Taylor Hebert is a 15-year-old parahuman who has developed the power to sense and control insects and other small invertebrates following a
traumatic event at the hands of bullies. She lives in the
fictional city of Brockton Bay, a hotspot of parahuman activity, and seeks to become a
superhero. On her first night out in costume, she defeats a superpowered gang leader and is subsequently mistaken for a villain by a team of teenage parahuman thieves known as the Undersiders, who work jobs for a mysterious benefactor. Taylor joins the team, hoping to learn the identity of their boss before turning them in to the authorities. However, Taylor grows increasingly close to the Undersiders, whilst having repeatedly poor run-ins with the Parahuman Response Team (PRT), the
United States of America's parahuman law enforcement agency, and the superheroes of the PRT's sister organization, the Protectorate. She ultimately finds herself unable to betray the Undersiders and becomes fully committed to them, adopting the moniker "Skitter" and abandoning her dream of becoming a superhero. After a job, Taylor learns that the Undersiders have unwittingly assisted their patron, the gang lord known as Coil, in the kidnapping of Dinah, a girl with powerful
precognitive powers, and is wracked with guilt over her involvement. In part due to violence initiated by the defeat of various gangs by the Undersiders, Brockton Bay experiences a period of instability. This culminates in an attack by Leviathan, one of three powerful monsters collectively called the Endbringers, which devastates the city. In the aftermath, Coil directs the Undersiders and a group of contracted villains, the Travelers, in seizing territory and they begin to operate as makeshift
warlords in the ruined city. Privately, Taylor and the Undersiders plot to depose Coil if they cannot secure Dinah's release. The Travelers struggle to find a cure for their fifth teammate, Noelle, whose condition is undisclosed and is living in a highly secure vault in Coil’s base. When Jack Slash, the theatrical leader of a notorious gang of parahuman serial killers known as the Slaughterhouse Nine, invades Brockton Bay, Dinah predicts he will bring about the end of the world in two years if not stopped. The city weathers the incursion, but its parahumans fail to kill either Jack or his prized protégé Bonesaw, a young girl kidnapped and moulded by the gang of serial killers. In the process of escaping the city, Jack learns of Dinah's prophecy and decides to fulfill it and end the world. Coil, valuing Dinah's precognitive abilities too highly to consider her release, attempts to assassinate Taylor when she pushes the issue. She survives and the Undersiders kill Coil in retaliation. However, as a final act of vengeance, Coil unleashes Noelle (now called “Echidna”), who is revealed to be a monstrous parahuman with power and lethality on par with the Endbringers. The ensuing battle between Echidna and the desperate alliance comprising the Undersiders and the heroes devastates the already-ruined city even further, and lack of cohesion between the Undersiders and the heroes (such as the heroes ignoring the Undersiders' warnings that Echidna can clone parahumans) worsens the conflict as well. After Echidna is defeated, Dinah is later returned to her remaining family, and the Undersiders seize control of the remnants of Coil's criminal empire, fully entrenching themselves as the shadowy rulers of Brockton Bay, though it remains ostensibly governed by the United States. Together, Taylor and the Undersiders carefully balance staving off attempts by regional criminal organizations to establish footholds in their city with scuffles against the legal authority of the city and assisting the remaining civilian population. Tensions with the authorities later come to a head when Protectorate heroes arrive at a school Taylor is visiting in an attempt to arrest her, publicly revealing her identity as Skitter in ensuing standoff. Taylor is even further dismayed when she is informed by the heroes that Dinah had turned on her and was voluntarily aiding them in their operation to capture her. Despite the overwhelming advantage that Dinah's abilities had given the heroes, Taylor leverages her reputation and the Protectorate's dwindling popularity to convince almost a hundred students to help her escape, and flees to the safety of her territory. The Undersiders then continue with their operations in Brockton Bay, later carrying out an attack against the PRT local headquarters in retaliation for outing Skitter and as a show of force to deter rival gangs from action. Taylor later learns from Dinah that the odds of averting the end of the world would increase if she is taken by the authorities. In response, Taylor devises a daring plan to conditionally surrender to the PRT and Protectorate, in the hopes of gaining a position to force meaningful change in the declining organizations before Dinah's deadline, as well as sparing the rest of the Undersiders from continued persecution by the authorities. The plan nearly fails when Alexandria, one of the world's most powerful heroes and secretly the PRT's Chief Director, attempts to force Taylor into accepting less-than-favorable demands by executing Undersiders one by one until she submits, prompting Taylor to kill her and others in a blind rage. Taylor later tries to escape in the aftermath of her attack, but is pursued by Protectorate heroes and learns from them that Alexandria had tricked her into believing that she was killing her friends. Reluctantly, Taylor agrees to surrender when the heroes accept most of her terms. Alexandria is publicly framed as a villain whose death at Skitter's hand had been necessary, and Taylor becomes a new probationary superhero "Weaver." After being
tried and convicted as an adult, Taylor leaves Brockton Bay for the city of
Chicago and is assigned to the local Wards, a team of teenage superheroes attached as a youth group to the Chicago Protectorate. Unsurprisingly, Weaver chafes under the restrictions imposed by her new superiors, with the Protectorate heroes and PRT officials naturally reticent and distrustful towards her (with some among the latter group even making veiled efforts to sabotage her), and with Weaver feeling less productive in comparison to when she was a supervillain. She also finds herself missing the Undersiders dearly, but is prohibited from having any contact with them due to the conditions of her probation, and fights the urge to return home due to the importance placed on adhering Dinah's predictions. Not long into Weaver's trial period with the Chicago Wards, Behemoth, another of the three Endbringers, surfaces and begins attacking New Delhi, India. The battle turns favorably for the capes and miraculously concludes in Behemoth's death. Weaver is instrumental in many capes surviving the conflict and Behemoth's demise, earning her popular renown and recognition as a genuine superhero, as well as cementing her place in the Wards. Over the next two years, Taylor continues serving out her sentence with the Chicago Wards. When Dinah's deadline passes, Jack Slash resurfaces with an army of cloned members (and former members) of the Slaughterhouse Nine, forcing Weaver and her allies to go to war against Jack to prevent the apocalypse. Though they manage to hold off Jack and his army, Jack manages to reach Scion, the most powerful superhero of all, and convinces him to begin an apocalyptic,
interdimensional rampage that would become known as "Gold Morning" - the prophesied end of the world. Billions are killed across the multiverse over the course of Gold Morning, with Scion overpowering the parahuman defenders with great ease. It is revealed that Scion is the avatar of an unfathomably powerful alien entity referred to as The Warrior, responsible for seeding the planet with superpowers in the first place, as part of his species' reproductive cycle; a cycle that would end in the destruction of the planet and all its alternate-dimension counterparts. One of the most powerful capes, Eidolon, is revealed to have unintentionally created the Endbringers before he is killed. The Undersiders convince the Endbringers to aid in the battle against Scion. Taylor, in a desperate bid to defeat Scion, has her power surgically altered to control humans as well as insects, becoming “Khepri.” The plan succeeds, with Khepri gaining complete mental domination over the trans-dimensional array of parahuman defenders, coordinating the parahumans with great acuity and overwhelming the alien entity. Gold Morning ends with humanity victorious, but the surgery causes Taylor's power to consume her mind and render her insane, prompting her to flee from her allies and into the expanse of the multiverse before being accosted by Contessa, another powerful precognitive parahuman. Contessa is shown to be the final agent and architect of the interdimensional conspiracy known as Cauldron, suggested to be responsible for many of the previous events of the story with the aim of combating Scion. Contessa then shoots the ailing Taylor twice in the head, seemingly euthanizing the younger woman and neutralizing whatever threat Khepri would later pose. In a series of epilogues, the short-term fate of the remaining Undersiders and surviving heroes following Gold Morning is addressed. Unbeknownst to all her remaining friends and former allies, Taylor survived and is living in exile alongside her father on Earth
Aleph, an alternate dimension that had been sealed off from the rest of the multiverse upon Scion's defeat. Contessa's gunshots appears to have restored Taylor's sanity, but seemingly removed her powers as well. With her short and frenetic life as a cape having ended, Taylor intends to settle into a quiet existence with the anonymity afforded to her on Earth Aleph, and later encounters and befriends an alternate version of her late mother. ==Themes==