Prodigal Daughter Pt 5 (Patreon)

Part Five: Brain Donor

[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

Imagine, if you will, the classic scene in the movie where the rough and ready hero of the piece is facing off against a bunch of street trash. Doesn’t matter which movie it is. We’ve all seen one like it. The scene is such a timeless one that they replicated it in every movie they could, for a while there. They’re even doing it with cape movies, now.
The scene goes like this: the hero, alone and looking outmatched and overwhelmed. There’s usually a day’s worth of artistic stubble on his face. Facing him: the aggressor, huge, intimidating, probably tattooed. They face each other, sizing one another up. This gives the audience time to start feeling fear for the hero.
And then the bad guy comes in with a rush. He’s surely going to destroy the hero. The fight will be over before it’s begun. The hero barely has time to move before his foe is on top of him. There’s a flurry of blows, then the hero steps aside and the aggressor falls flat on his face.
The gang laughs at first, because everyone loves a good pratfall, and surely their guy’ll be up in a moment, to hand the hero a well-deserved beating. And then the laughter becomes strained, as the big guy doesn’t move. Finally, as eyes travel from the fallen foe to the hero standing over him, the laughter dies away altogether, and the gang begins to feel worry for the first time.
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That was the look I saw in Riley’s eyes, right about then. She literally could not believe what she was seeing. It wasn’t hard to understand why. The Slaugherhouse Nine had been around for decades, always with Jack Slash at the helm. No matter what the forces of law and order—and the forces of crime and chaos, for that matter—had thrown at him, he’d always ducked and dodged it, bounced to his feet, and annihilated his adversaries. To them, he must’ve seemed indestructible, unstoppable, immutable. A force of nature. Now he lay on his back, eight inches of iron bar wedged into his skull.
I saw one foot twitch, which was a pretty basic sign of life, but it was enough. Pointing at the foot, I snapped my fingers. This was fortunately enough to bring Riley out of whatever fugue she’d fallen into.
“What have you done, Taylor?” she demanded. “What were you—”
I snapped my fingers and pointed, again. With Riley’s surgical tools down my throat and my jawbone dislocated, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk; I physically wasn’t capable of it.
What was I thinking? I rhetorically completed her question. I was thinking I didn’t want to find out if he can still hack me up with a machete. Not that I’d wanted him to die. Okay, he’d been acting like a total tool and yeah, Jack Slash would make a pretty boss first kill, but my own father? That would’ve made things kind of weird.
“Oh, crapola!” she gasped, seeing the twitch in his foot at last. “He’s still alive! Siberian, make him invincible, then pull out the bar!” She jumped off the porch, leaving me with her surgical tools stuck down my throat. Fortunately, she hadn’t started cutting on me yet. Small mercies.
I wanted to be able to talk, and I was starting to get a case of dry-throat, so I gingerly tugged at the gadgets. One didn’t want to move, so I pulled the other one out, which ended up being a combo periscope, scalpel and flashlight. Its friend still refused to leave where it was until I pressed a lever by accident, and it collapsed into itself. In hindsight, that was what she’d been using to dilate my throat.
With those out of the way, I pressed both hands to my jaw and tried to remember how Riley had coached me in how to dislocate it. It took a little work and a lot of pressure, but it suddenly popped back into place with a click that nearly deafened me. “Ugh,” I said. “Ah.”
Looking around, I saw the other members of the Nine standing around, watching Riley as she worked on Jack. On their faces—well, on the faces that were visible and could actually show normal human emotions—I saw a mirror of what Riley had shown when Jack first went down, plus a smidge of something else. This wasn’t surprise, or even anger. These guys looked lost.
“Hey, kid.” That was Crawler, his multiple mouths making any observation into a bizarre harmony with himself. “You do this?”
“I didn’t mean to.” I didn’t say it defensively. Defensiveness would’ve required a consciousness of guilt. I’d never felt guilty in my life, and I wasn’t about to start. “He came at me with a machete, and I threw the bar at him. It was an accident.”
“Well, shit.” That was Burnscar, her voice as devoid of emotion as mine. We hadn’t bonded over our shared lack of giving-a-fuck because we couldn’t give a fuck. “What the fuck are we going to do now?”
“If you will all be quiet,” Riley said, her voice tense with concentration, “I might just be able to save his life.” She reached out and took something from her surgical case. “Bring me a brain. I need a brain to take matter from. I need to patch the gaps.”
“How about hers?” called out Hatchet Face. I looked up at him, just knowing who he was referring to. Sure enough, he was pointing at me. “She did the damage, she can pony up the brainmeats to fix it.”
“Not fucking likely,” I retorted. “Jack was stupid enough to start shit, he deserved what he got.” I scanned their reactions to what I was saying, and it wasn't promising. Hatchet Face and Shatterbird were openly aggressive, while Mannequin and Crawler seemed to be standing back and watching how things fell out. The Siberian glanced from me to Riley and back again, as if silently asking her what to do.
Fuck it. There was nothing for it but to see what the blue bubble did. I locked the white bubble on to it and pushed it out to cover myself. Maybe it was a force field or something.
“Well, you are the most convenient,” Riley said. I had no time at all to react before I was both flat on my back and face to face with the Siberian. Her knee pressed into my chest, and her immovable grip held my arms to the boards of the porch. There was no emotion on her face at all, which I was cool with. What I was less cool with was the fact that she'd gone straight through my blue bubble without slowing down. There hadn't even been a humorous 'pop'.
Not a force field, then.
“Relax,” Riley said, getting up and coming toward me. In one hand she held a small electrical device with a tiny, sharp-looking circular saw-blade. In the other, she had something that looked uncomfortably like an ice-cream scoop. “We’ll be done in a moment, and I won’t take anything important.” She pressed a button on the device, and the little blade spun up with a high-pitched whee.
“Brute, remember?” I said, thumping my skull against the wooden boards. Trying to headbutt the Siberian probably wasn’t going to work. “That thing won’t even make a dent.”
“True,” she said, tilting her head. Turning off the cutter, she stowed it in a pocket of her apron. “It’s a good thing I’ve got someone here who can cut through anything then, isn’t it?”
“Huh. Point.” I still wasn’t a fan of donating any bits of my brain to Jack Slash, so I pushed out my blue bubble some more, in the hope that it would hold Riley back. She stepped right through, so there went that idea. I was starting to run low. The Siberian let go my right arm and held up her sharp pinky nail for me to see. I had no doubt that if I didn’t do something really smart in the next few seconds, the unstoppable naked tiger-striped woman was going to commence unzipping the top of my skull like someone pulling the top off of a microwaved meal. Only with fewer sludgy carrots involved.
Which meant the time for talking was nearly over; if my next gambit didn’t work, I was gonna have to push my grey field out to nullify the Siberian’s strength, then make a run for it. The only reason I hadn’t already done it already was because then I’d have the whole Nine after me, and keeping up either field was a little tiring. I knew for a fact that I’d run out of puff before Crawler did. It was time for the proverbial Hail Mary pass. “Just out of curiosity, do you really need human brains, or would any brain do?”
On the point of kneeling beside me, Riley stopped and looked at me with interest. Fortunately, the interest was directed at my words, not at the contents of my skull. “I guess not. Did you have a better idea?”
“Well, I was thinking, there’s plenty of squirrels and chipmunks in these woods.” I wasn’t good at emoting, but I did my best to sound as though this was the best idea in the world. “One of those would fill the gap, right? And you wouldn’t have to go digging through my brain. I’m kinda attached to it, you know? It’s where I do all my thinking.”
“Hm. That’s actually a good point.” She headed back toward Jack Slash. I was beginning to get an idea of what the blue bubble was about, so I started pushing it out as far as it would go. Leaning over, she looked into the cavity. “Yeah, I think a squirrel could just about supply enough brain matter for what I need.” She turned to look at the Siberian. “Do you think you could catch one for me?”
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Hatchet Face said scornfully, just before the blue bubble expanded far enough to encompass him and Shatterbird. “Squirrels?”
The weight on my chest vanished. Siberian ran along the length of the porch, bisected the rail at the end with her body, and vanished into the darkness. I heard rustling in the woods, and the crash of at least one falling tree.
Shatterbird looked more dubious than disbelieving. “Is that even possible? Will he start doing things like climbing trees and storing nuts for the winter?”
“Pfft, no.” Riley rolled her eyes. “Brains don’t work like that. He’s lost his eye, and the bar severely damaged the part of his brain that governs his sense of balance. If I wire that part of a squirrel’s brain in there, it’ll be able to take over, and his sense of balance will be better than ever. Apart from that, I can use other brain matter to patch some gaps. He’ll be better than ever in a week or so. Oh, his language centres were also damaged slightly, so he’ll be aphasic for a little bit, but I’m sure we’ll manage.”
I sat myself up and scooted my butt over so I was leaning back against the porch post. “So, are you gonna give him a new eye as well, or just slap a patch on it and call him One-Eyed Jack?”
“Hah!” The multi-toned bark of laughter came from Crawler. “I like that. We should do that one.”
It seemed I was out of danger for the moment. The blue bubble apparently made people more likely to listen to me and think about what I was saying. It wasn’t exactly Mastery—Hatchet Face didn’t look any friendlier toward me—but at least the others weren’t calling for Riley to dissect my brain any more.
I was fine with this, but it basically solidified my decision to go back to Brockton Bay. The Nine might joke around with me, but when it came down to a choice between me and my father, he’d win every time unless I got my blue bubble up in time. And I wasn’t at all sure about how well it would work on him. I had a sneaking suspicion that if someone really wanted to hurt me, it wouldn’t be enough to stop them from trying.
It occurred to me that I could simply kill him and take over the Nine—deliberately, I mean—and avoid the problem that way, but there were a couple of problems there as well. First, it would set a terrible precedent, and I couldn’t guarantee that Riley wouldn’t murder me in my sleep. Second, I really didn’t want to be a murderhobo (murdering people inside Brockton Bay was fine; that way, I’d know where I was sleeping every night). Third, I still felt that claiming my father as my first kill felt more than a little weird. I’d pass on that whole deal, kaythanksbye.
“I dunno yet.” Riley raised her head and looked around as more rustling heralded the Siberian’s return. The tiger-striped form bounded out of the darkness and landed precisely beside Jack’s prone form, going from high-speed movement to absolute stillness in an instant. I kind of wished I could pull off shit like that. Maybe I could; I could definitely practise. But I’d also keep my clothes on. The naked look just wasn’t me.
The squirrel squeaked and struggled in her implacable grip, right up until she snapped its neck with a tiny krak. With the same pinky nail that she would’ve used to open my skull, she popped the top off the squirrel’s head and offered it gravely to Riley.
I watched with interest as the bio-Tinker accepted the tiny corpse and dug the brain out of its bony cradle. She moved with quick, sure movements, slicing the bloodstained organ apart and implanting it piece by piece into the hole inside Jack’s head. It took far less time than I would’ve thought; only minutes later, so it seemed, she was packing cotton wool into the eyesocket itself.
“So that’s it?” I asked. “He’s fixed?” Even though I knew what she could do, it hardly seemed credible. And with a squirrel’s brain, no less.
“Not exactly fixed,” she said primly, tossing the remains of the squirrel over her shoulder. Crawler snapped it out of the air and ate it while Riley wiped her hands off on her apron. “But he’ll get better. Couple of days, he’ll be able to walk. In a week or two, he’ll be talking again. Once we’re communicating properly, he’ll let me know what he wants done about his eye.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. “Mind you, he’ll still probably be pissed at me that I nailed him with that bar.” He’d almost certainly be more pissed if it ever got out that Riley had fixed his brain with bits of squirrel, but that wasn’t really something I was concerned about.
“Yeah, true.” She smirked as she wrapped a bandage around his head. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d been thinking about the squirrel thing, too. “We’ll have him away from here by then, and you’ll be back in Brockton Bay.”
“Works for me.” I got up and headed over, and helped her tie off the bandage. At some point, I’d let the blue bubble contract back to its normal size, but the others weren’t renewing hostilities, which was fine with me. Crisis over, I figured. “So, hey. Still up to modifying my vocal cords?”
“Sure,” she said. “Sorry about the whole brain thing. Just seemed like a good idea at the time, you know?” As she spoke, she helped me lie down on the porch where I’d been before my father tried his sneaky shit. “So tell me. Did you aim for his eye, or was that just a lucky shot?”
“Pure luck from beginning to end,” I admitted as I let my head fall back. Holding up a finger, I wriggled around a little to get comfortable. “That’s better. Yeah, I just figured I’d make him duck or something. Never in a million years thought I’d actually get him like that.”
Riley laughed out loud. “Well, just between you and me? I’m not gonna tell him that. If he knew he got taken out by accident, it’d make him madder than if people found out that he’s got bits of squirrel brain in his head.”
I almost smiled at that. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”
“Cool. Now, can you dislocate your jaw again for me, like I showed you?”
Obediently, I wedged my thumbs in behind my jawbone and pushed. With a loud click, it popped out of place again.
“Okay,” said Riley. “Just hold still …”
I let myself relax as she pushed my jaw up out of the way, and slid the dilator down my throat again. Of all the things I’d thought I would be doing at this point in time, letting Bonesaw do surgery on my throat in the middle of the night didn’t even come close to making the list. All the same, it was kinda fun.
Still, as interesting as summer camp was proving to be, I couldn’t wait to get back to Brockton Bay.

Part 6