Twig

by wildbow

  “I’m not—no,” Cecil said. He bowed his head. He seemed to compose himself. “There were more riots. Men, boys and women from other areas got hurt.”

  “If there were more riots, we would have heard more horns,” the Shepherd said.

  “I don’t know,” Cecil said. “I’m just reporting… reporting names.”

  His words were halting. He seemed terrified before the crowd, sensing the latent hostility, the strangeness of it. But the terror seemed to work for him. It gave him an authenticity that he might not have had if he were speaking in monotone.

  He fumbled for a paper, unfolding it. “L… J.J. Bridges. K. Downs. I—I can’t read in the dark, with this rain.”

  A man broke rank, stepping forward to raise his cloak up over Cecil’s head. A lighter glowed, illuminating the paper.

  “R. Hartman. D. Estrada. M. Mayes. D. Thomas…”

  With every other name, there were noises from the crowd.

  “What happened!?” a man cried out.

  “I just know that they were hurt or killed.”

  “The full name. Was that Doug Thomas!?”

  “I don’t know the full names,” Cecil said, and in his fear, his voice was small and hollow, almost powerless.

  My eye fell on Jamie.

  We all saw so many people over the course of the day. We heard names.

  Jamie knew names, he knew faces. He’d actively gone looking for them, in quiet moments, had listened for them. He’d asked questions over the years. He’d pieced together a mental picture.

  Not complete, I was sure, but he knew important people and he knew who their children were. The faces that weren’t in the crowd.

  Jamie just stood there, rain streaming off his glasses and rain-cloak, having served as the harbinger of the worst kind of news anyone with a family could get.

  A restlessness grew within the crowd. These were people they cared about, people neighbors cared about.

  “Calm down!” the Shepherd called out. “Nothing is proven, nothing is certain!”

  But the crowd was beyond the point of listening.

  “If you react to this, you’ll be doing exactly what they want!” he said.

  But there was no response. He was shouting at a force of nature, now. He knew it.

  The crowd made a noise. A growing roar.

  They had an enemy.

  The Academy was here.

  Guns fired, where people in the crowd had been given such. Too early, shooting at the wrong targets.

  A formation of stitched, twenty-strong, each in uniform.

  People broke rank, hurried to grab things they could throw at the Academy’s beasts.

  We had our riot.

  We also had a problem.

  In this scenario Jamie had painted, the Academy had made the first move. It helped that people would go home and find their loved ones safe and sound. But if we couldn’t correct the interpretation, things would go sour. Hayle would be upset with me, because this wouldn’t be a perfect execution.

  We had a second issue, now that I thought about it, figuring out where things stood. The Shepherd was one to position himself carefully, so any piece that we took was well defended. That made me think about his men, and thinking about his men made me think about the fact that he now knew that we were working against him. His flock was scattered, turned into something wasteful, soon to be shut down, and he had nothing to stop him from dwelling on us.

  He met my eyes, and there was something there I hadn’t seen before.

  He was looking at me. Not as a child, or a member of his flock, but as the person on the other side of the chess board. Or one of them, anyway. He knew what we were, or he had an idea, now.

  I gave him a smile.

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  Cat out of the Bag 2.10

  The Shepherd touched the shoulder of one of the soldiers nearest him, then leaned close to whisper something. He didn’t take his eyes off me. Nothing in his posture or body language gave anything away. He didn’t seem affected by the warm rain that ran down his face.

  He might not have given anything away, as I smiled at him, trying to bait something out of him, but the soldier quickly made the Shepherd’s intent clear. He strode forward, saying something I couldn’t make out over the chaos of the crowd to my right.

  He pointed at Mary as he was talking. I was suspicious he was saying names. Ordering the men around him.

  They started forward too, a pair.

  “Six in total, we already have two,” the Shepherd said, his voice carrying where the soldier’s was drowned out.

  Capture the children.

  No!

  Shepherd, no! You were supposed to be looking at me as an equal! You butt!

  Mary seemed to come to the same conclusion I did. I saw her look toward the crowd, with the soldiers doing what they could to keep people from falling back and retreating to the church.

  She looked at me. I held out a hand.

  “Stop!” a man with a gun shouted, aiming.

  Mary didn’t flinch, nor did I. She hopped up to the wall, I grabbed her hand to help her balance, and we went down over the other side together, me a half-step behind, so I could put myself between her and the guy with the gun.

  I landed in a puddle, one hand, both knees, and the toes of both feet getting thoroughly wet in the process. My other hand held Mary’s. She’d landed in a crouch, so the short wall would provide some protection, but she’d managed to keep her skirt clean. Her expression was… I liked it. Not perfectly cold. I thought she might be enjoying herself on some level.

  More guns went off, not behind us, but from the larger part of the crowd. The stitched who were too close to reload used fists and butt-ends of guns to strike people down. It was painful to look at. The stitched didn’t hold back nearly enough, and they were strong.

  I sprinted from my crouching position, running along the wall, toward the crowd. Mary followed.

  An orange light lit up the surroundings as a fire burst to life at one corner of the crowd. Something explosive or very flammable.

  Even among regular civilians, the knowledge of the rules around the stitched was common. In a city like Radham, there were a great many farmers who relied on stitched animals and stitched farmhands. Inexhaustible, strong, requiring no food or pay. Fire tended to rile a stitched up and set them ablaze if they hadn’t been well tended, water tended to cause partial or total paralysis, if not deeper problems, and any given stitched had psychological tics. The brain was cut down to the barest minimum needed to follow orders and retain information, stand up, and exchange words, and in what remained, there were often trace memories, fears, words, names, or faces that all provoked responses out of the norm. When some stitched were hurt, poorly maintained, or when they got sick despite their high body temperatures, they would fall back on key phrases or habits. Children were told to limit interactions until the owner of the stitched could tell them what to do or what not to do.

  With a stitched soldier, the cutting was often more ruthless, the ability to converse left more limited, the range of abilities vastly reduced. They followed orders, they learned how to use weapons, they hurt people they were told to hurt.

  In Hayle’s carriage, the night after we’d taken on the snake charmer, I’d seen how the stitched bodyguard had reacted to fire. A new development in the production, treatment and teaching of the stitched, I was pretty sure.

  The soldiers didn’t react to the flame, though they avoided it. They pressed forward, almost harder, less cautious, more violent. They’d been trained against fire, made to stay on course, even if that meant doing whatever they’d been doing until there was no more fire around them.

  I couldn’t be sure, but I suspected this was a surprise to the Shepherd’s comrades in arms. What they’d learned about the stitched fighting alongside them in the war was no longer true.

  Mary and I made our way into the crowd. The soldiers who’d been sent after us were only a few steps behind.
/>   It was a very different dance for them and for us. Mary and I were moving as fast as we could, nimble, dodging between people who were alternately pressing forward and trying to run. I turned sideways at points, jabbed two fingers into one man’s ass crack to get him lurching forward and out of my way, ducked between one set of legs, and very nearly got knocked in the head by the end of a hoe someone was holding as a weapon. Mary was right behind me.

  The people following us, by contrast, were pushing through. They had presence, people naturally moved out of their way, and they had the physical prowess to work past the ones who didn’t, or who moved the wrong way and ended up as obstacles anyway.

  We weren’t the only ones navigating this strange battlefield of terrified and outraged civilians. Several stitched had made their way into the crowd.

  One stitched nearby had both hands on its gun, and was swinging left and right, hitting people with elbows, the butt of the gun and the bayonet on the end. It had been stabbed twice, one weapon still stuck through its chest cavity, its face had been sliced open to reveal a thick wire that had been placed beneath the skin. The wire was insulated by a tight coiling of something or other, and where the insulation had been cut by the same weapon, the wire periodically sparked, the surrounding flesh twitching reflexively in reaction.

  It had leveled ten or so people just getting this far, leaving them crumpled, bleeding and broken. Surrounded, it was strong enough to keep the crowd back, and scary enough that people were fleeing from it, pushing and jostling others.

  Had the Shepherd expected things to go this way? Had he expected to win? Because the crowd wasn’t winning, and I suspected things would be much the same if Jamie had left things alone. His side would be doing better, but things would be moving toward the same end result.

  An incoherent shout from the Shepherd’s camp went out. It was picked up by others, traveling forward through the crowd.

  “Burn the handlers!”

  Oh, well, that was one way to do it.

  Stitched didn’t tend to scream unless they were broken by fire or delirium. Still, as the fires erupted, the eyes were treated to a sudden flare of light, illuminating everything, and the ears were treated to screams of panic and pain.

  Not quite as tidy as I’d hoped.

  I’d entered the crowd for a reason. I chanced a look back, and saw that the crowd had bogged down our pursuers. The press of bodies shifted, blocking my view of them.

  Blocking their view of us.

  I found Mary’s hand and tugged, changing direction. We weren’t the only ones who were trying to move back toward the church, away from the fire, the stitched, the bullets, and everything else, but we were the only ones who were less than five feet tall. That counted for something. It gave us a fraction more mobility.

  Okay. This was usually the part where I fucked things up. Gordon was better at it than I was. I tended to overthink it.

  Not just fighting. Strategy. I could plot like nobody I knew, but strategy was an entirely different game.

  I tried to recall the number of soldiers that had been stationed at the back of the crowd and along the wall, compelling people forward, standing on or partially on the wall to shoot over the crowd. From that number and the general positions of them, there were any number of things I could do. The soldiers were all committed. Those that could be spared had been sent after us. That gave us options.

  I cut my thoughts short at that. No use in complicating things, getting too far ahead of myself, and then having my plan fall to pieces when something unexpected happened.

  Decide two things I want.

  The first was finding Lillian and even freeing Gordon.

  The second was maximizing disruption.

  Okay, no, wait, I had three things I wanted.

  Getting the Shepherd to see me as an equal was the third one.

  There.

  That was the plan.

  I checked Mary was with me, double checked we weren’t followed, then pushed my way through.

  Lillian wasn’t far from where we’d left her. The soldier who’d taken custody of her had, probably at the Shepherd’s instruction, backed away, keeping her closer to where the Shepherd, the captain of the soldiers, and the guy holding Gordon all were.

  The guy that had been watching her had been relieved by someone else.

  The man was holding his rifle out sideways, a barrier to discourage people from retreating. He was shouting, driving them forward, saying something about the Academy, something about how to deal with a stitched.

  Being short was an advantage. I ducked under the rifle and through the gap. He hadn’t expected anyone to be moving quite as fast or with quite so much focus as I was, and even the ones that were had been liable to bump into his weapon.

  The Shepherd’s captain saw me. He shouted, “Grab him!”

  I gave the man an arm, practically slapping my wrist into his reaching hand. My other arm I held back, in Mary’s direction, hand up.

  Stop. Wait.

  Wait.

  Another explosion of flame erupted at the far end of the battlefield. The soldier that had me looked up and over the crowd.

  More importantly, most of the crowd looked away.

  I dropped the arm.

  Mary moved. Her skirt clung to her mud-streaked legs as she lunged forward. The soldier saw the incoming attack, but his weapon was still held up to hold people back, and my hands went around his wrist, holding his hand so he couldn’t move it.

  Mary stepped up onto the soldier’s thigh, grabbed his shirt to help her upward momentum, and drove the top of her head into the man’s chin. She held onto him as he dropped, adding her weight to his. He tumbled, stunned, and his hand released my wrist.

  The soldier nearest us turned to look, eyes going wide.

  I was already bending, grabbing the rifle from the fallen man, spinning—

  One or two people who’d seen the gap and were panicked by the latest explosion rushed past me, bumping me. My aim was off.

  I still managed to scrape the back of the second soldier’s calf. He dropped. A second person pushing past me knocked the rifle out of my grip. I didn’t bother to rescue it.

  “Run away!” I howled, my voice raw.

  It didn’t take much to tip the scales and give life to the idea that was already in people’s heads. What was an initial one to three people quickly turned into a stampede.

  What had been a mass of people outside the short walls of the church was now draining out, feeding into the yard just past the church doors.

  Mary was smiling as she joined me, mingling in with the rush of bodies.

  Disruption managed. Now for the rescue of Lillian.

  The Shepherd gave a command. The men that had been holding back the crowd and the captain all converged on us, pushing past the bodies.

  Had to do this right.

  Like a professional. Tidy, like Hayle wanted.

  Well, insofar as any of this was tidy. I could make the argument that some of this was inevitable. The trick was leading this to as tidy a conclusion as possible. Given a sequence of things to focus on, people liked to focus on the beginning and the end.

  Our beginning had been good. We’d identified the threat.

  Our end… well, we had to neutralize it.

  My eye fixed on the man who held Lillian. He had his gun, and he had her collar in a deathgrip that pulled it up and tight to her neck. Her bag was on the ground to one side.

  Tidy, I thought. Properly.

  I rushed the man. Mary had done the headbutt to one vulnerable area. I aimed for one that was closer to the ground. Between the man’s legs.

  For my trouble, I got a knee in the chest. He struck me in the head with the butt end of his gun. I fell.

  Mary was a step behind me. She grabbed the wrist of his gun hand with both hands, and with this happening so quickly after he’d clubbed me with the thing, he took a second before reasserting his strength, holding the weapon firm.

  Ma
ry drove her shoulder into the side of the weapon. The bayonet blade slammed into the man’s forehead.

  She did it again. A second gash in the brow. He let go of Lillian to grab the weapon with another hand.

  Mary stepped past the defense to slice him with a knife. Quick slashes, inner thighs. She ducked as he slammed the side of the rifle toward her face, then stabbed him twice in the belly.

  He staggered, almost tripping over me, but Mary grabbed him by the sleeve and belt, hauling on him with all of her weight.

  I rolled in the opposite direction, rising to my feet so quickly that I nearly fell over again with the sideways momentum. Mary let him fall, reaching out to block the bayonet he swung at her on his way down.

  “Lillian!” I said, loud enough to be heard over the crowd.

  “Sy!”

  I swept up the bag, pushing her as we started moving again. Mary was already in step, not needing further cues.

  As a trio, we continued toward the church. The men coming after us were closing in, only a few steps away.

  “Just the girl I was looking for,” I said, as we ran. “I need you.”

  She smiled wider than I’d seen in some time.

  “Scalpels,” I told her, shoving the bag at her.

  “Um,” she said, she reached in. She handed me a scalpel with a cover over the end.

  “Gunk!”

  “Gunk?”

  “Gunk!” I said, louder.

  She gave me a squat container with a screw-off lid.

  “Great!” I said. “Now go, get lost!”

  The smile dropped off her face.

  “Hide, I mean!” I shouted. I wasn’t thinking straight, trying to think along multiple tracks at once. “Mary, go with her!”

  “But!”

  “Go!”

  They carried forward, heading toward the church.

  I stopped, twisting, and turned around.

  There were about five civilians rushing my way. Between them were three soldiers, one of whom was the Shepherd’s captain buddy, about as different from the Shepherd as a man could be. Tan skinned, short dark hair, a weather-worn face, all browns and darkness and leatheriness.