Wake-up Call – Chapter 73

Taylor's arm is tightly clutched around my waist, her body flush against my back.

It doesn't matter.

The wind roars around my helmet, the road blurring below my bike as the engine overheats between my legs.

It doesn't matter.

The Rig is getting closer.

[That] matters.

I swerve around a car moving far too slow for my tastes, the dirty white sedan frantically honking at me when I suddenly pull right in front of it to avoid the red truck coming at me in the other lane.

It doesn't matter.

I… I [strain], every single detail around me coming into stark relief, fed to Power as soon as I can be aware of them, or sooner in most cases. I adjust my course minutely to avoid yet another of Brockton Bay's potholes before I pull into a sharp angle that takes me along a perpendicular street and toward the coast, the Boardwalk, and I allow Power to calculate the likelihood of encountering one too many traffic stops along the way if I stick to conventional routes.

I don't like the result, so I speed up, jump the curb, rush past low buildings filled with cape souvenirs, and finally skid over tightly packed wooden beams mercifully deserted of most pedestrians, as even Brocktonites have the sense to void easily accessible public places when an Endbringer siren sounds.

I used to think it was stupid. Paralyzing the whole world at once every time there's so much as a threat of one of them showing up? Why not wait? Why not have a hint of their actual target before mobilizing an entire planet?

The answer?

Because we need to.

Because most capes refuse being easily tracked, so we need the rallying cry to reach all of them. Because if the Simurgh moves, no one knows where or when it will land, and every second counts in vacating civilians or at least getting them to the (oh so very inadequate) shelters. Because Leviathan cruises the oceans at a speed that allows him to strike anywhere in the world in minutes.

Because Behemoth…

The Hero Killer.

My fists tighten, and the engine roars.

There's a staccato, the suspension barely keeping up with the ups and downs of the wood below us, but Taylor doesn't complain. She just tightens her arm once again, holding me closer until we finally reach the expanse of concrete at the end of the Boardwalk.

Not far behind us, a gleaming, crystal hotel where we spent our last peaceful date fades into the distance.

And the Rig grows closer.

***

I pull up in front of the ramp leading to the superhero base of Brockton Bay's Protectorate. The rallying point is at the PRT building, but I'm not here to volunteer. I'm here to talk some sense into someone stubborn enough to…

To follow me to the other side of the country.

Damn it.

I kick my bike into its parking position, and Taylor briefly squeezes me before letting go, both of us dismounting as fast as we can. Then I tear my helmet off before I pull my phone out of my jacket's pocket as I march toward the ramp leading me to Colin.

I press a few buttons, and the phone only rings once before she picks up.

"Sarah! Sarah, I've been calling you—" Mom says.

"Are you safe?" I cut her off.

"Yes! Yes, we're headed to a shelter—"

"Don't. Get back to the house. Tell Danny it's Behemoth and remind him of the looting statistics during attacks. He'll know what that means."

"[What] does it mean?!"

I glare at the PRT trooper standing in the middle of the ramp until he gets the hint and steps away, but not before looking behind me at Taylor.

I don't know what she's gesticulating to him, but I can only guess being whitelisted by Tagg is helping at this very moment.

That, and that we currently are Skitter and Tattletale, so he may have guessed this has something to do with the ongoing crisis.

Good.

"There's nothing here that Behemoth wants. It doesn't fit his style, and there hasn't been any seismic activity. While Endbringers can and will deviate from known patterns, the closest shelter to Danny's home is near enough that you will be able to safely get there if Brockton Bay is confirmed as an attack site. Meanwhile, it's statistically more dangerous for you two to be on the streets."

"And what about you?" she asks, voice trembling.

I, without even slowing down, close my eyes.

"I am a superhero, Mom. The good guys always win," I tell her, lying to her worse than at any time in my life.

Then I open my eyes, and the glass gates leading to the reception for visitors and tourists (such a ludicrous thing) slide open before me.

"You don't have to be! You can stay here and—"

I hang up on her.

Then I call Brian.

"Almost there," he grunts in a way that suggests somebody is holding the phone close to his ear.

Note to self: buy hands-free devices. For all of us.

"Good. See you soon," I tell him, not clarifying what that means.

Because I haven't told him what I just told my mother. Because he's heading to the Undersiders' base to collect a little someone who may or not make an actual difference in the fight to come. The fight he still thinks may happen in his little sister's hometown.

Lying by omission. It's so easy it feels like cheating.

"Lisa?" he asks, something worried and anxious in his tone.

I glare at the receptionist standing behind the crystal shelf keeping her away from slack-jawed tourists, and stride right to an elevator with a number pad that I quickly press a combination on.

One I memorized when I came here to nail down the nature of my deal with Tagg. Thankfully. I'm not in the mood to play a guessing game.

Equally thankfully, the security of this place is still crap, and the password works despite having been used in front of a Thinker seven. Sometimes, I wonder how Coil wasn't already running this town before I arrived.

"It's…" I hesitate, something in me shifting after stopping. After having been made to [wait] rather than move. "It's nothing. Hey, Brian?" I say.

"Yes?"

"Aisha will be all right. I promise."

"You can't—"

"I can. And tell Rachel to stay at the base. Behemoth's aura would fry her dogs before they could do anything worthwhile, and I don't want that on my conscience."

The phone crackles with sudden motion.

"I can fight," Rachel says without any inflection.

"You can," I tell her. "But I don't want you to."

There's a pause that only makes me focus on the barely perceptible rumble of an elevator moving too slowly for my tastes.

"Thank you," a small, frightened voice that nonetheless stands firm finally says.

And Rachel hangs up.

My phone rings as soon as that happens, Mom's name flashing on the screen.

I…

I want to pick up. I want to tell her… A lot of things. Reassuring things, hurtful things, meaningful things, and ceaseless prattle.

I want…

I want to tell her everything still unsaid.

Without turning around, I hand the phone to Taylor.

"Tell her you need to speak to your father. Please," I say, my throat clenching before and after the last word.

The doors to the elevator open, and Taylor speaks to my mother behind me.

[Lisa Wilbourn—]

Just… Just drown me with facts and inferences, all right? Make it so I can't think my own thoughts until I need to. Please. Please, Power—

[Three main modes of attack. Attacks wasteful. No regard for efficiency. Overwhelming force. Display of power dramatic. Demoralization of opposition intended. Differs from other Endbringers in approach. No subtlety. No feinting. Relentless advance. Likelihood of—]

Thank you. Thank you, Little Brother.

[… So-called 'kill aura' consisting of lethal doses of radiation, yet not spreading in the radius expected by field equations—]

***

"You are not coming," Colin says as soon as the door to his workshop slides open and our eyes meet.

"You are not the boss of me," I try to tell him with as much levity as I don't feel.

Colin, standing amid whirring metal limbs, his armor still being secured over his black undersuit—

[Electromyography—]

Of course.

"No. I am not," he says.

And he keeps just standing there, arms spread, feet beyond the width of his shoulders as pieces of blue ceramics with a metal sheen are bolted on his frame, servos coming to life as they assemble and connect to one another.

"That's inefficient," I say.

"What?" he asks with actual affront.

"That. The myosensors. I'm betting they require pretty precise conditions to work to your specifications—humidity? Right. Humidity. Gel pads. You devote a lot of space, relative to what you're capable of, obviously, to making your suit adhere to the nerve endings you have calibrated for it and—"

"What are you doing, Lisa?" he asks.

"I'm showing you I can be of use! If I'm there, I'll see things—"

"You [promised—"]

"And I'm a villain! A Thinker—a [social Thinker]! Of course I'd lie to you and—"

And Taylor hugs me from behind.

"No," she whispers. Right against my ear.

Unfairly.

"Tay, I am—"

"You aren't going. What you could do there that you can't do remotely doesn't even rate the personal risk—"

"I could—I could hide inside Grue's cloud! Dragon just proved it's a shield against any kind of radiation, anything a dynakinetic can—"

"Except for [kinetic] energy. Like a thrown rock," Colin cuts me off.

I glare at him.

"Why aren't you surprised about what I just said? Dragon was almost apoplectic with the implications—of course."

A monitor swivels on an arm located behind and above Colin's left shoulder, and a sheepish Artificial Intelligence waves at me.

"Hi, Lisa—"

"Of course. Of course nobody stopped me coming in. Of course [he] isn't surprised and is ready for my arguments. [Of course—"]

"You are in no state to go to an Endbringer battle," Colin speaks right over me.

"—of course you'd all gang up on me to stop me from doing what I need to do to keep you, band of lemmings, alive!"

"I can't say I disagree with the sentiment…" Hannah mutters from right behind me before she lays a hand on the shoulder Taylor isn't wrapped around and goes right back to her place as my favorite adoptive mother figure.

…

My life is complicated.

"He'll go. [We] will go. It's what we do, Lisa; you already know that. You aren't even trying to stop us, just trying to be there, to feel like you have a choice in what happens. And none of us do," Hannah says, cruelly kind with every truth I already know.

I close my eyes. Feel Taylor around me.

And take a deep breath.

I… I need clarity, but I don't want it. I don't want to know the odds, how likely it is at least one of them won't come back. How…

How [powerless] I am.

[Lisa Wilbourn—]

All right. Poor choice of words.

So I open my eyes.

I look around me.

"This will be my comms center," I tell them in no uncertain terms.

Dragon smiles, Colin rolls his eyes, and both Taylor and Hannah squeeze me harder, though through different means.

***

I am sitting in Colin's chair, the damn ergonomics so fricking comfortable it's utterly unfair to my willfully tensed shoulders.

"We still don't know where he will emerge," I confirm with Dragon after taking a look at the extracts from shifting seismic readings all over the globe.

"He likes to do that. Swimming just below the Earth's mantle for a while, going in and out of convective currents to threaten different gathering points. He's… Different from the others. Leviathan and Simurgh will attack hard and fast, taking everyone by surprise in their search of their objective, but Behemoth… he [wants] an audience," Dragon tells me from the monitor over my right shoulder as Colin keeps making last-minute adjustments to his armor.

"Are you sure he's that sentient?" I ask, trying to come up with a pattern as Power and I browse a list of the last sites ravaged by the monster.

"It doesn't matter. If he isn't, he's being made to act as if he was," she says without even hinting at what pain those very words could cause her if applied to the artificial being who became a woman.

I hum.

Then I take out my phone, ignore the hundred missed calls from my mother, and call Brian.

"Lisa? Do we already—"

"Brockton Bay is safe," I tell him.

"Will you ever let me finish a goddamn sentence—wait, what? Are you sure?"

"I am… almost certain. He still hasn't set on a target, but there's nothing here to lure him in, given his past history," I tell him.

"Then—"

"Then," I cut him off with a hint of a smile, because one should relish life's small pleasures, "you can relax knowing that Aisha is as safe as I told you she would be. You and Alec, though…"

"What are you even suggesting?"

I close my eyes, lists of cities swimming behind my eyelids while Power sifts through them and tries to do what no other Thinker has ever managed.

I don't open them when I answer Brian.

"I am saying that we just learned your power is a perfect counter to many of Behemoth's known abilities, but [not all of them]. I am saying you could be Alec's bodyguard during the fight, or you could protect the healers and injured. I am saying that you, Brian Laborn, could be a hero today… And I don't want you to."

"What?" he asks, tense because of something other than me rudely interrupting him.

Must try harder.

[Lisa Wilborn's sense of priorities—]

Oh, come on, you like it as much as I do.

"I… Okay, don't take this the wrong way. I don't want you to go soft on me just because of this, but… I love you guys, all right? I… I have taken a peek at what each and every one of you actually is, what lies under the surface, and the trauma, and the powers bullshit, and I… Don't want to lose you. I don't want to lose someone I love ever again. But you're also not [mine]. I can't control you. I can't keep you safe despite your will. So, if you go? You'll get your pay plus a hazard bonus, and I'll be proud of you. Proud enough to give you detailed plans for counter-pranking Aisha the next time she gets a bee in her bonnet, literal or otherwise, and I know the expression doesn't even fit that well, but I'm an emotional wreck, and I want you to live, and not have to tell your little sister that her brother was a hero she should honor every day of her life, and—"

"Double hazard pay," he says.

"What?"

"I want double hazard pay. So does Alec," he says.

"I wasn't done telling you why this is a terrible idea."

"Yet I'm done listening to you lose your mind. I… We also love you, Lisa. And thank you for giving me this chance," he says.

And the man with the biggest chip on his shoulder I've ever met, a man who I just told is a perfect counter to some of the most feared attacks on Earth Bet, hangs up on me.

…

I may not have thought this through.

"You're far too mushy," Taylor says from my left, her hand squeezing mine once more.

"I just…"

"I know," she says.

And I open my eyes.

The almost soothing dark red from my eyelids is yet again replaced by Colin's harsh, stark lighting reflecting off the brushed metal covering his walls. He's on the workstation beside me, working on something that looks far too bulky to carry by himself, so I'm guessing it is a last-minute addition to his bike, and—

…

I forgot to chain up my baby.

[Lisa Wilborn's sense of priorities—]

And you [conveniently] forgot to point it out.

[… Anthropomorphizing of parahuman abilities interfaces—]

You mother[fuck—]

"It will be on Asia," Dragon points out, her voice stark enough to break me out of my inner dialogue.

I… blink, trying to regain my focus, and stare at the readings she just pulled up in the display in front of me.

Small tremors reported on Myanmar. South Korea. Nepal. Mongolia…

And none from China.

… They can't be [this] stupid.

It's absolutely impossible for even a dictatorial regime to hide seismic tremors during a Behemoth alert. Nobody is that suicidal. There's absolutely no way the CUI would willfully ignore useful, powerful assets invaluable to their survival—

…

[Lisa Wilborn's—]

I know. Shut up.

I close my eyes tightly for a couple of seconds before I reach for my phone.

Then, buried among the notifications of missed calls from Mom, I find… precisely what I expected to find.

And I return one of the many, [many] calls I kept ignoring.

"Hey, Dinah…" I tell her with my most apologetic, sheepish tone.

"Hey," she replies with an icy cold tone.

Then we let an awkward, tense silence pass.

"Would you believe I have been ignoring [another] person, and I just forgot to check on who else was calling me?" I tell her as both Dragon and Taylor look at me like I need some kind of intervention.

Hopefully, they have different methodologies in mind.

"Yes. Because I was forced to waste a question on that after [you kept not picking up]," the adorably grumpy world-class precog tells me.

"Right. Right, that fits. So I guess you already know Brockton Bay is safe—"

"[Yes]."

"Right."

…

I don't know how to handle this!

[Dinah Alcott's need for acknowledgment—]

… This is now going to feel manipulative, no matter how sincere I am, isn't it?

[Lisa Wilborn's sense of morality—]

I don't even know if that's a good or a bad thing at this point.

"Hey, I… I am sorry. I promised you I would treat you like an equal, and right as a crisis hit, I forget all about that and just try to tackle it on my own, and… And that's not how I want us to be. I want us to be badass Thinkers together. So… let's show an Endbringer what he's gotten itself into by bringing a Blaster power to a Thinker fight?" I hopefully ask.

"… You're quoting something I haven't read, aren't you?" she says.

"A movie, actually. And I'm paraphrasing it, not quoting it."

There's a strained silence as the partner I unwillingly offended likely pinches the bridge of her nose, copying something she's sometimes seen her uncle do and finally understanding the true reason behind the gesture.

"Let's kick monster butt," she finally says.

And, for the first time since this whole thing started, I feel my smirk stretch my lips.

==================

This work is a repost of my most popular fic on QQ (https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/wake-up-call-worm.15638/), where it can be found up to date except for the latest two chapters that are currently only available on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Agrippa?fan_landing=true)—as an added perk, both those sites have italicized and bolded text. I'll be posting the chapters here twice weekly, on Wednesday and Friday, until we're caught up. Unless something drastic happens, it will be updated at a daily rate until it catches up to the currently written 89 chapters (or my brain is consumed by the overwhelming amounts of snark, whichever happens first).

Speaking of Italics, this story's original format relied on conveying Power's intrusions into Lisa's inner monologue through the use of italics. I'm using square brackets ([]) to portray that same effect, but the work is more than 300k words at the moment, so I have to resort to the use of macros to make that light edit and the process may not be perfect. My apologies in advance

Also, I'd like to thank my credited supporters on Patreon: Niklarus, Tinkerware, Varosch, Xalgeon, and aj0413. If you feel like maybe giving me a hand and helping me keep writing snarky, useless lesbians, consider joining them or buying one of my books on https://www.amazon.com/stores/Terry-Lavere/author/B0BL7LSX2S. Thank you for reading!