章 2524: 107
Interlude 11.a: Old Soldiers
Emily Piggot's career with the Parahuman Response Team had been something of a clusterfuck from the beginning.
To say she'd had an inauspicious start would be the understatement of the century. It could hardly have been much worse, all things considered. Team dead. Friends dead. Commanding officer dead. Most of the strike force that had gone in with her was dead. Just about everyone that wasn't one of Nilbog's monsters was dead, and she'd had to listen to each and every one of them die, knowing there was nothing she could do about it, while the capes who were supposed to be backing them up fled like untrained children.
And the worst part, the damage she'd taken had been crippling. Career ending. She couldn't bounce back and keep on swinging, she'd been hurt so badly that it was either move into the civilian sector or park her ass behind a desk.
She was Emily fucking Piggot. She parked her ass behind a desk. It was the only decision since Nilbog had taken her ability to fight from her that she didn't regret in the slightest.
Her battles after that were of a different sort. She was no longer on the frontlines, fighting the good fight and keeping law and order functioning in an increasingly dysfunctional world, she was a paper-pusher. The ladder she had to climb was of an entirely different sort to the kind a field officer climbed, but she climbed it, clawing her way out of obscurity and disability claims, up through HR and dispatch and any number of other minor shifts until she was, at last, on the shortlist for a director's chair.
She'd had to get good at the politics. At handling people, especially the capes that could be so childish and mercurial. She'd had to figure out the ins and outs of glad-handing and kissing up, had to learn the intricacies of when to butter up her superior and when to lay the facts out with brutal honesty. She'd had to trial and error her way through bringing the hammer down and applying a softer touch.
At her core, Emily always thought of herself as a soldier. But a much younger Emily Piggot would not have recognized Director Piggot, head of the PRT, East-Northeast Division.
Things had been much easier, Emily often found herself thinking, when all she had to do was point a gun at the bad guy and squeeze the trigger a few times. Simpler, cleaner. Easier on her conscience, in some ways, because it didn't involve weighing the weight of others' lives and the meaning of "acceptable losses."
Director Emily Piggot had had to make some tough calls. She'd had to straddle the line of a city that was really more like a powderkeg, where one fight gone wrong would send the whole place up in smoke. She'd had to decide which lines in the sand couldn't be crossed and which ones she had to let be crossed to keep things relatively sane.
She'd had to let some things go that made her grit her teeth and wish all the more she could still grab a stiff drink. She'd had to come down harder on some people than she wanted to for the sake of sending a message. She'd had to find that delicate balance where the entire place held itself in limbo, neither calm and ordered nor falling into complete chaos.
And for a while, she'd managed it. She thought she'd done a pretty damn good job, too, considering how allergic the rest of the PRT was about sending her support to deal with the gangs. The status quo stayed, and neither the Empire nor the ABB managed to take and keep enough of a foothold to drive the other into a corner and start an all-out gang war in the streets.
Then Apocrypha came along and flipped the apple cart on its head.
Taylor Hebert. Piggot could admit she liked the girl, could even grudgingly admire her dedication and determination to live up to the idea of "hero," despite some of the more questionable decisions she'd made. She also had no idea what the fuck to do with her.
Not many people would, if they were suddenly handed the nuclear codes. Well, what used to be the nuclear codes, back before Scion destroyed all the nukes.
First impressions hadn't been great, admittedly. Forget the Shadow Stalker debacle — and how that one had slipped under everyone's noses was still being investigated — the Echidna Incident had put them both in completely untenable positions: a girl with way too much power for the government to let roam free and too much (completely justified, it turned out) distrust of authority to easily accept the PRT's leash.
Piggot considered it something of a coup that they'd managed to come to something of an amicable agreement about all of that. That the girl killed an Endbringer a week later was also quite the feather to put in her cap.
Of course, no sooner had that happened than had Hookwolf and his merry band of racists come rampaging through the PRT HQ — the last gasp of the dying Empire — putting Piggot on yet more time of "sit on your ass and get better." The man was lucky he'd already been caught by the time she was well enough to do more than piss in a bedpan, because he would have caught all sorts of hell from her if he'd still been free.
Emily took in a deep breath and let it out through her nose, trying to bring her focus back onto the paperwork sitting on her desk that needed reading and signing.
And then Tagg had been sent to replace her for the duration of her convalescence, and somehow, the absolute fuckup had managed to drive Apocrypha into quitting the Wards while simultaneously ruining every single ounce of goodwill Piggot had scraped and clawed for with that girl. Not only that, but through some god awful mishandling of what seemed to be his entire command, his colossal incompetence had driven two other Wards to resign in protest and the head of the goddamn Protectorate to leave, citing "irreconcilable differences."
Naturally, when it was all said and done, she was the one left holding the bag and having to fix Tagg's mistakes. Too many goddamn knots to untie to make it work, but she'd done her best with what she'd had on hand.
The utter paranoid fuckwit.
Emily took another deep breath. Two years on, and Tagg's screwups still managed to get under her skin, sometimes.
"The man had no business being in command," she grumbled. "How in the flying blue hell did he pass his mandatory psych evals?"
By abusing his position as Deputy Director, probably. Only thing a soldier got better at doing than cleaning his rifle was filing his reports.
Finally, Piggot got fed up and decided she wasn't getting any more work done, so she threw her pen onto her desk, leaned back into her chair, and let out a long sigh. The one good thing she could say about Tagg, he had excellent taste in office chairs. This one had to be twice as good as the one she'd had before, and it was probably six times as expensive.
Poor compensation for the complete mess he'd left her. Just about the only thing the man hadn't fucked over was his paperwork. He was a decent desk jockey, at least, so he had at least one redeeming quality. Pity it hadn't been a level head instead; misfiled reports were a helluva lot easier to fix than everything else.
What it was the Chief Director had been thinking when she put a man like that in charge of a place like Brockton Bay, she had no idea.
Suddenly feeling a little restless, Emily huffed and leveraged herself out of her seat, grabbing her cane to help keep her balance. She tried to ignore the dead feeling of her missing leg and the weight of the prosthetic hanging where the real thing was supposed to be, the odd stretch and pull of her skin where the thick tissue of her scars refused to flex quite as well as the rest of her skin, but it was yet more the pile onto the toll her injuries were taking on her body.
Nonetheless, Emily was a fighter and a soldier; she pushed past the discomfort and limped over to the far wall, where her windows sat. She used her cane only to steady herself from the awkwardness of her prosthetic leg, having never quite gotten used to it.
That's normal, her physical therapist had told her. Some people get so used to their prosthetics that they forget they're not the real thing. Some people never get used to them.
All it meant was another part of her routine that she'd just had to learn to deal with. She'd gotten used to her kidneys being shot and needing dialysis, she could get used to having a metal peg for a left leg, too, and she'd be damned if she let it get to her. She'd adapt; she had before, she would again.
At the rate things were going, Emily thought morbidly, soon enough, the only thing left of her would be her head.
For a few seconds, she closed her eyes and took in a deep, calming breath, and then she let it out and looked out her window and into the city.
How much it had changed in two years.
The Boat Graveyard was gone, although the bay itself wasn't visible from the angle her window sat at. Good riddance to bad rubbish, as far as Emily was concerned. If she'd had the power to do it, she'd have compelled the corporate snobs to pick up their shit years ago.
The bay itself was now host to a castle — and wasn't that a fucking surprise she hadn't wanted to come back to. She'd nearly blown a gasket when she'd heard the news, and she probably would have if the first she'd heard of it was to see it sitting there when she got back. That little twit had actually gone and done it, she'd taken over the city, and then given it back.
Emily had never missed alcohol more than when she'd gotten that little bit of news.
But the scenery out on the water wasn't the only thing that had changed. The city itself was bouncing back, in a way that Emily had long since given up on ever actually seeing for herself. Things were still shit — the world was still shit, so that was nothing new — but without the gangs, they were less shit than they had been. Crime was down. Murder, especially, was down. Parahuman incidents were at an all time low in Emily's tenure.
The city was finally getting back on its feet.
And then there was the tourism. Oh yes, the tourism. A bunch of rubbernecks who had heard about the miracle girl who had almost single-handedly dismantled the parahuman gangs in the city, had killed Leviathan, and had brought the Fallen to their knees, come to try and get a look at the latest rising star superhero. Oh, and she lived in a goddamn Disney castle out on a manmade island in the bay.
Either Glenn Chambers had been behind some of the hype to fan the flames, or he'd had a heart attack from just how ridiculous it all was.
The girl did good work, Emily would give her that. Had a tendency to go overboard and do all sorts of crazy and unnecessary bullshit — and wasn't that capes in a fucking nutshell — but the one thing Emily couldn't argue with was that Apocrypha got results. If only she could learn to get them without almost giving Emily a stroke in the process.
"Then again," Emily grumbled to herself, "she started her career beating Lung into the fucking ground. Small wonder almost everything else she's done has been a big fucking deal, too."
Like killing the Slaughterhouse Nine. Emily probably wasn't the only one who had gotten some kind of twisted pleasure out of the look of blank surprise on Jack Slash's face.
They'd never found Crawler, Burnscar, or Bonesaw. Emily thought she must have been one of the few who hadn't been particularly inclined to take Apocrypha at her word that they were all taken care of, but a lack of any sightings of them anywhere or mysterious deaths with their characteristic MOs was — she had to grudgingly admit — a pretty good indication that if they were still alive, none of them was a concern anymore.
A tapping on her window drew Emily from her thoughts, and she blinked down at the…that was a bird, tapping the tip of its beak against her window. Made of what looked like either glass or some kind of gemstone.
Emily let out a sigh of longsuffering.
It wasn't impossible that a glass manipulator existed in the city, somewhere, but… No, realistically, there was only one person it could be.
Emily undid the latch on her window and opened it; the bird fluttered out of the way, and then flew in through the gap and made a beeline for one of the armchairs sitting on the other side of Emily's desk.
"Apocrypha," she greeted stonily.
The bird opened its beak. "Good morning, Director Piggot," came Taylor Hebert's voice.
It was a minute ago, Emily thought sourly. She knew better than to say it out loud, of course.
"If you needed to contact me, the official channels exist for a reason," she said instead.
"This is too sensitive to have it showing up anywhere in the official records," the bird said, still in Taylor's voice. "There's something important that we need to discuss urgently, time-sensitive. May I come through?"
Come through?
Another thing to add to the girl's increasingly long list of powers: teleportation. There'd been some mixed reports about it before, but if there was any doubt, it could be laid to rest, now.
Emily grunted. "I don't seem to have much choice in the matter."
"You don't," the bird admitted frankly. "I quite literally can't put this off for later. This discussion needs to happen today, and it needs to happen early enough in the day for you to still make preparations."
She eyed the bird for a moment, but as much as the girl's attitude and — perhaps somewhat justified — sense of self-importance could get on her nerves, she'd been right about enough that ignoring what she had to say probably wasn't a great idea. Not that it was all always gold, but Taylor Hebert had an uncanny ability to get her nose stuck in business she had no place involving herself, and doing so in such a way that she was on the right side of it.
It was both her best and worst trait. She didn't know how to leave well enough alone.
Emily pressed a button on her intercom. "Samantha," she said.
"Yes?" the voice of her secretary asked.
"Hold all my calls for the rest of the morning. Something just came up and I have to take an emergency meeting."
"Yes, Director Piggot."
Her finger came off the button, and she turned to the bird with a single eyebrow raised. "Well? You said this was urgent, didn't you?"
The bird didn't answer. Instead, a pane of golden light described itself in the air in the middle of her office, and then folded inwards to reveal an abandoned street somewhere in a city — Brockton Bay, from what could be seen of the skyline. A moment later, a woman dressed in a costume of purple, black, and gold stepped through and into Piggot's office.
"Director Piggot," said the woman as she moved to take one of the seats across the Director's desk.
"Apocrypha," Emily replied. She gripped her cane and hobbled her way back to her chair; Apocrypha watched, but didn't comment.
"It's been a while."
"Since you requested that consult with the Ward from New York," Emily agreed. And then, somewhat sardonically, she added, "And before that, it was the Slaughterhouse Nine. I never had the chance to properly thank you for that mess."
"I figured you might appreciate Armsmaster's more…professional touch, in that case," Apocrypha said. "The familiarity of a previous coworker, as it were."
"Your thoughtfulness is touching," said Emily, "but it doesn't change the fact that you left behind five bodies for us to find. Including, as you might imagine our general surprise, the long-missing Doctor William Manton."
"Shocking, yeah. Wouldn't have thought the foremost expert on powers was the one puppeting a psycho like the Siberian, would you?"
"Officially," Emily corrected her, stressing the word, "the Siberian was among the bodies of the Nine we recovered on the scene. Doctor William Manton was found in an entirely unrelated incident in a nearby town. He's listed as a victim of the Nine."
"More than he deserves," Apocrypha commented, but she didn't seem particularly surprised or upset. Emily hadn't expected that. The girl who had originally been in her office had seemed like the sort to be violently indignant about the whitewashing of a mass-murdering serial killer with a penchant for eating his victims.
"Let's cut the bullshit," she said bluntly. "You wanted to talk to me about something. Something big, that you couldn't get an official meeting for."
"I do."
"Then start talking."
She was quiet for a long moment, working her jaw thoughtfully. Emily regarded her with a raised eyebrow.
"So?"
"I'm…trying to think of how to explain this properly," Apocrypha began slowly. "Most of the people I've been dealing with… They already knew all of the important bits. Made it easier when everyone already knew what was going on."
"You said this was urgent and couldn't wait," Emily pointed out.
"It can't," she agreed. "It's happening tomorrow. I… Was it ever explained to you, what Camelot's goal is? Its mission statement?"
"I can't say that it ever was," Emily replied.
"It's the preservation of mankind's future."
Emily's brow furrowed.
"We…don't really bother with petty, local crime," the girl went on. "Obviously, we've intervened here and there, because, well, we're not just going to sit around if someone starts kicking up a fuss in our backyard —"
"And Saint?" Emily asked. "Up in Canada?"
Apocrypha frowned. "He would have killed Dragon."
That brought Emily up short. "You're sure?"
Apocrypha nodded.
"And using her access permissions, he would have opened the Birdcage to let Teacher out, so he could get the boost he needed to try and keep up with all of the things she handles every day. With Teacher out, and the rest of the escapees running around as a distraction, Teacher would have made a play for world domination, leaving Saint to fumble around without any idea he'd been played like a fiddle."
A remarkably specific sequence of events. How did she — ah.
"Been speaking with Miss Alcott, have we?"
"No," came the simple answer.
Then how — oh. Well, that should have been expected, shouldn't it?
"Khepri?"
The girl's lips tightened. "I realize you're reluctant to place your faith in her memories —"
"With good reason," Emily interjected dryly.
"She was right about Leviathan," Apocrypha said, just shy of snapping at her. "She knows things she shouldn't be able to know about people I've never even met."
"And she is, according to you, a version of you from an alternate universe who had different powers," Emily said. "Yes, I am skeptical. I'm skeptical of the entire idea that your power works the way you actually say it does, for reasons that should be eminently obvious. That doesn't mean I'm going to dismiss out of hand the knowledge 'she' takes as fact when enough of it has borne out that I can't ignore it."
It would never stop being tough to swallow. A power that let you wield the skills and abilities of figures from myth and legend? Sure. It was on the strong end, but it was still within the realm of what was considered possible for powers and parahumans. Saying instead that each of those figures had once been real, live human beings who could do all of the incredible things that they were capable of in the stories told about them?
It strained credulity at best. At worst, it would have had the experts who had spent the last thirty years studying parahumans laughing in her face.
The only real wrinkle was that Khepri did, it turned out, know things that she shouldn't be able to know. Not unless she was the real deal.
"Would it help if I said the Triumvirate has known about this thing since they got their powers?"
That… That actually caught Emily by surprise.
The Triumvirate being in on this secret…whatever-it-was that was actually going down would certainly lend some credence to Apocrypha's story. Hard not to take something seriously when the three strongest capes in the world were taking it seriously, too. That also begged the question, though: why would Apocrypha, a powerful cape but still a…well, an eighteen-year-old girl, now, be in on a secret the very founders of the Protectorate were keeping, but not the PRT Directors leading their local teams?
Especially when it was a secret they'd apparently been keeping for something like twenty-five years.
"This…thing?"
Apocrypha's lips pursed, and she didn't answer right away. She seemed to be debating with herself the merits of getting right to her point, instead of the more roundabout route she'd started with.
"It all began with Scion," she eventually said, "and it all ends with him, too…"
In spurts and starts, she explained. Dinah Alcott's terrible prediction of the end of the world. Khepri cutting ties with her friends and joining the Wards. Two years spent in Chicago, training and preparing as best she could with what she had and what she could use. Sprinting towards the finish line in the hopes that she could be enough and stop the looming apocalypse.
Then, the Slaughterhouse 9000. Nilbog (Emily choked in a sharp breath when she got to that bit). Gray Boy and Jack Slash and Scion.
Gold Morning.
Emily listened, unable to find her voice, as the details were laid out before her. The absolutely horrible death tolls. The destruction, the chaos, the terror and lawlessness of the end times.
The capes, cutting and running like scattering mice the instant it looked like winning seemed more like a pipe dream than a possibility.
That one stung, if only for the familiarity of the disappointed anger that churned in her gut. Disappointed, but not surprised.
The worst part of it all? Khepri had been unconscious for three days. That meant there were three days whose terror and destruction Khepri couldn't account for. Three days of despair she hadn't witnessed. Three days of suffering she didn't know anything about.
"And you think he'll do this again?" Emily finally asked. "Go on a rampage? Try and destroy the world?"
Apocrypha hesitated a moment.
"Two years ago," she said, "I told my team that the world would end in two years, and that we would be the ones to end it."
Emily's eyebrows rose.
"The Triumvirate have spent almost thirty years preparing for the day Scion finally goes off and destroys us all," she went on. "I don't intend to give him the chance to even try."
It didn't take a Thinker to figure out what that meant.
"You're going to take the fight to him."
"It's what my team and I have spent the last two years preparing for," Apocrypha agreed. "Removing obstacles, eliminating threats that we didn't want at our backs when the time came, putting plans into motion for our strategy to use against him. It's part of why we went after the Slaughterhouse Nine — so that we could control when and where the fight started, instead of Jack Slash saying the wrong thing in a chance encounter while we were still trying to get ready."
"And if you're wrong?" Emily asked. "If Khepri's memories are wrong and Scion is exactly the hero the entire world believes him to be? What then?"
Because this was all incredibly tough to swallow, on top of Emily's usual levels of skepticism. She didn't have much opinion on Scion in general — he was more like a miracle from god, popping up every now and again; in other words, completely unreliable and never unwelcome when he did show — but there'd never been any indication of…this.
Then again, a traitorously logical part of Emily's brain whispered, no one suspected Jaime Rinke until the city was already overrun.
Apocrypha grimaced.
"We're not. The Triumvirate have spent thirty years preparing for the final battle against him. Do you think their information came from an alternate future self who was instrumental in killing him?"
No, of course not.
"The Triumvirate are not infallible themselves," she said, but it was mostly lip service.
Emily folded her hands in front of her face and leaned forward over her desk. Apocrypha met her gaze, as best as she could tell; the lenses gave nothing away, but at least the young woman's head remained steady and firm.
Now that the shock was beginning to fade, she found herself…perhaps not totally convinced, but at the very least, entertaining the possibility. Scion had, after all, been a fixture of the world ever since powers had become a thing. His random acts of heroism — and they were random, in the most literal sense of the word — had been a fact of life for much of her life. His presence and his, so to speak, inherent goodness had both simply been accepted for as long as she could remember.
But.
Thirty years was a long time to spend fighting the good fight, without any apparent breaks. Jetting from good deed to good deed, some of them as small as rescuing a cat from a tree and some of them as grand as driving away an Endbringer. Even the most tireless of heroes eventually wore down, mentally if nothing else.
And Piggot had been around to see Sphere turn into Mannequin. The idea that anyone, no matter how great, could never be driven to a life of cruelty and villainy was one she had long since discarded as naive.
"Why did you bring this to me?" she asked at length. "Scion caps out on most of our scales. I'm fairly certain the only thing in his PRT file is the word 'run.' I very much doubt he'll be stopped by containment foam."
"I wanted you to be prepared," Apocrypha said. "So you could put a team together to fight, if you had to. So you could be ready to hunker down or evacuate, if need be."
"You don't intend to fight him here?" Emily demanded, alarmed.
Apocrypha shook her head. "Of course not. But I won't say no to extra hands, in this fight. I also can't guarantee that the city will stay safe. Not in a battle this big. I figured it was only fair to give you a heads-up."
Emily snorted.
"So we know when to bend over and kiss our asses goodbye."
"So you know when to look out the window and flip Scion the bird," Apocrypha retorted.
Emily eyed her shrewdly. In some ways, two years seemed to have done her some good, made her a bit better, helped her get a better head on her shoulders. In some ways, though, Taylor Hebert hadn't changed much at all.
"I'll see what I can do," she said eventually. "But a day isn't much time to mobilize a large enough group to make much difference. Not without trying to explain everything."
And if I did that, they'd throw my ass out of this office as fast as it took them to shut the door behind me.
And even if they chose to believe her… Well, not many capes were brave enough — or stupid enough — to willingly face off against the one cape that Endbringers regularly fled from.
"All I need you to do is to help get them ready for the fight," said Apocrypha. "Actually getting them there will be taken care of."
That, at least, Emily could do. In fact, you might even say that was her job.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
NOTES
Last little bit of setup before we get into the final battle. Here's the Piggot interlude so many wanted to see last arc, but which never really had a place in it. Hope it lives up.
Special thanks to all my Patrons who have stayed with me this far, through all the rocky moments and dry stretches. You guys are the best.
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