Chapter Text
When I got home, I went down to the basement. Dad wasn’t back yet, and I could…
Well, I could clean the fruit juice out of my backpack. At least my school books were protected, since I’d put them in plastic bags, but the handouts were ruined. I glanced over at the little spot I’d made for my costume, my insects working away to make more silk.
It wasn’t ready but…
I really couldn’t endure another week of the Trio. I could go out this weekend.
And what, Taylor. You can’t even stop Emma. What good are bugs going to do against the likes of Lung? I shook my head. I wouldn’t be fighting Lung. I was just—
If you can ’t stop them, what good are you? The Protectorate and Cops keep fighting lower-level people, they keep talking about how they put some no name in prison, but it changes nothing, does it? Where were they when—
Lost in thought, I bumped into one of the haphazard piles of boxes. Mom’s stuff. We’d never gotten around to sorting it. I dove for the top box, but it slipped through my fingers and hit the ground. The wood just exploded, spilling plastic bundles across the room.
I stared at them for a moment. Mom had loved her literature, she’d been a good teacher.
And here it was. Just lying around a dusty floor. We should at least…
I reached down and picked one up. A garish cover greeted me. A man in a hat, looming out of the darkness, holding a gun.
The Shadow.
“Taylor, these were classics. I know people tend to not see them that way, but they informed an entire generation…”
Mom, talking to me when the storm roared outside. I hadn’t been able to sleep and she’d taken time out of her grading for me.
“They were stories of men and yes, some of them were a little… Well, the attitudes weren’t always ones we need, but the core was often someone taking a stand, using their brains, brawn, and learning to beat the evil, and if they were simplistic… Well maybe simplistic isn’t always bad.”
She’d glanced outside.
“It was a time before there were men and women who could laugh at bullets. Before the later comic books became real—only with no editor mandating that the good guys always would win. Like this guy…”
With a flash, I remembered that she’d shown me this book, the one I was holding.
“I always liked him. Where half the heroes were these clean-cut blonds, the Shadow well, look at his nose. He wasn’t afraid to use fear, but he used his brain, until most of his enemies didn’t realize they had lost until it was too late.”
He was ugly. Like me. Just an upright frog. But…
I shook my head. Those were just stories, and the dead didn’t send messages to the living, they didn’t—
I blinked and looked up to the light. I’d felt something there, and now I saw it. A big orb weaver spider, and enmeshed in its web was a centipede. The centipede was much larger than the spider and should have been able to beat it in an instant. But its mandibles were opening and closing helplessly, its long body bound with ever-increasing amounts of web. I watched it, doing nothing to control either one, as the orb weaver finished its task, leaving a feebly moving mass of web behind it.
“Maybe the dead do send messages…” I said. Strength didn’t matter. Not if you were smart. I looked around at the cluttered room. Abandoned, dusty, hopeless.
Like us.
Like the city. Nobody cared if E88 and ABB gangers recruited on school and the janitor just cleaned up the drug leavings at the end of every day. What had happened to me had been third-page news, because the same day, some old man had made the mistake of trying to protect his daughter by standing up to Hookwolf. It wasn’t fair. Not to me, not to them and…
Dad had always joked about the Hebert temper, back when he’d told jokes. And now I felt something boiling up within me. I stared at Mom’s life and remembered the times she’d talked about how the town had been better. How there’d been a time when if you saw a crime you called the cops, instead of pretending you didn’t notice anything because he was E88 or ABB.
The city had failed her. And now, going out with no plan, just to escape something I should solve, I was failing her.
No more. Maybe I was just an upright frog, but I’d been given powers that Emma couldn’t even dream of. And I was going to fix this city, no matter what it took, and if I couldn’t beat up Lung, I’d find other ways to beat him.
Lung needed thugs. Kaiser needed thugs. They survived because the city was rotten.
And I’d change that.
But I’d start with my school. That would be my first mission. I looked down at the image.
After all, how could I know where I was going until I knew what had made me?
I changed some of my orders to the bugs. I wouldn’t be going out this weekend. At least not like that.
I had a lot of things to do.
I turned to start picking up the wrapped magazines.
“Thanks, Mom,” I said to the empty air.
And then I got to work.