Twig

by wildbow

  I saw Jamie’s head rise as he looked up. I followed his gaze.

  Almost direct overhead was a dark line of cloud, concentrated. The cloud was black at its center, but as it expanded and diffused out into the air and the light, cold spring rain, it became gray.

  “The direction that’s coming from… the cliffs?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Jamie said.

  “Sanguine? Some kind of rocket or something, with a smoke trail? He’s pointing the way to us?”

  “That’s what I would guess,” Jamie said.

  “Which suggests he’s working with someone. Given the willingness to use lethal force, a different group from Catcher’s.”

  “Yeah.”

  I could hear the noise from the crowd as they noticed. A few hushed shrieks and gasps.

  “They seem to think it’s the plague being dispersed,” I said. “Which it might be.”

  Jamie nodded.

  The crowd was getting more agitated.

  If my instinct was right, the crowd would soon be taking shelter indoors. Sanguine was doing a fantastic job of keeping us on our toes. If we waited too long before we poked our heads up, the crowd would be gone and we’d have no cover and no way to obfuscate things.

  “Alright,” I said. I looked around.

  As with the trough in the little shadowy space, the ice hadn’t all thawed in the darker, more shadowy spaces. I lowered myself down and reached into the shadowy space between the dock and the wall. I came out with a chunk of ice and a numb hand.

  I reached into my satchel. I retrieved the guts of the second mine.

  “Alright,” I said.

  “When all of this is over and done with, I’m going to forbid you from using explosives,” Jamie said.

  “They’re so useful!”

  “Every single time you use one, I’m left convinced we or you are about to die horribly.”

  “Trust me,” I said. I glanced up to make sure nobody had poked their heads around to look down at the little docks down here.

  “Do you know how many times you’ve said that and you’ve betrayed that trust by trying something and making horrific mistakes?” Jamie asked. “I can count.”

  “Ha ha,” I said. “Stop being a pessimist.”

  I drew out the cord of the mine. It was like an expensive children’s toy. Pull out the string. When the internal machinery drew that string back in all the way, then if the switch was flicked, the mine would go off. The difference was that the draw was fast. There would be only a moment’s time to catch it or slap at the switch.

  The cord drawn out, I tied it around the chunk of ice. I set the ice down on top of the guts of the mine, explosives and all, then carefully removed my hands.

  The cord didn’t slip free, the mine didn’t go off. All seemed well.

  I exhaled.

  “Relieved sigh, Sylvester?” Jamie asked. “You weren’t a hundred percent confident this was safe?”

  “Stop being a worrywart,” I chided him. “Geez. Relax.”

  “No more explosives,” he whispered to himself, under his breath.

  I pushed the setup out into the sunlight, then swiftly backed away from it.

  “They’re going to see it,” Jamie said.

  I looked around, spotted a pile of rope, arranged into a coiled circle, then moved it, surrounding the mine and ice, so it looked like a coil of rope with a chunk of ice perched on top of it.

  Ice melts, the string will retreat into the mechanism, and… bang.

  “We need to get to the other side of this neighborhood, to another bridge,” I said, quiet.

  “Okay,” Jamie said. He looked at the mine. “Why this?”

  “So far, we’ve left a trail of explosions and explosives in our wake. Let’s let them think we’re doing it again. Are they really going to expect an explosion on a delayed fuse?”

  “They might,” Jamie said. “But this works.”

  We climbed over the edge of the canal, into the edge of the crowd. It was already thinning out considerably. Our activity down below had gone unnoticed, what with it being conducted in the shadows, occurring beneath people’s feet while their eyes were on the sky.

  Jamie and I hurried to catch up with the thickest part of the crowd. As a bullet cracked against cobblestone, we kept eyes forward, everything focused on the way forward, with the crowd between us and Sanguine.

  The Brunos had headed off in another direction. Others would be coming, with Sanguine’s direction.

  The net was closed, and because we were at the neck of this pear shaped parcel of land, there wasn’t a lot of room to move around.

  When we finally stopped to rest, sitting beneath the stairs of an elevated porch that overlooked the canal, our positions a good ten minutes of running downriver from the dock with the mine, I found myself so tense that my jaw clicked as I unclenched my teeth.

  We didn’t talk. We didn’t move. In our individual ways, with our individual focuses, we dwelt on the situation.

  I imagined we had twenty minutes before the ice melted enough for that string to slip free. My imagination was badly wrong.

  I couldn’t say what had happened. The ice might have slipped free of the coil of rope. A bird might have landed on it. But the mine went off, forcing our hands.

  Without needing to communicate, we moved. Straight for our next target, which we’d both assumed we would have the time to figure out. Another bridge to cross, while our enemies were focused on the bomb, thinking we were using it to cover our escape or to open a door.

  Another bridge to cross.

  I imagined it as another blockade of guards. It wasn’t.

  Our exit was blocked off with ropes stretching from one side of the bridge to the other. Strung along those ropes was a cloth with a sheet. A snake wound around a staff, contained within a crow with outstretched wings. The Academy’s symbol for quarantine, which every citizen knew. Facing us, it meant the plague had touched the space beyond.

  The bridge itself had been partially dismantled. Not impossible to cross, as the railing remained intact, even if the floor of the bridge had been removed. But no sane citizen would cross into a territory marked like this one had been.

  “They just left it?” Jamie asked. “They needed their forces elsewhere that badly?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “That bothers me,” Jamie said.

  “It should,” I said. “Because the only way I see them doing that, is if they want to secure a firm perimeter.”

  “They’re abandoning the city center?” Jamie asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe it’s bad enough that they’re planning on burning it all.”

  The symbol on that sheet seemed to declare itself to the world anew as the cloth strained against its bindings, moving this way and that in the wind.

  “If we stay, we’re going to have to deal with them,” Jamie said. “Catcher’s people. Sanguine and his friend or his friends, plural.”

  “You want to go?” I asked him. “Because it’s up to you. I’m probably immune. But you—”

  I let the sentence stop there.

  “Given how it’s cropping up, if I’m going to get infected, I probably got infected already,” Jamie said.

  It felt like false bravado. I tried to convey that in the serious look I gave him, without calling him out as a liar.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “You’re sure?” I asked.

  “If the plague is spreading to the point that they’re burning it all, then this area we’re heading into can’t be much worse than what the whole city is going to become in a few hours.”

  “It can’t be that much worse,” I said. “They can put that on our tombstones.”

  “I’ll take a maybe on horrible death this way over inevitable capture and death if we stay around here,” Jamie said.

  I hesitated.

  “I can’t go back,” Jamie said, voice soft. “You can’t either. Death is better than that.”

  I
thought of the howl of the injured, afflicted man, and I almost opened my mouth to disagree with him.

  Then I thought of the black feeling that had overcome me, at the foot of the balcony. The images of Lillian and Mary, of Jamie.

  “Take my jacket,” I said. “Cover yourself up as best you can. I don’t want you getting sick.”

  Jamie nodded.

  Better this than that. I would take the disease before I lived that black feeling again.

  I led the way into the quarantine zone.

  Previous Next

  Cut to the Quick—11.9

  Tynewear was a hustling, bustling city, its people possessed of all of the chaos and coordination of schools of fish, active and adventurous, safe in the throng. They weren’t feeling safe any longer. The city, ever blurred by fog, mist, snow, or rain, wasn’t scintillating like it should have been.

  Empty street. Then another. Then another. The few dark corners that prevailed in daylight were darker than their usual with the city’s power cut off. Businesses had shut their doors, many hanging up sheets like the one the guard had used to seal off the one cell. The sheets and the quarantine symbol blocked off one in four of the doorways and windows nearby. Other doors had been left open; I saw scattered belongings trailing out those same doors, as if the families had been so hasty in collecting their things and running that they had let some fall. Trash that had nothing to do with the dropped belongings now blew in the wind or, more common, had found puddles to soak in, losing most of its buoyancy.

  That wasn’t to say that we didn’t see any signs of life. People, ensconced in their homes, were looking out their windows. The ones that didn’t have quarantine blankets to seal off the outside world were putting up sheets and barricades.

  Running, Jamie and I made our way down a cobblestone street wide enough for three wagons to pass by one another, with the entire street to ourselves.

  Jamie’s foot splashed next to me. He had my jacket over his head, his hands tucked into his armpits, and ran while hunched over, his outer shirt removed and wound around his neck, nose, and mouth. He wasn’t really able to look where he was going. Not while he was running.

  “If you’re leading me, don’t walk me into puddles,” Jamie said.

  “Whiner.”

  The trees weren’t glowing because it wasn’t dark, and with the power out, the views through windows obscured with white and gray cloths, it was as if the area had been robbed of color.

  I was so focused on the city and potential threats that, as I saw the darkness of the liquid seeping out to wind its way around the cobblestones, I thought it was oil. I quickly connected the dots as we changed direction to move around a puddle, and saw the reflected face of a building. No, the darkness was creeping across the sky above us. Dark clouds, thick and unilateral enough in source that I suspected they were manufactured rather than natural, were now creeping across the sky.

  “The Academy is sending some bad weather our way,” I remarked.

  “Clouds?” Jamie asked.

  “Looks like. Heavy ones.”

  “Bad omen.”

  “Guess so,” I said.

  “They seemed willing to burn the Marina earlier. Rain won’t help them light the fires. That means they really want the rain for something else.”

  I looked up at the clouds. Jamie was right. That growing cloud had to be a big gun, if it was liable to make disposal harder, not easier.

  I checked behind us. We weren’t being followed.

  “We can slow down,” I said.

  “Good,” Jamie said. “My calves feel like they’ve forgotten how to flex and have just settled into one very heavy, clumsy state.”

  We slowed down. Jamie held the shirt in place as he raised his head, looking around.

  I experienced an eerie moment, seeing the world as he saw it. He looked away for a few minutes, moved a few city blocks, and then raised his head again. Things were different. He knew exactly how things had been, exactly how they were different, from ambient temperature to overall lighting.

  I think what I envied most was his ability to consistently track the tone of things. To take in the attitudes of people and see how they were shifting.

  “People are scared,” I said, the thought spurred by my moment of envy.

  “I’m a little scared,” Jamie said. He turned his head, looking through a window at a child that was helping his parents put up the sheet. Through the crack in the curtains, we could see the boy and the father’s legs as the father stood on a chair, the curtains wiggling in reaction to his work.

  Then, with the same force of a slamming door, the cloth dropped, cutting off the view, with the pale face of the child left as only a vague afterimage in my eyes, details already forgotten, while that was another little thing that Jamie would remember perfectly until the very end.

  “The shift in attitude,” I said. “It was fast. Faster here. Gut feeling is that the beat is wrong.”

  “Beat?”

  I drew a knife from my belt. Holding the grip between finger and index finger, blade touching the base of my wrist, I tapped it against the wall, marking the beat.

  “The rhythm. The flow of events?” Jamie asked.

  “Something like that. I can’t put words to it, and we don’t know enough about what this disease is for me to really make guesses about how things are moving and why. But it feels like something moved through this area. In the wake of it, with only a few words or sentences exchanged between neighbors, we have this… I don’t know what it is. Unilateral agreement? Resignation? Controlled horror? Just something stark and quiet and suppressive rushing through this area.”

  “It did,” Jamie said. “The wagon, a block back?”

  “Wagon?”

  “We’ll see others soon, I think,” he said. “They sent a wagon in, nondescript, but it held people, not goods. Recently, too.”

  “They’re moving the infected in here?”

  Jamie nodded.

  “Where are they?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Sy.”

  He hunched over and drew my jacket further over his head as the wind picked up. I could feel the chill, and the sting of the cold as it felt like it was reaching into my injured arm and down to my fingertips.

  “We’ve talked about this, but honestly, Sy, I think you like being miserable,” Jamie said.

  “What?”

  “Wherever we go, you wind up losing bits of clothing, you get wet, you get messy…”

  “Keep talking about me losing bits of clothing and people are going to get the wrong idea.”

  “They’re not going to talk about that when it comes to you getting wet and messy, Sy?”

  I gave him a weird look. Still hunched over, he angled his head up to look at me, arching an eyebrow.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  He snorted a little. A huff of a laugh.

  “What?”

  “I’m just thinking… I don’t know a good way of saying it, but I feel sort of sorry for Lillian.”

  “I really don’t get it.”

  “I’d ask what you did with her, but I don’t think I want to go there.”

  “Ohh,” I said. “I get it.”

  “And I just opened the door for you to go there, and I told you I didn’t want to. Damn it.”

  I grinned.

  “I’ve gone three days without giving you ammo, then we get shot at, a crowd of bounty hunters after us, a plague dropped on the city, and no way out in sight, and I let my guard down for one instant, and I ruin my streak.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, still smiling. “I know that might venture into touchier territory, so I’ll let it go, content to know I could use that ammo to torment you.”

  “Sure Sy,” he said.

  “You sound skeptical, you bastard. You don’t think I can be the bigger man?”

  He moved his head, I raised my finger, pointing. “No short jokes.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, sounding very se
lf-satisfied.

  “But,” I said, wagging my finger in his face, “I will have you know, sir, as a point of pride, that there is absolutely nothing wrong with my kissing technique. It is most certainly not messy nor too wet, of all things. I would even go so far as to say that I am…”

  I paused.

  “Don’t say it,” Jamie said.

  “Damn it! I forgot the word. Devilishly?”

  “I’m not going to tell you the word, Sy. I’ll remind you once an hour at most. I swear that whoever wrote the details for that poster put that in there to psychologically torment me.”

  I huffed, annoyed.

  Down one street to our right, I could see where of the sick that had been carted in, as a group gathered and headed into what might have been a restaurant. There was a wagon nearby, and the wagon had one of the quarantine sheets over top of it, lashed down in addition to being sealed. One of the corners had come free and flapped in the wind.

  One of the sick glanced in our direction. The markings streaked her face in an odd pattern. Around the cheekbones and eyes.

  Then, after a few more steps, we’d passed that particular street, leaving the ailing behind. They would hunker down in the dark, out of the way, and pray for announcement of a cure.

  I doubted that announcement would come very quickly. This was looking more and more like a weapon, and with all of the materials and ideas in the world, I doubted Fray or Mauer or whoever it was would make a plague that was easy to cure.

  “Kissing, huh?” Jamie asked, interrupting my thoughts.

  “I thought you didn’t want to know,” I said.

  “I, uh, find myself sort of pleased and simultaneously feel very, very sorry for Lillian? It’s bittersweet, but not bad.”

  “No need to feel sorry for her,” I said. I injected some smugness into my tone. “I’m a good kisser.”

  “You frustrated her so very much over the months and years.”

  “She likes being frustrated, you wagalilly—”

  “Wagalilly.”

  “Made that one up, and it fits you perfectly right now. And I made it up to Lillian. Take my word for it, on my last name as Sylvester Lambsbridge.”