Connection 1.01



In my family, we had a tradition: We kept every sign and banner we made for every picket line and protest we marched for. If we won, we hung it on the wall as a trophy. If we lost, we kept it in the basement for the day we’d need it again.



I’d earmarked the empty spot on the wall above my bed for my most recent creation. I’d gone a little overboard on the arts and crafts side, but that was par for the course for me. I was old hat at making signs. I’d made every mistake in the book at one point or another, and learned from all of them. I used wood instead of cardboard so it wouldn’t melt in the rain. I laid out my design in pencil before committing with paint to make sure it looked the same on the board as it did in my head. I used a ruler to draw straight lines for my text, and stencils for the letters so they’d be perfectly formed. My signs were downright professional. I could sell them, if anyone I knew had money.



This sign was my pride and joy. Aside from signs, I wasn’t much of a painter, but I’d laboured for hours over my pop-art tooth. The caption read, “Teeth are a necessity we can’t afford.” It had everything a good sign needed: a double meaning, an ironic reversal, a pop-art tooth.



One week ago to the day, no settlement had been reached in the final round of contract negotiations between the Dockworkers’ Union and the conglomerate that handled labour negotiations for the four big firms who dominated Brockton Bay’s maritime shipping industry. In the final hours, Mr. Hedley of Hedley and Sons had quipped, “A dental plan is a luxury we can’t afford, Mr. Hebert.”



Hence the sign. It was ironic because without a dental plan we literally could not afford teeth. Was that a correct use of the word ‘ironic’? I didn’t know what else to call it. It certainly wasn’t funny.



“Are you all packed and ready?” Mom asked. She stood by the door in her practical rubber boots and rain hat. She didn’t have a sign. She’d been working double shifts down at the munitions plant for the last two weeks and hadn’t had time.



“All set,” I said as I squeezed my feet into my own rubber boots.



“Do you have your umbrella?”



“Yes, Mom.” I was going to need it, too. It had been raining cats and dogs all week and showed no signs of stopping. It was a good thing I’d learned my lesson about cardboard signs.



“Hat?”



“Yes,” I said, slightly more exasperated.



“Lunch?”



“I already said I’m all set!”



“Okay, I hear you, just making sure,” she said. “You know it’s a long way home if you forget anything.”



I glanced at the clock. “It’s a quarter past eight. We were supposed to leave five minutes ago. We’re gonna be late!” The clock didn’t mention it and neither did I, but it was the morning of February 6, 2011.



Mom laughed. “We aren’t going to miss the strike, Taylor.”



I glowered, because that was so obviously not my point. I’d been to a dozen picket lines and protests in as many years, going all the way back to those embarrassing photos Mom kept showing people of me marching between my parents in the General Strike of 1999 at the tender young age of 3. If there was one thing I’d learned from that experience (beyond how to make a heck of a sign) it was that activism was a marathon, not a sprint. Keeping turnouts and spirits high through the fifth week or the tenth was infinitely more important than what happened in the first day.



Nonetheless, I protested, “All the big corporate honchos are going to be there for the official commencement at nine. This is our big chance to show them that even in the morning, in the rain, on a Sunday, we still have ten times more spirit than them. But not if we’re late!”



Mom was looking through her purse, showing no signs of being on her way out the door, even though it was now sixteen minutes after eight.



I tapped my foot impatiently until the clock hit seventeen minutes after, at which point Mom took off her boots and went in search of something that she had apparently forgotten.



“I’m going to go!” I shouted into the house.



There was no response, and no sign of Mom finishing her last-minute preparations even though it was seven minutes past the time we’d distinctly set as when we ought to leave the house.



“I’m opening the door now!” I shouted.



“Okay, I’ll see you at the picket line,” Mom shouted back.



Did she think I was bluffing? Well, I was made of sterner stuff than that. When I said I’d be in a certain place at a certain time, I followed through. I took activism extremely seriously. It was in my blood. I could trace my lineage all the way back to Jacques Hébert, who’d been executed by Maximilian Robespierre for the crime of being too radical even for Revolutionary France at the height of the Terror.



I marched out the door with my umbrella in my right hand and my sign slung over my left shoulder.



It wasn’t just raining cats and dogs, it was raining tigers and timberwolves. I regretted for a moment that we couldn’t take the car, but the price of gas was through the roof and we were on living on Mom’s income until the strike ended – Dad was adamant that the Union leadership couldn’t draw paychecks while everyone else wasn’t.



That we couldn’t take the bus was a different contention. The buses were only running vital routes until the gas shortage ended, and as soon as the strike was declared all the buses to the Docks were abruptly deemed unnecessary. Dad called it suppression, and it kind of was, but it was also a fair point.



The last alternative I had ruled out on my own. I could’ve used my powers and made a forty minute trip into a four second one. I’d originally expected not to be able to do that because I was walking with Mom and obviously couldn’t reveal my secret identity in front of her, but since I was alone that was suddenly not an issue. Still, I decided against it. I would be making this trip every day until the strike ended; in the morning on weekends, and in the afternoons after school on weekdays. If I got into the habit of cutting trips short, I risked accidentally revealing myself. No matter how careful I was, one-in-a-million chances added up.



And anyway, I liked to walk. It got my blood pumping. I also liked the rain, although the present downpour was a bit much for me. It was freezing cold February rain that pounded off my umbrella like a drum. My raincoat was waterproof, but the narrow gap between the bottom of my jacket and the tops of my boots got soaked almost instantly, and from there it was a slow trickle down to systematically soak my socks.



The Lord’s Port was at the extreme north end of Brockton Bay, in the mouth of the Piscataqua river. It bristled with cranes, piers, and warehouses. Every day six vessels visited Brockton Bay – that was just big cargo ships, not the feeders that followed them like servants after a king. Each one carried hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo, either flowing in to go to the trainyard and ultimately the towns and cities to the west of Brockton Bay – or else flowing in from the west, through the trainyard, and onto the ships to faraway places. The Lord’s Port was the beating heart of Brockton Bay’s maritime shipping industry.



I walked fast and arrived at ten minutes to nine, plenty of time to spare. I supposed I didn’t need to be quite so impatient with Mom after all. On the other hand, since I’d come alone, I didn’t need to find an excuse to ditch my adult supervision and spread my wings. There was something terminally lame about hanging out with my parents. Some primal rebellious instinct made me irrationally pleased with myself to be independent and separate, alone in the crowd.



Despite everything lined up against it, the turnout was pretty spectacular. I couldn’t begin to guess at how many people there were, but it was enough to form a semicircle across the wharf ten men deep, facing out to sea with angry eyes. All around, partial barricades had been set up the night before to prevent cars, especially the cops’ heavy and difficult-to-maneuver armoured cars, from navigating the streets, a preemptive measure against the kind of strikebreaking tactics the city had used on us last time, two years back.



The bosses had given us plenty of motivation. The strike had three demands: First, a reversal of the pay cut they’d foisted on us in the last renegotiation, which was still the subject of angry dinner conversation to this very day. Second, a dental plan. For ten years we’d been fighting for a dental plan, but this time we’d make them cave. Third, paid sick leave.



All we wanted was what we were owed.



In the middle of our angry semicircle was the Pier of St. James (I had no earthly idea why it was called that). A metre above street level, it made a convenient stage, and I saw that the union spokespeople were lined up on one side. I recognized Dad at the far end and waved, but he didn’t see me. Opposite them were the heads of the big firms. At the far end were Mr. Hedley and his two sons Mr. Hedley and Mr. Hedly of Hedley and Sons. On their left were Mr. Barnaby and Mr. Webb of Barnaby-Webb. Past them was Mr. Cooper of CSPD – his three business partners weren’t present. Finally, there was a man I didn’t recognize, who by process of elimination had to work for Associated Maritime. All of them had one thing in common: They were the enemy.



As I looked out, I heard a peculiar sound. It was like an approaching car, but it never passed. If you slowed down the sound of an approaching car so that you could hear it coming for ten or fifteen before it passed, it would be closer. It wasn’t loud, but it cut through the noise of the crowd with perfect ease. I turned my head back, then left, then right, trying to figure out where the sound was coming from. Suddenly, I realized: It wasn’t a sound at all. It was my superpower.



I had superpowers, of course. It had happened at the start of January in a lamentable incident I was resolved not to think or speak of ever again. In any case, mine were a bit peculiar. I had one which was extremely visible, dramatic, and attention-catching: I could create portals. Each was a single, immobile, freestanding two-dimensional object that occupied two planes of equal size at different locations. Anything passing through one pane came out the other.



At the same time, I had a second, invisible power, linked to the first, which served a necessary function that wouldn’t have occurred to me if the first had been described to me. A typical human has no way to pick a particular area of space out of thin air in which to create a portal. Unknowingly, all my life I’d never given those niggling details much thought; I assumed superpowers just took care of that kind of thing on their own. And, in a way, mine did.



My secondary power was like a cross between echolocation and seismometry. Every time my heart beat, my power sent out an invisible pulse in a spherical wave all around me. When the wave met an object, a fraction of the pulse determined by the density bounced off it and returned to me, while the remainder continued through. These pulses, when they returned to me, were like a sound only I could hear, but much more precise. I could only speculate, but I assumed that my power felt to me like echolocation felt to a bat. The philosophical advantage this gave me over Thomas Nagel was only one of my incredible advantages. The pulse was the targeting mechanism for my portals; I could only make a portal in places I could distinctly sense with my secondary power.



It made me wonder if other capes had invisible powers that supported their flashier, primary ones. It hadn’t escaped my notice that it would give me an advantage to keep my second power a complete secret.



Through careful experimentation, I had determined some of this power’s behaviour. If I stood in my bedroom, one quarter of the pulse bounced off the walls and returned to me, and made the walls seem, for lack of a better metaphor, brightly-lit. The pulse that reached hall beyond was dimmer by a quarter, as if the wall between me and it cast a shadow. Three quarters of the three quarters that remained passed through the far wall into the bathroom, of which one-quarter bounced off and returned to me. Of that one quarter of three quarters of three quarters, only three-quarters passed back through my bedroom wall to reach me, so the far wall of the hall was only 14% as “bright” as the wall of my bedroom. While I stood in my bedroom, I could just about sense the inside of the bathroom well enough to make a portal, but that was as far as I could go. On the other hand, a sheet of metal blocked almost the entire pulse and prevented me from sensing or making portals on the other side. At the opposite end of the spectrum, particles of air hardly blocked the pulse at all. In open air, my range was about a kilometre.



Finally, and most curiously of all, living beings absorbed the pulse entirely, neither reflecting it nor letting it pass through. They were a complete blackout to me. They and anything behind them were utterly undetectable, yet simultaneously extremely conspicuous. I could always tell when there were people around because of the holes they poked in my echolocation-sense of the world around me.



Returning to the present, I was surrounded by people on all sides. They blocked my echolocation in every direction except directly above and directly below. The sense, which I had incorrectly interpreted as a sound, was coming from directly above. I clued in to what I was feeling like the last piece going into a jigsaw puzzle. The rain was falling sideways.



Not all of it, but far above, ten meters above my head, too far to be seen in the rain, there was a distinct yet intangible plane, like a forcefield. Almost exactly half of the raindrops that touched the plane abruptly changed direction and flew perfectly horizontally out to sea. The other half were unaffected, and fell on our umbrellas. It wasn’t the wind; wind couldn’t be so discriminating. Half, seemingly chosen at random, were falling straight down, the other half out to sea.



I pushed my way to the front of the crowd to get a clear extrasensory view. I followed the sound of the raindrops with my mind, but I couldn’t sense far enough to tell where they were going. On a clear day I could sense a kilometre out, but it wasn’t a clear day. I could do two hundred metres, no more.



Well, I had a trick up my sleeve.



I made a portal the size of a postage stamp. One end was in my cupped palm, the other as far out to sea as I could go, one hundred ninety-two meters (it was a peculiar side-effect of my power that I could judge distances exactly). With the next beat of my heart, the pulse found the portal in my hand and passed through. The second portal at the far end of my range felt as close as the palm of my hand, because for the purposes of my power it was. The second pulse began at one-hundred-ninety-two meters and travelled one-hundred-eighty-one of its own, for a total distance of three-hundred-seventy-three metres. I made a second portal at that distance, also the size of a postage stamp, leading to my other hand.



Now I dismissed the first portal, and all I had was one at three-hundred-seventy-three. At that range, the raindrops had all fused together into a continuous stream. Still, they were heading further out to sea. The sheer volume of it gave me pause. I had a worrisome suspicion.



I made portals in every direction, nine of them in a 3-by-3 grid, each two hundred meters apart, covering six hundred square meters. Across that entire range, something was taking half of the raindrops that fell and pulling them somewhere out at sea. I broke out into a cold sweat. I’d never heard of a cape who could do hydrokinesis on such a scale. It smacked of something much worse.



I dismissed my grid and pushed my range out further. Five hundred meters. Seven hundred. A kilometre. Out that far, the water swirled into a vast spiral. Suddenly, the portal in my left hand winked out. That happened sometimes, when they were hit with something at a bad angle, in a way that disrupted the boundary. I tried to reform it, but before I could, the one in my right winked out as well.



I started over, extended my range again. Five hundred meters. I sensed a mass of water rushing towards me before my portal winked out. A splash of pressurized water no bigger than an ice cube came through before the portal closed and hit my hand hard enough to sting. At four hundred meters, the portal behind winked out an instant after.



And suddenly I could see it. Out at sea, barely visible through the rain, a black, thunderous stormcloud racing towards us with a vengeance.



It had been fifteen seconds since I first sensed the strange rain. How fast was it moving? Was it a solid thing, racing at supersonic speeds, disrupting my portals with its bulk and the waves that preceded it? Or maybe the storm had broken my portals, in which case it might not be moving fast at all, but that was no reason not to panic. Either I’d been very unlucky, or the storm was uncommonly violent, or, worst of all, it was intelligent and disrupting me on purpose – but that was baseless speculation. For all I knew, it was just a hurricane.



Sixteen seconds. I knew that I should have shouted a warning already, but I was paralyzed. I hadn’t had time to think.



Distantly, I realized that the strike was about to be officially commenced. I knew the plan was for a union spokesperson to dramatically rip up the contract and throw it into the sea, but they were all staring out into the ocean.



“What’s that?” someone shouted, and pointed off at the cloud. It was definitely getting closer. It was definitely moving fast.



My paralysis was broken. “Get away from the water!” I yelled, as loud as I could. “It’s coming right for us! Get away from the water!”



I’d intended an orderly retreat, but all I did was confuse people. A gaggle pushed past me and went to the wharf, trying to get a closer look. Some people gave me strange looks. No one seemed to recognize the danger. It was still so far away. They couldn’t tell how fast it was coming for us. I could hardly see it through the rain.



I forced my way back through the crowd and bolted into an empty street. Brockton Bay had used to be a much bigger city than it was now, and the depopulation had been selective. Whole neighbourhoods of undesirable not-quite waterfront property on the north side of the city had been abandoned as people concentrated into the south near the downtown.



I ducked into a warehouse. My powers informed me that there was no one around. Quickly, I daisy-chained portals back to my house, which, as I had noted that morning, made a forty-minute walk into a four-second walk. I went straight to the basement and uncovered the old coal chute. There, in an old suitcase, I kept my costume.



My costume was extremely unfinished and mostly consisted of odds and ends. I had no resources to speak of, but my powers put every rummage sale and thrift store on the planet at my disposal. I had a bright red coat and almost-matching bright red hat, and a black domino mask on an elastic band, and – other things I didn’t have time for. I’d tried to make something that looked cool, but right now I just needed to conceal my identity and draw enough attention to make people listen to me. I didn’t know how much time I had. I put on the mask, hat, and coat.



Instead of going straight back to the wharf, I came out of the roof of the warehouse. From there, I could see out over the bay. The thing was getting closer. I saw a swirling vortex of water, black clouds that roared with lightning, crashing waves and dense mist that obscured its body from sight.



I descended to street level with a door-sized portal right in front of the pier. All attention instantly focused on me. “Get away from the water!” I shouted as loud as I could. “Back! Back!” The wind stole my voice. The noise of the storm was twice as loud as it had been a minute ago. I distinctly noticed that the rain wasn’t falling sideways anymore.



I felt someone come up beside me, and turned. It was, of all people, Mr. Hedley. “What’s going on?” he asked, shouting over the wind. I could barely hear him.



“Everyone here is in danger! We need to get everyone away from the water!”



Mr. Hedley ran back to the pier and shouted at the union spokespeople and the other bigwigs. They followed him back. I was extremely conscious of Dad standing less than two meters away, and turned my face away so he wouldn’t recognize me. He wasn’t looking at me anyway. He was looking at Mr. Hedley, who was gesturing wildly. After a shouted disagreement that I couldn’t make out at all, Mr. Hedley snatched a megaphone from a man I recognized as the Treasurer for the Dockworkers’ Union.



A megaphone. Thank goodness. The needs of labour organization and the needs of evacuation, joined in perfect union.



“Tell them!” Mr. Hedley shouted, pointing out at the crowd. “They won’t listen to me. Tell them!”



I didn’t hesitate. I shouted straight into the megaphone, “Get away from the water! There’s an Endbringer headed straight for us! Run! Run!”



In the following moments, I realized that I could have handled the situation much better.



The crowd went into an immediate panic. People ran in every direction, pushing and shoving in their rush to escape. I saw someone fall and could only hope he wasn’t trampled.



Then they reached the barricades. Each one covered nine-tenths of the wide streets, only allowing pedestrian traffic and then only in small numbers. People pushed and fought to get through. I realized too late that I could have opened a portal on either side of each barricade to bypass them, but with the crowd pushed right up against the walls there was no way for me to get through – and, as living beings, they blocked my powers completely.



Quickly, I opened a portal leading from the rear of the crowd, closest to the water, to the furthest into the city I could reach, three blocks down inland. I made it twenty feet wide and ten tall, then raised the megaphone again. “Please proceed through the portal in an orderly-”



I didn’t get to finish. Someone ran straight into the edge of the portal in the fight to get through, and it popped like a soap bubble.



A fortunate, or maybe unfortunate, weakness of my portals was what happened when people touched the boundaries. In theory, a portal was a wedge with an infinitely thin cutting edge. Put your finger through it the wrong way and you lose the finger. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, they didn’t work that way. If a solid object passed through the edge of the portal, the portal lost its shape instantly and tried to close. If there was something in the way, it would stick to the edges of that thing until the way was clear. Once it was clear, the portal collapsed and that was that. They were harmless.



Harmless, but fragile. I made another one, and this time half a dozen people got halfway through before someone broke it again. The boundary lost its shape, contracted like an elastic band and stuck to the half-dozen people who were halfway through. They panicked. Half fell on the far side, half on the near side, all scrambling to get free. As soon as they were all clear, it contracted into nothing and vanished. I saw one of the ones who had fallen struggle to get up in the press. Another had her hand stepped on.



Suddenly, through the rain, I felt the creature enter my range. It was moving at a superhuman speed, at least two hundred kilometres an hour. I could see it now. Above the vortex, it had the torso of a naked woman, three meters tall but dwarfed by the mass of water below. He body was pale green and covered with ridges like coral.



It reached the wharf and kept going, not towards us but up the river. A tentacle with the same texture as the torso emerged from the water, then two, then four. It grabbed a crane with one and ripped it out of its housing in the same gesture, dropping it onto the pier where the union reps had been standing a minute before.



It didn’t so much as glance, but apparently the destruction wasn’t to its satisfaction, because in the next instant another tentacle wrapped around the pier and ripped it clear off the wharf, leaving only the concrete pillars it had rested on. The pier, a ten-metre long wooden platform, twisted and curled without its support. With a casual flick of its tentacle, the monster threw the pier into the ocean.



Just like that, the monster passed. A wave rose in its wake and crashed over us, reaching all the way to wet the barricades, but when it passed everyone was fine.



So where was the monster going?



In one step, I followed it a hundred meters upriver, then got ahead of it a hundred more. It showed no signs of slowing down. Two more jumps and my heart jumped into my throat. The bridge. The Sarah Mildred Long Bridge crossed the Piscataqua and connected Brockton Bay, New Hampshire to Kittery, Maine. The monster was heading right for it.



I made another jump right next to the Brockton Bay side of the bridge. I could use a portal to redirect traffic to keep anyone from getting on the bridge, but where could I send it? I realized in the same moment that I didn’t have time to think of an answer. The monster was moving too fast.



Before the next car could get into danger, I made portals across both lanes of traffic going onto the bridge, leading into the first parking lot I found. A red station wagon headed for the bridge slammed on the breaks rather than go through the portal and got rear-ended by the car behind it, which in turn got rear-ended by the car behind. The third car blocked an intersection, but I didn’t have time to look. I raced across to the other side and redirected both lanes going onto the bridge from that side. I couldn’t find a parking lot on that side, so I picked a street that wasn’t as busy as the others and sent the portal there. A black pickup truck went straight through, panicked, swerved, and crashed through the front window of a clothing store, sending mangled yet stylish mannequins flying in every direction.



There was only one silver minivan left on the bridge when the monster plowed through it like a battering ram. Two of the towers supporting the bridge fell and crashed into two others like dominoes. The severed middle fell into the river, slanting the road steeply. The minivan lost speed trying to climb the slope. Just when I thought it would make it, the wave that followed the monster’s wake climbed the bridge and smashed into the minivan. It swerved, over-corrected, and hit the railing of the bridge. The driver regained control, but the slope pitched further with every second. Slowly, the minivan started to slide down the bridge into the river.



I made a portal right behind it, but the minivan swerved again and broke the boundary. I tried again, with a portal right behind it. It went through, and its back bumper crashed into the street next to me. But the bridge was at such an odd angle to the street, it didn’t roll through like I expected. It flipped back, pivoting on the back bumper, and fell into the top boundary of the portal. Just as the bridge fell away entirely, the minivan backflipped. The front, still on the bridge, pushed the top boundary of the portal down and down, and then the front was suddenly underneath the rest, and pulled the rest along, back through the portal, into freefall towards the water below. I made one more portal, just above the surface of the water, and the minivan fell through and landed upside-down in the middle of the street not three meters away from me.



A car I didn’t see while I was watching the minivan came down the street at fifty kilometres per hour, swerved to avoid the minivan, swerved again to avoid me, spun out, and crashed sideways into the minivan at low speed.



An instant later, the monster doubled back across the ruins of the bridge, pulverizing anything unlucky enough to be in the water. Then it was racing back out to sea, back the way it came.



When I was sure the monster was gone, I ran to the minivan. The driver was struggling to get the crushed door open; in the back, three children were screaming. At least they were still alive and sensate enough to scream.



I looked back out at sea. I knew exactly what that monster was. A newborn Endbringer. One of Charybdis’ spawn, there was no doubt about it. I supposed we were due for one.



All my elaborate plans for my debut were out the window, and what I’d got instead was a fiasco, but that was the least of my worries.



The worst Endbringers were the ones we couldn’t catch and kill. The longer it lived, the stronger it would become. This one was faster than a car on the freeway, and on its first appearance. How many superheroes could catch up with a thing like that?



Off the top of my head, the only one who came to mind was me.