Twig

by wildbow

  “How?”

  “Have the men in the towers direct the Brechwell Beast along the North Road.”

  He stared at me, analyzing.

  “If people in the towers shoot to change or confuse its course, then you know they’re on her side. You can’t have people like that at your Academy while you rebuild,” I said.

  The Headmaster General nodded. He leaned close to one of the remaining officers, whispering orders, and then sent the man scampering off.

  “I’m staying with you, until this is all resolved,” he said.

  “It’s as resolved as it will get,” I said. “We pick up the pieces, now, and pay mind to the aftermath.”

  It wasn’t fast, the transmission of orders, or the initial movement of the Beast. Despite his promise to stay with us, the General stepped away to coordinate the passing on of messages.

  Jamie pointed the way, figuring out the routes Fray might have taken, the places she could be, assuming she was making a beeline for freedom.

  “This won’t stop her,” Mary said. “A surprise attack by the Brechwell Beast? It won’t remove her from the picture, she’s too canny.”

  “Her? No. But she has a small army with her. Can all of them get to cover? There’s got to be an inverse to the cats and cockroaches principle.”

  “We don’t have one,” Lillian said.

  “You need one,” I said. “Always count on some degree of incompetence, in a sufficiently large group.”

  The Brechwell Beast was moving. Picking up speed.

  “It’s on the North Road,” Jamie said.

  It had been quiet too long, my focus elsewhere. The sound of his voice made my heart leap, then fall three times as far as it had risen.

  I had never missed my best friend more.

  “Lowering its head,” the General said. “It spotted something.”

  It took three seconds. One attack.

  Then the Beast continued on its way.

  “We’re done,” I said. “Nothing more we can accomplish here. Let’s go find the others. You can break the news to them, Jamie.”

  “The news?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

  My heart was heavy. “I know. I’ve figured it out, why they would go for Ashton and not Evette.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “What?” Mary asked.

  “Redundancy,” I said. “Two social manipulators, two people who can fight. Why? Think about it.”

  “I’m thinking about it, but, they don’t expect any of us to die? Or are they—they’re not canceling a project?”

  I could hear the alarm in her voice. I could see the relief as I shook my head.

  A few ‘pops’ of gunfire suggested that things hadn’t entirely settled down in Brechwell.

  “They’re going to split up the Lambs. Or at least prepare for it to happen soon,” I said.

  Previous Next

  Enemy (Arc 7—Boys)

  Ashton

  “Here we go again,” Sylvester said.

  Ashton stared at the boy, uncomprehending. Here we go again? What did he mean?

  He said a lot of things that were hard to puzzle out.

  Understanding was important, the people back home kept saying. Had to learn, had to study. Ashton was here to study by experiencing. But Ashton had more questions than there was time to ask. If he started asking then he might never stop. Jamie didn’t mind, but Jamie wasn’t the only person here. The train car was packed with people, and people that listened to Ashton speak for too long had a way of acting funny and getting concerned.

  Then he had to make them less concerned.

  But that was a problem too, Jamie said.

  Click click click click. Hard shoes tapped the floor of the train car.

  Here we go again, Ashton realized. It was the woman again. He turned his head, looking up, just as she came into view. She was tall and pale and had dark hair. She was more like the pictures of pretty ladies they had shown Ashton than the pictures of the ugly people. That was a hard thing to figure out. If he paid too much attention to what made people pretty, the parts of the face, then he still made mistakes.

  Jamie had figured that out first, after watching Ashton’s class on people, faces, and acting. Jamie had found a medical textbook and showed it to Ashton, and Ashton had called the woman in that book pretty. That upset a lot of people. They asked him questions and Jamie said that the way her face was shaped, the shape of her eye, the look of her eyebrows, nose and mouth all seemed right.

  But the drawing of the woman in the book had a problem with the eye. The woman here had no scar on her face, no missing parts, no pocks or poxes. She looked young and smooth and wore makeup with a uniform that meant she was a member of the staff.

  She put a hand on Ashton’s head as she leaned in between the two benches the Lambs sat on. “Can I get you anything?”

  “No,” Gordon said, sounding tired.

  “We have biscuits in the staff’s car.”

  “You’ve mentioned the biscuits,” Gordon said. “No thank you.”

  “Something to drink?”

  “No,” Gordon said, firmly. “Thank you. We need some privacy, please.”

  “The train arrives shortly.”

  “Thank you,” he said, for the hundredth time.”

  “I’ll give you a hand when you step off the train.”

  “No need. Thank you.”

  “No need,” Ashton echoed Gordon, voice soft. He was bad at controlling his volume for different situations, so he spoke quietly just to be sure. Most people listened when he talked.

  The woman walked away. Ashton stared at her, watching her go.

  “What’s that,” Sylvester asked. “Thirty times?”

  “Thirty-one. Close,” Jamie said.

  “Bully for me,” Sylvester said.

  “You need to learn some control, Ash,” Gordon said.

  “Okay,” Ashton said. “It’s a problem?”

  “It’s annoying,” Mary said. “We’re supposed to be covert. Having people flocking to us? Not covert.”

  “I could push her away.”

  “Don’t,” Jamie said.

  “I think that would be a horrible idea,” Jamie said. “Look.”

  Ashton stared at the point of Jamie’s finger.

  “No,” Jamie said. His expression and tone were patient. Ashton remembered that lesson. “Imagine a line, drawn along my arm and out past the point my finger extends, where does that line go?”

  Ashton knew his brain didn’t work like a human’s did. When he imagined something new, he had to work to do it, and the things he imagined overwrote the things he saw. The line appeared, red because Ashton preferred the color red. He followed it, head turning, and had to work to correct it so it was mostly straight.

  Sitting across the aisle was a family. The two younger children and the mom were staring at the Lambs. The mom raised her hand in a small wave, smiling. Behind the family was a window, looking out on fields and trees. An orchard.

  “I’m pointing at the family.”

  Ashton nodded. Nodding was the thing people did when they wanted to say ‘yes’ or to agree, but didn’t want to say something. He was supposed to nod if he would say yes more than twice in a very short time, which was often when he was getting a lot of instructions. He wasn’t supposed to talk too much until he learned how conversations worked, so he’d chosen to nod.

  “If you try to make people go away, it makes them feel uneasy, scared, sick, or angry,” Jamie said, his voice quieter than before. Jamie’s hand had gone back to his lap, and the red line that stretched out from his fingertip was pointed at the train car wall under the window. “If you do that in this train car, where people have been breathing you in for a long time…?”

  Ashton looked around.

  “Chaos and panic?” Sylvester suggested.

  “Yes,” Jamie said. “I was asking Ashton, though, because it was a teachable moment.”

  “Ah, right.”

  Chaos and pan
ic.

  Ashton watched as people all around him started getting up from their seats, hitting each other, pushing, trying to get away. He could hear them as they made noise. They weren’t real people, only his imagination, and he wasn’t good at imagining people. The blood-stained pictures in his mind’s eye were distorted, the faces weren’t symmetrical—that was the part about the one-eyed woman’s face that the acting teacher had explained was important—and some had only one eye, or eyes in the wrong place, or stretched out black circles for mouths.

  He’d seen a lot of blood spatters during and after the fighting in Brechwell. The organ structures in his head, described as coral-like in appearance by one of his doctors, were busy calling those images from his memories, painting them around the train car. Sometimes the scale was wrong, or it was the wrong angle, against the wrong surface.

  But he was supposed to practice, and it was pretty enough to look at, so he let the images and the spatters and the dead bodies keep overlapping, even though none of it made sense anymore.

  Jamie was talking, he realized. He made the imagined-hallucinated screams stop so he could understand.

  “—when he gets more control.”

  “Nuanced,” Sylvester said.

  “We hope,” Jamie said.

  Ashton nodded. He wasn’t wholly sure that he understood what they were saying, but sitting still and doing nothing bothered people sometimes. Jamie said he was supposed to practice when and how he spoke and participated, even if he got it wrong, but only with the Lambs.

  “It’s interesting,” Sylvester said. “Figuring out how to move this particular game piece, with all of the inherent problems it brings to the picture.”

  “Game pieces?” Lillian asked. “Is that how you see us?”

  “Only when we’re playing a game, Lil,” Sylvester said. He looked to one side and then groaned.

  Click click click click…

  “I have mints in my purse, if you’d like—”

  “No,” Gordon said. “Thank you, miss.”

  “Okay, I just thought you should know the train is stopping now.”

  “Thank you,” Gordon said.

  “I’ll help you with your bags.”

  “No need. Thank you.”

  Ashton turned his head to look up at the woman. His imagination had the father from across the aisle swing the smallest of the children by one ankle, the head cracking open against the back of Ashton’s seat. Blood flew into the woman’s face. She didn’t move or flinch.

  That was false.

  He was supposed to practice. He imagined it happening again, her expression changing. What were the right emotions? Disgust and fear. The two put together, what was it? Horror.

  He watched the scene replay, over and over, trying to piece it together until it looked like something that should happen.

  “Ashton,” Gordon said. “Pay attention.”

  Ashton realized the woman was gone. The scene broke down into constituent parts, those parts scattering. He turned back to Jamie.

  “Don’t forget your umbrella,” Gordon said.

  “Don’t open it until we’re out of the train car,” Jamie corrected.

  Ashton bent down and picked up his umbrella. The others were getting their coats on. He didn’t have one, because using an umbrella was easier than remembering how to get dressed in a way that didn’t draw attention.

  “Try to focus, okay? I know you and Jamie aren’t facing the same danger as the rest of us, but what comes next matters.”

  Ashton nodded.

  Focus. He stopped practicing. The images went away, one by one. He looked across the aisle, and the images there went away too.

  The train stopped before he was finished.

  The Lambs made their way out, grabbing their bags from the compartment by the door. The man at the bottom of the stairs down to the train platform helped each of them, smiling at Ashton as Ashton stared up at him.

  There was a group waiting for them. Ashton’s doctors were among them. The department heads, the new Academy Headmaster, Professor Hayle, Professor Ibott, and a number of others Ashton didn’t recognize stood at a point just past the exit from the station.

  “Hoo boy,” Gordon said.

  Ashton watched the family that had been across the aisle walk past. The youngest child’s head was imagined-hallucinated to be broken apart from when his head had been smashed against the back of the seat, contents leaking out. Brains were gray but they looked pink when seen fresh because of the blood in and on them. Ashton left the little boy like he was, because it was pretty, and because red was his favorite color.

  Gordon

  Gordon’s hand reached down to find Hubris’ head. He gave it a pat and a scratch, more for his own security than for Hubris. Mary stood beside him. That was security of another sort.

  Scares like this were bad for his heart.

  “Lord Duke, Lord, Headmaster, esteemed professors,” Gordon greeted the committee in his best guess at order of hierarchy. There was a new noble as part of the group, and Gordon didn’t recognize the man.

  The Duke and the new noble were wearing hunting clothes, pants clinging to their legs, long jackets. The noble in the Duke’s company was younger, no older than eighteen, as far as age could be estimated by appearance when a noble was concerned. He had a pointed, jutting chin, stood tall at seven feet, narrow and long-necked. A swan turned human. Graceful, imperious, and, Gordon knew, swans were absolute bastards when met face to face.

  Like the Duke, the man’s hair was long and golden, but his hair was straight and flowed straight down his back, more supple than hair should be. He wore a checkered scarf in yellow and black. His teeth, as he smiled, seemed wrong somehow, too uniform and white, and his fingers were especially long, poking out of the embroidered sleeve of a hunting jacket. The nails were long and sharp, and the fingers were marked with jewelry.

  He wore a sword, Gordon noted. Noble anatomy, modified to be stronger, faster, inhuman by most measures. Gordon couldn’t say why, but he had the vague sense that the man could and would draw and use that sword to dispatch anyone who insulted him.

  Sylvester would be able to say why he gave off that impression, Gordon knew. All Gordon had in this situation were his instincts. He’d heard of the mad nobles, the dangerous ones, and this one felt more dangerous than even the Duke.

  Please don’t talk, Sylvester. Don’t say anything.

  “This is the Baron Richmond,” the Duke said. “A cousin. We were near Brechwell when we heard of the situation in Brechwell. Genevieve Fray spotted and effectively cornered.”

  Lower in status than the Duke by six orders of nobility, Gordon estimated. He wouldn’t speak out of turn. That was good. Gordon could imagine the man establishing his presence through violence and the making of examples.

  “Walk with us,” the Duke said. “Your bags will be looked after.”

  Gordon’s, “Yes, my lord,” joined a number of others.

  He didn’t even wait to see if the Lambs listened. The Baron fell in step beside the Duke with no trouble. The pair walked fast enough that their retinue and the other professors had to work to keep up. For the Lambs, especially the smaller ones, Ashton and Sylvester, that was doubly difficult.

  The crowd parted, people already had their heads and eyes toward the ground. As the Duke advanced, people of all social classes dropped to their knees on the damp road. It was as though an invisible wave preceded him, knocking people down.

  “Who have we lost to her side?” the Duke asked. He didn’t turn around.

  The Baron was watching over one shoulder. Gordon felt uneasy.

  “Out of the superweapons, Dog and Catcher, to be sure, my lord. Petey was confirmed. Most of the rest, but we can’t be sure who,” Gordon said.

  “The Baron has been arguing that you’re more liability than asset,” the Duke said. “We don’t know where the Lambs stand.”

  “The Baron is wrong,” Sylvester said, adding a belated, “My lord.”<
br />
  Gordon momentarily closed his eyes. Hearing Sylvester speak, even before the sentence was finished, had Gordon’s heart skipping a beat. Cognitively, he knew Sylvester had gauged the situation and no doubt gauged it well. But there was no room for even small errors, not here.

  The Baron had a dangerous look in his eye, but he hadn’t spoken.

  “Do you think so?” the Duke asked.

  “Yes, my lord,” Sylvester said.

  “I said much the same thing.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Sylvester said. Gordon could hear the note of smug satisfaction in Sylvester’s voice.

  “Provided we decide you’re trustworthy,” the Duke said. “You’ll give your report to the professors, the Baron and I will look over the written transcripts, and we’ll give the final judgments.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Gordon said, before Sylvester could speak. He couldn’t let Sylvester take command of this conversation.

  “My sisters will want to participate as well,” the Baron said.

  “Do you think so?” the Duke asked.

  “They’ve been so bored, and have complained about being left out of the hunting trip.”

  “Very well, the twins as well.”

  The twins. The words were akin to a bell in Gordon’s memory.

  Gordon had heard of the twins. To be exact, he’d heard about them in the context of the mad nobles. On the flip side, mention of mad nobles as a general topic invariably meant mention of the twins.

  “Little Helen, I think the Baron, Baronets and I would enjoy your company after all is said and done, should you be cleared of wrongdoing or dissent. You and Professor Ibbot shall join us.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Helen said, curtsying without slowing so much it mattered.

  “I’m honored, my lord,” Ibott squawked.

  “Yes, yes,” the Duke said, sounding annoyed the man had spoken.

  “If they aren’t cleared of wrongdoing, we should have them join us for company all the same,” the Baron said, still staring at Sylvester. “As I said, my sisters have been bored.”

  “I wonder if I haven’t read a fairy tale about something like that,” the Duke said. “It seems unwise to invite a group of assassins over for company and amusement, especially if they’ve been proven as traitors.”