Twig

by wildbow

  We had a job to finish. Westmore was a wash. Even if our forces won every fight that followed, it would be chalked off as a loss. A detriment to the Crown.

  But the rebellion wasn’t in a position to commit halfheartedly, and Cynthia hadn’t been in or around the tents where I’d been brought for treatment. She was still in Whitney.

  Vulnerable.

  Barely illuminated by the rising sun, we made our way down toward the city.

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  Enemy (Arc 5)

  Cynthia leaned back. “You’re sure?”

  Sanguine nodded.

  “You did the right thing, coming back,” she said. “No signal from Melancholy or the others?”

  Sanguine shook his head. He smiled with a mouth that was too small for his face. “It happens. We have very strong personalities. We get caught up in our activities.”

  “If you aren’t worried, then I won’t worry,” Cynthia said. “But those fires… a fireproof creation, perhaps? Maybe more than one?”

  “It could be.”

  “Or it could be the superweapon we already know of. The Lambs.”

  Sanguine smiled. One of his eyes, the size of a woman’s fist, remained fixed on Cynthia. The other turned to one side, peering out the window, past the rain-streaked glass and into the barely-lit street. He focused and unfocused his gaze on three different levels, telescoping his vision.

  Too dark.

  He switched focuses and stresses. The world took on different tones, textures, and hues, as he focused on a different spectrum of light. He adjusted again, and the darkness was illuminated, cast in white and black.

  Across the street, in the shadows between a shack and a house, a rat cleaned itself with its tongue and the water from the rain.

  He snapped his eye back to Cynthia, watching the world return to focus.

  “What are you doing next?” she asked. She was gathering paperwork together. Maps and letters.

  “Me, personally?” he asked. “Or us?”

  “I’d like to know the answers to both.”

  “Speaking for myself, I don’t know,” he said. His eyes remained fixed on her face, but he altered his focus, until his peripheral vision was sharper than what he could see in the center of his field of vision. He could see her cleavage as clearly as if he was nestled in it. The pores, the tiniest, fairest of hairs, the drop of sweat that traced its way from her neck down to her collarbone, then down into the alluring shadows that her blouse cast. His smile widened. “The smoke is too thick. I might wander the outskirts. But I thought you should know about the fire, and I wasn’t going to get much for my time. I won’t, really. Even if the fires are extinguished, the smoke will still rise.”

  “Then stay,” she said, her attention still on the paperwork. She was reading a letter, before deciding to tear it up and throw it aside. She met his eyes.

  He’d cocked his head to one side.

  “Best case scenario, Melancholy comes back with Choleric and the prisoners of war my boss wanted spared. Worst case scenario, your colleagues are dead, and you expose yourself by being out there alone.”

  “Oh.”

  “I didn’t offend you, I hope, with the idea that you’ve lost the others.”

  “I’m hard to offend.”

  “Alright. Keep an eye on things here. If you can kill any of those damnable spiders, I’ll thank you for it. Keep an eye out for trouble, watch the roads. From what you describe, they’re too pinned down for a counterattack, but I don’t like relying on luck.”

  “You’re scared,” he observed. He could see the softest, most vulnerable parts of her, the base of the throat over the pulse, moving faintly in response to the increased heartbeat. She was pretty in such a natural way, but she’d gone to lengths to make herself prettier still. That she did it because it was just another tool or a weapon for her to employ was something special. Yet… “You’re packing up to run.”

  “Concerned. Whatever the cause of it, the fire means you can’t enter Westmore, I can’t send reinforcements, meager as they would be, and I can’t carry out my remaining gambits. I have no control over what happens next. I have no reason to stay.”

  “That is an excellent rationale,” he said.

  She gave him a sharp look. He cocked his head again.

  “I preferred dealing with Melancholy,” she said, sighing. “And that’s saying something.”

  “She is much better at dealing with people,” Sanguine said, offering his version of an ear-to-ear grin, though even at that point, his mouth was no wider than another person’s might be when at rest.

  “Thank you, Sanguine. If Pock is up, you can tell him he should get some sleep,” she said. She made it a dismissal.

  He gave her a lazy salute, then headed for the door, his eyes pointing out to either side as he passed between the two immortal soldiers who guarded the door, then snapping back to point forward after they were behind him. Scarred and infested with parasites from head to toe, they were as stern and silent as he wasn’t.

  He walked away with a jaunt, humming, his long rifle banging against his calf and shoulder.

  He searched the streets. It was nice and quiet. The world was brightening, the sun rising, casting long shadows.

  There. A movement beneath a building.

  A stray cat slept on top of a barrel under the awnings of a shop. It had been targeted by one of the spiders. The spider had only started to work on the sleeping cat’s tail.

  He knelt, raising his rifle, one eye closed, the other looking down the sights.

  He adjusted for the speed with which the bullet would fall, raising the tip.

  Squeeze the trigger.

  The gun was loud, always was. Not that the spider heard in time. Sanguine rose to his feet in a quick, steady motion. Keeping with habit, always start moving right after shooting. One eye watched where he was going. The other watched the target. He made it one step—

  —The spider was obliterated. The cat startled, waking up and dashing off aimlessly.

  The tail would heal.

  He could remember being newly made, and wanting a cat of his own. Having it with him on a good day, sitting in his lap while he sat cross legged, watching for a victim, purring now and then?

  He swaggered his way to the labs on the Lanyard Avenue corner, pausing to admire the crown of trees growing out of the tops of the four walls, before he let himself in.

  The building had been a factory once, making use of imports from Westmore, shaping iron into nails, if he had to guess from what remained. Most of the machines and tools had been carried out, and the place retooled. There was a clear space down the middle, a path drawn out without paint or tape or railings, only convention and accepted practice. To the left of the cleared space were tables where stitched could be made, with Stitched ‘sleeping’ against the wall, hooked up to a flickering battery with things swimming inside. To the right was Edwin Grahl’s lab. The man was absent, and his work was left half-complete. The pieces of another giant stitched arm. Grahl hadn’t been seen since sundown. He would have seen off his first cannon-wielding giant, then gone to sleep, secure enough his work would suffice for Cynthia’s purposes.

  There were two sorts of people that Sanguine would see tonight. People who had slept through the night, like Grahl, and people who hadn’t. He wasn’t sure which one Pock was.

  Though originally a factory, the building had been modified. Crews of stitched and grown material had been used to throw together a second floor and a roof, producing a second tier to the building within the span of a day. This tier was home to three more laboratories. One to the left, one to the right, and a third at the end, no walls separating them. Left and right were left unoccupied, but Pock was in the one at the end.

  Pock was flanked by two identical women that stood seven feet tall, each one about ten stone at best, with long faces, folds at the eyes making them look Asian, their hair straight and black. Their spidery fingers were the most animated part of them, the
rest of their movements so slow they looked like they were moving underwater. The pair took turns handing him tools as he requested them. He made an incision, and slid a slice of fatty tissue into the cut.

  “Ah, you,” Pock said, almost derisive. Almost.

  “Me. Cynthia Imlay would like you to know that she won’t be needing your services tonight. There are fires prohibiting access to the city. I saw with my own eyes.”

  Sanguine smirked as if he’d made a joke.

  Pock stopped. He heaved out a sigh. “Are the prisoners of war still due to arrive?”

  “Very likely. My colleague is on it. But there’s no need for haste,” Sanguine said.

  Pock nodded. He raised his hands, and the experiments on either side pulled off his gloves. “I’d complain, but it’ll be good to let the swelling subside, and see how close I’ve managed to get.”

  The man on the table slept, his face subtly different from one side to the next. Old enough to have grayed hair, his facial hair was cut to have only a beard, no mustache.

  “He looks real,” Sanguine admired, studying pores and finer structures. There were differences from an ordinary man, but not ones a typical eye would catch.

  “He is real,” Pock said, offended.

  “For something made in a vat, he looks human. And he’s not even a clone.”

  “He’s close to being one. I had the notes from a colleague. We even had two conversations over the phone. I gave him my own notes.”

  Sanguine leaned closer, cocking his head until it was lined up with the man’s. “You have a reference image?”

  “A painting,” Pock said, pointing.

  Sanguine nodded. He straightened. “Beautiful thing, this. To come out of war, no less.”

  “Mm,” Pock said.

  “War is amazing like that, isn’t it? Nothing drives us to be better as much as a gun to our head does. With the western Crown States in the midst of a civil war, we have thirty-thousand guns to thirty-thousand heads. The world is going to change in the wake of this war.”

  “Of course it is,” Pock said. “We’re going to uproot the Academy from these states, take the clutching fingers the Crown is using to grip it and break every one, until we can retake this part of the country for ourselves.”

  Sanguine broke out into a laugh, genuine and hearty.

  “Yes,” he said. “That sounds wonderful.”

  Pock wasn’t looking half as impassioned now. The man had gone cold.

  Was the laugh too much? Sanguine cocked his head.

  “Was there anything else?”

  Sanguine shrugged one shoulder. “You can rest if you need to. The prisoners of war will be here by midday, if not sooner. We won’t lose anything if we start late.”

  “Uh huh. Will you be shooting that damnable gun of yours in earshot?”

  “It’s likely. I’m supposed to look out for trouble. There are some spiders lingering, at the very least.”

  “No sleep for me, then,” Pock said, grim.

  Sanguine bowed a little, then saluted in the most insulting way he could.

  He passed downstairs, out the door, and locked it behind him.

  His head turned. He studied the surroundings, adjusting the focus of his eyes as he did it. The changes in sharpness and softness and detail rotated through a series of possibilities, until it looked and felt as if his eyes were hearts, beating in his eye sockets. The surroundings throbbed in a way, and he could get a sense of dimension, of texture. His visual memory was acute, and as he took a few steps forward, searching, he could get a sense of where the ground rose and fell, all the way down the length of the street.

  The eyes were such an important sense to humans, but the eyes had stopped developing long ago, because the developments were so very unnecessary. When they’d made his eyes, they’d turned to sea creatures for inspiration. Even his face was a bit fishy, he liked to think.

  He smiled.

  He could see footprints in the mud. He could gauge their size, follow their path, see how the light rainfall distorted the water that had collected in them, and even guess at the amount of muddy water within, water that would have been squeezed out by the weight of the foot setting down. His eyes pointed in two different directions and adjusted until he could compare both places at once, his own footprints from a minute ago against this very small footprint. The amount of water suggested that the person had passed by a moment after he had.

  He was amused by the fact that they had probably been watching him, yet he hadn’t seen them.

  One child. A Lamb?

  It took him a minute to walk to the set of tracks. He pulled his gun around, holding it in both hands, though he didn’t point it at anything.

  Whitney wasn’t a city meant for warfare and the military. The layout wasn’t organized in a way that made it easy to defend and hard to take. The military leadership, Cynthia included, had wanted to situate themselves at the center, at the heart of things, except the buildings there were mostly shops. They’d changed the buildings here and there, and made compromises elsewhere.

  The footprints led to one such compromise. A shop with living quarters above it.

  He slowly turned, taking in the surroundings. Looking, searching for more errant children.

  He slipped a bullet into his gun, then fired blindly at the sky. He did it again, then again, then again.

  It was Pock who stepped out of the Lanyard Labs, swearing up a storm. His assistants followed him.

  “The hell do you think you’re doing, you imbecile!?”

  Sanguine held up a hand, index finger raised.

  “What? You’re telling me to wait now? You wake half the city, and—”

  “Can you shoot?”

  “What?”

  “Shoot. Are you able?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  Sanguine nodded, his eyes still roaming. He drew a gun from inside his jacket and tossed it to Pock’s assistant, who caught it.

  Pock’s attitude changed. “What’s going on?”

  “You are coming with me. We’re entering this building. A spy is lurking within.”

  “And why would I put myself in close proximity to a spy?” Pock asked, derisive.

  “Because the tracks suggest a limp, making this one the most obvious target,” Sanguine said. “And because there are five more close by. If I leave you alone, you’ll be dead before I step outside again.”

  Pock didn’t have a ready answer for that.

  Sanguine reached into his coat, then affixed a blade to his rifle. He took his time securing the bayonet, using a key to tighten the banding, before slipping the key into a notch to secure it’s place on the barrel.

  “The others. If there’s that much danger, then—”

  “Cynthia will have heard the shots and thought there was something unusual about it. She knows there’s danger.”

  “You’re sure? Because she—”

  “I’ve seen her fight. She’s the rare sort of capable.”

  “Are you done interrupting me?”

  “Yes. Because you must be exceedingly quiet,” Sanguine said. “Or you may die, sir.”

  Pock fell silent.

  Sanguine smiled as he approached the door. He nudged it open with one toe. “Leave your assistants outside. They’ll make too much noise.”

  He adjusted to the darkness with a speed and facility that matched poor Pock’s ability and quickness in blinking.

  Dusty. The store hadn’t been cleaned since the commanding officer had taken up residence upstairs. Light streamed from the window above the stairs.

  Another adjustment this time. Focusing on light, contrast.

  The specks of dust almost glowed, as he focused on the way they caught the light. Fireflies in darkness, swirling, dancing.

  The swirling was more intense further up the stairs. His quarry had passed by more than a minute ago, but the air still stirred, just a little.

  And, halfway up the stairs, he noted a wire.

  Not m
eant for people giving chase or coming upstairs. For someone going down.

  A just-in-case measure, was it? If the target got away and ran for the front door?

  He approached the stairs, touching the blade of the bayonet to the wire.

  Movement. Slight.

  He leaned over the railing, repeating the touch.

  An empty flower vase on a little stand beneath the stairs moved in response. The razor thread wound lightly around the railing, extended down to the vase. If disturbed, the vase would fall.

  Because of the limp. A lack of security in his or her own ability?

  Was it the boy he’d shot the previous day?

  “Assassin,” he murmured. He couldn’t hold back his excitement.

  Pock made a face, quizzical.

  “Not a spy. An assassin,” he clarified. “Take the vase, Pock.”

  Pock did as he was told. Good man. Sanguine turned the rifle upside-down and used the sharp end of the bayonet blade to cut the wire.

  He gestured for Pock to follow, watching the movement of the dust in the air as he ascended the stairs.

  He saw the way the swirl of dust danced down the hallway, leading to a room at the end.

  He gestured for Pock to stop, this time. His feet fell on the sides of the hallway, not the center, and he transferred his weight slowly. His body had suffered in the same set of treatments made to capitalize on his eyes. He wasn’t strong. He was sensitive to the heat and the cold, which were bad traits for a sniper who would otherwise want to remain still in poor weather for long periods of time. But that same degree of sensitivity let him sense the creaks as they started, shift his weight away, move the foot to the next few floorboards, and try again.

  He was silent enough that he could hear Pock more than he heard himself.

  He stopped at the doorway. He could hear whisperings, two voices.

  A girl and a man.

  His movement noiseless and smooth, he leaned his head forward, peering past the doorway. Nothing so sudden to draw focus.

  The girl was straddling the officer, who was in bed, wearing his pyjamas. Her knees were pressing his arms down, but he was undoubtedly strong enough to throw her off. The wire she had around his throat was keeping the man still. She held it with one hand, the wire wound around the handle of a knife. The other hand was on the headboard, so she could lean forward, her face inches from his. She was wearing a raincoat over a dress with lace at the ends. Twelve or thirteen years old, ribbons in her brown hair.