Summus Proelium

No, no-no-no-no. That was all I seemed to be able to think over the next few minutes. We ejected from the VR machine, leaving Pitman within to keep him out of trouble. He was stuck there in that fake lab, unable to do anything of note. Not that he really needed to do anything just then. He’d already managed to yank the rug out from under us quite thoroughly. Even in his supposedly helpless position, he’d taken us completely by surprise and fairly effectively dismantled our entire plan without even lifting a finger.

He didn't make Sleeptalk. It wasn't his thing. No matter how many special tools we used, we couldn't force him to make the cure and wake up my parents and the others, because he never designed this stuff in the first place. He hadn’t made it. Cup had. She was the one who had created the fucking stuff all along, from the very beginning.

“His protege!?” Sierra shouted once we were downstairs in the main room once more. Aside, if that was, from Fred and Murphy. Those two were staying up there to keep an eye on the man. Yes, he was trapped in virtual reality and strapped to the bench. He shouldn't have even been able to move at all, much less find a way to escape and cause even more trouble. But we weren't stupid. Well, not that stupid anyway.

“That psycho cunt is his fucking protege?!” Sierra was still raging, arms flailing. “I mean, sure, she seems like just his type. They’re both pieces of shit who deserve to be thrown to rabid sharks. But come the fuck on. How the hell did that happen? How could she be working with him?! How long has that been going on?! What--what?”

Qwerty jumped over to my shoulder from the table, patting my hair now that I’d taken the helmet off. “She's the bad lady from the other day, right? She already surrendered. So can't you just tell the jail people that she has the cure and they need to tell her to make it? She wants to not go to jail forever, so maybe she’ll do it if they tell her to.”

I grimaced a little despite myself while reaching out to pick up a little fire truck from a shelf full of toys in this section of the shop. Running my hands along the wheels to make them spin helped calm me down a fraction of a percent. “Sure, but how do we convince them that we're telling the truth? How do we even tell them how we know about that? We can't exactly say, ‘hey, we used a machine to teleport this guy off Breakwater and interrogated him. Oh, where’d we get the machine? We broke quarantine to go pick it up in Utah, so yeah that whole car chase thing was us too.’ I don't think that would go over very well.”

Paige shook her head. “It wouldn’t,” she confirmed. “Breakwater would--it wouldn’t be good. We’re talking massive international incident, taking a prisoner off their island. We broke so many laws. Even if they understood why we did it, which is iffy on its own, they’d still have to make an example of us. They’d have to make sure no one else ever tries it.”

“The whole point of Breakwater is that it’s inescapable,” Roald pointed out with a visible wince. The blond boy was half-slumped over one of the counters, staring down at his own hands as though in disbelief over the entire situation. Which was fair. “That idea is what keeps things as together and… you know, stable as they are. Having a way to permanently deal with the worst Fells out there is what stops a lot of people from panicking. If they find out one of those prisoners escaped, and that we were the one who took them off that island, they… they won’t let that go. They can’t.”

“You know that’s why he didn’t really care about telling us that much,” Sierra muttered, sounding as annoyed as I felt. Which still felt odd, coming from my own voice and face. It was like watching a recording of myself that I couldn’t remember making.

Paige smacked her fist against the wall. “Of course he didn’t. Sure, the suit forced him into it, but he didn’t mind. Because he knows we can’t just tell everyone the truth anyway.”

They were right, of course. We couldn’t just go marching into the hospital or the police station and tell them to get the answers out of Cup. Yes, they had her. She was right there. But we couldn't explain how we knew that she was behind Sleeptalk. We couldn’t explain any of it, not without revealing far too much that would cause even more problems.

“Maybe we should do it anyway.” That was Wren, the girl standing up straight next to the main cash register. She looked scared, yet determined. “People are sick, they’re hurt. Maybe we should tell them that we did a very bad thing. We’ll have to get in trouble, but… but those people will get help. If we admit what we did, they can do whatever they want to us, and… and still help those other people.”

Her words were met with silence as we all considered them. She had a point. After all, no matter how much trouble we got into, regardless of how bad it was for us, wouldn't it be worth it if we could help all the people who were sick right now? Including my parents and Irelyn. We could help everyone, and get the city back to the way it had been. We could undo the quarantine and just… fix all of it. We could get Detroit back on track. All we had to do was throw ourselves on the mercy of whoever ended up judging us.

Paige, however, shook her head after that moment of silence. “It wouldn’t--okay it would help somewhat. But it would still destroy the trust people have in Breakwater. It’d still create an international incident. It might even make some countries leave the Armistice. Which would create even more problems. Even if they believed us, and immediately started forcing Cup to make the cure, we’d create more problems than we solved. Sure, Detroit would get back on its feet… probably, but the overall damage we’d do to everything else would just--it wouldn’t be good.”

Sierra’s head bobbed. “What she said. Doesn’t matter how much we help Detroit if we tear apart the whole international cooperation system by destroying their faith in Breakwater. Even if we’re willing to take that hit, we’d still hurt more than we help.”

Okay, so we couldn’t do that either. I heaved a long sigh, setting the fire truck down before picking up one of the nearby stuffed animals. “We can’t officially admit what we did, but we also couldn’t just tell those people, ‘Hey we can’t tell you how we know, but Cup’s the one who made that stuff. Just trust us.’”

“Unless we can,” Peyton pointed out thoughtfully. When we all looked at her, she shrugged. “I mean, we know she did it, right? Maybe we should interrogate that bastard upstairs a bit more, make him write down what he does know about it. You know, where she made it, where her labs are, that sort of thing. If we can go there and find evidence that she’s the one who created the stuff, we can just tell people we were investigating things because we didn’t want her to get away with claiming she was innocent, found her labs, and figured out she was behind Sleeptalk. We don’t have to tell them we had a headstart on that. We admit to a much lesser bad thing, that we had some information about where her labs were but didn’t tell anyone, and say we wanted to try to find proof that she was still bad and holding things back before she managed to get a sweetheart plea deal.”

I considered that for a minute, turning the thoughts over in my head a bit before looking to the others. “She’s got a point. If we can get proof that Cup is the one who created Sleeptalk, we don’t have to admit to anything else. As far as the rest of the world can be concerned, she made it, she unleashed it. They can deal with that.”

Paige was giving a slow nod, clearly intrigued by the possibility. “That way there’s no reason for them to find out we have Pittman, no reason for any kind of international incident, no reason to stop trusting Breakwater. I mean, they probably should stop trusting Breakwater, honestly, but we don’t have the time or resources to deal with that. And completely breaking down the whole system probably wouldn’t help anything.”

“The point is, we have enough to deal with without being responsible for something like that,” Sierra noted with a grimace. “Cassie’s to-do list is long enough as it is. Let’s not add something like, ‘deal with the aftermath of destroying public trust in Breakwater and ripping apart the entire Armistice international alliance.’ I mean, can you imagine how bad things would be if it was every country for themselves at this point?”

Roald was pacing back and forth, his mop of blond hair getting even more unruly as his head shook rapidly. “We can’t do that, we can’t break the alliance. We can’t do something that makes people start to pull out. They need to work together, they need to keep the Fund going. That’s what helps pay for damages during Touched fights and Collision Points and all that, but it only works because Germany, France, Brazil, Japan, Canada, Australia, the UK, and the US all contribute to the Armistice.”

We were using the term Armistice as both the name of the team and the name of the agreement between those countries. There was some long official term for the agreement, but it was boring and basically no one actually tended to use it. It was just called Armistice for short. If you were part of the alliance between these countries, you were allowed to have a member on the team known as Armistice. Speaking of which--

“South Korea now too,” I reminded him. “They just officially joined a little while ago. They've got a full member on Armistice and everything. A member who--uhh, who were they, again?” I’d heard of them having a member officially join and all, but had been a bit distracted away from the details considering everything else going on.

“Kumiho,” Paige informed me. “They are a Joined. Two independent beings physically merged during the Touching process. Like Janus. Or sort of like Theory and Praxis, or our bear and raccoon friends, but they don’t switch places. Both of them are out and active at the same time, just in the same body that’s fully combined. One was a fox, the other a girl. When they Touched and merged, they became a fox-girl. A fox-girl with extra fox ears on top of their head and three tails.”

Part of me felt like that was enough and that we should focus. But on the other hand, Paige seemed a little calmer while she was explaining that. She had been visibly anxious and aggravated this whole time. Being around Pittman clearly wasn’t exactly good for her, especially now that he had revealed that he couldn’t even fix Sleeptalk anyway. After everything we had done to grab and contain him, he still managed to screw us over. I had a feeling that was making Paige feel like she had lost even more control. Control she had desperately been clinging to. And yet, right then while she had been talking about this new Armistice member, she had calmed down a bit. Maybe that could help her think straight?

So, despite the pressing urgency of our immediate situation, I decided to see if I could help that along. “What can they do, exactly?” Get Paige to talk about something else, something unrelated to her father, and maybe she could settle down enough to focus.

It seemed to work, at least a bit. Paige looked to me briefly before explaining, “According to the press release, they’re Mind-And-Psy-Touched. Enhanced intelligence, instinctive tactical ability that makes them a wizard at spotting potential combat advantages, enhanced senses, they can get sort of a ghostly-image of what someone’s about to do in a fight when they focus on them, and they can project brief images of alternate situations into someone’s mind. You know, while they’re fighting someone, they can make that person see something else happening to distract them. Only lasts for a second or two, but that’s plenty long enough in the middle of a fight.”

Grimacing at the thought of having to deal with someone who could project random distracting images into my head at any point, I replied, “Well, let's just be glad they’re on the good side, and try not to do anything that could piss them off. Which goes for every member of Armistice, while we're at it. And that means we need to go with the plan where we expose Cup without tearing apart the entire Armistice alliance in the process. Which means we don’t tell them we have Pittman, or what he said.”

Qwerty sat up a bit on my shoulder. “But what are you gonna do with him after that? If you can't let them know you took him, or how he got off the island, how are you going to send him back? Can you put him in a big box and mail him anonymously?”

“We could try teleporting him back to the island,” Wren tentatively put in, “but I looked at the machine after we brought him here, and it’d take me at least a month to put it back together. Plus a lot more super-expensive supplies. Some of the important stuff in his part of the machine sort of disintegrated. It's gonna be hard to replace. Even for you guys.” She looked back and forth between Paige and me. “The parts are really rare. Maybe I could find a way to umm, get around it, but… uhh… that’s still gonna take awhile.”

“We’ll figure it out when the time comes,” I replied, trying to sound as confident as I could. “If we can't teleport him back, maybe we’ll hand him over to the Ministry and see what they want to do with him. They’ve got resources we don't.” Even as I said that, I couldn’t believe the words were coming out of my mouth. And yet, it was true. Pittman was a threat to everyone, and the Ministry could deal with him in ways we couldn’t. Except that he might tell them things we didn’t want them to know for certain. If he told them Paige was a Biolem, what would happen? What could we--yeah, maybe that was a bad idea in general. But right now, we just had to deal with the immediate problem, all preferably without exposing the fact that we had abducted Pittman in the first place.

“So that’s what we do, then?” Roald put in, looking around at the rest of us. “You guys go back in there and make him give you everything he knows about her labs, then we just hope we can find something in one of those places that can prove she’s the one who made Sleeptalk, so the authorities can force her to make the cure.” He paused, taking a breath before adding, “I can umm, talk to Rubi to see if she has any ideas about Pittman and what we could do with him. Without exposing too much about us. Maybe she’ll be able to figure out how to get the parts Wren needs.” Belatedly, he added, “But she’s not gonna do it if it gets her in trouble. Not when she just got this job. We’re not… we’re not risking that.”

I felt more than a little bad about potentially putting Rubi in that sort of position at all, even if she did have access we didn’t. With my stomach rolling at the very thought, I gave a firm nod. “You're right, we're not going to risk her getting in trouble. We’ll figure something out. Hell, we're getting ahead of ourselves anyway. Let's focus on getting what we need out of him first. Maybe he can't fix this stuff on his own, but he can sure as hell help us figure out how to force Cup to do it. For now, we just have to make sure he doesn’t escape. Obviously, he’s gonna try. And he’s really smart. Not just really smart, he’s a Tech-Touched. A biology-focused Tech-Touched. Who knows what he could pull off if we give him the chance?”

“So we won't give him the chance,” Sierra insisted. “We keep him locked in that virtual reality the whole time so he doesn't even have access to anything here in the real world. He can just stay trapped in there until we're ready to figure out how to deal with him.”

“You’re sure the countermeasures will stop that bomb in his head from going off?” I asked Paige, really not wanting to even think about what sort of problems we would have if his brain ended up exploding while he was with us. He might’ve deserved it, but… no, we couldn’t let it happen.

“Bomb won’t explode and they can’t track him,” Paige confirmed. “Which is another reason he can’t really escape. The moment he leaves the suppression effect, his brain won’t survive the process. Trust me, he might not care about any of us, but he definitely cares about himself. He won’t risk running off like that. Even if he managed to get out of the simulation, he’d have to take the time to make a portable suppressor or dig the thing out of his brain. Which would give us time to… deal with it.”

Okay, well, at least I felt a little bit better than I had a few minutes earlier when the world had seemed to be ripped out from under us. It still felt like my stomach was going to twist itself into a full-on pretzel even without any pink paint assistance, but now we had a decent plan. We hadn’t completely fucked up, things were just… a little more complicated now.

Taking a deep breath, I straightened up while giving the others a lingering look. “Right, so we go back in. I think Peyton and I should do that ourselves. No reason to risk Paige and Sierra interacting with him even more.”

Both of them looked like they were going to argue, but eventually gave up. Paige’s voice made her unhappiness clear. “Fine, we won’t go back in with him this time. But don't let him trick you into talking too much. Don't tell him anything. Even if you don't think it's important, he might still be able to use it. I know it sounds paranoid, but better safe than sorry. Give him nothing. Just take what we need. Make him write down everything he knows about her labs, and don’t engage him in conversation. Don’t rise to any of his bait, no matter what he tries.”

“I’ve got an idea,” Sierra put in, raising a hand as she looked my way. “Maybe you should go in there as me. Let him think he has a chance to control you, so he focuses on that instead of some other plan. Let Peyton do the talking, and don’t react as though you can hear him. Just… just pretend you’re me. We’ll put you in my suit and everything. You know, if the machine can’t just be adjusted to make you appear in it anyway.”

I thought about that for a moment before nodding. “Sure, I guess. Anything that makes that bastard focus on the wrong thing. Every little bit helps. But for now, let’s go get some actual answers out of him. Then we’ll go find proof that Cup really is an evil bitch who belongs in Breakwater right alongside him. Come to think of it, if this works out and we can send Cup where she belongs by the time it’s over despite all the games she’s been playing, maybe it’ll be worth all the extra trouble after all.”

With a firm nod at my own words, I set the stuffed animal back down on the shelf to head upstairs. A second later, I turned back and moved the red dragon over a bit, to be with the rest of the set.

Maybe later I would ask Wren where she had picked up a full Cuddle Corps collection in such great condition.