Twig

by wildbow

  I could see it dawn on the man. Comprehension settling in as he realized what he was dealing with.

  The snake seized the man’s feet, and began the very slow process of swallowing him.

  The snake charmer’s screams became frantic.

  “Lillian,” Gordon said, raising his voice to be heard over the screams.

  “I don’t want to see.”

  “Then shield your eyes. But your job is to keep us in one piece. Sly is hurt. Focus, and make sure he doesn’t die.”

  I felt the burning stop as Lillian tended to me. By the time she was done, the screams had stopped. The powder that dusted me made it hard to see, but that was fine. I was lifted to my feet.

  “I have to say, I’m very interested in what the fuck you were doing, faking that fall, setting yourself up to get hurt just now,” Gordon said. “You’ll have to tell me later, when you can talk again.”

  I managed a nod.

  “Off we go,” he said.

  I could hear the door open.

  Helen spoke for the first time in a while. Her voice was cute. “The Academy sends its regards, Mr. Snake Charmer.”

  . Next

  Taking Root 1.2

  Gordon had one arm, while Lillian was dividing her focus between supporting my other arm, keeping us moving and trying to examine me. It made for some uncomfortable stumbling and fumbling around, including some grazing touches of the burns, but I didn’t want her to stop doing any of it. I bit my tongue and inside cheek and endured it, blinking my eyes to try to generate the tears I needed to clear my vision. I was mostly effective.

  Jamie was waiting outside, his book under one arm, our shoes and boots in the other hand. All the laces had been tied together, making for only one knot that he had to hold to carry them all.

  The bundle dropped from his fingers and landed in a puddle. I spotted my left shoe, on its side in the puddle.

  “You’re hurt!” Jamie said.

  “You just got my shoe wet,” I said. I started to point, then winced as skin pulled where the enzymes had eaten away a spot on my arm. I held back a cry of pain. My arms had taken the brunt of it. There wasn’t a spot on the back of my arms where I could have laid a hand flat without touching something the enzymes had devoured. Some of the burns eclipsed my hands in size, and my arms weren’t large. My skin looked like a sock that was as much holes as it was fabric, and the flesh beneath was angry, a scalded red, with blood seeping out from crevices.

  More burns on a similar scale speckled my neck, one cheek, my side, my legs, and one foot. My clothes had absorbed the worst of it, elsewhere, only droplets reaching through.

  “I saw through the window, but I didn’t realize how bad it was,” Jamie said. “I thought you all had everything in hand, but then Sy fell, and I wasn’t sure if I should go for help—”

  “My shoe,” I commented, managing to point this time around. Fixating on one thing made it easier to handle the pain. The wounds themselves didn’t hurt, but the edges burned like fire.

  “Sy didn’t fall. He took a fall. Wording,” Gordon said.

  Jamie’s expression switched from confusion to an accusing glance. Thinking that Gordon might be wrong didn’t even cross his mind.

  “Why?” Jamie asked. “You got yourself badly hurt, you twit.”

  “Did I?” I tried to exaggerate the surprise in my voice, and all the pain-relief chemicals that my body was dosing me with made me sound even more exaggerated, my voice almost breaking. I added some sarcasm for good measure, “Oh. I hadn’t noticed. Thank you.”

  Lillian spoke up, “It’s nothing too dangerous. I don’t like some of these spots on your side, but I don’t think you’re going to die from it. Not soon.”

  “Not soon. That’s the best we can hope for,” I said.

  Jamie looked closer at one of the wounds. With Gordon still supporting me and both Jamie and Lillian fussing, there were a few more accidental touches of the burns. One of the touches didn’t actually hurt so much, but I played it up, flinching and letting a gasp out, if only to get them to stop.

  “Don’t let him distract you,” Gordon said. “He’s trying to dodge the ‘why’ question.”

  “I’m trying to hurry this along,” I said. “Priorities. Can I get medical attention? Pretty please?”

  “Still dodging the question,” Gordon observed.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “Wait. Jamie needs to pick up my shoe, which is getting soaked through, then we can go. Maybe since Jamie won’t stop touching me to make sure I’m okay, Jamie and Lillian can make sure I walk okay?”

  Gordon looked me over, suspicious. “You’ll tell us on the way, then?”

  “Assuming there’s something to tell,” I said. I felt the burning at my wrist get worse, and my little noise of pain wasn’t intentional. I reached for my wrist, and Lillian slapped my hand away like I was a kid going for the cookie jar. For her benefit, I said, “Hurts.”

  “Good,” she said, sounding like a cross between the bossy older sister and a schoolteacher. “Maybe you won’t do that again.”

  She wiped at my arm, clearing away blood where it had welled out from the center of the burn. Where the blood had run through the edges of the scar, the trickle had left a faint pink line. Spreading the enzyme around.

  “Sy,” Gordon said.

  “Gordon,” I cut him off.

  There was a pause. I hesitated to call it tension. He wanted me to come to my senses, I wanted to wait long enough for his concern for my well being to override his curiosity, which was bound to happen sooner or later. Tension implied something being stretched to a limit, but we were both being patient.

  I felt the burning sensation at my side getting worse. From a six to a seven on the scale, and I was the one who caved, in the end.

  “I promise I’ll tell you after,” I said.

  He seemed to consider, rolling his head to one side, then the other.

  “Fine. Jamie, take over?” Gordon said. “Seems to want you for some reason.”

  “Jamie is shorter, I don’t have to stand on my tip toes while he’s holding me up,” I explained.

  Gordon transferred his hold on me to Jamie, who had to transfer his hold on his book to the other arm.

  “And he’s nicer,” I added. Jamie rolled his eyes.

  “Did you lock the windows?” Gordon asked, ignoring me. The question was aimed at Helen, who had emerged from the door behind us.

  I turned my head to see Helen’s nod. She and Gordon worked to slide the door closed. The movement of the wheel through the rut spat water at our legs.

  “Let’s hope it stays put,” Gordon said.

  “I thought we decided that it wouldn’t go anywhere after eating,” Lillian said. “Carnivore eating habits. Hunt or scavenge, eat, rest, rouse, repeat.”

  “It was hungry enough to eat two meals. Probably going through a final growth spurt,” I said. “Let’s not rule anything out.”

  “Okay,” Lillian said, right beside me, and I was genuinely surprised at the note of anxiety in her voice, how it had cut the word short. “We can leave now.”

  Very nearly but not a question. A plea?

  I suspected it was fear, but that suspicion sat askew in my head. Lillian had experience with that stuff. She’d had hands on experience with creatures and experiments at the Academy. More restrained than that one had been, but the idea of the unrestrained experiment wasn’t enough to justify the thought. It was probably well fed enough that it would ignore any meal that didn’t walk right into its open mouth.

  Or lay there struggling as the snake charmer had.

  There we are, I thought. The snake charmer. I could remember Lillian shielding her eyes. The anxiety had more to do with the reminder of the man and the way he’d left this world. If he had left it. There was a chance he was still in there, alive and slowly dissolving.

  Gordon had collected the bundle of shoes but hadn’t handed them out. Which was fine. My feet were muddy, and I had a burn on the top of my
foot that would have made wearing the shoes hard. The burn announced its presence every time I stepped in a puddle.

  It wasn’t a particularly short walk back, and I was content to keep my mouth shut. If I started talking, I might have started grunting or making noises in response to the pain. If I started whimpering, then Gordon might have started reminding me that I’d done this to myself.

  Instead, I focused on the future. The snake charmer had been handled. Were questions possible? What about my injuries?

  “We’re close to King,” Jamie said, interrupting my thoughts. I realized Helen and Gordon were talking, with Gordon doing the lion’s share. I’d tuned it out.

  “Yeah,” I noted.

  “Busy street means head down,” Jamie said, very patient. He tugged on the front of my hood, so it could shroud my face in shadow. “Hood down. We don’t want your face to scare the locals any more than usual.”

  I couldn’t help but smile wide at that.

  The main street was framed on both sides by taller buildings, a great many of them being apartments. People sat on steps beneath the overhang of their porches, smoking, and the occasional light glowed from within rooms above.

  The plant growth that supported the structures reached overhead to meet and mesh. An arch, to introduce us to the main street proper. King Street. It was a thick crowd, even in the late afternoon, the sun setting. Men and women in raincoats, with umbrellas, walking on either side of the road.

  Lillian and Jamie stopped supporting me quite so much. I started to teeter over a bit, and Jamie caught me at roughly the same point I stuck a leg out to catch my balance myself. I hadn’t realized how heavily I’d been leaning on the others, or how dizzy I felt.

  Horses pulling coaches outnumbered cars at a nine to one ratio. Of those horses drawing coaches, only one in five were truly alive. The remainder were stitched, their hides patchwork, seams joined by thick black thread or by metal staples with burns where they touched flesh. Were I able to see beneath the heavy raincoats, I would have seen the thick metal bolts that had been screwed into points down their spines.

  Live horses were an affectation, really. There was a convenience to them, as they didn’t suffer from the water in this city where it always rained, they could be taken out hunting, and they had personalities. A horse could be a member of one’s family. There was a lot to like.

  But the stitched horses, voltaic horses if you asked someone who knew what they were talking about, they were cheap, they didn’t get tired, and rather than food, they could be kept going by connecting wires to the bolts on their backs and waiting. When a stitched horse had done its work for the day, it could be placed in what amounted to a long closet.

  There were no rules for the road, but everyone found their way. Most people here knew most others. A lack of courtesy today could be paid by a lack of cooperation from others tomorrow. That wasn’t to say there weren’t idiots or disagreeable types who others paid no mind to, but it largely worked.

  Like the branches and plant growth, it amounted to a planned chaos. The exact shape and character of branches couldn’t be decided in advance, but the key elements were given attention, the problematic ones pruned. The squat apartment buildings didn’t have room for even stitched horses, which meant every essential service had been put within walking distance. Pubs, grocers, tailors, barbers and the like.

  I raised my eyes. Looking down the length of King, I could see it rise at a gradual incline, until it touched the perimeter of the Academy itself. Radham Academy, to be specific. All things flowed from it, all things flowed to it. I imagined the same went for any Academy. Stick one somewhere, and people would collect to it like flies to a carcass. The advances and work that went hand in hand with an Academy would bleed out in a very similar way. First to the city as a whole, then to surrounding regions.

  Jamie grabbed the tip of my hood and tugged down, forcing me to look at the ground in front of me. I’d been showing too much of my face.

  We moved as a huddle, and with our heads down and hoods up, we weren’t much different from half of the streets’ occupants. My burns didn’t earn me a second glance, because I scarcely warranted a first one. I suspected that Gordon had chosen where he stood with the idea of shielding me from others’ sight, for added assurance.

  I liked the thought. It made me wonder if any other people in the crowd were in similar straits.

  Ahead of us, a large shape loomed. It looked like the offspring of a deer or rabbit might, if their offspring was squeezed out too early. No larger than one of the cars on the street, it was pink, with stretched skin, the translucent eyelids appearing bruised with how they let some of the darkness of the black eyeballs beneath leak through. Its head sat crooked, forcing it to see the way forward with only one of its two wide set eyes. Its mouth hung open.

  Most prominent, however, were the legs. Not much thicker around than my leg, half again as long as the tallest man on the sidewalk was tall, the four legs ended in points, a single claw to each leg. Saddlebags were strapped to saddlebags to form chains that draped the thing like a peculiar sort of jewelry.

  As the coaches and cars on the road made way and cooperated, so did the people on the sidewalk. This however, was motivated by discomfort and fear. Men and women gave the thing almost the entire sidewalk to itself.

  A woman led it on a fine chain, holding an umbrella overhead, though the creature’s mass already helped shelter her from the rain. She was barely entering into her twilight years, but only the pale color of her once-blonde hair suggested as much. Her face and body were young, and her clothes looked expensive, though they tended toward the simple.

  I very nearly tipped over again, as Jamie let go of me and stepped forward to obscure the woman’s view of me.

  Feeling as wobbly as I did was more than a little concerning, and a delay was the last thing I wanted.

  “Hello Mrs. Thetford,” Helen greeted the woman, smiling.

  “Helen,” Mrs. Thetford said, tugging on the chain to make her packbeast stop in its tracks. Her expression changed from an easy smile to shock. “Look at you! You look like something the cat dragged in!”

  How apt, I thought.

  “It’s Sylvester’s fault,” Helen said. “He pushed me and I got wet.”

  Of course she invents a lie that makes me look bad. I made a point of hanging my head, to better conceal my injuries. I could see the crowd passing around and to either side of us.

  “Sylvester, for shame,” Mrs. Thetford said, and she used my name as a rebuke, and the way she said ‘shame’ even made me feel a bit abashed over the deed I hadn’t committed. “You really should be nicer to girls.”

  “He really should,” Helen said, and her tone was perfect. Just a little bit smug, chiding, but not so much of either that Mrs. Thetford would think less of her.

  “And you,” Mrs. Thetford said, reaching under Helen’s hood to comb Helen’s hair back with long fingernails. “You should give some thought to keeping better company. I know you’re loyal to your so-called brothers and sisters, but you could do so well if you devoted some time to others. Your caregivers have very nearly polished you into a diamond, and it would warm my heart to see you finish the transformation.”

  “Thank you, Ma’am,” Helen said, smiling, pretending to be a little shy. Not a lot, but enough to be humble. “It means a lot that you think so well of me.”

  “If you decide that you would like to become more of a lady, I would be more than happy to introduce you to some people who could teach you the finer points. Music, dancing, etiquette. The same goes for you, Gordon. You’re evidence that Helen here isn’t a simple fluke. It would take more doing, but I think we could turn you into a proper gentleman with some tutoring.”

  “I might take you up on that offer, ma’am,” Gordon said.

  “Do! You should,” the older woman said. She brushed Helen’s cheek with her fingers. “You’re a dear. I would have you for myself, if I hadn’t already had my fill of raising childr
en.”

  “For now, if it’s alright, I’ll have to content myself with getting home before it’s dark. I’m looking forward to getting dry again,” Helen said, sticking me with a look.

  “Of course! Now I feel bad for keeping you. You know where to find me if you would like those lessons.”

  We hurried on. Rather than take the long route around to the sides, we passed under and between the legs of the packbeast that was carrying Mrs. Thetford’s shopping.

  By the time we’d flowed back into the crowd, almost invisible, Helen’s expression had gone flat again, her eyes cold. The smile was gone.

  She saw me looking.

  “Are you upset?” she asked.

  “Why would I be upset?”

  “I blamed you.”

  “I always get blamed. I’m used to it.”

  She seemed to take that at face value.

  I might have pursued conversation, but it would have been purely for self gratification, and I was feeling less and less like talking. My brain had apparently decided that the easiest way to handle what I was feeling was to declare that all of me hurt, and certain parts of me hurt enough that I was reconsidering my ‘one to ten’ scale of pain. If I focused on any one part of me too much, it quickened.

  All of that in mind, I was very glad to see the orphanage.

  The building was perched in an odd spot, beside a creek and a stone bridge that was thick with grown-in vegetation. The land by the riverbed was stony, uneven, and threatened to be damp, discouraging building efforts, but the building itself had been here long before the Academy, serving as a home for shepherds when Radham had only been a few buildings set around a crossroads.

  That it had withstood the test of time was either pure luck, or the person who had mortared the stones together had known what they were doing.

  One floor tall, with a stone exterior, it lacked the reinforcing growths that marked so many nearby structures. The only wood came from a tree in the backyard. A short stone wall encircled the property, only three feet tall, and the height both served as a way of keeping the smallest children on the property and was paradoxically welcoming. I couldn’t approach it without wanting to hop up onto it.