really? That’s how you want to play it?” she says.
“This isn’t a game,” I tell her, trying to pinpoint any kind of echo, anything at all that will let me know where she could be hiding.
Waiting for me.
“Oh? I disagree. In fact, I have some experience with holding games like these over the phone. Mind, last time it was me playing defense, but I think I’m enjoying this one round far more.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I quite frankly don’t care,” I say as I step farther inside, checking for any sign of disturbance, any tripwire or half-open door.
“Huh, I would’ve guessed your informants in the PRT would’ve clued you in. Maybe you aren’t paying them enough, Ems? Trust me, I know how unreliable disgruntled minions can become.”
The living room is empty.
So is the kitchen.
“I am not Coil,” I say, looking once more at where my dialysis machine used to be, my eyes always drawn to that vacant spot by my armchair with a mixture of hatred and relief.
“Try the second floor. And no, no, you aren’t.
“Because, as I said, you don’t even rate.”
I don’t need any of Amy’s enhancements to pick up on the sheer vitriol. The bitter spite.
I guess I touched more of a nerve than I thought I would with her mother.
The stairs curve up from the entranceway, the thick, varnished oak handrail gleaming as I move the beam of my flashlight up in search of any traps.
“I want proof of life,” I say, mostly to keep her going, but not according to the script she would have planned.
Hopefully.
“And I want you not to ever involve my family or friends in any of your petty power games. You can’t always get what you want, don’t you know the lyrics?” she says.
Before she starts humming.
I almost grind my teeth at the sheer pubescent gall of it all, my grip on my revolver still light enough to properly aim just out of sheer training and stubbornness.
And then I go up the stairs.
Because I can hear the humming coming up from above.
She’s luring me in. I must assume she knows about my hearing. That she understands how I see the world now.
So I warily step into the landing corridor at the top of my stairs, take off my left earbud, and close my eyes.
The attic ladder is firmly shut, and I can’t hear any movement from above. The two guest rooms to my left, where a nurse sometimes used to sleep when things were particularly bad after a too-long shift, are as silent as they’ve been since Amy first touched me—stupid hormones.
In my right ear, Tattletale giggles.
“Oh, she’s done a number on you, hasn’t she? How’s this second puberty treating you? The rush of hormones and urges you thought no longer relevant to the life you were leading?”
She’s watching me, obviously.
But I can see no cameras, so she’s using Armsmaster’s borrowed tech, like that report Tagg had on his desk a few days ago claimed, the one detailing the plan to take down the E88.
I really shouldn’t kill her. Not if I can avoid it.
“You aren’t here. Amy isn’t here, or she’d be struggling to send me some kind of warning,” I say, not detecting any movement from the doors to my right either.
“I never said I was,” she says, neither confirming nor denying.
“You told me to check the upper floor.”
“Yes, I did. Because that’s where you’ll find the next clue, Ems. The one I can’t wait to see how you’ll react to,” she says before giggling again.
And the giggles come from my bedroom.
Speakers. A phone, Cape bullshit. There are plenty of ways for that to happen without her being there.
I still walk past the door to my bedroom and go to the next room, the one for actual guests. The one where Amy has stayed at times, when she’s needed to get away from her home life for a while, or where she’s decided to wait for me when she’s deemed one of my missions was too dangerous not to be readily available.
It’s not her room.
Just a guest room.
I half expect to find something scrawled on the white paint of the door. Something in garish red, like some kind of horror movie cliché warning that would make my blood run cold.
There’s nothing.
That’s almost more unsettling.
I slowly open the door, listening for any mechanical noise, any hint of a trap about to go off.
Nothing.
Just a dark room lit by the streetlamp outside the window going through gauze curtains and the lone beam of my flashlight going over a double bed with a bunched shirt that—
Not important.
I step inside, always checking for tripwires. Because the obvious trap is the room besides this one, so the second most obvious trap would be this one, but, again, it’s not like I have much of a choice.
“I admit I always enjoy the foreplay, Ems, but if you don’t start to hurry, someone I’m looking at may start having an even worse day than she’s already having,” she says.
I wet my lips and take a steadying breath.
“She’s the most powerful Striker you’ll ever meet. She can turn you inside out with a touch—” I threaten her.
“That’s what latex suits are for, Ems. Suits thick enough that she can’t turn the bacteria in her skin into a latex-eating abomination that would allow her to use her power before I knock her out again.”
“She’s a strategic asset. If you’ve hurt her—”
“My plan just killed Behemoth. I think I can get away with whatever the Hell I want to do to a surly teenager who isn’t even emptying Brockton’s hospitals after she deliberately went after my civilian identity and trigger event.”
She can.
I don’t think I’ve ever miscalculated things as much as I did with that stupid, boneheaded letter.
Yes, it was the right move to get Amy to accede to my demands. To establish the initial bargain that would get her on my side.
And everything I knew about Tattletale told me that she would get the message. That she would let things rest, taking the blow as compensation for what she did during her bank robbery.
Every single, horribly misguided psych profile told me that, spiteful as the blonde is, she would feel guilty enough to take the blow. To just consider the debt settled.
I wet my lips.
She isn’t in the room next to this one, in my bedroom.
But there’s something there she wants me to see. The next clue to where Amy is.
Or the first trap for me to step into.
So I go to the left wall and face the one that connects this room to my bedroom. The one wall I’ve recently discovered to be too thin for my new hearing when Amy stays over and—
Doesn’t matter.
I take another breath.
And I run.
An explosive start, as fast as I can, and, right before I hit the plaster and wood wall separating this bedroom from mine, I turn aside to project my right shoulder forward.
The wall explodes.
The lattice of thin beams hits the farther wall in front of me as white powder and chunks of painted plaster rain down around me as I fall down into another roll, rising up into a crouch as I sweep the room with my flashlight and revolver, not seeing anything obvious—
I try to jump out of the way, back to Amy’s room.
The weighted net is faster.
It sticks to me, tangling around as I struggle, as I try to take off my jacket and use it to push it away from my body, broken wood and plaster dragged to me as every one of my movements just makes things worse before I think to go for the knife in my inner pocket.
And then the bugs buzz.
I’m surrounded by a black swarm, the air quickly heating up until I sweat in something other than cold dread.
I take my knife out.
The swarm gets louder.
“All right, I think that’s enough, Tay. Ems here gets the idea, don’t you, Ems?”
I drop the knife.
And I watch as it gets carried away by a caravan of black widows before a jumping spider drops in front of my face, making what I’m pretty sure is an indecent gesture at me.
Comments
Agrippa
*whistles in the thing currently spoiled on the Discord*
Evilreadermaximum
Daaaaaaammmmmn. Don't fuck with Lisa's trigger. Now I wonder what, if anything, they actually did to Amy.
