章 2436: 19
Chapter 19: Trust 3-2
Trust 3.2
Even a good night's sleep in my enchanted bed wasn't enough to really improve my mood; I woke up on Wednesday morning refreshed, awake, and well-rested, but nonetheless, still a little grouchy.
Dad and I had made up, mostly. There hadn't been anymore yelling or shouting or insulting, and we had a normal, if a little quiet, dinner. Afterwards, we'd just…talked. We talked about what had happened, we talked about all of the things I'd said — the feelings behind them more than the actual content — and I told him everything.
Well, not quite everything. I still didn't… The day had already been a long one, and the bullying and all that had been happening at school was already a heavy enough subject, and I'd even shown him the journals I'd been keeping about it all. Adding the whole, "I have powers," talk on top of that felt like just too much to deal with in one evening, so I'd kept that one to myself and made a silent promise to bring it up later, once this whole situation blew over and the shadow of Sophia's death wasn't still hanging over us.
Talking about it, however, still didn't make all of the frustration and the anger go away. I hadn't quite come to terms with it just yet, I didn't think, the idea that Sophia and Shadow Stalker were the same person, that one of my tormentors had been a government-sponsored hero. I didn't feel like blowing something up anymore, but that didn't mean everything was suddenly sunshine and rainbows, either.
So, I woke up feeling…not tired, exactly, but less than enthusiastic about climbing out of bed. I had no idea how I was going to handle going back to school and facing the Trio-minus-one, again, or even what would happen, now that they were down their "enforcer." I had no idea how this was going to affect the social dynamics of my everyday life, no idea how this would affect the bullying, and no idea if things would (miraculously) improve, now that Winslow didn't have a Ward to cover for as an excuse for leaving me out to dry. I wasn't particularly excited to find out, either.
There wasn't much for it, though. Even if I didn't want to, I was going to have to face it eventually, and no amount of procrastinating or dragging my feet was going to stop the inevitable, so I groaned into my pillow and pulled myself out of bed. As an afterthought, I went to shut off my alarm, only to realize halfway through the motion that I'd forgotten to set it last night.
If that didn't say something about how long and trying a day yesterday was…
Dad was already there when I made it to the kitchen, chugging a steaming cup of coffee as he cooked breakfast. He glanced blearily over at me, and I saw dark circles under his eyes, which explained the coffee — he probably hadn't gotten much sleep, last night. If it wasn't for my enchanted bed, I probably wouldn't have, either.
"Morning," he croaked groggily.
"Morning," I managed to mumble in reply.
"Scrambled eggs and toast okay with you?"
"Sure."
I sat down and set about slipping on my running shoes as Dad continued to make breakfast. The silence persisted the whole while, broken only by the sizzle of the eggs cooking; Dad didn't really look up to holding a conversation, and I didn't know what to really talk about that wasn't one of the things we'd discussed last night. I…didn't want to be the one to bring any of those up, again, either.
Dad came over to the table a few minutes later carrying two plates. One, he set down at his own place, and the other, he set down in front of me. I started buttering my toast as he went back to retrieve his coffee, then he sat down across from me and we ate.
It was…quiet and a little awkward. If I wasn't in the middle of eating, I probably would have been fidgeting anxiously. Dad looked…honestly, dead on his feet. He was moving slowly, fumbling with his fork, and twice, he had overreached and nearly knocked his coffee over, that was how out of it he was. I was beginning to doubt he'd gotten any sleep, last night, let alone enough to function normally.
I finished much sooner than he did, but when I reached for my dishes to go and wash them, Dad's hand shot out with surprising quickness and held me there. I looked back at him, halfway out of my chair.
"Dad?"
He kept chewing for a moment and swallowed before he talked.
"You're staying home, today," he told me as a fact, looking me straight in the eye. "Tomorrow, too. The rest of the week, if it comes to that. You're not going back to that school until I've had a few words with Principal Blackwell."
I blinked, surprised. "I, uh. Okay."
"I took today off. Might take tomorrow off, too, if I have to. I'm sure I'll be having words with Alan, by the time it's all said and done, too."
His grip on my wrist slackened and he gave the back of my hand a couple gentle pats.
"Go ahead and go on your run," he said. "Be safe."
"Right," I replied, still a little off balance. "Yeah. Sure I will."
I continued where I left off and went to wash my dishes, glancing back at Dad on the way. Dad just kept on eating, going just as slow as before, and didn't seem to notice me watching him.
That was different, I found myself thinking as the water ran. A little strange, if I was honest. I wasn't exactly sure what I'd expected to have happen, after what I'd told him last night, but in hindsight, confronting the problem head-on probably should have been somewhere on my list. That was the kind of person Dad was, after all. He had to be, to keep going when the Dockworkers Union was only barely treading water.
I stopped for a scant second as I realized I was smiling, and when I looked up into the window that looked out from the kitchen, I could see my face reflected in the glass. It wasn't a happy smile, not really, because I wasn't happy, exactly. Just…it felt good, to have some of the old Dad back. It felt good to finally have someone on my side, for once.
When I finished and made to make my way outside, I hesitated for a brief moment as I passed by Dad, had a few seconds of indecision, then I leaned over, wrapped my arms around him from behind, and gave him a squeeze. Into his ear, I muttered, "Thanks, Dad."
He mumbled something back that I couldn't quite make out, but I understood the sentiment well enough. I gave him another quick squeeze, then let go, turned towards the door that led outside, and I left.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
Dad was already gone by the time I got out of the shower, and once I'd toweled down, dried off, and gotten dressed, it was to find that I didn't really have anything to do. No homework, in part because I'd left school halfway through the day on Monday and Friday, and just hadn't gone yesterday (after that whole…mess, yesterday morning).
I could, maybe, have gone and gotten some training in or something. Work on one of my unfinished projects. I had a whole day free, now, after all, and that was a lot of time that I could spend getting done some of the things I needed to get done. I'd fallen behind with my martial arts training, after all.
I just didn't feel like it.
I was still… just… Sophia was Shadow Stalker. It felt like that was going to keep intruding on my day, because my thoughts kept going back that way. That knowledge, plus the knowledge of how she died, the knowledge that my defenses were what killed her…
I hadn't been able to tell anyone that. Not Dad, especially, because that opened the can of worms that was, "Hey, Dad, I have powers." Not the police or the PRT, because even if I'd been so inclined… Yeah, fuck that. Shadow Stalker was a Ward, and I wasn't about to go explaining to the PRT this crazy, fucked up mess that was this whole situation.
I still wasn't sure if I even believed that they hadn't known what she'd been getting up to, what she'd been doing to me at Winslow. How could I trust them with this when I couldn't even trust them about that?
I sighed as I flopped down onto my bed, but my ceiling didn't offer any answers.
Maybe I should have picked up precognition earlier, I thought wryly. Aífe wasn't especially good at it, but if I'd started on it way back when, maybe I could have seen this whole shitstorm coming before it even happened. Then, I wouldn't be lying there wondering what the hell I was going to do.
Maybe…what I really needed was someone to talk to about this thing. Someone who could understand the cape side, like I wasn't ready to talk to Dad about, yet. Someone I could talk to about this who would understand why this whole mess was so fucking messy, with Sophia as Shadow Stalker and me as Apocrypha, with my Dragon Teeth and my fortress of a house.
I turned my head to the side and eyed the innocuous scrap of paper sitting on my desk, where I'd put it two days ago before I went to bed. It was creased from where I'd folded it up, so I couldn't see everything, but I'd already memorized what was written on it.
…Yeah, I thought. I could go for some good tea.
I hefted myself off of my bed and swiped the paper off of my desk as I left my room. I thought about sending her a message on PHO, but halfway to our old computer, I changed my mind and made for the phone, instead.
Lisa answered by the third ring.
"Hello?"
She sounded tired, but then it was — I glanced at the clock — only about eight o'clock. I had no idea whether or not Lisa went to school or where, or even if she had parents or guardians or whatever, and in hindsight, it was kind of stupid to expect that she'd be off for the day just because I was.
"Lisa?" I asked, suddenly less sure of myself.
"Taylor?"
"Yeah," I answered. "I, uh… I know it's a little early, and I dunno if you have school…"
"I got my GED," said Lisa, sounding kind of amused. "So no. I don't have school."
"Right. Yeah. Okay, good."
"Everything okay, Taylor?"
"I…" I sighed, ran my hand over my face. "Are you free, today?"
"I don't have anything pressing planned, no."
"I… I mean, that is… Would you…"
Good fucking god. It wasn't like I was trying to ask her on an actual date.
"Sure," said Lisa, sparing me further embarrassment. "Let me grab a quick shower, first, but after that… Say, the coffee shop from Monday, about ten o'clock? That good for you?"
"Yeah," I said, relieved. "Yeah, sure. Ten sounds fine."
"Wow, this must be pretty heavy, whatever it is you need to talk about. I could feel the weight lifting from your shoulders from over here."
"I…"
One of these days, I was going to ask her how she did that. Powers, obviously, but exactly what those were, I had no idea.
I sighed again. "Yeah, I'll explain later. Just… See you soon?"
"Ten o'clock. Promise."
Click.
I hung the phone up and made my way back up to my room, and I spent the next hour sitting on the floor, tinkering with one of my projects without really getting anything done. My mind was too focused on meeting up with Lisa, so when nine o'clock came around, I hadn't really accomplished anything except to half-heartedly examine what I'd already finished.
Then, I got changed, and ten minutes later, I was locking the front door behind me and looking out at the yard, where the only sign of what had happened yesterday was the splotch of copper that still stained the spots where Sophia's body had lain. Even that would probably be washed away on the first good rain.
I caught the nine-ten bus at my usual stop about a block away from my house, and a little over thirty minutes later, I was stepping off on the edges of the Boardwalk, where all the shops were just starting to open their doors. There weren't many people out there with me, just what I assumed were a few tourists who apparently hadn't heard that Brockton Bay wasn't the nicest of cities to visit, and I didn't imagine that most of those shops saw much patronage in the early morning on a weekday.
Probably made a killing around lunchtime and after school, though.
I turned away from the Boardwalk and navigated back to that little coffee shop, trying to remember how Lisa and I had gotten there on Monday (and taking a few wrong turns along the way, much to my frustration), and by the time I finally caught sight of that sign, "AHNENERBE," again, it was just five minutes before ten.
The bell jingled on my way inside, and if possible, the little shop was even emptier than it had been two days ago. There were a few people sitting at some of the tables beneath the front windows, but for the most part, I was really the only one there.
I glanced around, but Lisa was nowhere to be seen, so I meandered through the tables and made my way to the one she and I had taken before, then took a seat. Nothing left to do now except wait.
Five minutes passed like an eternity, stretching every second out as an eon, then my watch let out a little chime to mark ten o'clock. There was no sign of Lisa. Another five minutes went by, and somewhere along the line, I started drumming my fingers along the table to no particular tune, wondering what was taking her.
I was just starting to worry when a mug of steaming hot tea was set down in front of me and I startled, jerking back in my chair. A grinning Lisa was standing next to me when my head swung around to follow the arm holding the mug of tea.
"Earl Grey, no cream, three sugars, just like last time," she said, and then she walked around the table and slid into the chair across from me. In her other hand, she had a mug of her own coffee, which she took a quick, careful sip of as she sat down.
"You look chipper this morning," she commented.
"Yeah…" I said lamely.
I hooked my fingers through the handle on my mug and took my first sip of tea; it was just as wonderful and just as amazing as it had been the first time, and for a moment, I thought that I would be spoiled if I drank here too often.
For several minutes, we sat in silence, me sipping occasionally at my tea while Lisa stared straight at me, her index finger tapping against the ceramic of her cup. I considered her from across the table, too, wondering how I should broach the subject, wondering how much I should tell her. If I tried to explain everything…well, then I'd basically have to tell her my life story, wouldn't I? Emma, Sophia, the bullying, all of it.
The thing of it was, I didn't know Lisa all that well. I'd called her and asked her to meet up because she was the only person I knew who I could talk to about the cape side of my life, the only person I could probably call a friend, right now. I…didn't really have anyone else, and after the whole mess yesterday, I could probably consider the Wards bridge burnt.
…Okay, yes, the Wards bridge was burnt. Even if they were willing to accept me once they found out Shadow Stalker had died to my defenses, I didn't think I wanted anything to do with them anymore.
Either way, it was a lot of trust to place in one person, especially one I'd basically just met, and I… damn it, I didn't want another Emma. I didn't want another friend who'd turn on me and use everything I told her against me. If I had to go through that again… I didn't think I could —
"Hey."
A hand landed on mine, gentle, friendly, comforting, and I blinked and looked up from my tea to Lisa's smile.
"It's fine, I promise. If you need a minute, take a minute. I've got nothing else to do today." Her lips twitched on the one side. "Just…don't worry so much? I can practically feel it over here, and if you stress out too much, you'll give yourself wrinkles."
I frowned down at my tea, and for a moment, I hesitated. I still wasn't sure how much I wanted to tell her, how deep into this whole mess I was willing to take her, how… how much of my past traumas I was willing to drag up and show her. Whether I'd be willing to tell her about the Locker.
At the very least, however, I could tell her the thing that had been bothering me for the past day.
So, I just blurted it out: "Sophia Hess was Shadow Stalker."
Lisa jerked as though she'd been slapped. "Shit!" she hissed. "Taylor, what are you — the Unwritten Rules! Why… Wait." She stopped and peered at me intensely. "You said 'was.' Past tense. As in, she's not, anymore."
I swallowed. "No, she's not. She's — "
"Dead," Lisa concluded. She hissed out a sigh. "And you killed her. Fuck." Her mouth twisted into a grimace as she looked at me. "No, not you yourself, but…your powers? Kind of, but not really? Something related to your powers, created from them? I… Fuck."
She massaged the bridge of her nose, eyes clenched shut, as though to ward off a migraine.
"I think you'd better start at the beginning."
I frowned and looked back down into my mug, watching the ruddy brown swirl around the sides. At the beginning, huh? I… Yeah. I still wasn't sure I was ready to trust her enough to tell her everything.
"I was heading out for my morning run, yesterday," I said slowly, "and I found her body — Shadow Stalker's — lying in two pieces on my front lawn. Cut clean in half. No signs of a fight. Nobody'd heard a thing when it was happening."
"Which is strange for a cape fight, right," said Lisa, nodding a little. "They're not always…loud, exactly, but they're not completely silent either. I'm not seeing how that means you've got to be the one that killed her."
I scowled down at my tea and didn't answer for a moment. I knew I should feel bad that I'd killed Sophia, even indirectly as it was, but it still just felt like a relief, like a bleak fog had been lifted from my life. My powers had killed a person, my home defenses had killed a teenage girl, had mercilessly cut her in half, and I was just glad that I would never have to see her face again.
"It couldn't have been anyone else," I told her. "She was on my front lawn. And she was cut in half."
"So?"
"So, I… I set up these defenses around my house —"
"Like traps?" suggested Lisa.
"No," I said. "No, um, more like…deterrents. Things to keep burglars or…or, well, enemies I might make out of my house. That was, uh, before you told me about the Unwritten Rules, so I thought, well, I don't know, Lung or Kaiser or someone might try to come after me, and…"
"So, you built a bunch of things that would…make them go away?"
"Not…just go away," I said. "They, uh, kind of escalate. If one doesn't work, the next one is supposed to be…more serious, I guess. Because getting to it means the, uh, the attacker is more serious."
"So… what kind of escalation are we talking about, here?" Lisa asked. "I mean, going from 'beware of dog' to 'I have a shotgun' might be reasonable, but going from 'trespassers will be shot' to 'nuke the entire neighborhood' is kind of extreme."
I pursed my lips, and for a moment, I debated the merits of telling her exactly how my house was defended, but I'd been willing to trust her this far, hadn't I? And even if I did tell her, that didn't mean she had any idea of how to get around them.
Hell, short of dismantling them with my powers or taking out the entire city, I didn't know how to get around them.
"At the edges," I explained slowly, "there's a…a field. A kind of No Man's Land. To attack the house, you have to pass through it, and when you do, it hits you with this… this feeling of, this is a bad idea. Just…a feeling of unease, a fear, that if you keep going, something bad is going to happen."
Lisa froze, mug halfway to her mouth, and set it back down.
"That," she said deliberately, "sounds like a Master power."
"I… I guess?"
I'd never really considered it, hadn't had any reason to — I'd just really learned about Master powers two days ago, when Lisa herself told me about them, and the defenses around my house were already about a month old. I'd just never made the connection.
I could see it now, though. Masters were those who influenced the minds of others, right? Who took control of other people, manipulated what they felt, how they acted? Yeah, the first line of defense around my house did that sort of thing. It…I'd wanted an option, my first option, to be a method of defending my home without violence or actually hurting anyone, and making them too afraid to even approach the house seemed like a pretty good alternative to…to something like had happened to Sophia.
"Is it…really that big of a deal?"
Lisa hummed. "Yes and no. Yes, if you get on the wrong end of the PRT and make an enemy out of them, they'll use whatever they can to ruin your good name, and that includes calling something like that an evil Master power. No, because if you don't give them a reason to screw you over, the PRT would do like they did with Glory Girl's aura and call that a Shaker power."
The knot in my chest that I hadn't really noticed loosened a little.
"So, that's stage one," said Lisa. "But a big dose of fear wouldn't have cut Shadow Stalker in half, like you said she was; what's stage two, then?"
"Dragon Teeth."
Lisa blinked and gave me a strange look. "What?"
"Dragon — uh, in the legend of, um, Jason and Medea, during the quest for the Golden Fleece —"
"They sow the ground with dragon's teeth, and out sprout fully armed warriors, right," Lisa finished for me. "You…have some of those guarding your house?"
"A few…dozen," I admitted.
"A small army, in other words."
When she put it like that, it sounded excessive. Was it actually? I didn't know. I'd wanted to be safe; I hadn't worried about overkill, mostly because whoever got past the first line was probably someone who really wanted me — dead or recruited, neither option was very palatable. Half measures wouldn't protect me from someone like Hookwolf or Oni Lee.
"So," she began, summing it up, "Shadow Stalker came to your house, tripped your defenses somehow, made it past stage one, then came face to face with an army of warriors sprouting out of the ground and got killed."
"That…sounds about right, yeah," I said. "It's a little more — I mean, they're only supposed to trigger if it's, you know, someone trying to attack me or Dad, so…"
Lisa looked at me for a moment with a very strange expression on her face. "…Okay. Sure. Intent-based defenses. Why not." She muttered something under her breath that I didn't catch. "The thing that I'm not quite getting is, how did she die?"
I opened my mouth to reply, but she waved her hand impatiently. "I don't mean the obvious," she said. "I mean, Shadow Stalker's power is made for avoiding attacks. As long as she can see it coming, she should be able to phase right through it. So how did she get cut in half in the first place?"
It was a thought I'd had myself the morning previous. How did it turn out that a cape whose power was to turn basically intangible had been killed by an attack, since she could just phase through it? How had Shadow Stalker been killed by a simple sword, when her fighting style had to revolve around letting attacks just pass through her harmlessly?
There was only one answer I'd really been able to come up with.
"Maybe," I said lowly, staring down into my tea, "she was caught by surprise. Maybe my Dragon Teeth killed her before she could react to seeing a bunch of skeletons pop up out of the ground."
Lisa snorted. "You don't give her enough credit."
I glanced at her, and whatever my face looked like, it was enough to startle her.
"Okay, wow, and you have good reason not to," she amended. "But she was pretty hardcore. Very violent. She's gotten into loads of fights in a town where we have an Asian man who transforms into a dragon, a psychopath who turns into a wolf made of blades, and a Neonazi who can summon ghosts that can stab people. An army of skeletons is not gonna surprise her enough to make her drop her guard that badly."
I frowned, and after a moment, I shrugged cluelessly. "I have no idea, then."
Lisa's lips pursed and her brow knitted, like she was trying to think through a puzzle, then she gave a small shake of her head and seemed to give up on it. "Let's just chock it up to weird power interactions," she said. "So, Shadow Stalker came to your house last night, tried to break in and attack you, ran into your dragon's teeth, and wound up in over her head. There's just one thing in all of this that I'm not understanding."
She leaned forward, looking straight into my eyes. I found I couldn't look away, so I stared straight back, unblinking.
"The first thing you said was that Sophia Hess was Shadow Stalker," Lisa said lowly, like she was telling me a secret. "You knew her. Not Shadow Stalker, not that Sophia was Shadow Stalker, at least not until…yesterday? Yesterday. Obviously, there's something between you, none of it good. But what was it that has you so sure she came to your house to try and kill you?"
I was the first one to break eye contact. I turned my gaze away from her, staring down, again, at my mug of tea. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lisa lean backwards, and I heard her let out a quiet sigh.
I…wasn't sure I wanted to tell her. What Sophia and Emma had done to me…I had just barely told Dad, and even then, I'd basically had to, because it had all been forced out into the open. Telling a girl I'd just met, telling a brand new friend that I'd only known a few days, it felt like… I didn't really have words for it.
Maybe…it was just that I was scared. Lisa had already been so very nice to me, and my experience with that had always ended with Emma and her cronies swooping in, either to ruin my budding friendships or to reveal that it had all been a trick from the beginning. I'd been burned so many, many times, I'd had all of my deepest secrets thrown into the light of day for one girl's twisted amusement, and I didn't want to risk something like that ever again.
I didn't want to mess up the first friendship I'd had in two years just two days after it started.
Lisa was the one who broke the stretching silence.
"I knew something was wrong for a while," she said a little distantly. "But I didn't care, at the time, and I didn't realize what would happen. I just hated him because he was the favorite child who could do no wrong. The popular kid that everyone liked. He tried to be nice to me, to act like a real brother, but even then, I could tell he was acting, so I didn't bother letting him try."
For a moment, she didn't say anything, and when I glanced at her, she was swirling her coffee and watching it spin.
"He committed suicide," she continued at length. "Just…one day, decided he couldn't go on, and took his own life. My brother was gone."
She let out a sigh and took a long swig from her mug, almost like it was alcohol.
"I made the mistake of telling my parents that I'd noticed something wrong but never said anything about it," she went on. "After that, it just started gnawing at me. Could I have stopped it, if I had? My parents, my family, it felt like everyone was saying that I could have saved him, if only I said something about it. And I wondered, too. Were they right? Could I have saved him?"
Lisa chuckled lowly. "I got my powers from that question. Just…had a nightmare, woke up the next morning with powers. And they didn't make anything better. Once my parents figured out I had them, they used me to pad their bank accounts. That's all I became to them, a tool to make more money. Their own personal Thinker to game the system."
She took another long swig from her coffee. "So, I swiped as much money as I could from them, grabbed whatever I couldn't leave behind, and ran away." She smiled at me, a lopsided thing that didn't quite meet her eyes. "Even changed my name to Lisa and left the city. Haven't looked back since."
I closed my eyes and let out a sigh through my nose.
It was…an incredibly personal story she'd just told me. Her Trigger Event, her One Bad Day. I knew why she did it, too. Build a rapport. Extend some trust. People tended to trust more when they felt like they were being trusted. I'd had the technique used on me one too many times not to recognize it.
But… But those girls were doing it to get at me. They were doing it to torment me. Lisa was… Lisa was actually my friend, wasn't she? This wasn't something she was using to hit me harder on the inevitable betrayal, this was genuine trust, wasn't it?
Wasn't it?
So…couldn't I trust her, too?
I… I wanted to.
So badly. So, so badly.
And, well, I'd already trusted her with my true identity, hadn't I? Couldn't I extend this much, too?
"They…hadn't done anything for several weeks before Winter Break," I began slowly, like my mouth had already decided what my brain was still debating. "For a while… I really thought they'd gotten bored and moved on. But on the first day back, I could tell. It was… an instinct. A honed sense I'd picked up to survive. I didn't know what it was, but I knew they were going to do something."
I closed my eyes again, and I was back there, the walls pressing in around me, the rot squishing beneath my fingers and feet. The hot air smothering me, suffocating me, clinging to my cheeks and stifling my lungs.
Please! Let me out! Someone! Please!
"They'd filled my locker with used pads and tampons," I went on. "Emptied the biohazard can in the girls' bathrooms, if I had to guess, and shoved as much as they could fit in. Left it to stew over Winter Break, which is as disgusting as it sounds. I could smell it from halfway down the hall."
The rotted blood mixed with the pungent odor of my vomit, and all I could smell was the decay that surrounded me, that choked me, that tried to drown me. All I could smell was death.
Someone…anyone…I…I don't c-care who…
"I puked as soon as I opened my locker," I said flatly. "I was still half bent over when someone grabbed me from behind and shoved me inside, and she locked me in there with the filth and the rot and left me to die. I was sure that I was going to, too."
The heavy sound of my own breathing echoed. My struggling had grown weaker after the adrenaline started to lose effectiveness, so the thuds and clangs of my kicks and pounding against the wall had become muted and weak. I couldn't tell, at that point, whether the laughter I heard, the shrill cackles of my three tormentors, was real or just my imagination.
I-I'll…do anything. Anything you want…everything I am… It's all yours. Just please…save me… Save me…
A great force answered. All of the empty spaces inside of me were filled, and suddenly, something vast, something beyond my understanding, was trying to mould me into her own shape. Everything that was me, everything that was Taylor Hebert, was being overwritten and consumed.
Even with my throat already raw, even with every part of me exhausted, even with all of my energy gone, I had screamed. Screamed until there was no breath left in my lungs, and rejected with all of my will the great force trying to take me.
My Trigger Event. My first Install.
"They told me I was in there for three hours," I finished. "I spent the better part of a week after that either catatonic or in a medically induced coma. The doctors said it was a miracle I hadn't gotten an infection or done serious damage to any of my joints."
I opened my eyes. Lisa was pale and faintly green, with a disturbed look on her face. I noticed her knuckles were white, she was gripping her mug so hard.
"There wasn't enough evidence, so no one was punished, but I knew who it was," I said. A spark of anger coiled in my gut, but I squashed it. "That's why I'm so sure that Shadow Stalker was trying to kill me. She tried in January, for no reason other than I guess she found it fun. After the tongue lashing I gave her in front of all her friends on Monday, she'd have a much better reason, don't you think?"
"Shit," Lisa murmured shakily. "I knew that bitch was unhinged, but seriously…?"
I felt my lips quirk up in a mirthless smile. "She's been making my life a living hell for two years, Lisa. Is it any surprise she's the one who caused my Trigger Event, too?"
Lisa laughed. It was mirthless, too.
"No, I guess not," she said. "Fuck. No wonder…"
She took another long swig of her coffee and drained it until it was gone.
"So, two years of being pushed around by that psycho, and to top it all off, she caused your Trigger."
"Yeah."
"And now she's dead. Killed by you, after a fashion."
I guess that was unavoidable, wasn't it? Even if I hadn't done it on purpose, even if I hadn't meant to, at the end of the day, it was my defenses that had killed her.
"Yeah."
"And you're… okay with that? Happy that she's dead?"
"I…" I hesitated. "I'm not, no. Happy, that is. Relieved, I guess, that she's gone, that I never have to deal with her again. She's out of my life, forever."
Lisa leaned in again. "And it doesn't bother you? You don't feel guilty?"
"…I don't, no," I said at length. "I feel like I should," I admitted. "I feel like I'm supposed to feel guilty. Like…like it should tear me up inside or something. But…I hated her. She and her friends tortured me for two years. I'm… I'm not happy that I killed her, I'm not happy that she's dead, but I'm glad she's gone. Glad that I never have to see her face again."
And, I didn't say, I was also at least a little glad that she'd finally gotten what was coming to her. What she deserved. A little karmic justice, long overdue. Not happy she was dead, but happy she hadn't gotten off scot-free again, to come and torment me another day.
"Good riddance, then."
I blinked and looked up, surprised.
"What?"
"Good riddance," Lisa repeated. "Shadow Stalker was just as much a psycho in costume as you say she was out of costume. The reason they brought her in, caught her and offered her to either be a Ward or go to juvie? It's because she's seriously hurt people. Pretty sure she's got a minor body count, too, from a couple of times when she went a little too far without thinking about the consequences."
Lisa leaned back in her chair a little. "So," she said again, "good riddance. I certainly won't mourn her."
I found myself staring. "You…don't think I'm…"
Lisa snorted and shook her head.
"Honey, you have a right to defend yourself and your home," she told me. "Whatever it is that got her killed, it's not your fault. You gave her ample opportunity to give up and leave. It's not your fault she decided to stay and get herself killed. It's her fault. She made her choices, and she paid for them."
A wash of relief swept over my shoulders and down my back; at least some part of me had felt…maybe not guilty, exactly, but burdened. The fact that it was Sophia had mostly buried it under the complicated mess of feelings — the tangled web of anger at Sophia, betrayal by the PRT that was supposed to be watching her, frustrated understanding of why she had been getting away with everything — but I had still been carrying around the weight of being responsible for someone's death.
I wasn't a killer. I didn't want to be a killer. To have Lisa tell me that I wasn't…
"So," she went on, "I'm still having some trouble wrapping my head around this, but…why you?"
"What?"
Why me…what?
"Why you?" Lisa asked a second time. "What happened that made Shadow Stalker — that made Sophia decide to make you her personal punching bag for two years? What started this whole thing?"
I frowned. "I…don't know. I never did anything to her to warrant…everything. But…"
I hesitated for a moment. I'd come here…I hadn't intended to tell her everything. I wasn't sure exactly how much I meant to share, but telling her everything about the Trio was definitely not on the list. It was just… too personal. There was too much of my personal history involved to talk about all of that.
But…
But I'd already gone this far, hadn't I? I'd already told her about my Trigger Event, my One Bad Day. I'd already told her more than I ever really meant to.
What was this little bit more?
"I guess," I began, "it all really started about two years ago, when I came home from Summer Camp…"
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