Twig

by wildbow

  “One at a time, then. Or send their creators in with them.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Gordon could see Ibott react to that.

  Hubris touched his nose to Gordon’s hand.

  Gordon’s heart was thumping. It was a limping struggle, one side stronger than the other.

  By all rights, he should have stopped walking and let it calm down and find its rhythm again. He kept up the pace.

  “That in mind, I would recommend we err on the more conservative side of things,” the Baron said.

  The Duke, still leading the group as they walked up to the Academy, smiled at that. “I’d ask if you meant conservative in the sense of preserving more of our Academy’s hard work, or conservative in avoiding potential traitors in our midst, but it would be a rhetorical question, dear Richmond.”

  “I’ll be paying close attention to the verdict,” the Baron said. “If I’m dissatisfied with the result, I’ll see that corrections are made.”

  If he doesn’t get the guilty verdict, then heads roll. Or whatever he and his sisters do to amuse themselves. The Baron was a mad one too, then.

  That would make for a fairly emotional discussion. Some of the people in the meeting that were discussing whether the Lambs were too dangerous or not were in danger regardless of what happened.

  Jory, Gordon’s head doctor, glanced back, offering a worried look. He was one of them.

  No trust. Mary got along with her doctors, at least to the point of being able to have conversations. Jamie did too. Had and still did, presumably. Sylvester… didn’t get along with most. But Gordon’s team was a big one. The conversations had been limited to small talk, a duty that seemed to be rotated between staff members to the point that little familiarity was established.

  “Tell us,” the Duke said. “A prelude to the interrogations. What did you accomplish?”

  “We know her plan, my Lord,” Sylvester said.

  “The creator of the Ghosts is dead, my Lord,” Gordon said.

  “That would be my creator,” Mary said.

  “Mary had a strong hand in how that unfolded. We couldn’t have done it without her,” Gordon said. “With that settled, we can hope they don’t have the resources to keep developing and improving on that project, which we know was tying up our resources. With luck, the project might die altogether.”

  “And Fray herself?” the Duke asked.

  “We didn’t have the manpower to stop her ourselves, with our forces distracted and other experiments turning coat, but we were able to make a last minute maneuver and steer the city’s superweapon her way. A number of her people were injured.”

  “Was Genevieve Fray?”

  “No reports of such, Lord Duke. She has Avis, wearing wings, as well as a brute of a man in her company, they could have scaled to a safer height or forced their way through a set of doors or a window. We were talking about it earlier, but it didn’t sound as if she was successful in forming the alliance between the different factions,” Gordon said.

  “Explain.”

  This was where he bent the truth. He didn’t have the deserved reputation of a liar that Sylvester did. He had the undeserved reputation as the honest one.

  “Lord Duke,” Gordon said. “In part, our actions disrupted the already tenuous negotiations between Genevieve Fray and Cynthia. Cynthia split off to charge through the Academy’s lines. Mauer’s side was displeased with how things were going before that, we killed one of his lieutenants, something that wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t come to Fray’s meeting, and our final move, delivered with the Brechwell Beast, primarily hurt Mauer’s elite group of soldiers and may have even hurt Mauer himself.”

  “You believe he’ll be at odds with her?”

  “I believe, my lord,” Gordon said, “that he won’t be as sympathetic to her as he might be if things had played out otherwise.”

  “And here I’d actually thought I had to invite my cousin to visit in order to hear someone tell me so very little of substance with so many words,” the Duke said.

  “You wound me,” the Baron said. The Duke smiled, but it was faintly derisive. Gordon wondered if even close friendships in the Duke’s world were combative and bitter.

  Hubris nudged Gordon’s hand again.

  It’s okay, boy.

  “I’m sorry to be vague, my lord,” Gordon said. His heart hitched, and he bit back a gasp. “I’m aware that if I’m too specific, and something contradicts the specifics, it will look bad.”

  “Very true. I have missed the Lambs. I so often find I have to hunt for intellectual company, even among professors and supposed geniuses.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Gordon said. “Thank you.”

  They were approaching the Academy gates now. The armed guard at the gate parted, the gates opening as that invisible wave of presence extended out to touch it.

  “We’ll be taking our leave. I did promise Baron Richmond a hunt today, we’ll be visiting the underground labs to see what can be loosed. Keep the Lambs separate, watch for their hand-signs, see to their appointments after or during, so we can be sure they won’t coordinate or correct one another’s stories. Though I imagine they would have already, were they lying.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Sylvester said.

  Both the Duke and the Baron looked back at Sylvester. Most of the Professors did too, the ones with their lives on the line looking aghast.

  “If we were lying, my lord,” Sy said. “We’re not.”

  “You are very fortunate you amuse me, Sylvester,” the Duke said, sounding far from amused.

  Then the Duke was gone, talking to the Baron as they walked. The group remained where it was, the crowd that had parted remained still, almost as if it was in shock, unsure if it was safe to resume going about their day.

  “Indoors,” the new Headmaster spoke. “No talking. It’s bad enough some of my superweapons have turned, I’m not about to lose my head, or half of my staff. Radham Academy has to recover from this. We do this perfectly, giving the Baron no excuse to target us.”

  It wouldn’t matter, Gordon knew.

  Claret Hall wasn’t far from the entrance. Some staff broke away to look after other business. The Lambs weren’t among them.

  Gordon’s left hand went to his chest, rubbing at the sternum, as if he could somehow massage what lay within. It wasn’t settling.

  Beside him, Mary took his other hand. It was only when he felt the warmth of her hand that he realized how cold he’d gotten.

  His interaction with her had happened so gradually he wasn’t sure when it had unfolded. She’d started expressing interest some time after he’d broken it off with Shipman, through little gestures, going out of her way to spend time with him, to practice, showing him her knife throwing so he could improve his own.

  He’d stayed at arm’s length, because he knew Sylvester had feelings of his own for the girl, as well as a kind of possessive attachment. With anyone else, there might have been problems, but she’d kept him at arm’s length, too.

  It had just been that. A pretty girl, regularly in his company.

  But then Sy had started paying more attention to Lillian, and Gordon knew there was some manipulation there, Sy playing some matchmaking game, providing signals. Gordon had let it be what it was and stopped worrying about hurting their friendship.

  Then this thing with Percy, and Mary had drawn close.

  It was awfully easy to let her. All the rational reasons not to were suddenly very hard to bring up. She wasn’t some common girl, he could never stand the usual girls, not the ones nearer his own age at Lambsbridge, not the ones he’d seen associating with the mice, not the pretty ones at Mothmont.

  He liked Mary like he still liked Shipman. Both were girls who demanded a special kind of respect, instead of being content to receive ordinary respect. Smart, dangerous, strong in their individual ways. But all of that was dressed up in girl. Not girlishness or femininity, but in the distilled reality of girl. He wanted to see mor
e of them, hear them speak, touch them, taste them as he kissed them. The way Mary’s skirt moved as she walked made him feel like he’d just stepped outside to sun and fresh air, after years and years of rain and Radham air that smelled like smoke, blood, and manure.

  Helen’s explanation of her own desires were scarily in line with his own when put forward as an allegory for how strong his own feelings sometimes were. What had she said? ‘Feel every part of them with every part of myself?’

  He glanced at her. She gestured. Strength. Courage.

  “None of that,” someone barked, behind them.”

  Mary lowered her hand. She smiled at him.

  They would get through this. Looking at her like this, he could appreciate why people drew together, formed pairs, even with all of the difficulties of being in a relationship.

  He imagined her face, contorted with a special kind of grief as she looked down on his body.

  His desires and the new feeling of guilt joined the anxiety of the moment, the imminent questioning. The feelings didn’t mingle or mix, but remained discrete. A jigsaw set of emotions for a jigsaw body made of individual pieces that just so happened to be put together.

  The Lambs were so similar in that way. The distinctions between each were clear. Yet the Lambs were to be split up.

  The symbolic parallel gave him an uneasy feeling, as the Lambs were invited to sit on either side of the hallway, more than ten feet of space separating one Lamb from the next. The doctors and groups of doctors positioned themselves to better block line of sight.

  He spent so much of his time worrying, these days. It would be so nice to stop dreading what came next and just focus on the present. The closer Mary was to him at a given point in time, the more he felt like he could do that. Probably why he’d been dwelling on her so much in the last few minutes.

  “Sylvester first,” Hayle suggested. “I somehow feel like we’ll want to take what he says and keep it in mind as each of the other Lambs speak.”

  So much worrying.

  Previous Next

  Enemy (Arc 7—Girls)

  Mary

  Four nobles. Augmented physiology, augmented minds. They were, as Mr. Percy would have said, ‘top notch‘. Absolute monsters. Depending on what unfolded, the Lambs might find themselves in a fight by the day’s end.

  It wasn’t a situation the Lambs would survive.

  She had to trust Sy and Gordon to figure out if there was a way out, and handle her part of the questioning as well as she could. What she could figure out was a way to make things easier. If they were called in, the girls were likely to be called in first. Helen first of all, the appointment was already made, then Mary herself, very possibly, or Lillian or maybe Sylvester, but Mary was likely.

  The professors and assistants in the hallway were blocking Mary’s view of the rest of the group, while Gordon was inside, giving his answers. She could only stare out the window, at the people, or gaze at the floor while she worked out a strategy.

  Mr. Percy had always encouraged ‘mental practice’. Picturing where her body would be, the motions she would make, the weight of things, and all the details, sometimes over and over, before she acted. Then she would act, perform more mental practices, adjusting for how things had felt, and the loop would continue until the actions and process were distilled in her mind’s eye.

  Helen would probably die, if she was first. If Sylvester or Lillian were second, then they would die next. That would hurt more. She cared about Helen, but Lillian was her best friend, worth killing Percy for. Sylvester was important to her for different reasons.

  She had to steel herself for that. Prepare herself by putting the emotions aside, lock them away. If she was going to use them, it had to be in rage or in desperation, a forward push to get past any pain or bodily harm she might feel, past poisons or drugs or whatever else they might do to her.

  The Twins were torturers with a retinue of doctors and madmen who catered to their whims. The bodies might well be on display. What was left of them, if they were lucky enough to be dead.

  Mary felt cold inside, hollowed out, but she was able to drive out the feelings of fear and panic. Those were useless, dangerous feelings, ones that robbed her of precision and control.

  She had to prepare, be ready.

  The Nobles were tall. They liked that, being above the common people. Mary was far from full grown, with a three-quarter foot to grow, if she compared herself to the woman who was supposed to be her mother. The legs would be her best target.

  But that wasn’t the whole story. The jackets the Duke and Baron had been wearing were heavy, and they flowed oddly as they walked. There was something in them, armor.

  She had to attack from the front, knowing that the one she chose as her target was quicker, faster, and very aware of what was going on around them.

  Best to attack while her back was turned. Use her head to distract and drive one foot back and up, to target the knee. If she could topple one, then she could target the neck.

  Easiest to do if she had a knife, but she suspected she would be searched. They knew her methods too well.

  There was a disposable scalpel razor in the lining of her coat, and another blade in the tongue of her shoe. Small enough she could put them up her nasal cavity or in her mouth. The nose meant a risk of bleeding if she slipped, but she’d done it before. The mouth, hm, they would search her mouth if they had any sense at all, but she suspected she could embed the blade in the flesh behind the last molar, pointing toward her throat. Easy to miss if the lighting was wrong, and she could swallow the blood. If she threw up from that, then so much the better, it only gave her more opportunities.

  Maybe both.

  Topple her enemy, target the spine. She tried to picture the scenarios unfolding.

  Not the throat or the jugular, unless she could do that as part of something else. The spine was a better target. Cervical four, third bundle was a likely target, but would only shut off breathing, freezing the diaphragm. She would get pulled away, the doctors would swoop in. They would fix the noble in the time it took them to die from a lack of breath. Depending on how their bodies had been changed, that could be a very long time.

  Thoracics one through four had places she could drive a blade in to shut off the heart, lungs, and larynx. Drive in the blade, do as much damage as possible, shut off heart function or ability to breathe. Hard to do if the back was armored and protected, if the twins might have open backed dresses, or she could reach in past the collar. It was worth keeping in mind, reciting that play in her head as a possibility.

  If she could drive the blade in, knowing how small it was, then it would be harder to fix, the damage more severe. It would require something harder than any one part of her body. Something from the environment.

  She could do it if her hands were bound, it would be harder but possible. But being restrained was the least of her concerns, as she imagined different factors. They might not fall, even as she leveraged a kick that could break ordinary bone into one of the more vulnerable parts of the human body. Their spine might be protected. She might not be able to access and keep a blade. Her hands might even be bound, which wouldn’t stop her, but it could cost her the time she needed to grab the blade and follow through.

  She would die. That bothered her less than the cold hollow emptiness that Helen had articulated so well, the loneliness that took hold inside her even now at imagining Helen’s dead eyes staring off into space, or Lillian in horrible pain.

  She would die, but even if she tried, if she was clever about it, the nobles who remained might think twice about giving personal attention to the Lambs who remained. If they deferred to another method of execution or torture, then the remaining Lambs might have a chance to escape that they wouldn’t have with the nobles.

  It was a chance, however slim.

  Hope for the best, trust the Lambs, anticipate the worst. She and her knives as the final measure to turn to when the talking and strategy drew to a clos
e.

  So often, her way of showing her affection for others meant killing people. For Percy, it was always the plan. For Lillian, she’d killed Percy. Now she might have to kill a noble, a possibility few even dared to contemplate.

  The Lambs were too important to her.

  She could see glimpses of Helen through the crowd. Helen seemed utterly at ease, but she didn’t broadcast her feelings like others did. She could see the sort of situation that Mary had imagined earlier, the Lambs dead or mutilated, and smile and act like nothing was wrong.

  Mary liked to think that even if Helen smiled and acted normal, she would seek revenge if it came down to it. She had spent a lot of time stressing out about Helen, until months of close proximity and sharing a room had forced her to come to terms with her feelings. Helen was a lot easier to understand as a creature when Mary stopped looking at her as a human, and more as a reptile or a cat.

  Even cats and snakes had a measure of loyalty.

  That made her think of Lillian.

  Mary had never had a friend. The depth of her feelings for Lillian spooked her, sometimes, sometimes on par with her early feelings for Sylvester, in a very different way. Sylvester had been like a leap over a gap between rooftops, dangerous, uncertain even when she was fully aware of her own ability. She knew he was a manipulator and liar, and that had made him interesting.

  It still did. More than any of the Lambs, the little things and the patterns of Sylvester promised to complete her. They were in step, he could carry out a plan and she didn’t feel uncertain. When she faltered, he was there. When he faltered, she knew she had the opportunity to shine. It was rare for her to experience the concern about Sylvester’s plans that Gordon so often commented on.

  She had spent a long time feeling very incomplete, as if she was working hard to fill a void with Percy’s approval, and someone who conformed to her as easily as Sylvester seemed to do was tempting.

  But it had always felt dangerous. Always promised betrayal down the line. Idly, she had sometimes wondered how she would kill him if it came down to it, because she couldn’t entirely convince herself that it wouldn’t. Even as her trust in him approached that ninety-nine point seven or ninety-nine point eight percent, she had harbored faint doubts. That was who he was.