Like me better than who? I wondered. Than Lisa? Rachel? I didn’t get a chance to ask. I was distracted as I sensed an approach and turned to look.

  “Bitch is here,” Imp said, noting the turn of my head and the figure at the end of the street, ignoring traffic as her dogs made their way to us.

  Rachel, I thought.

  “She’s been going to the fights, helping out here when we send for her. I haven’t been going to the fights, so I dunno how much you’ve seen her there. She’s been checking in on me, wandering around here with her dogs and scaring the everloving shit out of people until I come to say hi, then she leaves for another few weeks. I’ve probably seen her the most.”

  “I’ve barely seen her at all,” I said. Even with the Endbringer attacks.

  The dogs weren’t running, and it took me a moment to realize why. There was one dog that was larger than the rest, with half of a bison’s skull strapped over the left side of its face, the horn arching out to one side. Armor and bones had been strapped on elsewhere. It didn’t seem like something Rachel would have done, dressing up her dog. One of her underlings?

  It’s Angelica, I realized. The dog lumbered forward, moving at a good clip, but certainly not the speed the dogs were capable of when they went all-out. Rachel was controlling the speed of the other dogs to allow the wounded animal to keep up.

  She was riding Bastard, I recognized. It was different from the others, symmetrical, the alterations flowing into each other better. Two other dogs accompanied her. Bentley wasn’t among them.

  The onlooking crowd, Imp’s underlings included, sort of hurried on their way as the dogs approached Regent’s monument. Rachel hopped down as they reached our side of the street.

  Rachel was taller, I noted, browned by sun, the jacket I’d given her tied around her waist, a t-shirt and jeans, with calloused feet instead of shoes or boots. Her auburn hair, it seemed, hadn’t been cut in the two years since I’d seen her. Here and there, hair twisted up and out of the veritable mane of hair, no doubt where tangled bits had been cut away. Only a sliver of her face and one eye were really visible through the hair, a heavy brow, an eye that seemed lighter in contrast to the darkened skin.

  And damn, I thought, she’d put on muscle. I’d gained some, working out every day, but even with her frame and her natural inclination towards fitness, I suspected she must have been working hard, all day, every day. Maybe not quite what a man might have accomplished, but close.

  “Rachel,” I said. I was overly conscious of how we’d parted, of the way I’d left the group and the awkward conversation during the New Delhi fight. “Listen—”

  She wrapped me in a hug, her arms folding around me.

  I was so caught off guard that I didn’t know how to respond. I put my arms around her in return.

  She smelled like wet dog and sweat, and like pine needles and fresh air. It was enough that I knew the new environment had been good to her.

  “They told me to,” she said, breaking the hug.

  They wouldn’t be the Undersiders, I gathered. Her people, then.

  “You didn’t have to, but it’s… it was a nice welcome,” I said.

  “Didn’t know what to say, so they told me to just do. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I asked and they told me to hug you if I wanted to hug you and hit you if I wanted to hit you. Yeah.”

  I’m guessing she only just decided, I thought. I’d been gambling by wearing my Weaver costume, but then, I hadn’t expected them to converge on me like this. I would have changed before seeing Rachel.

  “It’s good?” I asked. “Over there?”

  “They’re building, it’s annoying to get in and out. But its good. Tattletale made us bathrooms. We’ve been building the cabins around them.”

  “Bathrooms are good,” I responded.

  She nodded agreement, as if I hadn’t just said something awkward and lame.

  “I remember you complaining about the lack in your letter,” I added.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  Wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, to carry on a conversation with her.

  “Others are checkpointing in,” Imp said. “Just to give you a heads up.”

  “Checkpointing?”

  “Teleporting, kinda. Limited. Um. We’ve only got a second, but you should know in advance that they’re married.”

  “Who?”

  But Imp didn’t respond.

  Foil and Parian appeared in a nearby building, the same building the girl with the baby was watching from. Two others had arrived with them.

  Them? I wondered, mildly surprised. Then again, it made sense.

  They approached, holding hands, and a bear managed to form itself from the roll of cloth Parian had bound to her back, without anyone, the stuffed creature included, really breaking stride. They’d barely changed, but for a little more height. Foil carried the crossbow that the PRT was apparently maintaining for her, and Parian had donned less dark colors, though the hair remained black.

  The two capes with them each wore red gloves as part of their costume. I knew who they were from the stuff on the forums. The Red Hands. The alliance had gone through, apparently.

  “So. You draw me over to the dark side, and then you flip,” Parian commented.

  “I hope it’s working out,” I said.

  She shrugged. “It isn’t not working out.”

  “We’re fine,” Foil said. “I suppose I should thank you. If you hadn’t left, I don’t think I could’ve come.”

  “You may be the only person to thank me for leaving,” I said.

  “Don’t be so sure,” Imp added.

  “Huh?”

  “Nevermind.”

  Tattletale arrived next. Grue appeared at the location with more Red Hands as she stepped outside. Where the others had been modest, approaching with a kind of leisure, she almost skipped for the last leg of the approach. She hugged me briefly, then kissed me on the cheeks. The mandibles, really, where the armor framed my jaw. Whatever.

  Of everyone, I was least surprised at the changes with her. Her hair had been cut shorter, and she wore a mask that covered the entire upper half of her face, coming to a point at the nose. Her shoulders, elbows and knees had small shoulderpads on them, and there was a definition to the horizontal and vertical lines of black that marked her lavender costume. She wore a laser pistol at her hip, which bounced against her leg as she ran. PRT issue. Extremely illegal to own.

  “Jerk!” she said, after she’d kissed me on the cheeks, “You’ve barely responded to my fan mail!”

  “It’s kind of hard to reply to it without drawing attention,” I said. “You don’t know how much I wanted the details on what’s being going on here.”

  “Jerk,” she said, but she smiled. “But I should warn you—”

  She didn’t get a chance to finish before I saw.

  Grue approached. Of everyone, he was the least changed. Physically, anyways.

  But the Red Hands walked in formation around him, and one, a young woman, walked in step with him, close enough that their arms touched. They could have held hands and it would have been just as blatant.

  I’d faced Endbringers, the Slaughterhouse Nine, I’d taken down who knew how many bad guys… and I had no idea how to face this.

  He’d moved on, and I was glad he’d moved on. He maybe needed someone to lean on, to give him emotional support, and maybe she was that. I told myself that, I tried to believe it, but I was jealous and hurt and bewildered and…

  And I bit back the emotion, approaching, ready to hug.

  When he extended a hand for me to shake, I had to fight twice as hard to suppress any reaction to the hurt. I could tell myself that he’d at least done it before I’d raised my arms to hug him, but… yeah.

  I took his hand and shook it. Then, on impulse, I pulled on it, drawing him forward and down a little, and put my other arm around his shoulders. Half of a hug, half a shake.

  “Happy birthday,” he said, after I stepped back.

  The others echoed him. Welcomes and happy birthdays. He’d remembered, but… that choice of words.

  I eyed the young woman. She was a rogue, in the dashing villain sense, wearing a mask around the eyes, and old-fashioned clothes with lace around her ample cleavage. Her jacket and slacks were festooned with belts, bearing utility pouches and knives. The glove that wasn’t red had a knife attached to each fingertip, a brace around it to keep everything in place.

  She met my own gaze with one of her own, a narrow, hard look.

  “Oh. Skit—Taylor, meet Cozen. Second in command to the Red Hand.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said. They don’t really match.

  “Pleasure’s mine,” she said. “I’m meeting a legend, after all.”

  Awkwardness followed.

  And in the midst of that, Imp’s statements finally caught up with me.

  I like you better than her.

  Don’t be so sure, Imp had said. Well, Cozen would be happy I’d left.

  Then, with a realization like a dash of cold water to the face, I remembered.

  They’re married.

  “Taylor,” Tattletale said, rescuing me before I could say something dumb. She hooked her arm around mine and led me around and away. “Much to talk about.”

  “The end of the world,” I said. “Endbringers. Finding Jack, or the designer—”

  Safe topics, somehow more reassuring than this.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Everyone’s playing it safe, keeping things quiet.”

  “What do we do?”

  “What was the plan?” she asked. “When you came?”

  “I’ve got six hours before I need to be in New York. They’re swearing me into the Protectorate.”

  “Congratulations,” Grue said. He sounded genuine.

  “I should be saying that to you,” I said, glancing at him and Cozen.

  “Oh. Thank you,” he answered, in his characteristic eerie voice. I couldn’t read his tone, and felt a little grateful that at least one of us was spared sounding awkward.

  “Six hours,” Tattletale said. Another rescue.

  “I was going to visit everyone in turn to catch up, visit my mom, then see my dad.”

  “Well, we’re all here. We can go somewhere together,” Tattletale said. “There’re stories to tell, I’m sure.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. I almost wished my original plan had gone ahead, that I could have a really short visit with Grue, a longer sit with Rachel and her dogs, then a long discussion with Tattletale about what was going on, before I headed off to see my mom’s grave and my dad.

  “Come on. We’ll walk, see the sights,” Tattletale said. “figure out what to do for breakfast or brunch.”

  “Okay,” I said. I glanced at the others. Would they be down, or would they back out? Parian and Foil weren’t close to me, but they were sticking around. Cozen wasn’t making an excuse and leaving, and neither was Grue. I could see him exchanging murmured words with her.

  I must have looked a little too long at him, because Imp fell in step beside me.

  I glanced at her.

  “I was just fucking with you,” she whispered. “I thought you probably deserved it.”

  My stomach did a flip flop at that. Anger, relief, bewilderment, more anger. Still more anger.

  “Man, the way your bugs reacted. Hilarious. You act like you’re all stoic, but then I just have to look over there and over there and I see bees and butterflies circling around like eagles ready to dive for the kill.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but she cut me off.

  “She is pregnant,” Imp said.

  My mouth shut.

  “Kidding. This is fun. Come on, butterflies, I see you over there. Do your worst, I know you want to kill me.”

  I considered jabbing her with my taser, and the thought was vivid enough that I imagined it buzzing at my hip.

  Except it wasn’t my taser. It was my phone.

  As it had so often this past month, I felt my heart leap into my throat, that pang of alarm. A very different kind of alarm than Imp had been provoking from me. More real, more stark.

  I drew the phone from my belt, then stared down at the text that was displayed. A message from Defiant.

  “Endbringer?” Rachel asked. Something in my body language must have tipped her off.

  I shook my head, but I said, “Yes. Sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “An endbringer with a lowercase ‘e’,” I said. “It looks like Jack may have made his challenge to Theo. It’s starting.”

  Interlude 25

  July 8th, 2011

  “…The reality is clear. The repercussions of what happened today will change the relationship between hero, villain and civilian. It remains up to them to decide whether it will be a change for the better, or a change for the worse.”

  “Pretentious, isn’t he?” Jack asked. He was naked, covering himself with both hands, sitting on a metal bench with more brushed stainless steel behind him. With the angle of the device, he faced the ceiling.

  “Likes to hear himself talk,” Bonesaw replied, agreeing. “Which do you think it’ll be? Change for the better or change for the worse?”

  Jack only smiled, his eyes crinkling a bit at the edges. He was getting older. It was reassuring and spooky at the same time. He’s the daddy of the group and I’m the kid and he’s getting older which makes him more daddylike.

  But it meant he moved slower and got tired more easily. It was only a matter of time before he made a mistake, lost a fight.

  “It’s a given?” she asked. She pressed the button, and the lights started to flicker again.

  “I think so,” Jack commented. “But I almost hope things do turn out well.”

  The flickering steadily increased. The progression had to be slow, or they could set off a cascade cycle and overwhelm the power cell they had liberated from Toybox. If that happened, then the shell that was keeping this reality together would break, the holding grid for the pocket dimension’s substrata would become fluid and leak out into other hardened realities. They would likely be crushed by the air, pulped as gravity twisted into eddies and condensed points of hyperconcentration.

  Which would be funny, really. A reckless, violent, unpredictable death would be awfully ironic, really. An artful death, almost, in an anticlimactic way. It would be better if there was an audience, if anyone could even know and tell the story. But art wasn’t art without an audience.

  “Makes for a greater fall?” she asked.

  “Exactly,” Jack replied. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the whine of the generator. “I guess we find out soon!”

  She laughed in response, giddy with the idea, with possibilities, ideas.

  Then she pulled the switch. In a heartbeat, Jack was frozen in stasis, contained.

  She walked over to the computer. Flowers, rainbows and gray-green smiley faces with the eyes crossed out in death bounced around the screen. She moved the mouse to end the screensaver, giggles still periodically finding their way out of her mouth.

  She set the timer, the alarm clock for the stasis to end.

  The giggles trailed off.

  Silence.

  The lights slowly flickered back to life, and Bonesaw found herself standing in front of the keyboard. The smile fell from her face.

  Jack had assumed she would freeze herself. The empty pod reinforced the idea.

  Except… she was telling herself she had to be there to wake them up, and that wasn’t wholly true. It was smart, but it wasn’t true. She wasn’t one to be afraid of something, but she felt a touch of trepidation at the idea of entering stasis without someone to handle the exit process, without assurance she would wake up. That was without touching on the issue of the power cell, watching that things didn’t go tilt with the pocket dimension.

  No, that wasn’t wholly true either. It was a one percent chance. Five percent, if she counted her lack of knowledge about other tinker’s stuff. But she hadn’t touched it, even to move it. It should be safe.

  Her eyes tracked the rows and columns of incubation chambers. They weren’t her field either. A different row for each member of the Slaughterhouse Nine, past or present.

  King

  Screamer

  Harbinger

  Breed

  Crimson

  Gray Boy

  Nyx

  Psychosoma

  There were ten of each in various glass chambers. The original members.

  With many, many more besides. She looked down the length of the room. Most members of the Nine had lasted only weeks or months. She could count the ones who’d lasted longer than that on the one hand. A shame she didn’t have samples for all of the past members, but she had most of the good ones.

  Her, Jack, Mannequin, Siberian, Shatterbird.

  Crawler had managed pretty well, too.

  He’d been a doofus in the end, though.

  She smiled. It would be a family reunion, really. But there was work to be done.

  They’d come out blank. Wouldn’t do. She had access to some of the toys they’d liberated from the Toybox. She’d have to put the new Slaughterhouse’s memories together herself. Brains. Memories, or things close enough to memories. She had notes and records, all of the bedtime stories Jack had told her as she drifted off to sleep these past few years. There was information saved on the computer. She could hodgepodge it together.

  This would be real art. How well could she rebuild them?

  Cranial had been selling memories on the black market, selling skills. She’d kept bad memories too, took them from people, even gave them to some people. Silly, really. A lot of them had wanted trigger events, except the trigger events didn’t work like that.

  This computer was only an access point. The other computers took up vast amounts of space, out of sight, out of mind. If something failed, she’d have to go fix it, but she would spend most of her time here, surrounded by her family, some she’d never met.

  Mannequin had lost his wife and children in a Simurgh attack. How to approach it? A file here, with a woman who had lost her spouse and children in a car accident she’d driven. Close enough. She could leave gaps and it would fill in all on its own. Build it all on a foundation of an academic background, a doctor with confidence to spare, an architect in the same vein, a celebrity singer who’d come in wanting inspiration at the press of a button… run everything in parallel, with the ideas of the former two and the experience of the other…