14 – i – Suppression

Two birds fell, sniped from so far away that neither had any idea where the shots were coming from. Debates on how intelligent the birds were had been going back and forth since their appearance, but instinct drove them to lash out at anything nearby.

The Art pulled back, dodging the sharp talons of an irate bird. Coils of tendrils concealed within her porcelain body tensed and thrust, sending her sharp, ceramic claws between the metallic ribs of the monster. Thinner tendrils erupted from the ends of her fingers, wreaking havoc in its core organs.

Another bird lunged forward, flinging metal feathers at The Art.

Ripping her claws from the bird, she caught it by the ribs and held it up, using its corpse as a shield against its fellow’s attack.

Air just above The Art’s head warped in the wake of another bullet. The metal of a bird’s faceplate cracked, sending it skidding to the ground at her feet. A second slowly spiraled out of the air, squawking and shrieking to alert the others.

“Only clipped that last one,” The Hanged Man said over their radios. “Might still be usable.”

The Art internally scowled, though her porcelain mask remained as impassive as ever. “Is that necessary?” she grunted as she swung her shield into another bird, crushing it against the ground. “I can keep this up all day.”

“There are at least six just circling around. I could try shooting up at them, but if I miss, someone across town is going to have a bad day.”

“You? Miss?” The Art scoffed as she drew the bloodied pulp of her shield back to herself, blocking feathery flechettes from the bird The Hanged Man only clipped.

“It has been known to happen on occasion.”

The Art shoved, skewering another bird with the sharpened feathers of her shield. “Fine,” she said, releasing her shield, leaving the squirming bird underneath pinned against some derelict van in the middle of the road. Turning, she faced the injured bird. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Sounds wond—”

The Art couldn’t hear the rest as she pulled herself into the core of her porcelain doll. Her arms went limp and her legs locked into place, keeping her upright for a moment more. The tangled, squirming mass, fully concentrated in the doll’s torso, pulled at a small internal lever.

Coiled springs flung the chestplate open in three pieces like a corpse on an autopsy table. Clinging to the two upper plates, The Art used the momentum to launch herself at the surprised bird.

Sharp, needle-like tendrils wormed their way past its metallic shell to the biomechanical innards. The birds, despite their outward appearance, maintained little in common with anything native to Earth. That mattered little to The Art as she infested it, spreading through the organic components as she burrowed deeper and deeper into its body. She felt through the neural pathways, twisted her worms around its bones, and clamped down around the pumping pistons that worked as their heart, keeping them going even as the creature died around her.

The Art had a foot. She twisted it, sliding it forward to keep herself upright.

The Art had a neck. She twisted that as well, feeling a strange snap, but that didn’t stop her.

The Art’s vision came into focus, dampening her odd, hazy vision as she gained the sharp, precise gaze of an eagle.

She flapped her wings, one sluggish and limp. The remnants of the bird’s mind felt the pain, but she ignored it, twisting and bulging her tendrils to repair a gaping hole left from The Hanged Man’s oversized bullet. She flapped again, feeling her wings moving naturally. Putting a little extra spring into her new legs, The Art stole some instinct and jumped into the air.

The Art spread her wings, catching pockets of air in a way that couldn’t have been natural. No creature this heavy could fly like a bird, and yet, she started soaring. It felt less like a pigeon she had once infested and more like flying on the wings of steam, lifting her up to carry her wherever she wished to go. No amount of instinct stolen from the creature told her how it was working.

So she stopped thinking about it and started looking upward.

With the beyond-perfect eyesight of a biomechanical hawk, The Art easily spotted three birds circling overhead. Fewer than The Hanged Man said, but two others dove past her, completely ignoring her presence. The missing number could have already flown down.

As soon as the two birds landed on the building and started pecking at it, The Hanged Man removed them from the equation with prejudice.

The three overhead didn’t change their flight pattern, almost lazily circling. Their eyes, as sharp as The Art’s were, swept back and forth, scanning the ground below. She wondered if they were more intelligent than the rest—they were certainly larger, roughly the size of a compact car—like some overseers or just opportunists, waiting for the perfect time to strike.

Then she crashed into one. Beak wide open, she clamped down around its neck. Thin tendrils shot out from her throat, piercing the thinnest part of its neck. With a jerk, she ripped back out, leaving the bird plummeting while she took its place in the lazy circle.

Now that she had been inside one, she knew exactly where to strike to disable them as fast as possible. It never even had a chance to make a noise.

The other two still noticed it fall. Finally, they turned their beady eyes toward her and saw that she wasn’t one of them.

They simultaneously shrieked and swooped, breaking their lazy orbit to go on the full-on attack. Knife-like feathers grazed The Art; a few even struck, biting into the metal carapace of her body. Two sliced into her chest, ripping apart tendons, hydraulic lines, and organs. The injuries would have been incompatible with flight, if not life, had The Art been unable to patch the wounds with cords of tendrils.

Worse than the injuries was the force of the impact, nearly knocking her right out of the sky. Figuring that spinning was a good trick, The Art did a barrel roll, using her odd wings to propel herself forward through the twist.

It wasn’t as good of a trick as the movies made it seem. The added momentum ripped one of her wings clean off as a weaponized feather sheared through a joint. Tendrils slurped back inside her main mass as she began falling uncontrollably.

One of the birds caught her, stopping her fall, but began gripping and pulling with its talons.

The Art peeled back the biometallic flesh of her body, helping the bird rip her apart as her tangled mass of worms lunged through the air at the new body. The moment her needles pierced its flesh, she began infesting it, snatching control over her new body mid-flight.

She let her old body fall in two bloodied hunks, angling herself upwards just in time to slam into the sole remaining bird. Tendrils erupted from her backside like she turned into a flying porcupine. She struck at every weak point in its body before drawing back, sucking the tendrils into herself as she sloughed off the fresh corpse.

Aerial superiority achieved, she scanned with her sharp eyes, looking for any additional targets. Finding none at this altitude, she scoped out her porcelain body and dove, plummeting from the sky at speed.

She landed hard, crushing a bird that was getting a little too close to her other body for her liking. Perking her head up, she spotted The Hanged Man in the distance just in time to lose her head to one of his bullets.

A grumbling, irritated mass of worms crawled its way out of the corpse, dragged itself across the road, and hoisted itself up inside the still-open chest cavity of her porcelain doll. After prying the chest casing shut, she diffused her tendrils throughout its limbs and head.

“—orry about that,” The Hanged Man said in her ear. “Couldn’t be sure it was you.”

“How cautious of you,” The Art said, stomping toward her previous body. The bird she had landed on was still squirming, but weighed down by the much larger corpse. Lifting her foot, she stomped down on its head, ending it. “Status?”

“Area clear from my vantage point. I saw a fresh flock far in the distance, but they turned away after you started attacking the ones up above.”

The Art looked up but couldn’t see a think from the ground—too many buildings, and her natural vision was garbage without a borrowed set of eyes. She did find it strange that the flock would turn away from a fight. These things dogpiled when riled up.

“Do we know what set them off in the first place?” she asked.

“Oh, you’ll like this: The Adjustment’s little pet project.”

“Her mutant spider colony?”

The Hanged Man went silent for a long beat, radio active but with only the buzz of his background noise coming through. “Her… what?”

“The Hunters?” The Art corrected herself.

“What kind of spider—”

“Were they killed?” The Art interrupted, needing to know—The Adjustment wouldn’t take kindly to the bad news.

“No, no…”

Hearing the creak of a door, The Art turned. Four familiar faces stepped out, all looking more or less okay. She thought she spotted a fifth figure in the back, staying just inside the darkened doorway, but the hazy blob in her fuzzy vision faded away with nobody else emerging. The four actually present figures came into focus as they approached.

“Whew,” The Agent whistled as she looked around. “How are you going to cover this one up? More gas leaks?”

The Art followed her gaze. Dead birds littered the street. She had personally taken out a dozen of the things, but The Hanged Man nearly doubled that with his rifle.

“Doubt they need to,” The Longshot said, running his fingers along his beard in thought. “These monsters are public knowledge. The news just needs to report that someone agitated them, and wildlife control had to shoot them to stop the threat from spreading.”

Cover-ups weren’t The Art’s department, but she nodded along, figuring his assessment would be mostly accurate. “I need to get off the street,” The Art said, more to The Hanged Man than to The Hunters. Although based overseas, The Hekhtep would still raise a fuss if they had to scour more supernatural evidence from the internet than strictly necessary.

The Emperor had been complaining, just yesterday, about them weighing on her for all the recent issues in Chicago.

“Already on my way,” The Hanged Man said in her ear. “Coming up behind you.”

At the same time, The Agent stepped forward. “We were trying to—”

The Art held up a finger, waiting just a moment for a large black SUV to roll down the street. “Get in,” she said as it pulled up alongside her. After opening the rear door, she climbed into the passenger seat.

They looked understandably wary—The Agent most of all, once she caught a glimpse of The Hanged Man in the driver’s seat. They had history in situations like this, The Art knew. “The area is being cordoned off,” The Art said, rolling down the window. “You can either come with us or be subject to interrogations, non-disclosure agreements, and queue lines.”

“Feels a bit odd to willingly climb into the black van,” one of them quipped as he slid across the rear bench with a large tube package, making room for the others. “Guess that’s what we get when we’re working with the Men in Black.”

“Working with is an especially generous phrase,” The Hanged Man said in a humorless tone.

“Yeah, fuck you too,” The Agent snapped, climbing in last. All of them were armed, but the way her fingers kept tightening around the grip of her baseball bat felt especially dangerous. Her eyes bored into The Hanged Man as he sped off down the road.

“The Emperor won’t be happy with you all rushing off, causing problems immediately after your meeting.” The Art leaned over, blocking The Agent’s view of The Hanged Man—she hoped her better rapport, and association with The Adjustment, would work in her favor. “Weren’t you supposed to lie low until everything was ready?”

“The Church,” she started, only to pause and glance at her companions. “Whatever, point is we found a place that looks like they’re preparing to make a shit ton of their cultists.”

“Make cultists?”

The Agent blinked, confused, leading her companion to nudge her in the side. “We didn’t tell them about the masks,” she said quietly before leaning away from The Agent to address The Art. “We think The Mummy has a way of brainwashing people into being their minions.”

The Hanged Man angled the mirror to glare at the back seat. “We weren’t informed of this earlier because…?”

“Because there is a lot of shit to keep track of and I can barely remember it myself,” The Agent snapped. “But yeah, like Anna said, they brainwash people. That place seemed like it was all set up to process two hundred brainwash sessions at a time. I was going to blow it up on our way out—”

“Please refrain from acts of terrorism in The Emperor’s territory,” The Art cut in.

The Agent curled a lip, rolling her eyes like she hadn’t just admitted to wanting to blow up a building. Her companion stalled any further commentary on her part, however.

“Makes me wonder how many other places like that exist in Chicago,” The Longshot said, pensive. “What are the odds that our stakeout spot ended up right next door to a cult den?”

“To be fair,” The Sword said, “it wasn’t next door. Erika had to walk halfway across town. It might have felt closer because I was flooring it the entire way, trying to shake off that…” He went quiet, eyes widening before he visibly deflated. “My van… My new van…”

“Still, Les isn’t wrong,” Anna said. “Anywhere in walking distance feels like too much of a coincidence. We’re either extremely lucky, or there are more of these things scattered throughout the city. If I were The Eclipse,” she said, turning to The Art, “I would use my resources to investigate any abandoned buildings. Wasn’t Delilah’s cult thing in some boarded up apartment complex as well?”

“It was,” The Agent nodded, though she hesitated, adding, “It was just a regular cult until The Mummy’s goons showed up, which might mean any isolated population, like actual cults, need to be investigated as well. Surely they’re not all based out of old condemned buildings?”

“Yes, of course,” The Hanged Man took a deep breath. When he breathed out, The Art could taste the sarcasm. “We’ll just go door-to-door, checking every building in Chicago. With the manpower we have, we’ll be finished within fifteen years.”

“Or do nothing,” The Agent said with a shrug, “and wind up with half of Chicago lying low as sleeper agents, just waiting to strike.”

The Hanged Man and The Art glanced at one another before the latter spoke. “The Emperor will decide how to proceed.” Pivoting in her seat, she stared down The Agent, hollow eyes of her porcelain head digging into her. “This is information I’m sure The Emperor would have preferred knowing earlier.”

“You know now,” The Agent said with a huff, breaking eye contact in a way that made The Art flinch, like continuing to stare would have consequences. Not that The Agent noticed, looking out the window as she was.

“Is there anything else we ought to know?”

The Agent didn’t answer right away, looking down the seat at her companions.

“The head cultist got loose,” Anna said. “That’s part of the reason we were out tonight, checking to see if we could track him down. We mentioned them in the meeting though, the tattooed people.”

“You should keep an eye out for metal sculptures of vaguely skeletal people,” The Sword added. “That seems to be their main… thing?”

“The hub of the masks,” The Agent said, her words meaning little to The Art. “We need to destroy them.” She took a deep breath. “However, the main thing is that we found a portal at that building—it’s why I didn’t blow it up on our way out.”

“A portal?”

“We talked about portals at the meeting, right?” The Agent asked, looking to her companions to confirm. “It’s like the whole reason we even went to you guys, to get support delving into the one the birds came from.

“If the pattern holds, there is another god inside this one, waiting to be freed.”