I hadn't slept well last night.
What little I had slept, anyway.
Dawn found me cupping my mug of tea in my hands, looking out at the city below.
Seeing nothing but memories.
Memories of last night; memories of my old life.
Last night, I'd followed a villain home, looking for an opening, a way to capture or kill him… and found a family dinner.
The comparison to what Bakuda had done to me, to my father, was painfully clear.
They weren't the same thing, at all — Krieg and all his family were still alive, to start with — but it was a terrifying thought. A fresh nightmare, to add to the ones about how my parents had actually died. It seemed unfair, somehow — dreaming through the same scenario as victim and as monster, one of those alternatives had to be… not better… less bad than the other, right?
As far as I could tell, each was worse than the other, some kind of M.C. Escher spiral of guilt and betrayal and loss that only went one way.
Down.
I squeezed the mug in my hands, letting the lingering warmth soak through, feeling my swarms stir at the shift from night to day.
Not useful.
So focus on what would be useful.
What were my options, anyway?
I could wait. Watch for the arrival of the Teeth, of the Fallen, of whoever else might come. Continue to set villain on villain, and wear away at the Empire. I could get better, but even now this was a game I knew how to play. I could make those skirmishes cost.
But.
But that relied on the Empire not reinforcing faster than they were assailed, relied on the Empire not simply crushing an incursion before it became a threat. Krieg was careful, thorough, and unafraid to take a risk where he thought it would bring victory. The whole point of bringing down Kaiser had been to let the Empire fragment without a competent leader, and it wasn't working. Whatever Krieg thought about his comparative lack of skills, his inability to bring Purity back to the service of his cause, a week ago the Empire had been ripping itself apart, with Krieg the leading suspect for betraying Kaiser.
Now, it was on the verge of holding the entire city. Firmly united under Krieg. He'd managed it without any casualties lost to the civil war, and even the losses to opportunistic attacks by the PRT, by the Merchants, by Lung… had been in the service of victories. I wondered, briefly, if Kaiser would have lived had he let Krieg take the lead on Lung.
No, waiting for Krieg to make a mistake would be a very bad plan.
Besides, the very first lesson I'd learned — from Bakuda — had been about the importance of seizing the initiative. She'd acted faster than anyone could have expected, working on rumor and a handful of facts… and had come closer to killing me than anyone ever had, before or since. Lung included.
She had killed my father.
I'd responded with equal suddenness, and had enjoyed success beyond my wildest dreams.
Or nightmares.
Too much success could be its own problem. The third lesson Bakuda had taught me, the one she'd never learned herself.
If I wanted to keep setting other groups against the Empire… did I have other options? The Travellers? The Undersiders? Faultline's mercenaries? Lung?
A straight up fight against the Empire would involve casualties — not even Lung had achieved his victory over Kaiser without sacrificing Oni Lee. I didn't think any of the villainous groups would take on a fight on those terms. Villains, after all, tended to be in it for themselves. And Lung… the Empire would simply refuse battle, and attempt assassination until they found something that worked.
Assuming I could even talk to Lung without him trying to kill me; with Kaiser gone, I didn't know of any other enemies he wanted dead more than me.
That left the capes who weren't in it for themselves, who would take on a fight even if it did involve casualties… if the cause were just.
The heroes.
I thought about the Protectorate I'd met.
Of Battery's calm professionalism, and Armsmaster's unswerving focus — the way that both of them had spoken of their job almost as a calling, something that brought meaning to their lives. Of the way those examples resonated throughout the city, the way old Pete Walker stood up straighter and smiled more when he was talking about Dauntless or Miss Militia. The trust he had, that things would get better, because they stood as champion for him and all like him. He hadn't been able to shoot the Marquis when they met, hadn't been able to avenge his granddaughter, but he told that story with a smile these days instead of shame.
Because the Marquis was in the Birdcage now.
The heroes had won.
And Pete had faith that they always would.
I'd trusted like that too, once. Had an Alexandria lunchbox and Armsmaster underpants, when I was younger. Not just because they were cool, but because they were a promise: that, despite everything, the best of humanity could outweigh the worst. Overcome anything, in the end.
Even the Endbringers, someday.
I hadn't so much lost that trust as started to see what it looked like from the other side, the sheer weight of the responsibility. The lives lost because I'd acted too quickly, the lives lost because I hadn't acted quickly enough. And the Protectorate heroes I'd met hadn't flinched at the burden, just shaped their lives in an effort to meet it.
I thought about New Wave, and the way they'd demolished Coil's soldiers.
Of Carol, disciplined and fierce, laying out her plans for Fortress one day after beheading Coil with a crackling blade of light. Of Amy, who'd healed me when I was at my lowest: friendless, hiding beneath her hood, left behind in the raid's van. Of Victoria, superficially brassy-bright at tea, flirting with Gallant and sweeping up her sister; calm and focused in the fight, trusted at her mother's back for Coil's death. I didn't know the rest of New Wave, but if I wanted to guess at how dear they were to each other I only had to feel the raw wounds left in me by the deaths of my own parents.
Finally, I thought about the Wards I'd met, the team I might have joined.
Aegis, diligent and protective, watching over the team like his namesake. Vista and Kid Win, younger than I was and desperately trying to seem older. The odd duo of Clockblocker and Gallant, the one who'd make a joke of anything and the other who always played it straight: both of whom had disobeyed orders for me. No, not just for me: because that was the right thing to do. It's one thing to fight a villain; another to stand up to your boss. They did both with mismatching smiles.
Heroes.
I thought about doing something that would get some of those heroes killed.
And it would, it would have to. The Empire was still larger than any local group of heroes. Very nearly larger than any two. Given the unretirements, given the recruiting efforts underway, they might soon be larger than all three combined. The fights I'd arranged, the fights I'd seen, all had one thing in common: they'd been unfair. Tilted in the direction of my choice. Ambushes, surprises, numbers, overkill… I'd used any advantage I could find. Life wasn't one of those debates about who would win in a fight: a single mistake or bad luck could be the end for anyone.
It nearly had been for me.
The Empire was large enough that any all-out fight would be very difficult to control. Very difficult to keep unfair. I could try to set up a smaller series of fights, take them bite by bite… but I couldn't see any way to do that and keep surprise for the later fights. What kind of odds would I need to guarantee success?
New Wave had outnumbered Coil seven to one in capes. They'd had total surprise and real-time tactical information. Even so, if Lisa hadn't confirmed the self destruct… how many would he have taken with him? In the building above, hundreds. Of the heroes? They didn't all have forcefields. And not only was Panacea incapable of raising the dead, she would have been caught in the collapse herself.
We'd come closer than I liked to think about to absolute disaster that day. Brandish had waved it off as a win, and it had been, but I didn't like winning through luck. Over time, that was the same as losing.
The Empire was large enough, strong enough, that any fight with them would spiral out of control. I'd miss something.
And then heroes would die.
To clean up my mess.
Well.
That clarified things nicely.
I rinsed and racked the cup and went to put on my costume, now patched and with the new lenses inserted, and then the street clothes I'd wear over it.
If I couldn't wait, and I couldn't hand it off to someone else… then I'd just have to solve this myself.
Somehow.
···---···
Krieg got up early.
He was gone from his house by the time I got there, and the sun was still touching the horizon then. His car had had a 'Reserved Parking' sticker for a building in the Medhall complex so, for lack of a better clue I headed there. There were more people than I expected at work already — as in, anyone — but still few enough that it was easy to pick out the active offices: I found Krieg in one of the corner offices, high up. I picked a bench on which to wait for the nearest convenient cafe to open — technically, more of a sports bar, but proximity to the office complex meant that they opened for breakfast and lunch, with a thriving takeout business. I settled into a booth in the back, laid out my notebook, and pretended to write while I worked to get eyes and ears on Krieg.
From what I was hearing, apparently, he ran a pharmacy chain. In his spare time. When he wasn't running a criminal Empire.
Maybe it was a money-laundering front, and he wasn't really doing the work for both.
Then again, the meeting he was in was about his work as interim CEO of the Medhall conglomerate itself (their CEO was incapacitated, and he was laying out contingency plans for what happened if he didn't recover). So Krieg was running at least two companies in his spare time, and the Empire.
He ought to write one of those time-management technique books: "Secrets of Highly Successful Supervillains."
I'd buy it.
I could use a book like that. I had spent nearly every waking hour since the coma trying to remove the gangs, and so far all I'd managed to do is change which gangs held which territory. Still, cleaning up a city was the kind of project which you might expect to take more than a month, so maybe it wasn't going as badly as it sometimes felt.
Getting vision turned out to be a little tricky: I needed a critical mass of insects if I wanted to see or hear through them. Coil's base had been furnished in something best described as 'Cold War bomb shelter': enormous air vents, designed for regular manual inspection; rough concrete; exposed piping and lighting. Easy to assemble my bugs in various places. Krieg's office was 'design minimalism', all glass and brushed steel. That still left a lot more places for insects to hide than I would have imagined before I could sense them, but not as many as I'd like. Sound wasn't so hard — just find a place in the walls, or under the floor. Vision, though…
I resolved it, eventually, by assembling multiple swarms on the roofs of nearby buildings. More eyes, more widely spread, let me see farther. And more sharply. Didn't have the full three hundred and sixty degree coverage of everything in his office, but it was a nice trick.
He looked different, out of costume. The high-peaked officer's cap he wore as Krieg lengthened his face, emphasizing a sharp nose and pointed chin. Without it, the receding hairline made it all look rounder, focused attention on his nearly-constant wide smile. And when he spoke, he sounded English, like a BBC actor. Was the whole German accent just part of the costume, a way to hide one distinctive accent beneath another? Or were both accents assumed?
Working out a way to use my bugs as a telescope array had taken me up to lunch, a time period during which I'd also thoroughly mapped out the Medhall complex.
Procrastination.
I stirred my bowl of chowder absentmindedly, and ripped off a piece of sourdough to dip and eat.
I'd wasted the time because I was still working on how to deal with Krieg. I'd been looking for something elegant, and hadn't found it yet.
One of the televisions cut away from local news to a press conference from the ruins of city hall. The mayor was there, on a stage, with a man in a suit. No backdrop, just the ruins behind them. On the edge of the shot I recognized Carol, in a crowd of other suits.
Fast work.
I focused on that television. I had swarms in my vicinity as a matter of habit, but I hadn't had any on that television and it took a moment before I could hear it clearly through the noise of the bar.
"… pleased as I am to welcome… Fortress Construction…"
"… you, Mr. Mayor… committed to… humanity against… Our shelters… forty percent… research… millions of people. It's a record we're proud of. And we've done well for our shareholders in the process. Today, though, I want to announce a new way for Fortress to help humanity. We're launching the Fortress Global Reconstruction Initiative, because we believe that our expertise in heavy construction has broader applications, and because we want to give back to the communities who've trusted their protection to us. We're here in Brockton Bay because this is a city that's been hit hard recently. And there are things we can do here: rebuilding the Scar; roads and rail, buildings and infrastructure; even dredging and reopening the port."
He had to stop talking because the reporters present were cheering too hard. I smiled, and dipped another piece of bread.
Hands outspread to quiet the crowd, he continued. "Obviously, this will cost money. Billions. And while I can't discuss the specific amount that Fortress is pledging for this city's project at this time, or discuss what other cities will be a part…"
I tuned him out. Around me, people were already ordering drinks — the bartender had given a round away on the house. It had been a while since Brockton Bay as a whole had cause to cheer for the future.
I thought about Quinn, telling me "there's more than one way to fight; more than one way to make a difference." Of Carol, telling me that with the right lever, she could "move the world."
This wasn't a victory won with superpowers.
She'd taken Calvert's connection to Fortress, and run with it. As she'd explained it to me Saturday, a lawsuit would take years; a settlement could take days. Even though some details remained to be hashed out, this was already a commitment to something big. Dredging the harbour might cost a quarter billion dollars. Or twice that: those were the kinds of numbers bandied about the last time it was raised. Add in the other things… rebuilding the city wouldn't be cheap. But it could be done.
And that had been the plan she'd laid out for me on Saturday.
Carol said that sunlight disinfects, but that only helps if you're throwing light on a wrong. The PRT being infiltrated by a villainous Thinker was a failure: dealing with parahumans was, precisely, their job. Fortress had been taken in by a powerful Thinker — no shame there. Their job was building things. Legally, the answer was much the same. Calvert had been a consultant, not even an employee, and a villainous parahuman to boot — why, when you looked at it, Fortress was really the victim here. With all of that, it would be very hard to lay liability against Fortress in a court of law. She'd told me all of that, how she didn't have a prayer of doing anything useful with a lawsuit.
And then she'd smiled.
The court of public opinion was a different matter. Fortress relied on government contracts for the bulk of its twelve-figure revenue stream, and something like this could quickly spiral out of control, could be taken as a betrayal of the united front humanity tried to present against the Endbringers. For her own part, Carol wasn't willing to risk disrupting the ongoing work of building Endbringer shelters.
But she had bet Fortress wasn't willing to risk disrupting the ongoing profit, either.
She had bet that they'd waver if blitzed, that the moral authority she could bring to bear as the heroine who'd uncovered the lair they'd built for a villain would tip them into action, that the opportunity to satisfy their fear and their desire for a good reputation would lead them into doing something. And, at that moment when they were casting about for something to do, she might be able to make a suggestion. A forceful one.
Blackmail? Maybe.
It had worked.
That kind of money and effort could revive the city, or give it a fighting chance, and I'd never dreamt this was even a possibility.
It wasn't a cure-all: that kind of money would draw villains too. Or let existing ones entrench themselves, go semi-legitimate.
Which brought me back to dealing with the Empire.
Not involving the heroes meant that the Empire would just be fighting me, and that only went one of two ways: I could go to ground and hide… but that meant giving up my efforts to clean out the gangs, at least until they forgot about me. If they ever did. Not something I could work with. Or, I could fight… but at those odds, I was pretty sure I wouldn't walk away. Better than getting some of the real heroes killed, but still a failure. Dying to make things right… well, there were worse ways to go. Dying, and not making things right… no.
Not acceptable.
I kept thinking of things I couldn't do.
What could I do?
If you have an enemy you cannot beat in a fight? Then do not fight him.
I could hear Krieg's clipped, precise words in my memory. His answer to the riddle of Lung.
And instead of a fight… what?
We do not have to fight him — just kill him.
Could I do that?
There were parahumans so dangerous that it was considered 'self-defense' if you shot them while they were sleeping.
With artillery.
That's what a kill order meant. Even though the Protectorate heroes usually put down such villains, anyone could do so, and it wasn't murder. Just carrying out the sentence.
It could be very lucrative, even: victims, or their families, often contributed to a bounty fund, and the PRT itself did so sometimes. Even a villain could claim such rewards under temporary amnesty. Not that anyone really made a living at it: too risky.
So there was precedent for skipping straight to lethal force.
But…
There was no kill order out on Krieg.
There wasn't even one out on Lung. Getting one took something beyond day-to-day villainy, something special and ongoing. Like the Slaughterhouse Nine: by now, joining that group automatically brought a kill order with it.
They had a lot of turnover.
They were still at it.
Krieg wasn't even in the same league as those villains — Grey Boy had been a member of the Nine, and arguably not the worst.
No one had yet found a way to put his victims out of their misery.
Jack Slash, who led the Nine as much as anyone did, was apparently going to end the world. Implausible for anyone, let alone someone with a power as simple as cutting things at a distance… but then he'd lasted years with the Nine, more than a decade.
Most members lasted months.
Whatever he did, it worked.
With such horrific exceptions aside, not all villains needed to end their story dead or Birdcaged. Purity was at least trying to turn things around. The Undersiders might just retire on whatever Lisa had salvaged from Coil. The Travelers, too, maybe. I didn't know that Coil had forced them into service the way he had Dinah Alcott and the Undersiders — but it was how he worked.
Had worked.
The city was better without him.
Would Krieg repent or retire?
How many risks did I have to take to give him that chance? He was dangerous, not just in his power but in his care and skill. Dangerous to me. Dangerous to the city.
Would Brockton Bay be better off without Krieg, too?
Yes.
Could I bring him down without killing him?
Every alternative I'd thought through which involved taking him alive and putting him in custody ended with open war between the Empire and the heroes. The Empire might — would — lose that fight. But the Protectorate and the city would lose, too. Could I keep him hidden? For how long? And was kidnapping better than killing? Given his powers, it was definitely more dangerous.
Did I have the right to decide whether he should die?
I wasn't sure. But it was the only alternative I thought I could live with. I couldn't live with doing nothing, with inadvertently having helped the Empire take the city; couldn't live with calling for help, and heroes dying to clean up my failure.
That left living with this question, and living with acting without a perfect answer to it.
So.
I began eating, methodically.
How? If I was going to do this, I'd make it count. What could I do that would hurt the Empire most?
… that wonderful blend of certainty and uncertainty necessary to inspiring proper fear…
Bakuda, explaining what Lung had taught her about the uses of fear.
Fine. I'd take that lesson and apply it.
Certainty and uncertainty?
Two options: 'natural causes' and 'vanished.' Either would provide useful uncertainty; his removal would provide certainty.
Could I even pull off 'natural causes'? A tripwire on the stairs, maybe. The density and kind of insects I'd have to use to make it lethal wouldn't be natural at all. Unless he was allergic? Too much left to chance.
Vanished, then.
The corner of my mind that had never stopped paying attention to Krieg's office noted that he had meetings scheduled late into the night.
I could wait.
And prepare.
···---···
An hour and a half ago, the sun had set. The moon had set just before it, and the sky was dark. Streetlights made puddles of light, and the windows of the few occupied offices shone bright against the night. Krieg was still at his desk, still working through a spreadsheet. Budgets, if I was reading the foreshortened screen correctly through rain-streaked windows. The building was all but empty. He stretched, yawned, and stretched again.
Stood.
Was he… he was leaving.
He shut off his computer, cut the lights and went toward the stairwell.
Good.
I'd prepared for the elevators too, of course, but he'd taken the stairwell when I'd seen him last night, and that's where I'd focused my primary preparations.
He started down the stairs, briefcase in hand.
His car was on the second floor of the parking garage — I had time.
The fourth floor was completely empty: there'd been a construction crew there earlier, probably working on tenant improvements for whoever was leasing the floor. No one there, very few on the fifth and third floors.
He was just reaching the landing above the fourth floor, the farthest point from any of the stairwell doors, when I struck.
An enormous blob of bugs dropped on him from above, massing twice what he did. It knocked him flat, attached silk-strands to hold him in place, and immediately set to biting, injecting venom and simply trying to rip its way through his eyes, up his nose, down his throat — to enter anywhere there was an opening, and make an opening anywhere there wasn't. Another, still larger group covered the floor, emerging from the underside of the landing and stairs, and piling on.
He struggled, flailing mindlessly for long seconds before recovering himself with what must have been a remarkable effort of will. An out-thrust arm sent a spray of bugs forth. Again, so violently that many became smears on the concrete.
The swarming mass was hardly diminished. I did detail some of my reserves to clean off the walls — no point vanishing someone if you were going to leave evidence, and it wasn't as if there was room to use them offensively at the moment.
He changed tactics, trying to clear his face off. He had some success, but by this point I had an entire swarm's worth of bugs beneath his skin.
Some of the choking noises were rhythmic: I wasn't sure what he might have been trying to say. Something about the cause he'd served? His family?
He clung to life far longer than I'd expected.
Minutes.
But in time, his body grew still, the only movement that of my insects.
I stood and paid my bill from dinner, leaving a generous tip at the sports bar where I'd spent the day.
My swarms bustled, cleaning the wall and floor of stains, devouring Krieg's flesh. Each insect could only take so much, of course, but if you rotated them efficiently it could be done more quickly than I would ever have imagined, before. What remained were his clothes, his personal effects, and his bones.
That had been… simple.
It wasn't because he was weak.
In a fight, he could have killed me from blocks away, launched me into a wall with neck-cracking force. I'd seen him kill Skidmark and Squealer in just that way, not a week ago, with a glance and a wave of his hand, seen him rock Lung with a gesture. Bugs could survive falls from extraordinary heights: he'd propelled some of those on him with force enough to smear them across concrete. If he'd done that to a person in a fight, the only possible reason for his foe to not be similarly smeared across the concrete would be if Krieg had simply put him through the concrete.
And rebar.
My spider silk costume was tough… but, against that, it would have done nothing but provide a funeral shroud.
So, I'd learned the lesson he had to teach: I hadn't fought him.
I'd killed him, as carefully and efficiently as I could, and now I'd use that death to destabilize and terrify his gang.
I had my living carpet of bugs pop the battery out of his phone, and then convey what was left of him, the things my bugs couldn't eat down the stairs to the ground floor.
There was a security camera covering the exit and alleyway. A small patch of silk was lowered into place over the lens, and I walked into the alley and levered up the storm drain access grate, using my baton, careful not to touch anything with my hands. A pair of threads held it suspended, and I went on my way toward my scooter.
After I'd turned the corner, the stairwell door opened and the chitinous tide swept out, carrying its burden into the storm sewer. Two spiders severed the lines, dropping the grate back into place, and then cleaned up after themselves; another pair of spiders removed the cover from the camera and departed.
My bugs and their burden moved down the storm sewers; aboveground, I paralleled their course on my Vespa.
Ten minutes brought both routes to the beach.
I parked the Vespa and walked out onto the pier. Below, where the storm sewers emptied into the ocean, a handover was taking place. I scattered the insects, and a fresh procession of crabs took the duty, bearing Krieg's remains and his effects out to sea. There, as deep as I could reach standing on the edge of a pier, the crabs cracked his bones with their claws and buried them; shredded his clothes and buried them; crushed his phone and watch and buried them too, all scattered in dozens of caches scattered across the ocean floor, with rocks piled above them.
Come the morning, the Empire would find that Krieg had simply vanished.
I looked out at the ocean for a time, dark as only a cloudy and moonless night can be.
Even so, there were spots in which I could see the reflection of the stars.
Eventually, I turned and walked away.
I was halfway back down the pier when I realized that, for once, things had gone smoothly.
No self-destruct, no deadman switch, no unexpected Oni Lee at my throat… this had actually gone according to plan.
I was still thinking about whether that was a good thing or not when three miniature suns bloomed amidst a thicket of lasers in the hills off to my left.
Oh, come on.