The River King 20

The River King 20

Taylor Hebert

The last of the smoke faded. I could see clearly with my human eyes now. As I watched, Bitch’s three dogs began to lose their shape. They shuddered in place as flesh and bone sloughed off. If they were half as loyal as their owner, they’d probably come after me as soon as they physically could, but they were in no position to do so at the moment. 

Honestly, I thought I’d already killed them back at the bank so I was surprised to see them again. Bitch was their getaway and heavy so I removed her dogs first. Then, I headed inside to mop up the other three so I didn’t see what happened to her dogs after.

Apparently, the dogs were way more durable than I’d expected. I distinctly remembered shattering bones, snipping spines, and puncturing arteries with dagger-like pincers. Much like now, actually. Yet, even as I watched, injuries healed as Bitch’s power wore off, as though the injuries were akin to the armored plates and didn’t translate to the dogs’ true forms.

I groaned in frustration. I didn’t enjoy killing dogs. I would, as gently as possible if they came for me, but I’d really prefer not to.

I instead turned to Tattletale. She laid on the ground, one hand cradling her broken leg. Her other hand was similarly broken, probably when she hit the curb. She heard me coming and looked up with wide-eyed terror in her eyes.

“Where are they?” my bugs heard her mumble. “Where are they? Where the fuck are they?”

“Who is ‘they?’” I snapped. A tendril of water lashed out, wrapping around her throat. “Who set this up?”

“Hahaha… Ahahahaha,” she laughed. Not out of some spiteful pleasure in keeping me in the dark; this was the laugh of a broken girl. “He lied. He lied to me…”

“Who? Who’s responsible for this?”

Her eyes gained a shred of clarity. Bottle-green eyes pierced into my own with visceral spite. “You have no fucking clue, Monarch. You know nothing, do you?”

“Tell me, or I’ll–”

“You’ll what? Kill me? I know,” she laughed bitterly. “I’m dead anyway. Even if you don’t, he will. Can’t you hear it?”

I paused. Sure enough, there was a great deal of noise. It sounded like gunshots, so not Oni lee. They were a few blocks away.

“Coil. He set this up. I was supposed to lead Oni Lee here because it’d draw you out. You two were supposed to fight while a third group killed you when you got distracted,” she admitted.

My vision blurred red. All this was just bait to lure me out. My grip on her neck tightened. “Why? What does Coil have to do with any of this?”

“Dumb bitch. None of that happened the way it was supposed to. Oni Lee left. That noise? That’s the assassination team fighting off the Protectorate. Coil’s a thinker. You and your fucking crabs fuck with his powers and that interference has been getting stronger.”

“He wants me gone.”

“No shit, dumbass. He’ll never leave you alone because you ruin every plan he makes without even knowing about them. He’ll help the Empire, ABB, anyone he thinks might want to kill you.”

“Then I’ll kill him first,” I said firmly. The sky was blue. Water was wet. Coil would die. He got dangerously close to my house today.

“Let me help you,” she started, voice rasping through my hold on her throat. “You don’t even know how to find him.”

I considered it. For the first time in my life, I seriously considered partnering with a villain.

Whatever plan of his I’d ruined, Coil knew how to draw me out. It’d need to find him as soon as possible or this shit would keep happening because his plan worked. I’d just proven that hitting this neighborhood would bring me running.

Then, Grue’s smoke cleared enough that I could lay eyes on the extent of the damage. Oni Lee relied on regular grenades because, like the insects that got transferred with his teleportation, complex systems seemed to break down with too many copies. It was a guess, but I figured each of Bakuda’s bombs had a strict number of times they could be reused.

Maybe Bakuda supplied a new batch. Maybe he’d confiscated them from unpowered lieutenants. Whatever the case, he hadn’t felt the need to hold back this time. I saw craters from standard explosions, homes that had been scorched black from incendiaries, and the esoteric bombs that transmuted flesh or created bubbles of looping time.

Coil. Oni Lee. They cared nothing for the unwritten rules, not a whit for civilian deaths. This was my neighborhood, the place I’d lived in all my life. My hand clenched involuntarily until her breath came in wheezing whistles.

I saw Mrs. Baker’s lawn in shambles. She had two dogs. One was a bloody smear while the second crawled along, dragging her hind legs on a broken spine. She used to babysit me, back when dad was busy with union work and mom spent hours grading college essays.

I saw Mr. O’Reily. He was dead, or comatose, I didn’t know. He laid on the ground, staring blankly up at the sky. He had no visible injuries, but his chest did not rise. He was old; a pain bomb probably could have forced his brain into shock. This man had a nephew who sometimes used to play capes and robbers with me and Emma.

Sean Cunningham’s house was blown apart from within. There were bloodstains I could smell from the nearby roaches. Quiet sobbing could be heard from the bedroom. I didn’t care that it was one of Oni Lee’s “normal” grenades that went through a window. I didn’t care that it was an accident. It was one more sin to put at their feet.

All around me, I saw nothing but devastation. Everyone here, from Mr. Darry who hosted summer cookouts to Ms. Cook who bitched out any girl with a skirt shorter than her fingertips, were stubborn people. We’d lived our lives through Marquis, Butcher and Empire with no gang calling us theirs.

And it’d all come crumbling down because of these “small time” villains, because a shadowy thinker thought this was how he’d get his shot at me.

Then, I saw something that made my heart stop. Oni Lee’s bombs had been scattered at random, but of the countless tragedies, I fixated on one: dad.

He’d been busy lately. The gang war wasn’t good for blue collar jobs, but it wasn’t bad, either. There was always rubble to be cleared, help to be organized. Communities learned to rely on an informal network because we all knew the city was strained to the limit already and dad, Kurt, and Lacey were at the heart of that.

I hadn’t spoken to him in days. Now, I never would. They had been driving home, only to foul into one of those special bombs. A gray bubble covered his car, as if all the color had been bled from it. Countless insects crashed into the bubble’s perimeter, but found a perfect, glassy barrier.

Slowly, legs trembling, I walked closer. I watched dad’s car glitch, only to reappear five yards away. He drove to the edge of the bubble, swerving to avoid a fog that was no longer there.

There was a moment, that fraction of an instant when he realized what had happened. His face would contort into dawning horror, Kurt would open his mouth to shout something, only for it to happen all over again.

“N-No…” I whispered. “D-Dad…? Dad?”

Tattletale slumped to the ground, utterly forgotten as I reached out. The barrier was perfectly smooth, an absolute boundary of time and space. It was as if the universe itself was saying, “This is where I end.” I was inches from the only family I had left, yet a literal reality apart.

I slammed my fist into the barrier. My knuckles shattered. My hand broke. I did not stop. I could not stop. Pain meant nothing. The heroes, still fighting in the distance, meant nothing.

There was no rage, none of that burning wrath I felt when I first saw Cricket walking free. The chill of revenge, that icy feeling I’d always likened to the River’s depths, was also absent. I learned then that sorrow wasn’t hot, nor was it cold. It was empty, devoid of everything but an all-consuming, hollow numbness.

The swarm was silent. There was no emotion to deposit, nor could I reach Oni Lee or Bakuda to enact my revenge. Never, not even in that locker, had I felt so alone.

X

I didn’t know how long I checked out. At some point, I’d sunk to my knees, though I didn’t remember doing so. My hands were a mess of pulped meat and bone fragments, hammered apart even as Tahm’s boon knit them back together.

Tahm. Tahm Kench. My best friend who could forge binding vows and enforce contracts. He… He wasn’t dad, but he was someone. The dull ache in my fists reminded me of him and I found myself reaching out before I could form the words.

“Tahm… I need you,” I whispered in a broken sob.

My voice was soft, barely fit to be heard in a library, but it carried nonetheless. The River bore my words, as it had borne me so many times before. And from somewhere far away, where the city’s gang war did not reach him, he appeared.

Tahm Kench emerged from the murky depths. He was dressed in his massive, yet slightly too small overcoat as he always was, looking like the genteel Case-53 he was. It upset me as much as it relieved me. How nice it must be, to go where he pleased and remain unaffected by it all?

“Taylor, you aren’t hurt, are you?” he asked in his trademark, southern drawl. He looked curiously at the grayscale bubble. His hands traced along its surface. “Curious… Neither here nor there…”

“N-No, I’m… That’s not important right now,” I said. He was a trump. It was a long shot, but it was the only shot I had. “Dad, he’s trapped there.”

“I can see that.” His voice came in a soft hum. There was acknowledgement, but not worry, as if he was observing nothing out of the ordinary. 

I let that give me hope. “C-Can you break it? You’re a trump. Trumps affect other powers.”

“Perhaps… The River flows to all places. You may see a bubble of displaced time, but all bubbles can pop.”

“How? Tell me, Tahm.”

“If it cannot be popped from without, perhaps it can be burst from within. But no, ol’ Two-Coats has no true power, you know. The only power I have, is the power to give it away.”

I understood; he needn’t say more. I stood and marched towards Tattletale. Her eyes widened with terror at my approach. I wondered what she saw when she looked at me.

Probably a monster. Hopefully, the consequences of her own fucking actions. But what good was being a thinker, anyway? It didn’t help her make wiser choices, not at the bank and not now, either. It sure as shit wasn’t going to keep her alive.

“No, please, you can’t do this,” she pleated. Her voice came out in hoarse croaks. She tried to flee, but only managed to crawl back on her mangled arm. “It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t–”

“You did. A life for a life seems fair to me,” I said as I grabbed her by the hair and began to drag her towards Tahm. There was no vindication, no sense of triumph, only hollow emptiness as I offered her to him.

“I-I can help! Coil, you need me to find him. He used us. The bank heist, it was all a smokescreen so he could kidnap a little girl,” she babbled. “She’s a thinker. She makes Coil better. I can tell you everything.”

I listened with half an ear. I liked to know everything about a villain before moving. I was the person who made detailed maps of the Empire territory using immobilized cockroaches. Vaguely, I could recognize that I would have been very interested to hear it all in any other circumstance.

Not now. It all went in one ear and out the other. She poured out her heart and soul, grasping at a mercy that she had to know by now didn’t exist. I wanted Coil dead. He would die, eventually. But right now, nothing mattered more than the faint glimmer of hope that I could get dad and his friends out of there.

“Take her. Take her and give me a River that will flow through time,” I said desperately, thrusting the babbling girl towards him.

Then, I saw my friend’s apologetic face and my hope died. He shook his head with ponderous slowness. “I’m sorry, Taylor. That’s not how my power works. She isn’t enough.”

“I can get you more. As many sacrifices as you need,” I promised. He said “not enough.” That meant there was a number. “Every villain in Brockton Bay, Tahm. All of them.”

“That won’t work. You know why already. It was never about lives or bodies, my friend. It was about you, the weight you place upon each sacrifice. You don’t value this girl, not like you value your father.”

“I don’t value anything like my father!” My voice cracked as I cried out. What could I value more than the only family I had left?

“No, I suppose you don’t.”

I stared longingly into the gray bubble. My father looped again, his face morphing from laughter at something Kurt said to shock, fear, then horrified realization. At the very last frame of this fucked up recording, I could almost imagine that he recognized me, that his eyes met mine through the wall that divided space itself.

My breath came in short gasps. There had to be a way. Tahm’s power was the power of contracts. I remembered how I’d gotten my arm back. Cricket and Stormtiger hadn’t meant a damn thing, but they’d been stepping stones. They gave me the power to take Hookwolf down.

I eyed Tattletale. Everything was a bargain with him. “She can be the first. I’ll… I’ll work up to it. She can make me stronger still, right?”

He understood what I was saying. “A small amount, perhaps. It is not about the number, nor the lives. I can’t bend the rules, my friend, not even for you.”

“Then do it. Every little bit helps. And tell me what I need to break this bubble.”

“I never hesitated to tell you the truth. Are you sure you want to know the price?”

“Anything.”

“Your father is your present. All I ask in exchange is your past,” he said with a solemn smile.

I fell silent at that. Tahm dealt in lives. At this point, it barely phased me. But… But getting my father back meant sacrificing someone from my past. There was a certain, poetic irony to it. It sounded like the kind of Faustian bargain that mom liked to read and overanalyze when she was alive.

I took a deep breath. For the first time, I was beginning to understand the nature of Tahm’s power. I’d always known, of course. He’d been honest with me. But now, it truly sank in. Yes, he was a hydrokinetic. Yes, he was a brute. Yes, he could teleport, seemingly with no restrictions.

Even so,, at his core? At his core, he was a merchant. He wasn’t unlike the boatmen who rowed up and down the Mississippi River during the steamboat days. All that he offered, he offered for a price. All that he took, he took without reservation.

There was a cold callousness in that. He called me “friend,” but “customer” was probably the more accurate word. He probably had other “friends” across the country, maybe even the world.

But, there was also a rightness in that as well. Tahm Kench was fair. He’d never lied to me. He took. He gave. The scales were always balanced. And in a world that took so much from me without giving anything back, “balanced” sounded pretty damn great.

“You’re a monster,” Tattletale whimpered. Hers was the voice of a woman who’d lost it all. “You have no idea what you’re doing, do you? You have no idea what you’re feeding.”

“My past, in exchange for my present. That sounds like a fair trade to me,” I said, ignoring the last words of a dead woman. “Take her to start, Tahm. I know what I have to do.”

The merchant of death nodded. He tipped his hat with a knowing smile. “I thought you might. You always were my best customer, Taylor.”

His long, muscular tongue snaked out, caressing Tattletale’s face almost like a lover. Whatever she saw in those teeth, she went catatonic as it wrapped around her and dragged her into his maw.

I turned away. I’d made my choice. If I had to sacrifice a person to kill my past, there was only one person who could qualify. And hey, it was only fair; she’d made it quite clear our past meant nothing.

X

Emma Barnes

Life was terrible. Nothing had been going right this year. Ever since we put Taylor in her locker, everything had been going downhill. And how sad was that? Putting Taylor in her place was the highlight of my year? I wanted to throw up at how pathetic that sounded.

There was some bullshit about how she went missing for a few days, but it was easy to avoid blame. After all, we truly had nothing to do with that. Sophia, Madison, and I happily surrendered text messages and email records from the day or so before she fucked off to Boston or wherever. None of it was criminal, just cliquey girls being catty.

No, it all just ended up destroying Taylor’s credibility. We weren’t bullying her. She was just the depressed, disturbed girl who couldn’t let go of the fact that her former best friend had new friends. I’d looked forward to watching her crumble; it would have been hilarious to see her face when she realized her little plan backfired.

Then, the gang war happened. Winslow shut down indefinitely, which was fine on its own. I didn’t mind the time off from school, but they were saying we’d all have to repeat the year, or at least the semester. Some of the girls were talking about how their parents were thinking about moving, or homeschool. Whatever the case, my friend group would probably get a lot smaller next year.

What sucked more was that my modeling gigs evaporated like smoke; no one gave a damn about a teenage model when some Asian bitch was doing her best to bomb the city back into the Stone Age. Worst of all, Sophia was also too busy being a hero to hang out, not that there was anywhere to hang out at even if she found the time.

Annoying. Everything was so annoying. It was like the universe itself was conspiring to get on my nerves. And for what? It wasn’t like I did anything.

I stepped out of the shower with a frustrated sigh and an involuntary shiver. The water was cold, made only marginally better by the fact that it was April. At some point, some gang shootout or other had ended with a bomb that damaged a gas pipe.

Dad talked about it, but I hadn’t been paying attention. All I knew was that hot water for our entire neighborhood was out even though the fight had been blocks away. That was days ago. Repairs were slow because the fight made it a “hot zone” and no one wanted to be out there. The utility company just shut off the gas and called it a day.

I stumbled back into my room and threw myself beneath the blankets. At least my bed was still warm. I set up my laptop to play a movie, some braindead romcom that everyone insisted was great, but couldn’t name a single unique thing about it if asked.

I considered doing schoolwork, stuff dad insisted I do so I “didn’t fall behind.” He’d gotten it all from a friend on the school board, but I couldn’t bring myself to give a damn. Algebra wasn’t very compelling when the city was literally being bombed by a super-terrorist.

I finished the movie and got ready for bed. As I turned out the lights, I thought I heard a scraping noise in the walls. At first, I thought it was nothing, but Sophia said I should trust my instincts.

I turned the lights on.

Nothing.

Letting out a grunt of annoyance, I turned the lights back off. As I snuggled back under my blankets, I heard it again. This time, there was the distinct smell of stale water. It reminded me of an aquarium that hadn’t been cleaned in a while.

My eyes widened in surprise. We didn’t have an aquarium. We hadn’t had one since I was in middle school. I wanted a dog, but mom rejected any pet that could shed or throw up on the carpet, so fishes it was.

It was probably a plumbing thing. I grudgingly got out of bed again so I could tell dad. But the moment my feet touched the carpet, I felt a damp, wet tentacle wrap around my ankles. I opened my mouth to scream, only for water to fill it. 

I thrashed as much as I could. More tentacles wrapped around me, keeping me from knocking over anything to make noise. They dragged me towards the closet like the monster I used to have dad check for every night.

Then, before I knew it, I was sinking. Water flowed into my nose. My lungs burned. Just as I thought I’d black out, I hit dry land again.

Author’s Note

Props to the person who assumed something would happen to Danny. And Emma. Though I guess it was kind of a given. 

Animal Fact: I said before that cookiecutter sharks are bioluminescent. As it turns out, there is an entire subgroup of sharks called lantern sharks that are related. They have bioluminescent fins and gills and use this light both to hunt and communicate.

They’re not very well-studied because they live so far down. But, given they are thought to possess electro-receptors like most sharks, they’re uniquely suited for hunting in the darkness. Oh, and they also have those jaw muscles that allow them to protrude their lower jaws to grab prey, kinda like a goblin shark.