Twig

by wildbow

  She looked up and over.

  She didn’t want to share a window with me. No, she wanted to move to the next window over.

  I reasserted my grip, then nodded, swinging her away from the window in question. Using me as a rope of a sort, finding the scarce footholds in the mortared sections between bricks, Mary moved away, then used the backswing and her own running footsteps to help cover the distance between the windows. She let go, lunged, and grabbed the other windowsill.

  Together, we climbed up, folded arms wrapped around sills as we peered over and in. Mary had more upper-body strength than I, and she was faster to arrive. I stared into an empty hallway and sitting room. There was a great deal of art on the walls, including some very large advertisements, which seemed like a very weird thing to have indoors. The one in plainest view featured a clown in the French styles. The silhouettes of the audience that sat around the clown each had crowns. Some stage production that targeted nobles and the upper-class.

  Two, she gestured. One. Gone.

  Two of the three, then. Her instincts had been right, or she’d caught a clue I hadn’t.

  Wood-water. The two gestures flowed into one another. Wood-water would be tea. Mary’s view was probably of the kitchen. They’d just stepped indoors, they were putting a kettle on, and it would be a while before they stopped moving long enough for us to find our way in.

  I settled in, shifting my grip and footholds to prepare for a longer stay, clinging to the outside of the wall. Quick glances confirmed that nobody really had a good view of us. That could swiftly change.

  Mary held up a hand, no gesture in place, and then signaled me. You.

  I hunkered down just a bit as the pair came into my view. The woman and the man with the arched eyebrows. She was being playful, teasing and affectionate. She kept touching his arm with her hands, then when he finally responded to her, she stepped back and out of his halfhearted attempt at reaching out, giving him a coy smile.

  I gestured the general details to Mary, making the relationship between the two targets clear.

  The man with the sharp nose and the eyebrows that had been plucked to a jaunty angle took his turn at pursuing the young woman, saying something, moving closer. She dodged out of the way, still flirting and smiling as she did it. She picked up a piece of paper from a desk at the center of the room, holding it at arm’s length. It was a sketched portrait not unlike the mugshots of criminals that sometimes appeared in post offices, but it was of a firstborn.

  She used the pretense of work to deflect her beau’s advances.

  I communicated this too.

  I watched and we waited as the scene progressed. Given the excess of flirting, I expected them to get to the point where they were distracted and we could slip inside. As is, they maintained a strange dance of their own. Never drawing too close, never getting too far away, it was as if they wanted the to-and-fro more than they wanted resolution. They backed off too easily when the other ceased teasing or when any displeasure or change of focus was apparent, and they traded roles on the regular.

  There were connections I could draw from that, ideas I could put together about who they were. People who had known each other for too long. They had turned the pursuit into the objective, let things fall into habit. In short, they were what I might have been with Mary and/or Lillian, had I not bitten the bullet and decided to direct Mary to Gordon and pursue Lil.

  I could smell the faint flowery waft of girl that had accompanied Mary’s leap in my general direction and her grip on my hand. I knew that she dabbed perfume on her wrist, and I had grabbed her there for the best possible hold.

  But I could also, if I turned my imagination to the task, do much the same with Lillian.

  It was a lonely thing to do, devoting so much attention and focus to wisps and imaginings. To let myself imagine that the shapes reflected in the mirror put Lillian’s face a few inches from my own.

  I made a mental note, that I needed a night’s sleep before I tackled the Baron. It was too easy to let things get fuzzy around the edges.

  The kettle whistled, the shriek of it audible even from outside. The man stepped away, leaving the woman to look down at her notes while he prepared the tea.

  Clear? I gestured at Mary’s window.

  She shook her head.

  A moment later, a gesture from her. Three.

  All three people were in the house we were spying on. I was able to see as the young man with the tinted glasses and bristling mustache stepped into the living room. The flirting was in full effect with him and the young woman, much as it had been with the other man. They, too, flipped between roles of pursuer and pursued, never settling on a role.

  I was used to holding strange positions, but lurking at the outside of the building made us obvious if and when anyone happened across us, and there were officers out there with dogs, sniffing for trouble. I was anxious to get inside and get to work, but, somehow, the trio proved to be a hard nut. They were too active, moving between rooms without ever settling down. Their attention was all over the place.

  Lillian, I thought.

  It was a conscious decision, to step further away from grounded reality and let my mind use one of the strongest points of reference I had available to dredge up memories and details, and to see things in a different light.

  Lillian wasn’t talking to me, but I could make out hints of her expression, where the upper half of her face was reflected in the window. Contempt. These three walked in circles that Lillian went out of her way to avoid. In a way, they were her antithesis. They weren’t healers, they weren’t interested in the people, and they hadn’t taken this position out of a hope for something better. No, they were indolent.

  There were clues there, but it wasn’t enough.

  Gordon? I thought. Then I remembered that Mary was here. She was already thinking about the attack, how to hit these people where it hurt. No need to be redundant.

  Helen.

  “You know they’re using stimulants of some kind, right?” Helen murmured. “You can’t wait for them to sit still because they’re not going to sit still for hours.”

  “Yeah,” I murmured back. “I had an idea.”

  Mary’s head snapped around to glance at me.

  Drug, I gestured at her. Agitate.

  Attack? Agitate enemy mess scare? Mary’s hand moved through the gestures in a rapid way, touching on ideas in abstract. I had to turn it over in my head once or twice until I thought I knew what she meant.

  Attack, shake them up. Disturb them, scare them. Would the stimulants and altered mental state hurt their reactions and reaction times, create windows of opportunity where there weren’t any?

  I thought of the analysis thus far, of how they had acted like they were invulnerable and untouchable when they walked down the street. If we shattered that illusion—

  Go, I gestured.

  She moved one hand to the window, lifting. It resisted. Locked.

  A moment later, she was climbing up, each hand on one side of the window frame. She stood in plain sight of anyone in the kitchen, knife jammed down between the lower window and the upper one, forcing the latch.

  “What the—” was the initial statement, as she hauled the window open, ducking through to step inside. There was the sound of something very large and heavy tumbling to the ground.

  From my vantage point, I could see the woman and the man with tinted glasses standing, the woman doing so with such force that she slopped tea on the ground.

  “Aaaaah!” was the strangled cry from the kitchen. The woman, in the process of putting her tea down, practically dropped cup and saucer in her hurry to go help.

  It meant Mary was alone, dealing with three grown but addled adults who presumably had little experience in fighting. I trusted her to hold her ground, but in the spirit of being a good teammate, I hurried to open my window, which had been left unlocked, and climbed inside. The short haired woman turned to face me.

  She had a letter
opener in hand, an improvised weapon she had grabbed in the time it took me to slip through the window. I had a gun and a proper knife, but I wasn’t wholly sure this was a fight I’d win. Stimulants and fear meant she was unpredictable and possibly aggressive enough to lunge at me, and I wouldn’t win a contest of strength against a twenty-something woman, even a sprite of a woman like this.

  I glanced at Mary’s prey. The man was down on one knee, arms flailing. Loops of razor wire had encircled his head and neck, with a line of wire drawing blood at the corners of his eye sockets and bridge of his nose, pressing in close enough to the eye that the eyelid couldn’t completely shut. Another loop encircled his mouth, cutting in at the corners, while a third had him at the throat. Mary stood several feet behind him, one foot out and in the small of his back, one of her hands holding a knife, using the weapon’s handle to control the wire like a kite flier might manage the kite-strings. Her other hand held a throwing knife by the pommel, ready to take the bespectacled man out of the fight.

  “Eyes, mouth, throat. That’s going to end gruesomely,” I said. “I’m just not sure which is going to go first.”

  The woman with the letter opener glanced back at her friend.

  Good. She was suggestible.

  “If the wire slips down, he’ll lose the skin of his nose and a lower eyelid, it looks like,” I said. I touched my eyepatch. I was careful to modulate my voice, to sound more bored and calm to make the scene more dissonant and terrifying to our panicked guests. “I’ve traveled down a similar road, and it is far from pretty.”

  “Shut up,” she said.

  “But the mouth?” I said. “Once that wire properly breaks the skin, if my friend isn’t careful, or if eyebrows there jerks the wrong way in reaction to the pain, it’s just going to slide back, cut through both cheeks like a hot knife through butter, until it reaches the back teeth or the muscles of the jaw. Then there’s the throat. I don’t know if you’ve ever cut a throat, but I gotta say—”

  “Shut up!”

  “—there’s a lot of blood.”

  She made a movement toward me with the letter opener. Mary managed the wire, and her victim gargled out a low warning scream. Like he was a puppet and Mary the puppeteer. The low scream was enough to distract the woman from her imminent attack. She hesitated.

  Weapon, I gestured.

  “Drop the weapon,” Mary said. She moved her weapon a little to one side. The wire slid, all three lengths sawing lightly against flesh. Her victim’s shuddering breath was staccato, broken by the intensity of his shudders.

  The letter opener dropped to the ground. I extended the toe of my shoe, touched it, and dragged it back and away. I picked it up.

  “Take over?” Mary asked me.

  I grinned.

  I had to walk past the woman, spectacles, and Mary’s puppet before I was at Mary’s side, able to take hold of the knife with the wire. My hand brushed against Mary’s as we transferred the grip.

  All three of our targets were frozen. The two that weren’t in the embrace of Mary’s wire could have made a break for the door while Mary and I were preoccupied and one or both of them might have made it. As far as they were aware, I didn’t have a pistol, and if they rounded the corner, Mary couldn’t give chase without risking releasing her current victim.

  If they’d thought about it rationally, staying was a very bad idea. But they weren’t in rational states of mind.

  Was it loyalty that drove them to stay? Stupid, self-destructive loyalty? My gaze lingered on Mary as she worked, guiding the two others to chairs, making them sit down.

  “We only really need two,” I said.

  My victim gurgled. I had to lean forward, keeping my hand in place, to make sure I hadn’t accidentally pulled back too hard. He was fine. A bead of blood where his eyelid had been lacerated had to be making his eye sting something fierce. The lid that was caught by the wire and being stung by the blood fluttered like the wing of a butterfly that was in the midst of being electrocuted.

  The other two didn’t look or sound happy about what I’d just said, but they at least had the sense to stay quiet.

  “We only really need one,” Mary said. “But I’m interested to hear what you’re thinking.”

  “Having two means we can threaten the welfare of one to get the other to do what we want,” I said. “If we take out a third, we let them know we’re serious.”

  “Point conceded,” Mary said.

  “You, eyebrows,” I said, giving my puppet a light kick in the back of one knee, upsetting his balance without quite tipping him over and shredding his face, “Who should we spare?”

  His eye rolled back and to one side until he could almost look at me. “Uhr.”

  Her.

  “Then you, mustache,” I addressed the man with tinted glasses. “Who do we spare?”

  He seemed horrified at the question. His eyes widened.

  But, like any gentleman would, he said, “Her.”

  Three friends, two men who were after the same girl, they never made anything of it because they respected the friendship more than matters of the heart. They flirted with each other and with drink and drugs, but never crossed the line.

  I asked the questions, but I already knew what the answers would be. I urged things in that direction with the phrasing, ‘who do we spare?’ Even if they weren’t the Academy’s top scientists, they were educated sorts, and the wrong phrasing might lead one to try to play my game instead of falling into my trap. Making them focus on who most needed rescue enabled me to prey on their good breeding.

  “Tie-breaker,” I addressed the woman. “Which one do we kill?”

  She looked between the two, startled, wide-eyed. The sense of invulnerability had been stripped away.

  This makes a good test-run for going after the Baron, I mused.

  “Me,” she said. She was defiant, her jaw set.

  I met Mary’s eyes. She stood behind the woman, who had twisted around in her seat in hopes of keeping both Mary and me in her field of view. Mary’s thumb hooked past the bottom of her skirt, to the top of her stocking, and I saw the hard line of a blade there.

  She drew the knife and drove it home in one motion. With a kind of cough and sputter, too forceful and swift to seem real, the woman collapsed in one direction, tumbling out of the chair and onto the ground.

  Her mouth gaped, opening and closing, to little avail, as she lay there, eyes open, unable to draw the breath she wanted to. She coughed, and flecks of blood painted her already crimson lips.

  The spectacled man who had been made to sit on the other side of the little coffee table leaped out of his seat, going for Mary. He didn’t make it. A blade was flung down at an angle, piercing the top of his foot and pinning the sole briefly to the hardwood floor. He twisted on the spot, then sprawled, howling in mixed pain and grief.

  You could’ve run. You could’ve gone for help, sought a solution on your own, I thought. If you’d been a real gentleman, you could have saved your girlfriend. But you remained stuck where you were, and you doomed yourself.

  “Do you have a lab in-house?” I asked.

  As the most able to move and act, my puppet spoke, “Yahs.”

  “You’re going to take me to the lab,” I said.

  The ‘yes’ was a little slow in coming. The man with a knife in his foot looked up at my puppet. A message seemed to pass between them. Nothing too vital, only an awareness of what their reality was.

  “I punctured her lung,” Mary said, in a matter of fact way. “Can you save her?”

  Spectacles looked up, each gasping breath serving dual purpose as a little moan of pain. He managed the word, “Yes.”

  “Then try. While you do that, your friend is going to take my friend to your lab.”

  Another exchanged look. It took a kind of bravery, with razor wire digging into face and neck, but my puppet managed the slightest of head nods.

  “Okay,” the man on the floor said. “I’ll need my kit. It’s up
stairs.”

  “Go. Crawl if you have to,” Mary said. Her voice was utterly without empathy. She looked down at the woman, who was still struggling to breathe. “I’d hurry.”

  I watched as Mary escorted the man, walking behind him as he hobbled his way down the hallway.

  There was an edge of viciousness and ruthlessness to her actions that seemed unusual for Mary. For someone so straightforward, Mary required a lot of reading between the lines, and I was left to guess as to why she was acting like this. She had always been a cold-blooded killer, but the trick with the wire and the man’s face, while evocative, wasn’t the methodology of that efficient killer I’d met at Mothmont years ago.

  Was it her finding an outlet for other emotions? For her frustration about Lillian and the loss of Lillian’s black coat? About Gordon’s death?

  A part of me hoped that it was an insight that might lead to Mary making the decision to come with me. That our coordinated dance might continue beyond this one mission.

  I knew how Mary worked, the things that made her tick. I knew that there were manipulations I could use that would get the results I was so heartsick for. I could have done it with Lillian, so easily, given her a push at a moment of weakness, when she was telling me that she would give up on the black coat and choose me instead.

  I could get Helen on my side. I could even convince Jamie, who I struggled to understand and predict, so much of the time.

  But it wouldn’t be their decisions. It was a coward’s way out, even if it seemed sensible in the moment. Forgiveness would be found wanting in the days and weeks that followed.

  I looked up and met Mary’s eyes.

  I might as well ask directly.

  “Where does this new anger come from?” I murmured.

  “Uhrm!?” my puppet managed.

  I watched as she raised a finger to her lips. Silence.