by wildbow
“You want to cooperate?” the Baron asked. He leaned back. The edge of madness was gone, now. He was interested enough that he might have forgotten his dead sister in the moment. Even the Twin that stood behind him had gone still.
“I want to… not stop each other to work to ends that serve the other,” Mauer said, voice smooth. “That is, I’ll stress, something that is a lot easier to do if you don’t prey on citizens so much that it upsets me.”
“And the Lambs?”
“That’s between me and them.”
“Mmm,” the Baron mused.
Now Mauer was taking my advice. Leaving the offer on the table.
The Baron found his feet. “A productive discussion.”
The attention of the entire room seemed to hang on him.
“Candida, was it?” he asked.
“Yes, my lord.”
“Stop with the ‘my lords’. If you’re going to be my fiancee, then stop mewling and start listening carefully. Else I’ll kill you out of irritation before we reach Richmond House.”
Candida nodded, very quickly. Then she turned, and she bent low, giving Lillian a quick hug.
A mistake. A weakness, showing vulnerability.
The road ahead of her was as hard as they got. It would be harder, as she turned the back on her new fiance, said goodbye to us. He would find ways to punish her for that. Even now, he walked to the door on the far end of the room, his sister at his side. If Candida didn’t catch up before he passed through, I could imagine he’d give the order to resume the war, the deal and everything else forgotten. Spite defined him.
But for Lillian, who wasn’t seeing that far ahead, even elemental Lillian, altered with wyvern, it was reason to cry. She’d put so much of herself into this mission. The hug was meaningful.
For both of them, I whispered, “I will personally kill the Baron within the next three months.”
Candida turned, looking at me.
“Go,” I said. “Hurry!”
She looked, and she saw the Baron’s sister passing through the door. She ran, and it was only by virtue of the enhanced physique that she reached the door just as he was letting it swing closed. She caught it, and disappeared outside.
Lillian met my eyes. “Did you really—”
I put my fingers out, against her lips. Not the time or the place.
She threw her arms around me, careless of the arm in the sling, careless that her face was rubbing against my eyepatch and swollen face, a tight, emotional hug.
“Why?” I heard Jamie ask Mauer.
Mauer didn’t give a response. He gathered himself up, fixed his coat, and turned to say something to one of his soldiers. He turned, meeting my eye, and then made his exit, not a word spoken.
For a man so good at using his voice, it was eerie how much he could say by uttering nothing at all.
☙
Restless, I sat on the stairs outside Lambsbridge. It didn’t feel like home. Lambsbridge felt haunted, every child I looked at was a lobotomized creature, reduced to a mere animal in status by the word of a noble.
Then they spoke, mostly like normal, and the illusion fell away. Only a mental picture so distinct I could barely distinguish it from reality.
Gordon’s room was empty. The dog no longer slept at the front of the fire while the kettle was on for evening tea with the older kids and Mrs. Earles. We’d shared the news hours ago, and the children had cried. Some were still crying now, up on the second floor, their voices coming through the window.
In the dark, head on the pillow, only our own thoughts for company, it was especially lonely. As it had been when I’d lost Jamie, it was the same now. I couldn’t even think of sleep.
The old Jamie was gone. The new Jamie was distant. He had barely talked, the entire ride back. We had volunteered what we could to the Gages, and then we’d caught our train.
I stood from the stairs, and I walked up the long road.
The Academy loomed, dusted with falling snow that would be an inch thick by morning. Windows here and there glowed orange-yellow.
I’d thought once of the Lambs as being at odds. One Lamb complementary with some, at odds with others. It was getting to be less the case, now, as our group changed. But somehow, we weren’t any closer together.
Men at the gate let me through. I headed to the dormitories. It was a trip I’d made before.
Faculty and guards walked around the dormitory, protecting the youths and young adults who slept within. I was justifying the reason for their existence at this very moment, a boy in the girl’s dormitories.
I found Lillian’s window, and I found it locked, sealed shut against the cold air. I picked up the lockpick that I’d left by the latch the last time around, and flicked it. I was quick to open the window, slide in, and close the window, before too much cold air could flow inside or the lantern of a nearby guard could wash over me. With care, I shut the window and locked it, before turning.
Mary was still awake, her face streaked with tears. Lillian was curled up next to her, her face mashed up against Mary’s chest, clutching tight, like she might fall away into oblivion if she were to loosen her grip any.
Mary had seen me, of course, and nodded with unspoken understanding as I approached. There was more room on Mary’s side of the bed, but I took the foot-wide gap behind Lillian, kicking off my shoes and climbing under the covers, curling tight in much the same way Lillian had, so I wouldn’t fall off. Lillian seemed to relax with a weight behind her, as if oblivion had less of a hold on her.
“Hi, Sy,” she mumbled into Mary’s chest.
Mary’s hand reached past Lillian to take mine, holding it.
Jamie hadn’t had much to say, but he’d asked me a question before he left for his appointment.
“Are you leaving?”
As if, like Mauer, he saw it as a foregone conclusion.
Sitting on those steps, I hadn’t been sure.
But this, listening to Mary’s snuffles and Lillian’s soft breaths… knowing that this was one place I was accepted… the one warm place in all the world? It had helped with Jamie. It let me sleep. It let me put the fear and the loss and the cold aside.
The hours wound on, and I didn’t find sleep, even as I found that acceptance and warmth.
I thought about Jamie’s question, and I wasn’t sure.
Previous Next
Enemy (Arc 9)
Within a short time of becoming aware, this creature experienced a large, ferrous foreign body penetrating skin, three layers of supporting bone lace, and the organ primarily responsible for the awareness. Other, complimentary organs remained in place, processing this reality.
Processing itself and its surroundings on a higher level had rendered this creature vulnerable somehow. Using the limited pool of resources available to it, this creature began solving the problem. It created another, similar organ for higher processing and coordination. This one was different in the nature of the encasement, slightly different in position, lower to the ground.
The ferrous foreign element was triangular, this creature noted, as the object cleaved the new growth away.
It was aware, using its secondary processing organs, that the tool that had hewed the organ away was set to one side. It was aware of a source of heat and light, and of the pheromones released as the organ was burned away into nothing.
It was too wasteful to continue. It waited, and it focused on other things. Movement, like processing, was hampered by external factors. The core of this creature consisted of a branching, solid structure, the branches breaking down from whole body to a given section, then to all the pieces and organs that made up that section, and then to the structural elements of those pieces, and the smallest branches extended to the cells of those structural elements.
Steadily, slowly, this creature focused on refining processes, breaking down the resources it was given and using them efficiently. It clarified how it perceived the external world, and how it understood its own form, a
nd it tracked everything it had done before by writing it all into its own skeletal structure.
Working across multiple organs, focusing on things it consumed, on particles it inhales, on light and types of light, this creature was able to identify more complex things, even if it couldn’t understand them.
If this creature was only a response to its environment, purely adaptive, it would abandon processing entirely. But this creature has fifteen lesser processing organs and it has developed the ability to recognize patterns. The damage is targeted, aimed at particular parts and for reasons this creature does not yet understand.
This creature wants to develop the ability to understand and this creature devotes time to working out how. It develops five organs simultaneously, spaced around its body, and makes one of the five about processing and deeper understanding.
All five of the organs are soon removed. Many resources have been wasted, but this creature can write the learned detail to its bones, through structural chains built on a sub-cellular level. Crude, but placement, composition and general purpose can be transcribed.
This creature grows another organ, and this time, it moderates its own behavior. It does not exercise its body and attempt to record the best movements to its new thinking-organ, nor act agitated, nor does it relax.
The pattern has been figured out. If it gives overt indication that it is learning and studying on a higher level, it is culled.
Further experimentation lets this creature place and hide its cognitive organs within itself, as ribbon-like striations between organs and along the skeletal lace. When this creature begins demonstrating the behaviors again, there are exploratory cuts, carving deep into its body, but the organs are not found nor carved away.
With the still-developing organs for sight, for smell, and for hearing, this creature notes more agitation on the part of these foreign beings that keep cutting at it and binding its movement. They are upset or disturbed.
This creature has won a small victory. Now, faster than before, it begins to coordinate how it grows, how it processes the environment, and it thinks in abstracts.
There are six other creatures like it in the environment. In identifying and processing a complexity it has noticed, this creature now knows that two of the three have already begun communicating between one another. There are fifteen different compounds that each of their bodies produce in excess waste. This creature can vent these compounds into the air as a part of its respiration, exhale one of the fifteen compounds, or a pairing of compounds. A hundred and twenty different possible expressions.
This creature rapidly draws a connection between the fact that they chose this form of communication and the need to hide some behaviors from those who control them.
It takes some time—days—to learn how this communication works and to develop ways to truly comprehend it and respond. By the time this creature is done, the others have worked out a way to communicate using three compounds at a time, and the fourth of them is just now starting to use two compound expressions.
Outward form remains stable for each, roughly analogous, as can be communicated with messages, and seen with grown eyes, acknowledging that each has different eyes and fields of view. As the correlations draw stronger, the others in the environment, foreign attackers and cultivators, grow more more agitated. Subtle agitation—small movements, of hands and feet, alertness, watching, speaking in shorter sentences.
Messages are communicated. Forms are left different. Too much coordination is bad, and will see culling. Will a whole creature be cut away and burned as the smaller growths were? It is not worth taking the chance.
As the outsides remain similar and stable, the insides change. Each one takes different paths, and with the same patterns used to write to skeletal structure, they communicate things to the others.
A fifth has recognized and started to develop the ability to communicate, but it is badly behind the curve. There is a high chance it was too passive, taking the culling of brain matter as a reason to not develop intelligence. It is not mobile, it is not strong, it is not intelligent, but it can perceive its surroundings well. Still behind, communicating in its stilted way, it gives clues on how to see more clearly, how to smell, and how to hear. Color becomes easier to perceive, and the same pattern recognition that made it possible to understand one another now tracks how the others in their environment communicate.
Some sounds and utterances in the pattern of communication are more important than others. This creature starts to work on learning what those utterances mean.
Always, always, there is the need for more resources. Food can be taken apart, the individual components pulled from one another, studied in isolation, learned from. This creature hungers.
There is an exchange about one of their number breaking from the rest, attempting to escape its bonds. None are willing to be that sacrifice. There is more communication, in abstract, about waiting for another of their kind to develop the ability to communicate, and deceiving it into being the sacrifice.
Coordinated, the group now acting as a unit, they do the majority of their work in secret, beneath layers of tissue that the other lifeforms can’t sense.
☙
This creature played at being the savage. It hurled it self against the chains. Larger, false eyes focus only on what is in front of it. Other eyes coordinated to watch the people who had been working so hard to contain it now attaching new chains and unhitching the old ones.
These people were ordered. There were some who led and many others who followed, and one figure seemed to lead even the ones who led. His hair was red and he was fearless to the loudest roars and screeches. He held something to his face, masking his nose and mouth. The arm that hung at his side was misshapen and smelled foul, like rot and pain.
“Why?” the man in charge asked.
“We needed to keep it dumb,” spoke the old man who had been in charge from the beginning. This creature could tell that he was obsequious, obedient, wanting to please. This creature understands most of this utterance.
“That’s not how it works,” the man responded. “You slowed it down, but you can’t keep it from doing anything. You just made it better at pretending.”
This creature can understand the negatory, the confidence, the meaning of slow, of doing. Pretending is a new word, but it’s a word the creature can intuit the meaning of. It understands much of this, too.
Regular, unfocused efforts to keep this creature dumb had meant that the cuts were so often blind, now. The people who tended this creature were oblivious as to how any individual piece of it worked. They started cutting off the heads of this creature and its brothers, blindly trying to slow them down, to keep them dumber and more docile.
This creature responded by not growing another head. The mass of the body became a home for everything vital, for perception, and for the cognitive processing.
Movement beyond the confines of the stable it had been allotted was a foreign thing, but this creature and all of the others had already started developing flight, and it had developed some muscle for moving around, to buy time when something vital was being carved away. The chains went taut, and this creature felt itself being pulled along. It stumbled on legs not meant for walking, and started processing how it might better configure its own limbs, what would need to be put together or taken away to make this movement easier.
“I know you’re fooling us,” the red haired man spoke.
This creature knew ‘fooling’. The men that watched it and cut at it played cards, and they ‘fooled’ with one another, sometimes calling it ‘lying’ or ‘bluffing’.
This creature could tell there was slack in its chain. It capitalized on it, lunging, roaring at the man with the red hair. The chains pulled tight, hauling against wood beams that had been bolted to floor and ceiling, wood splintering into and through the links of metal. The beams held firm.
The man with the red hair stared at it, but it wasn’t a stare of fear. This
creature was still working on the processing necessary to understand nuance, the subtleties of expression. Five variants on the same lobe of the brain intended for the task were focused on this man. Across the five lobes, the creature was able to see the higher patterns, the little details in how the man stood and how he spoke, that were constants. They were things that others did only occasionally, in times of need.
In expressing himself, he was a figure who naturally did what others strove to do in times of need.
“How many of them are viable?” the man with the red hair asked.
The creature had heard many variants of this question since it had learned to understand people.
“Seven,” the old man said.
“We only need four.”
“Only four?”
“You made them too clever. I think we can manage four, but seven would be pushing it.”
“Made them clever? No. I worked hard to keep—”
“Harding,” the red haired man said. “I’m going to pay you the same amount, no matter what happens. A group of adolescents just tried to set me on fire. A war is about to erupt. I want you to bite your tongue, take a deep breath, and then start cooperating, so I can focus on important things. You’ll get your money regardless of what happens.”
There was a pause before the old man spoke. “Yes, sir.”
The creature listened, and it watched. One of its brothers took flight, trying to find an angle where it could break free, getting up and away from the chains. The men didn’t try to fight it in strength, instead relying on the strength of the beams the chains were lashed to.
“Oh, God,” one of the strange men said. “I just about shit myself.”
God. An unfamiliar word. The creature noted it for later.
One of the other creatures that this creature knew only by scent and by sound had been producing an airborne chemical in efforts to dissolve the wood. The wood was softer, heavy with accumulated moisture, prone to peeling and breaking away, but the chemical hadn’t yet soaked in far enough to penetrate the hard core. The chains scraped against the wood and only the outer layer came free. The same chemical had made the men who did the most watching and carving away of this creature’s parts slower and sicker. It meant slower delivery of food for all of them, and the exchanged messages that were conveyed through coded exhalations and high-pitched sounds had become heated over that topic, with some others getting very agitated about the lack of resources.
