by wildbow
I nodded.
“I’ll see you later tonight?” she asked. “Or should I be scarce?”
“Tonight is good,” I said. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”
She smiled, and it seemed more honest a smile than the ones she’d forced earlier.
I had to check the time in the dining room, and immediately skipped to, grabbing my jacket and heading out the door at a good clip.
The snow was falling more heavily, and the days were short enough that it was already getting dark, before dinner.
There was some traffic to and from the Academy, and I walked well away from the road to avoid a stray wheel kicking up any mud or snow at me.
Jamie was right. I wasn’t focusing enough. It was a chronic problem of mine, that I could convince myself of nearly anything. It was one of the problems I ran into in fights, where I saw a course of action, a way to get great results in a clear, concrete way, and I ended up wanting my opponent to set themselves up so badly that I believed it would happen on an instinctual level.
Doing this, tonight, with Lillian, it was a mistake. I should have been showing off signs of instability, much as I’d done with Duncan, breaking further away from the team, so it would be easier for them to claim they had no connection to me, should I fail. I should have been picking my partner for the upcoming job, to give them a chance to do the same.
As it was, I was paying mind to team bonds, to helping and supporting Lillian, to giving her attention and showing her that I cared.
My legs were still sore from the incessant running around in Lugh, which felt like it had happened far longer ago than it had. Forcing a march-walk uphill on snow-layered, uneven ground was straining my legs and tiring me out with surprising speed.
I passed through the gates and past the area where carriages and other vehicles were arriving, bringing students and the ailing in from the city, and headed around the back paths. I made my way around to the back of Lillian’s dorm, checked my surroundings, and then quickly climbed the outside of the building, careful to avoid getting my clothes dirty.
I tapped on the window, keeping my head out of sight. Parents wouldn’t be allowed in the dorms, but I wasn’t ruling out the possibility that they could have been visiting the room that they paid for.
The window slid open. Lillian, her hair styled, earrings in her ears, poked her head out.
“There are people around,” she said. Her hand reached down for mine. I took it, and accepted her help in climbing through the window.
She smelled like women did, like hair products and flowers. The dress she wore was one I’d seen her in before, but it was a nice one, dark green. It went well with the intensity of her eyes.
“Remind me what our relationship is? I just want to make sure we have our stories straight,” I said.
“We’ve talked about this,” Lillian said, still very stern. I could identify the attitude as a very mocking sternness, now that I was observing her while not clinging to the outside of a cold brick building. “You’re a liason with the Academy. Like me, you’re an advanced student working on special projects.”
“Got it,” I said. “Well, I already had it. I just wanted an excuse to see you.”
She smiled, and she gave me a playful slap on the cheek, so light a mosquito would survive it.
“Button me up?” she asked, turning her back to me.
I touched her bra strap, tracing my finger along it.
I missed her so terribly already, and she was right here, in arm’s reach.
“Sy.”
I began doing the buttons.
I stopped shy of doing the last one. I leaned down a bit and planted a kiss where the button was meant to meet the braided loop. That done, I slipped button through loop.
She turned, and her face was so close to mine. Her hand touched my cheek, fingertip touching the eyepatch.
“You’re quiet,” she said. “Are you okay? That thing you said earlier, to Duncan—”
I laughed, one note, working to keep my voice down. Students were going to be gathering for dinner in the main dining hall soon. The hallways would be crowded.
“I don’t think it’s funny,” Lillian said. “I’m worried.”
“Jamie asked me the same thing,” I said. “I think Mary was wondering too, but she’s… subdued.”
“Yeah,” Lillian said. She leaned close and gave me a kiss on the cheek, leaving her hand where it was until the last possible moment, as she stepped away to look for her shoes. “I know what you mean.”
I approached her desk, pulled the chair away, and picked up the shoes, holding them out for her, while she continued to turn her eyes elsewhere, searching.
My eye scanned her desk. Papers, files. There were numerous drawings, many looked like tracings. Notes appeared in the Wollstone shorthand, filling the empty space around the tracings, with lines pointing to parts.
Lillian realized I had her shoes and plucked them from my hand.
“For my senior project,” she explained the drawings. “They only choose a few students and projects to pass, in the first grading. Half of the students are dropped, and have to try again next year. By the second pass, only a third of the students will be confirmed for the implementation phase. That’s when they put their project to work, with up to two assistants—”
“Chosen from the failures.”
“Yes. And you have to have a working project by the end. After that is the jury, where you have to justify your work to a committee, and then there’s the break. Summer or winter, depending on the project, the school, and the timelines imposed. Your work has to survive and operate for the two month break. If it breaks down during the second month, you lose a letter grade. If it dies before then, you lose two. If your project is something that isn’t alive in that sense, then they find other ways to test you or stress test the project in the meantime. The ‘break’ is what breaks a lot of students, that’s the joke.”
I looked over the papers and the sketches. A warbeast, bulky and stout, the measurements putting it at two feet at the shoulder, with organs on the outside. Another seemed reminiscent of the Twins, if rather bulkier and clumsy in shape. The skeletal structure was what made me think of the nobles. It was framed as if it was hollow inside. The third set of documents was more formula than sketch. A drug?
“Your projects?” I asked.
She approached me from behind, wrapping her arms around me, her chin on my shoulder. I could feel the heaviness of her sigh. “Proposals. I haven’t decided which one to go with. With all of the enemies we’ve fought with extraordinary senses, I thought Sparky there might work. Something like the stink-bomb I used against the Twins, but it also has the ability to produce explosive flashes of light. I don’t know if I can get it bright enough to blind or loud enough to deafen, but enhanced senses come with better sensitivity, so… I don’t know.”
“I can see them really liking that.”
“Mm hmm,” she said. “I figured most of it out on a purely theoretical, pen-on-paper level, and the smell is easy, but I can’t figure out the flash or the bang. I’m worried I’ll start this project, I’ll run into that dead end, and I’ll end up failing because of it.”
I touched the paper with the crude humanoid.
“I don’t think I can sell it to them,” she said. “So soon after wartime, with other wars possibly on the horizon… it’s not efficient for what they would want it to be efficient at.”
“What is it?”
“Dumb vessel for collecting the wounded. They get pulled inside, their legs inside its legs, their chest in its chest, their arms in its arms. It works as a weak exo-suit, added muscle, for when you need more heavy lifting, but the real purpose, what I’d really hope to pack it with, would be life support. Not a lot, but enough. Pressure on wounds, help with breathing, help with heart rate. If I did it in an advanced way, I’d have it recognize the need on its own. As it is, I think I’d have it respond to external cues. Taps.”
Her
hand rubbed up my stomach and chest and down, flicking each button on my jacket in passing. “I thought, what did I want most, back in Lugh? For myself, or for Gordon? Or when I was working on Mary, here in Radham, and Jamie had to remind me the steps for surgery? Support.”
I stared at the page, trying to visualize it.
“The third project is a drug. I… I don’t know, Sy. It’s not fully thought through. I’m sure it’s been done before, but I thought I should have a third project. I admit I’m selfish in wanting it. Something to help suppress fear, to clarify the mind. A low-impact combat drug for soldiers.”
“Something you could take, so you didn’t need wyvern?”
“I don’t want to use wyvern ever again, Sy,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, but—”
“No,” I said. “I understand. Believe me.”
“I don’t know how long the effects will last, so I’ve been working so hard, using all of the time I’m not spending consoling Mary, or with you. They said they would be lenient, knowing I was working with the Lambs project and helping the Gages, but I’ve been fretting. Even with wyvern to help focus me, I’m worried. This is sort of major, and I haven’t even had time to think about it.”
“How long do you have to work it out?”
“Tomorrow. Part of tomorrow.”
I pulled my way out of her arms, turning around so I could face her. “What?”
“Tonight, after dinner, they’re holding a meeting. They’ve been having them all day. All of my teachers, and my parents, looking over my academic performance and reviewing my records. With that meeting fresh in their minds, I have to bring a project proposal forward tomorrow morning. They’ll decide, based on the meeting with my parents and teachers, if I’m capable. I’m not sure how they’re going to explain things to my parents, but I’ve been told my parents won’t hear the whole story, so I think they’ll say their piece and then leave. Which should suit them fine.”
“That’s why your parents are in town,” I said, speaking the realization aloud.
Lillian nodded. Her eyes were filled with conflicting emotions.
I could imagine her crying if she didn’t have the wyvern formula, and I really wished she would, so I could better know how to console her. As it was, I looked at the papers, then at Lillian. My thoughts were a jumble, chaos.
Lillian was too important. She was the one person I could trust to remember the Lambs as we actually were. I’d been so preoccupied I hadn’t been able to see. I couldn’t abandon her, not at this critical juncture. I couldn’t stay, either. I would lose my mind and I would inevitably hurt her.
There was a word for the bitter feeling I was experiencing: torn. Pulled in multiple directions, agonized, knowing I was going to fail her somehow, no matter what happened.
Just leave, a little voice spoke in the back of my mind. Leave. Run away. Go, go, go. There are only bad things for you here.
It was a little voice that had been with me for years. Since well before my last attempt at running away.
Just leave. You know you have to. You’ll go mad if you don’t.
But, like I’d told Mauer, my whole life was here. Lillian, and everything Lillian represented. Mary, Jamie, Helen, Ashton. The people I knew in the city.
Pulling away meant putting every single one of those things in jeopardy.
Reaching forward, I put my arms around Lillian. It wasn’t on purpose, but I ended up pinning her arms against her sides, my arms around her upper arms and back, hugging her so tight it had to hurt.
Unable to hug me back, she planted a kiss on my ear.
It was more on an already full plate, but I knew I had to listen in on that meeting. I had to know Lillian’s fate. I couldn’t make any decisions until I did.
Dinner with her parents, and then finding a way into the meeting.
“Not that this isn’t the nicest thing, Sy,” she murmured in my ear, “But my parents are waiting, and you need to step out that window and go wait outside with them.”
I broke the hug. I couldn’t look at her smiling face, so I headed straight for the window. Let her think I was bashful or something.
“See you in a minute,” she said, as the window scraped open.
“Yeah,” I said, still thinking. “About the projects? I like the second one. The suit. I think it’s more ‘you’.”
She smiled wide. “Thank you, Sy. I think I needed someone to tell me that, to make the decision.”
I nodded, climbed out the window, and quickly made my way to the ground.
Warring emotions plagued me as I took the long way around. I had to stop for a moment as tears filled my one good eye.
I’d told Jamie that everyone needed to be the hero of their own story. That they needed a version of events that could paint them in the right.
I didn’t have that. Never really had.
She was the sweetest, bravest girl, and I couldn’t give her a happy ending. I was doomed to disappoint, no matter what I did.
I wiped away the moisture that had collected in the eye with my handkerchief, took a deep breath while I straightened myself out, and then rounded the corner. A steady stream of girls departing the dormitory gave me a moment’s respite, as I had to wait for them to clear out of the way.
Lillian’s father and mother were standing a short distance away from the gaggle of girls. Her father was a sturdy man, with brown and gray hair and permanent frown lines across his forehead. Her mother looked like a timid woman, her fashion and makeup aggressive to make up for what she lacked personally. They stood close together, and talked very easily with one another.
As the path cleared, I made my approach.
“Can I help you?” Lillian’s father asked me.
“I’m Sylvester, a friend of Lillian’s,” I said. “I believe we’re having dinner at Claret Hall?”
I extended my hand. The man shook it, his hand enveloping mine.
“We expected her friend Mary,” her mother said. “Lillian wrote so much about her in the letters.”
I’m so sorry to disappoint, I thought.
Lil’s father, meanwhile, released my hand. The frown lines in his forehead deepened.
“I believe you have lipstick on your ear,” he told me, staring me down.
“Ah,” I said. I pulled the handkerchief from my pocket, and rubbed at my ear.
“And you smell like perfume,” he added.
I didn’t even get a chance to get a word out before the door opened. Lillian must have run to get downstairs as fast as she did. She skipped down the path until she was at my side. She hugged my arm, smiling up at two very disapproving parents.
Previous Next
In Sheep’s Clothing—10.5
I gave Lillian’s hand a squeeze, turning my attention to her parents. The thing to do was to maintain a cool poker face. If I looked guilty, I would be hung as a guilty man.
“I live at the orphanage further down the road. Beautiful stone building with the stone fence around it? You would have seen it as you came up. Lots of kids, a number of girls, a number of us getting ready to go out? I couldn’t escape the haze of perfumes.”
“Perfumes?” Lillian asked. Then, without missing a beat, said, “Helen?”
“Helen and Fran,” I said. “Your dad saw a smudge of crimson on my ear.”
Lillian smiled.
“You’re an orphan, then?” her dad asked, his voice low, his tone like that of a priest at a funeral, heavy and suggestive of doom and gloom.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Dad!” Lillian sounded positively horrified.
“If it was another boy, I’d ask him what his father does for a living. I’d want to know where he comes from, the values he was raised with. I can’t do that, obviously, so I’m inquiring about this.”
“And I’m saying no to this inqusition!” Lillian said. There as a fierceness in her eyes. “I am very fond of Sy. Sylvester. If you’re going to be a bully, then we
’re going to leave you two to have dinner alone. I want tonight to be a nice night.”
“There’s no need for that,” her mother said. When she looked at her husband for clarification, however, it wasn’t to warn him, but out of hope.
“Dad?” Lillian asked. She was warning her dad where her mom seemed unwilling. “Try again. Let’s start with polite small talk. Please.”
Her dad wasn’t budging. He looked at his daughter for a long while, and then looked at me.
Challenging me.
I didn’t let a glimmer of emotion show on my face. Casually, I said, “I don’t know where I came from. All I know is the orphanage. I was raised by an excellent staff and by the oldest children, and I now help where I can with the younger children.”
The look Lillian gave me suggested I’d failed her in a small way. She’d stood up to her dad and I had undercut her. But I knew that if I’d let her decide this, then I would never have won her dad over. The night would have been filled with him steadily beating me down with pressure and subtle digs. I could play that game, but I wanted to do better than that.
I’ll make it up to you later, I promised her.
“I have a few employees who have similar backgrounds,” her dad said. “They didn’t really have the benefit of a family, so they hashed together a replacement. Out of the, hm, about five of them I’m recalling right now, four ended up with broods by the time they were eighteen.”
The words were almost accusatory.
“I can’t comment on their desire for family,” I said. “But if they are your employees, then isn’t that what’s important? Hard work, ethic, focus?”
I was cheating there, a little bit. I had a general sense of who the man was, based on what Lillian had shared and what I had seen of Lillian.
“If you two are going to stand here and debate all evening, maybe mom and I can go to Claret Hall to eat,” Lillian said.
“We should probably walk over now,” I said. “Or we might not get a good table.”
“Good,” Lillian said. “That’s a good idea, thank you. It’s this way.”
She was tense, now. Not spooked or scared, but fully prepared to step in.
“Were you a Mothmont student?” her mother asked me.
