Twig

by wildbow

  She froze, and looked up at her father, who wore a defeated expression, barely seeming to care about any of this.

  “What’s this about?” Everard asked.

  I leaned close to the girl, holding her hair to my nose. While close, I murmured under my breath, “Say yes.”

  She wore a puzzled expression as I backed away. She started to speak, and I stuck a finger up, pressing it against her mouth. I looked at the captain. “How much?”

  “Hm? To buy?” he asked. “Debt for that family is two thousand. That one’s five thousand, the criminals are working for five years at a dollar a day, if I remember right. Some for ten years, that one and that one.”

  I pulled my finger away, pointing at the girl. I asked her, “Do you know Lugh? Have you been?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Good,” I said. I turned to Everard. “I want to buy them, sir. Pay their debts and take them on. All of the children of the debtors, the child criminal, and the parents as well. It’s extra ears on the ground, we can wear their clothes off the boat, so we don’t draw too much attention.”

  “You don’t have the means of disguising yourself already?” Everard asked.

  Yes, of course we do.

  I grabbed the girl’s shirtfront, and sniffed it. “It smells like the seaside, sir. Sometimes we deal with people who have enhanced senses. Smelling like we belong is critical.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Everard said. “If that’s what you need to do, then do it. We’ll see about convincing the captain of the boat you’re taking.”

  “Do you have the wallet?” I asked Gordon, gesturing subtly at the same time.

  “No, it’s in one of the bags. I’ll get it.”

  Everard made a ‘tsk’ sound, then said, “Captain, do you know who I am?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Gage.”

  “I’ll pay you the next time you’re in this port. You know I’m good for my word.”

  “Yes sir,” the Captain said, trying too hard to avoid smiling. He put his hands on the shoulders of different members of the group I’d pointed out, speaking to his pet monster, murmured orders. Telling it not to act, to let them go. He’d gotten a grotesquely good deal on this, I suspected. “You have the means of controlling them?”

  “We’ll manage,” I said.

  “Mm hmm,” he said, in a very ‘it’s your funeral’ way.

  Nine people ended up coming, six children and three adults, two men and a woman, roughly half the group black, the other half white.

  I didn’t see Everard’s negotiation with the captain, but I did see the captain give the order to move one set of crates off the ship and onto the dock. Making room.

  I kept quiet and stayed focused, avoiding the puzzled glances of the parents and the children until the ship was underway. Everard Gage and Adelaide Gage stood on the docks, watching us as the crew freed the ship from the dock. There was probably a nautical term for it. Unmoored?

  “You’re free,” I murmured, to the little girl, gripping the ship railing and staring out over the water. Lillian was standing right beside me, Jamie behind me. “After you help us in Lugh, but you’re free. Debt is paid.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  I didn’t answer. The ship started moving.

  “Before this is done,” I said to the little girl, “After things settle down and you find a home, you need to learn to fend for yourself, to be clever and be strong. Because whatever your parents did to get into debt that bad, they’re going to do it again.”

  I turned my head, meeting her eyes.

  I saw a resigned look, one that suggested she’d long since accepted that she was doomed to rise and fall as her parents did.

  “The next time, you can’t get caught when they do. You have to be able to manage on your own. Because I’m betting that one of the stops between Lugh and Key Isle is an Academy.”

  “There isn’t,” Jamie said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Then they keep you at Key Isle until you know just how miserable existence is there, and then they tell you that you can leave, have your debt cleared, if only you accept doing some work for the Academy. They’ll test something on you, and you’ll take that deal. You’ll wish you hadn’t.”

  She nodded.

  “Go wait with your family below deck. If there’s too many of us, the captain is going to get annoyed.”

  She nodded again, then scampered off.

  I liked her.

  The ship rose and fell with waves. Hubris’ claws skittered momentarily on the deck.

  “Was that what happened to you?” Lillian asked, quiet. “With the debt, working for the Academy?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “Wouldn’t remember if it was.”

  She nodded. She took my hand.

  “But it could’ve been what happened,” I said. “Which is reason enough.”

  Previous Next

  Bleeding Edge—8.3

  I watched as Lugh came into sight. For a city that seemed to have been named as a hybridization of ‘Lug’ and ‘Ugh’, the sprawl I saw before me seemed fitting enough. It called the shims of Radham to mind, the poor, menial labor focused area of the city, but writ large and dashed across rocky seaside.

  Half of the buildings were blocky and brutish, pure utility and the cheapest means of building put to use—stone blocks and the builder’s trees, which seemed to have been grown into and through buildings rather than used as the buildings were first put together. Of the other half of the buildings, those that weren’t made out to be sloping off to one side by optical illusion and the jaunty slant of rooftops were actively working on falling over, with no optical illusion needed.

  A thick, dark smoke rose from chimneys, a thin spitting of rain came from the clouds above, and the odd occupant of the city had a lantern out or a flickering light on and casting orange light, despite the fact that it was still early in the afternoon.

  But the capstone, the element of Lugh that made people want to drift close enough to see, should they be on a boat, was the impressive sight of the great superweapon. Or the ex-superweapon. It had died at sea and drifted inland, or it had died at the coast and languished there. Either way, it was too big to really dispose of, so it had been left to rot. The armored exterior and the skin had proven too resilient for even vermin and disease to eat at, and much of it had calcified over the last decade or two, the remainder falling away. As new buildings and sections of dock had gone up, they had done so under, over, and around the tendrils and tentacles that flowed from the armored carapace. Here and there, wood had been grown and brickwork laid to reinforce the structure.

  “Professor Ibott’s mentor created that thing,” Jamie remarked.

  “Really?” I asked.

  The waves were heavy in the bay, and the ship rocked this way and that. We were heading for the dock, and it didn’t feel like we were slowing down enough to avoid crashing bodily into it. I tensed a little and gripped the railing.

  “They made the project a recurring one, they keep a pack of those things in the water, but the batches are smaller. At a certain point, with size, you’re not getting any more effective, you’re just showing off,” Jamie said. He smiled.

  I felt like he was making a joke, and I didn’t get it. That annoyed me, quite a lot.

  Was it a short joke? Because I was shorter than most boys my age? Whatever my exact age was?

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Sorry,” he said, looking out at the city.

  “S’alright,” I said. Even after months, there were still bound to be growing pains. I could take a short joke if it meant things would fit together better than they had been.

  He leaned over the railing, resting his chin on the back of his folded hands.

  I went still.

  Bad, complicated memories were springing to the fore.

  I swallowed hard, and I looked away, watching as the distance between the boat and the dock dwindled. The crew of the ship were rushing back and forth, seeing to dutie
s.

  Lillian was further down the ship’s port side, crouched over, her arms around Hubris, talking to the dog while she looked at Lugh through the posts of the ship’s railing. Gordon was below deck.

  When he pulled away like that, I knew something was troubling him. He’d be trying to rest so he could be in the best shape possible when we hit land again.

  Talking to Jamie was a good thing, from a strategic standpoint. I couldn’t just stick to Lillian and pester Gordon and call it a day. Leaving Jamie out and off to one side wouldn’t breed loyalty or develop the firm bonds, and it would leave me in the dark about him and him in the dark about us when it came to knowing how each of us approached things and thought.

  It was a good thing, but it was so dang hard sometimes.

  “You’ve been quiet on the subject of bringing the runaway girl home,” I commented.

  “I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other,” he said.

  “Really?” I asked.

  He raised his head up, which was a bit of a relief.

  “Really, really?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said. The chin went back down, and he resumed watching the waves break to individual pieces against the rocky outcropping that was the closest thing to Lugh’s ‘beach’.

  Leaning forward like that, that position of head and hands, talking while he scanned the surroundings with his eyes, baring a part of himself, even with a singular ‘no’, it was too painfully familiar.

  I was tougher than this.

  The real Jamie wouldn’t want me to be stewing in emotion to the point I couldn’t function.

  “You’re not a stitched,” I said. “You have a brain of your own. We won’t bite your head off if you voice an opinion.”

  “I know that. I’ve read the books, I… cognitively, I understand things.”

  “But not-cognitively?”

  “Not-cognitively,” he said, breaking a small smile, “Not-cognitively, I feel like an impostor.”

  “You are,” I said.

  I saw him flinch. He straightened, stepping back a little from the railing and from me.

  It dawned on me that the words had actually flowed from my head and out of my mouth.

  “That wasn’t what I meant to say,” I told him.

  He looked away. I could see on his expression that I’d hurt him.

  This situation was a parallel to that one in more ways than how the tableau was set out.

  “Jamie,” I said.

  “I can remember,” Jamie said, very slowly, as if he was picking his words out, “What Mary said, back when we first met. I overheard your conversation with Fray, Mauer, and Percy. You confessed your manipulation of Mary, and she said, I quote, ‘You’re really terrible at being honest’.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond.

  “We’ve been made into such warped, stunted people, haven’t we?” he asked. “Fair is foul and foul is fair. I’m someone that was propped up with memories and knowledge, only to be knocked down and forced to pick up the pieces. You’ve been twisted around, so that it is the lies you tell that are the most just part of you, and the truths you speak—”

  “Are the most unjust?” I finished for him.

  “No,” he said. “Not unjust or unfair. But you’re really unkind when it comes to picking them out.”

  If he’d wanted to strike me across the face, it likely would have hurt less.

  “I didn’t really mean to be unkind,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “Like I said, I’ve read the books he left behind. I know how you operate. I know who and what you are, in nature and personality. I don’t think any less of you, I don’t blame you, and I don’t harbor any negative feelings.”

  “That’s not—”

  “I forgive you, Sy,” he said.

  He reached for my shoulder, and I pulled back, without meaning to. His hand froze where it was.

  After a long second, he resumed moving his hand. He gave me two lame pats on the shoulder.

  I could remember tackling Jamie, the roughhousing, me getting his head under my arm, him getting my head under his arm more frequently. The jabs, no holds barred.

  This Jamie stood arm’s reach away, withdrawing his hand.

  “I’m going to go down and let Gordon know we’ve arrived. We might need to wrangle the indentured workers you purchased.”

  I nodded.

  He turned to leave.

  I looked back at Lillian, wondering if she’d seen, or maybe to look for eye contact, to see someone’s eyes with warmth in them, familiarity, genuinely happy to see me.

  Her attention was divided between Hubris and the imminent contact with the dock.

  “I can’t seem to do anything right when it comes to you,” I said, to Jamie’s back.

  He stopped.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  He glanced back at me. “It’s alright, Sy. I know that feeling very well.”

  Only my white-knuckle grip on the railing kept me from falling over at the unexpected contact with the dock.

  When I stood straight again, I saw Lillian recovering from the light crash with Hubris’ help. She stood straight and flashed a smile at me.

  There it was. That look.

  I’d needed that.

  I held out a hand. She almost skipped a little as she hurried to take it.

  Once she had it, I pulled her close. She didn’t let go of my hand until I tugged mine out of the way, so the hug I gave her was a stilted one.

  Needed that too, if I could admit that much.

  “What’s that for?” she asked me.

  I gave her a quick peck on the lips, then reached up. My fingers mussed up her nicely-done-up hair as I put my hands around her ears. Then I kissed her again, more meaningfully.

  I’d expected one of the sailors on the ship to comment or jeer. What a grave disappointment that was. I could have made her blush.

  I broke the kiss.

  “Or that?” she asked.

  “Do I need a reason?” I asked, moving my hands so she could hear me.

  “You always have a reason, Sy. For everything you do.”

  Hubris pushed his head under Lillian’s hand. She gave him a scratch.

  Lillian’s hair was messier now, but she was still dressed nice, one button at her collarbone undone. Her cheeks were flushed, her lipstick ever so slightly smudged, and she looked to be more or less in her element and happy, if only for the moment. I wasn’t sure she’d ever looked prettier.

  A reason.

  Because you almost make an empty and cold part of me feel full and warm, you make me think it’s possible to leave old hurt behind and heal this wound, and that has nothing to do with your abilities as a field medic or doctor in training, I thought to myself. Because you’re genuinely nice to look at and be with.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I told her.

  “Probably not,” she said. She shot me a look, serious and accusatory. Then she smiled. She linked her arm with mine. “Let’s get changed.”

  “I was going to say something about needing to remove all of that lipstick, first.”

  “I was going to already, Sy—” she said.

  I reached out, put a finger on her chin, and turned her head my way, so I could kiss her again.

  “Oh,” she said.

  There, right there, that was the bright red flush and the flustered look that was all mine to enjoy provoking.

  “Not that we actually have time,” I said.

  “And there it is. The let-down after raising me up.”

  “Barely,” I said. “Cut me some slack. And the mission does come first.”

  “Except I’m dreading this one,” she said. She looked up as a sailor pushed past us, breaking my hold on Lillian.

  We had to hurry to get out of the way as others were pressing in, wanting to access the cargo belowdecks. I made sure to keep our arms linked so we wouldn’t be separated again, and the two of us headed back to the corner where the
others waited with our luggage.

  I saw Jamie there. I saw him smile at Lillian and I in greeting.

  When he’d said he’d forgiven me, he’d meant it.

  I wasn’t sure how to parse that. But if it meant keeping the peace and working toward something better, I could do my best to simply take and accept that kind of understanding from him, where I’d never really accepted it from anyone in the past.

  I was doing that a fair bit these days, trying to make amends by making changes in ways I wasn’t sure I could explain to the people in question.

  ☙

  The people of Lugh were more heavily modified and tattooed than any group of people I’d seen in the past. I tried to avoid staring as we passed a collection of six men with roughly identical builds, each with slabs of muscle, hunched-over posture, and arms as thick around as their legs, which were thicker around than I was. Where the next guy could pick up a given maximum weight, these Brunos could carry two of those ‘next guys’ and the weights besides.

  I knew the type—manual laborers, taking some cheap and freely available option to alter themselves. Radham had one or two that popped up now and again, but for there to be six gathered together, and then more at the docks and some outside the bar down the street, and an eclectic assortment of other types nearby?

  It made for very interesting people watching.

  “Strategy,” Gordon said. “How do we handle this? Is it a kidnapping job? Hunt and stalk? Infiltration? Sabotage?”

  “Th—” I started.

  “Shut up Sy,” Gordon said, without malice. I doubted he’d even been sure I’d been replying, the way he was walking ahead of the group with Hubris and some of our recruited help. “Lillian’s answering this one.”

  “Someone woke up grumpy,” I said.

  Gordon, Jamie, Lillian and I had dressed down for our exploration of Lugh. Our clothes weren’t bad, but they weren’t nice enough to stand out. Lillian wore boots, stockings, a dress, and a sweater with a run in the wool. Gordon, Jamie and I each had simple slacks in muted colors tucked into our individual boots, simple white shirts, and jackets. Gordon had donned a cap.

  “Um,” Lillian said. “Thinking about it, I’d rather avoid violence. That’s not in the cards unless we put it in the cards, I think.”