Twig

by wildbow

  She sniffed, turning forward. “I hope so.”

  The confusion on Lillian’s face redoubled.

  “You more than anyone, Lil,” I said, smiling.

  Her eyes narrowed, she turned away, then shot me another look, as if she could’ve caught me smirking at her back.

  I smirked when she was done.

  “We really need to get you an appointment,” Jamie said. “Before you get yourself in trouble, trying to be funny.”

  “Hate to admit you’re right,” I said.

  “They said I could have had my appointment, but I convinced them to put it off, because I knew the rest of you wouldn’t. Better to do it all at once, so the Lambs aren’t shorthanded.”

  “Good. I’m glad to have you with us.” I clapped a hand on his shoulder. He smiled.

  We were all the way down King street, and now, like the veins and arteries in a human body, things were starting to break down into smaller streets.

  “Hereabouts,” Gordon said.

  “If you’re looking for specific smells,” I said. “Academy carriage, or something made to look like one, stitched horses.”

  “Too common on these streets, both,” Catcher said.

  “Child, drugged, in the carriage,” I said.

  “Enclosed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Too muffled an odor.”

  “Blood,” Mary said. “I threw a knife at one of the beasts at a checkpoint, it attacked the horses. I had another knife hit Percy, at the front. I wasn’t—I didn’t…”

  She stopped herself.

  And, though I was only able to see occasional glimpses of her face as I watched her, I could see her attitude shift. The glitter of pretty stabby torture things and the glamour of spiked mechanical confinement tools were only meager bandages for a bigger wound.

  She hadn’t finished her sentence, and the answers that my mind supplied weren’t kind ones.

  I wasn’t sure it was him? I didn’t want to hurt him?

  “Bleeding stitched is more distinct,” Catcher said. Dog bobbed his oversized head in a ponderous nod, the metal at his jaw clicking and rattling as he switched from moving his head down to lifting it and vice versa. “Bleeding man and bleeding stitched? That’s a starting point.”

  Dog swung his head one way, then the other.

  “And he’s got the scent,” Catcher said.

  “Excellent,” Gordon said. He was smiling.

  Metal at dog’s face shifted, covering his nose. That metal moved, slats opening to let the air in, closing as he moved his head, then opening again when he stopped it.

  He turned to Catcher, then huffed, a blast of hot breath.

  “Got it,” Catcher said. He tilted his head to one side. “There.”

  Dog started moving, loping forward.

  “We’re not running?” Gordon asked.

  “When we’re closer. Don’t worry,” Catcher said. “Very few slip away when we have the trail.”

  We backtracked a bit, then headed down a side street. The buildings here were more apartment than anything else, with the occasional shop on the lower floors. Bakeries, butcheries, furniture stores. The balconies weren’t as clustered together as the ones in the shims, which suggested larger residences, but the area wasn’t quite nice. It just wasn’t awful. A step up from the shims.

  Jamie whistled under his breath, then gestured.

  In the time it took our collective heads to turn, the blonde woman in the window ducked out of view, only a flash of pale hair visible for an eyes’ blink of time.

  “Want to chase?” Catcher asked.

  “We’re not fast enough,” Gordon said. “They’re quick.”

  “Do you?” Mary asked Catcher, “Want to chase?”

  “No. I thought you’d want something to do. It’s your job, we’re just helping,” Catcher said.

  “Our job. We share the credit if this goes well, we Lambs suffer any consequences if it goes bad,” Gordon said.

  “Says Gordon,” I said. “Heck no. I totally want the credit. But if Dog and Catcher want to take some of the blame, I’m not going to whine about it.”

  “It’s a good thing I know you’re joking,” Catcher said.

  “Am I? I didn’t realize.”

  Jamie made another small whistle, gesturing.

  The Japanese woman, also on lookout, this time on a rooftop. Once she realized we’d spotted her, she moved, falling back to a position where we couldn’t see her.

  The situation had reversed from what we’d faced before. This time, they were the ones on watch, we were the ones encroaching on their territory. We wanted to make away with a captive we could squeeze for information, if we couldn’t get to Percy himself. They’d wanted to make away with a child.

  We didn’t make it another half-block before Mary moved, pointing with a knife-tip.

  The red-haired woman. Inside a window.

  “Stop,” Catcher said.

  Collectively, the group stopped moving.

  The woman was already fading into the shadows within the unlit apartment.

  “Ghosts,” Catcher said. “I can’t hear them.”

  Dog shook his head.

  Catcher spoke again, “I can hear most footsteps, can hear some from a distance like this if I focus. I’m focusing and I don’t hear them.”

  Dog said something garbled.

  “You do?” Catcher asked.

  Dog grunted an affirmative.

  “Footsteps?”

  Dog shook his head. Spoke in that mishmash of sounds and metal against metal that only Catcher and sometimes Gordon could understand.

  “A high sound,” Catcher said. “Too high for even my ears.”

  “Or mine,” Helen said.

  Dog raised one paw, an amalgamation of flesh with metal supporting and replacing the flesh where it hadn’t grown in strong enough, bobbing it in time with noise we couldn’t hear. Up up, down, up up, down down down, up…

  A conductor to a silent orchestra.

  The paw came down, the claws themselves clacking like so many spurs.

  “Silence?” Catcher asked.

  Dog nodded slowly, head craning, vents on the lower face opening and closing.

  “There,” Jamie said.

  The Japanese woman. On another rooftop. She’d managed to cross the street in front of us and travel a distance that would have taken another person four or five minutes, and she’d done it in half that, without being seen.

  She didn’t budge from her position, halfway down the street, at the top of a flat rooftop. The wind stirred her damp hair and black dress.

  No.

  “Okay,” Lillian said. “I’m a little spooked.”

  “That’s good,” I said. My eyes were wide, searching, my senses pitched to a painful sharpness. “Sensible reaction.”

  “I didn’t think they were that fast.”

  “They’re not,” I said, just as Dog began shaking his head. “There’s more than three of them.”

  Jamie pointed to the other side of the street.

  A brunette. Same clothes, same demeanor, same look in her eyes.

  The next building over, another Japanese woman, identical to the one who stood on the flat rooftop.

  We shifted positions, our backs to one another, shoulder to shoulder, searching the area.

  They stepped out of hiding, one after the other. There was a petite one with dark hair, who I saw four different versions of, another blonde, two more redheads… those were only the ones in the direction I was facing.

  Dog raised his paw, bobbed it, then dropped it to the street.

  “They’re talking,” Catcher said. Dog nodded confirmation.

  “They communicate with whistles? Too high frequency for any human to hear?” Gordon asked. “A unique language?”

  “So it seems,” Catcher said.

  “So many of them,” Lillian said.

  “Yes,” Catcher said.

  Mary was silent, her expression dark.

&nb
sp; “Communicating like that… they’re pack hunters,” Helen said.

  “So it seems, yes,” Catcher repeated himself.

  “We can’t get separated,” Gordon said. “Best thing we can do—”

  “Hold on,” I said. “Hold on.”

  Silence reigned for a long few seconds. The women gathered around us were all utterly still.

  I felt like I could hear the high pitched sound, but I couldn’t. But something was setting my teeth on edge, making my head hurt.

  I raised a hand, snapping my fingers.

  When the others looked at me out of the corners of their eyes, I gestured, fierce.

  Silent. Around, enemy scout.

  Or, in context, be quiet. They can hear us.

  Hear what we say to each other, plan or counter-plan accordingly.

  Gordon raised his hand, snapped once, gestured.

  Leader chase. I group dog. You go.

  There were two options. To decide we were in over our heads, or to go for the leader.

  Gordon wanted to go for the leader. He’d group up with Dog. The rest of us, Catcher included, would take another path.

  I didn’t technically disagree with the idea. The ghosts were coordinated enough to make use of any weakness or opportunity our splitting up afforded to them, but Gordon and Dog together could be fast, and I trusted them to be effective, for the most part.

  Yet his left hand, at his side, was partially clenched, ring and middle finger extended, and the middle finger bobbled up and down as if it wasn’t under his control. He was holding it between himself and Mary as if he hoped to keep it out of people’s view.

  “Gordon,” I spoke aloud. He looked at me. I glanced down at his hand. “You sure?”

  “Perfectly.”

  I didn’t believe him at all.

  It was such an awful situation. When I had to extend trust to someone or lose their trust. It took a great power balance and upset it, because it wasn’t a thing that happened once. Gordon and Fray, Mary and Percy.

  He gestured. Our gestures for numbers were what they were for much this reason. It wasn’t intuitive.

  Three. Two. One.

  He grabbed onto Dog’s armor, hauling himself up, heading right. The rest of us ran forward, down the length of the street.

  Silent, without fanfare or theatrics, the ghostly sentries of this neck of Radham slid away. Not all into shadow, but perfectly out of view. It was as if they knew where every single one of our blind spots were, every piece of cover that would serve.

  Percy was injured. He’d be patching himself up, if he wasn’t already done, and as hurt people tended to do, he would be inclined to find shelter, return home.

  The enemy wasn’t the only wild card in this game, not fully understood as a group. Mary counted as one. Gordon counted as another.

  Catcher leading the way, Mary at the rear corner of our triangle formation, Helen at the other corner, we ran, making a break for the weakest link, the critical target.

  A leap of faith, then another, then another.

  Previous Next

  Lamb to the Slaughter—6.7

  We were surrounded with the net closing around us, and I was swiftly realizing that the so-called ‘net’ was made for this.

  The women were entirely capable of staying out of sight as they closed the distance to us, and they chose not to. They revealed themselves, crossing a street, hopping down from one place to another, moving along rooftops, or stepping out of cover. Most were wearing black dresses, some had shoes, some didn’t.

  But each and every one was erratic. They didn’t run headlong at us, but moved in diagonals or horizontally. They only revealed themselves when they were in a position to reverse direction and take cover, or take a step to the side and be out of reach. All of the instincts and habits and prediction that suggested where they should be were consistently, inevitably wrong. They would step out of sight and reappear a distance away, and I could never be sure if it was the same one, or a clone.

  Three times, Mary started to move to throw a knife, and each of those times, the ghosts would fade away in the same moment she started to move. The knife never left her hand. It would have been a wasted throw.

  As psychological weapons went, it was all very effective.

  Gordon and Dog had broken away from the group, and I could see some of the women moving, turned away from us, giving chase in their roundabout way. The women were still disappearing, hiding with the same mind-bending effectiveness, even though we weren’t their focus.

  Throughout it all, I could feel a peculiar tension and strain, as if my body was experiencing a unique form of stress, bone-deep. It was as if something was stretched too tight, a terrible noise that would have been hurting my ears if I could hear it.

  “Echolocation,” I said, between pants for breath. I was running as fast as I was capable.

  “Probably,” Catcher said.

  They communicated through screeches, too high for the human ear to catch. Those same screeches told them where we were, and what the surroundings were. To be this effective at staying out of sight, they were mapping it all out in their heads, figuring out where our fields of view were, and avoiding those areas.

  If I recognized their system and tried to muck with it by turning my head more, being unpredictable, I only saw glimpses. My head and eyes could move faster than their whole bodies could, but only barely.

  Not sustainable. I was disorienting myself more than anything.

  Craig had said this was Academy work. We’d convinced ourselves otherwise.

  But to create this many, to do work this good, it was beyond the capacity of the rebellion, as I understood it. The Snake Charmer, Percy, and all of the doctors working for the rebellion thus far had been people who’d been removed from the Academy. Less resources, less education, or less grounding. Some had been brilliant, but they’d been working with less.

  Unless there was something I was missing, these women were on the level of a superweapon. On par with Dog and Catcher, or the Humors, or the Lambs, but modern, not years out of date.

  That did mean they were less experienced.

  No, I have to focus. It was too hard to think along multiple tracks at once, these days.

  “There!” I pointed.

  An ajar door.

  If we were being surrounded, then we had to minimize the number of avenues they had for approach.

  We ran through the door, catcher first, Mary at the rear. She slammed the door shut behind her.

  It was an apartment complex under construction, two stories high, getting more apartments with length rather than height. The essential posts and beams of the building were intact, not yet cut back from the mostly straight, treelike growths that had been generated, and only a few walls were being grown, plant matter set to grow, the rapid growth directed with boards that had been propped up and temporarily clamped into place. The project must have moldered, because there was grass and flowers growing up here and there where the work had been left incomplete.

  The door was barely shut when I heard glass breaking and things tumbling to the floor above us, and at the various parts of the building to the left, right, and front of us.

  “We cornered ourselves!” Lillian said.

  “No,” Catcher and I spoke at the same time. Catcher glanced at me, and I said, “We were already cornered.”

  “Oh god,” Lillian said. “I remember—”

  She paused, she was talking too fast while trying to take too much air in, and ran into a conflict of sorts. “—when I started. They said I wouldn’t get into danger. I’d stay at the back and sidelines, just close enough to practice what I’d already learned.”

  “They lie,” I said.

  “Says our best liar.”

  “Everything I am, I learn from others. I learned from them, Lil.”

  “Focus!” Catcher barked. All business. “Your hand signals, earlier. You have a minute to teach me. Command for stop?”

  “We have thr
ee,” Jamie said. “Different—”

  “You have fifty-five seconds to teach me!” Catcher said.

  “Stop,” Mary raised a fist, pointing it at the ceiling.

  “Left?”

  “Like this with left hand,” she said, doing the same gesture, pinky extended, then raised her other hand, thumb extended, “This with right.”

  “I can guess what the sign for the other direction is. Danger?”

  Mary extended middle and index finger together, pointed in various directions. She then pointed it straight down. “Trap.”

  He did the gesture, but pointed straight up. “What’s this, then?”

  “Heads up. Alert,” she said.

  “You sat down and worked this out? A special language, for all of you?”

  “No,” I said. “It evolved naturally. We bullshit it half the time and trust the others to figure out what we mean.”

  “Okay,” he said. “You think they hear us?”

  “They hear everything,” I said. “If they do have echolocation, they hear the walls.”

  “Mm.”

  I looked to make sure Jamie, Helen, and Lillian were keeping up. We’d spent enough time out and about in the last six months for them to build up stamina, but Jamie and Lillian weren’t athletic. Not like Mary, definitely not like Gordon.

  Helen was different. She didn’t have the capacity to build stamina in that sense. The rest of us, we were human, in varying senses, and humans had come into being as primates who excelled at marathon running. In getting better at running, we were returning to our roots. For her, it was learning something alien. Something she wasn’t built for.

  Catcher raised a hand, two fingers raised.

  Alert.

  He was adjusting his grip on his weapon.

  Twenty feet down the hall, a red-haired woman stepped out of a doorway, spinning to face us, rapidly walking backward.

  The two fingers folded into his fist, leaving only the gesture for ‘stop’.

  He’d picked it up fast enough.

  We stopped in the middle of the hallway. There were no footsteps drumming above us, but there were creaks here and there in the apartment building, as if it were caught in a strong wind, or it was busy resettling.

  A full second after we stopped, the sounds did too.

  “Hello!” Helen called out to the red-haired woman.