Twig

by wildbow

  I gave him a small wave back.

  Then my eyes dropped to the book. I avoided looking at Jamie as the Doctors set everything up, pulling cloths off of the vats. A faint bioluminescent glow filled the room.

  I knew that if I looked at him, he’d gesture my way, and I’d have to respond. I didn’t know how to respond.

  Instead, I looked down at his notebook. Annals of past events, from someone with a perfect memory. I looked across the room at the bookshelves that ringed it, still avoiding looking directly at Jamie, and thought about the way things had been. All of the memories in there.

  I saw the men walk up the steps. In keeping with the promise, I watched carefully as they put the mask on, and put Jamie to sleep. I wasn’t sure Jamie saw me looking.

  All the same, when they threw the switch, it made me jump.

  Jamie was under. He sagged slightly, the cords and connections running into his back and all down his spine, tension tight, holding him mostly upright. I could hear the humming, see the overlarge brains in tanks move slightly, reacting to altered blood flow and temperature.

  I nodded, then opened the book, paging through it.

  I wanted to find an answer, and I didn’t. There was an insight into Jamie’s eyes. A drawing of the rat with grass and flowers growing out of it, other things he’d seen—creatures I’d missed, people in the street. The Lambs recurred, over and over again. The strokes were bold and harsh, sketchy more than anything.

  A perfect memory made for that kind of harsh view of things, maybe. You couldn’t forget the ugly little details.

  I closed the book. The answers I needed weren’t in there.

  I spent a while looking at Jamie, then a while looking across the hall and out the window.

  “Hey,” a man’s voice said.

  I raised my head. I saw a bruiser of a man in a lab coat that didn’t fit him. “Oh. Yeah. I was supposed to stop in.”

  “Don’t fucking waste our time, Sylvester,” Huey said.

  “I didn’t mean to. I was thinking.”

  “You’ll think better after your appointment.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I nodded to myself. “Yeah. That’s true.”

  “Let’s get it done.”

  “Now? Huey, look, if we can’t—”

  “That’s not my name.”

  I blinked.

  “Dewey,” he said.

  “Close enough.”

  “It hasn’t been that long, Sylvester,” he said.

  “No, probably not,” I said. “Can you do me a favor?”

  “I seem to recall the last two favors ending up—”

  “Not like that,” I said. “No. I just… I need to think, without Wyvern. To see if I even can figure out this problem in my head, when I’m like this? Do you get what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Yeah, look, can I stay? You can dick off and do whatever, or get caught up on whatever.”

  He gave me a level stare.

  “Please, Dewey. I need to be here, I think. Or I won’t be focused on the problem.”

  “We use the restraints this time. You stay put, after getting dosed, you stay quiet, you don’t bitch, you don’t get clever and try to run off while you’re working through the worst of the pain. Think you can manage that?”

  I nodded.

  “I fucking hope so,” he said. “Fuck with us on this and you don’t get any favors again.”

  I nodded.

  He tromped off, heavy feet clumping down the hall.

  Avis was enduring her own mental gauntlet, caught with nothing else to do but try to endure, to figure out what her answer to the Duke would be. Mine touched on unfamiliar territory. On Jamie, and a divide between us that I couldn’t ignore.

  It hurt, that things couldn’t be what they were. I was angry, I was confused. There was no right answer to give, yet if I couldn’t one, then things would be broken like this forever.

  That he’d think I wouldn’t look after his book or keep the promise after everything we’d been through, it scared me. Some things were inviolable. It made me feel uneasy.

  Hours passed. It was dark, but for flickering lights and the glow from the room, the doctors rotating so that one was observing at all times.

  The entire time, I was trying to unravel the problem, though the edges of my brain had dulled. I wasn’t sure why I was so stubborn about wanting to do it without a full dose of Wyvern, but I’d started the journey and wasn’t about to abandon it.

  I looked deep within, trying to find a glimmer of something, as if I could pry out some part of myself that could see Jamie in the way he seemed to see me. I thought back, memory by memory, trying to figure out when things had changed, knowing my memory was weak at the best of times. I thought about looking in the books, but somehow I knew I needed to find the answer here, not there.

  As the third doctor came in for their night-shift, stepping over me in the doorway, I asked the time, and was informed it was four in the morning.

  Perhaps an hour after that, I realized what it was I was trying to do.

  I couldn’t have one more minute like the past afternoon and evening had been. Not another second of that painful awkwardness. I wouldn’t be able to endure it.

  I had to greet him with a genuine smile as he woke. Nothing more. I could do that much. I was sure that it would at least open the door for things to get better, and that was all we really needed.

  Secure in that knowledge, I finally drifted off.

  ☙

  Hands seized me and dragged me, pulling me out of the way. I stirred, annoyed, knowing I hadn’t gotten enough sleep, that it was far too early and I’d fallen asleep too late.

  Then I realized where I was, my attention turned to where I was supposed to be—sleeping while sitting astride the doorframe, and I connected the dots to what was going on. The Lambs were coming down the hall at a run—Lillian, Gordon, Mary, a patchy Helen.

  There were far too many doctors in the room.

  The shock of being pulled from deep sleep didn’t seem to go away. I felt detached as I pulled myself to my feet.

  Gordon was shouting my name.

  I ignored him, pushing my way through the doorway, into the room.

  So many doctors here, talking, chatting. I’d seen all of them at one point or another. Hayle was just entering the room behind me. He gave me a passing glance, then headed over to talk to Jamie’s doctor.

  I turned my attention to the throne.

  Jamie wasn’t there.

  There was a person, and that person looked down at me, but there was nothing there. No glimmer of recognition, no personality.

  He moved his hand, and it was a movement that suggested he was figuring it out.

  Empty.

  I could hear the chatter as two dozen disparate voices, talking about the same sort of thing. What had been retained, what would be in the tanks, what to keep. Project caterpillar this, project caterpillar that.

  Everyone on their best behavior, with the Duke leaning against the wall in the corner, arms folded, observing.

  Jamie’s name didn’t seem to come up once.

  I spotted the doctors in charge of Jamie’s care.

  They were taking it in stride. Upset, as anyone would be when they had a bad day at work, but hardly upset enough.

  I passed by one doctor, bumping into them, and my hand found their pocket. A scalpel was clipped to the inside. I grabbed it and popped off the tip.

  A short distance later, I repeated the same process, finding another. I drew nearer to Hayle and the other doctors.

  The closer I got, the more sure my steps were. I walked briskly, head down, scalpels hidden so they wouldn’t be too obvious.

  I was tackled all the same, thrown to the ground, arms hugging my arms to my sides, scalpels gripped to either side of my waist.

  I fought, squirming, elbowing, wrestling, mad and incoherent and not even sure what sounds were leaving my lips. Tears were streaming down my chee
ks.

  It was Jamie, damn it.

  I managed to flip over, got my wrist free of the grip, and stabbed, only to get caught again, and swiftly disarmed.

  I stopped when I met Gordon’s eyes. I saw the tears there. I saw the Lambs huddled behind him, the expressions in their faces. They were standing, and I was the one that was breaking. I stopped struggling and went limp.

  “The one fucking time you put up a half-decent fight, Sy,” Gordon said, soft words all too audible in the hush.

  Previous Next

  Enemy (Arc 6)

  The door slammed shut. The impact rattled her thoughts. Double vision, triple vision, vertigo, but all cognitive, her thoughts alone.

  One breath blurred into the next, the space between breaths stretched on, adding together, piling onto one another until she realized she was suffocating. She coughed, gasping and wheezing for air.

  Panic surged in her breast. A bird’s flutter of emotion, beating harder and more frantically, until it filled her.

  Then, unsustainable, it was gone. Was it the drugs they were pumping into her that quelled the fear? Did they worry that enough fear and anxiety could tax her brain and kill her?

  Or had minutes passed, or hours?

  She screamed, thrashing against her bonds, a cage custom-molded to her body. The scream bounced off of the walls, joining the fresh screams as she caught breath. A momentary catch, a drawn-out process of panting for breath? Both?

  She tried to figure out which it was, scanning her memory, gathering clues, and lost track of time. She gasped for breath again, having let herself slip, letting the time between breaths become too long.

  Heartbeat, she thought. She fixated on her heartbeat. The steady pulse, accelerated by her fear. It was meditative, calming, a rope to cling to as she drowned in this new sea.

  They stole my sanity, she thought.

  They stole my mind from me. They’ve hobbled my brain as surely as they crippled my body. Until I can get this fixed, I’ve forever got one additional ball to juggle.

  There were tears in the corner of her eyes. She struggled again against the bondage, fierce enough she was certain she would hurt something.

  She had to adjust her mental clock, taking into account the exertion, how it affected the heartbeats she was counting.

  The lighting seeping in through the crack beneath the door had changed. Was that the flicker of torchlight, or had she been down here long enough for things to change? A different load on the systems of the Academy, leaving more power to go to the lights in the hall?

  Her heartbeat had calmed, she realized, but she was still using the same measure, her judgment of how many seconds or minutes had just passed was dashed to the wind.

  Someone moved in front of the door, a shadow passing through that slice of light.

  Unable to find the words, she screamed at the door. It was a futile thing, a cry for help with no expectation that that help would come.

  Everything she tried, it was making things worse. She was in the Bowels, a place where she’d spent a fair amount of time, and she knew how deep they would have put her, how thick the walls were, and how far the trip was to get to the surface. Even once she was there, she would be surrounded by soldiers, she would have to pass through the checkpoint, and pass more soldiers on the road out of the city.

  It was akin to being beneath the ocean, the weight of all of that water pressing down on her, crushing, wearing her away.

  Three more times, she lost track of her breathing. Her stomach gurgled, but it wasn’t hunger. It was suction and air, as a tube worked at the side of her stomach, removing waste, tarry and black. She felt a pressing need to go to the bathroom, but it never got better or worse. Tubes coiled up inside her bladder, most likely.

  Again, she screamed and thrashed. She wanted to hurt herself, to find some avenue to rub herself raw, do some damage, out of some hope that she could make that damage severe enough to end her existence. It would be a form of control, a way of taking charge of her own destiny.

  But it was futile. She’d been trained as a doctor, finishing her education here in Radham. She knew what the tarry black waste meant. She had a bloodspur in her. When her blood pressure was sufficiently high, the device would bleed her, dumping the blood into her stomach. New or artificial blood was fed in through tubes. She couldn’t bleed herself out, not realistically. If she was wounded, the bloodspur would cease working, and the wound would take over its duties of slowly emptying out the blood the tubes gave her.

  She was exhausted but unable to sleep. Again and again, she struggled, because there was nothing else to do with herself. Again and again, she lost track of her breathing as she got too deep in thought.

  Tears streaked down her face. She recovered.

  She screamed again, howling to see if she couldn’t scream her voice raw. The seam in her chest where they’d done surgery threatened to pop from the strain.

  The door opened. The light was blinding.

  Had she been in the dark that long? Or was it drugs and a perpetual state of blood loss?

  The Duke and his coterie.

  “I’m sorry for the delay,” he remarked. His expression was placid compared to hers, as she panted for breath. “I wanted to have a conversation with the Lambs.”

  She stared at him, uncomprehending.

  “Do you remember the terms of our last discussion?” he asked, his voice eerily smooth and deep. Artificial.

  “Yes,” she said, and her voice was hoarse.

  “I’m going to ask you a question. Yes or no answers only.”

  “Yes,” she said, again.

  “Will you provide the locations of each of the other cells?”

  She considered for a moment, but again, time threatened to slip away from her. After half a second—or was it a minute?—the Duke turned to leave.

  “Yes,” she said. She opened her mouth to speak, then remembered his warning and closed it again.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know where Percy is. Cynthia handled the coordination between groups.”

  “I see,” he said. He gestured at a doctor, “The mask.”

  “You said I had permission to speak!” she cried out, struggling, trying to pull her face away as the doctor lifted the tube and the grasping bloodsucker toward her mouth.

  “I didn’t say I’d favor the answer,” he said. “Take some time to think it over. I hope you’ll come up with clues about his whereabouts.”

  The tube slid down her throat. The device locked around her jaw and the back of her head, connecting to the table.

  The lights went out, and again, the door slammed shut.

  This time, she still needed to regulate her breathing, but it was through the nose alone. She couldn’t scream, she couldn’t measure her breaths.

  ☙

  There once was a girl named Mavis. People all around her got sick, half the people in the town she grew up in. It got worse and worse, people hacking and coughing, until the Academy arrived. The best doctors, checking, giving care, not unkind people.

  Had everything gone according to plan, it would have been a positive experience for her, a reason to respect and favor the Academy.

  Except Simon Weltsch had fought in the war, and he said there was a more sinister explanation. The Academy had made them sick, testing a drug on the village’s population without permission.

  She never found out if that was true or not, and as head of communications for Radham, she’d made use of every resource available to her to try and find out. It wasn’t to say Simon was spewing utter nonsense. After becoming a student, she had researched the testing of drugs on communities, but the casualties were low to nonexistent, the rate of advancement high. Without paperwork or records to tie back to her community in particular, it never quite hit home to the point that she could get angry about it.

  She wished she could say that Simon Weltsch’s unexplained and gruesome death had woken her up to reality. It was accepted across the c
ommunity that the Academy had done the deed to silence the dissident, but everyone was healthy and nobody had wanted to stick their head up, Mavis among them.

  She’d eaten dinner with her parents, gone for long walks and talked with her friends, and flirted with boys. As she came of age, she started studying, and earned a place at the Academy, abbreviating her name as soon as she fixed on her preferred area of study.

  No, Avis’ problem had never quite been with the Academy.

  Her first winter holiday back home, she had been excited to share her tales of being at the academy. Avis had met with friends for tea. The boys who’d been farmers and laborers trickled into the bar, and she’d remarked on how few were turning up. Then she had heard. No, not gone to war. Had it been that, she might have been able to justify it as necessary evil.

  Three nobles had come into town, young ladies not much older than she was, gallivanting around. The noblewomen had asked for the company of young men, and the young men had not been in a position to refuse. When they left, they took the most handsome with them. Avis’ girlfriends had joked that it wasn’t much loss, the noblewomen being so attractive, but she hadn’t missed the emotion beneath the words.

  There had been only one letter back since the boys had left, and it had read like it had been written carefully, so as not to offend any who read it before it reached home.

  It had taken some time for Avis to come to terms with her feelings over that. Life had gone on as normal, with some farmers getting help from the community to make up for the labor their sons weren’t providing. Where war was a necessary evil, this didn’t feel evil at all, and it most definitely did not feel necessary.

  It hadn’t been the blow that destroyed her loyalty to the Crown, but it had been a wedge, and every story or idea that touched on the Crown drove that wedge in deeper.

  Avis stared into the Duke’s eyes.

  “Do I need to repeat the question?” he asked.

  She opened her mouth, then closed it. She felt painful bumps here and there where the inside of her mouth had been rubbed by the gag.

  She nodded.

  “Will you tell me the location of your loved ones. Your mother, father, siblings, cousins, and the friends you wrote to while you were first studying in the Academy?”