Twig

by wildbow

  “Sanguine said—”

  “Fuck Sanguine,” I said. I went for the medical kit. “I got my practice in with Hammond or whatever his name was. Give me a chance to learn, I can get good at what I’m doing.”

  I brought out Evette and Lillian for guidance.

  Jamie was shaking his head, as if he was ready to protest.

  “I’ve got ideas on crude fixes. Electricity, cold, acid, and fire, in that order,” I said. I found the syringe I’d had Marv give me. He was primarily a surgeon, and he’d had the necessary supplies. I crossed the room to Jamie’s side, used fingers to measure the distance from the side of his neck, and plunged the needle in. “And I’ve got painkiller. It won’t stop the phantom pains, I don’t think, but it’ll keep you from feeling the work in progress.”

  “Sy—”

  “You should be losing sensation from the neck down. Hopefully you’ll retain the feeling in your tongue, because I want you conscious and talking me through the trickier bits,” I said, as I washed my hands with the stuff Marv had handed me. “Got it?”

  Jamie shook his head.

  With my hands, putting fingers through Jamie’s hair, I gripped Jamie by his head, tilting his face up to face mine. “Got it?”

  “Sy, whatever you cut away, you’re going to have to cut around the insertion points. The parts where the Caterpillar project plugs in. I won’t be able to—It’ll be a matter of months. A year. There won’t be getting a doctor to kludge something together to offload and organize for me, like I’ve been kludging your Wyvern together.”

  “Better than a matter of days,” I said, firmly, still gripping his head. I gripped it harder, squeezing a little. “Let me save you.”

  “You’re crazy,” he said.

  Evette cackled in the background.

  “I wanted to get into Academy medicine,” I said. “Expand our skills and options. I got too good a taste of it in Warrick. But I need you at my side to make it work. Okay? I need you at my side for lots of reasons. Okay? Okay?”

  I gave that final question emphasis enough to make it about more than the Academy medicine.

  “Okay,” Jamie said. “My body is going numb now. It actually does help a little with the pain. Feels like my head is disembodied, and my body is very far away.”

  “Good,” I said. I stood up and began getting the tools together. “Perfect. Listen, they’re underestimating just how quick I’ve gotten with that scalpel. And I’m going to get quicker by the time I’m done here.”

  “I know, Sy.”

  “They’ve counted you as one of the dead. Now I fully intend to make you one of the living again. I promise.”

  Scalpel in hand, I set about following through on that promise.

  Previous Next

  Cut to the Quick—11.15

  A cup of fresh tea sat in my hands as I sat at the window above my bed. I watched as stitched and Academy soldiers in special outfits made their way through the streets in a systematic fashion. The outfits were black, covering them from head to toe, but for pale masks, akin to the beaked plague doctor masks of the last century. These beaks were far less pronounced, only a stylistic choice to house and protect the filters around the nose and mouth.

  I thought of them as crows. Black and beaked, they picked their way through the dead, carrying guns that spit out flame and chemical in equal measure. The result, even past sealed glass windows, smelled like a very chemical, very personal, and very insulting letter to Mother Nature, telling her in no uncertain terms that we were done with her.

  I sipped on my tea, watching as one group of crows knocked heavily on a door. While they waited for a response, I reached down to a saucer I’d perched on the windowsill, picked up a sugar cube and placed it on my tongue. I let my saliva dissolve it. It had been a couple of months since the plague hit, several weeks that we’d been camped out here, specifically, and the good snacks had run out a good week ago.

  Further down the street, the crows put up a kind of quarantine seal over the front door of the house they’d knocked at. They got under the curtain, making it bulge with the bodies beneath, then found their way inside.

  “That’s the third contingent of people who’ve come through the city to get people out,” Jamie observed, from the other end of the room. “They might come knocking soon.”

  I nodded, still letting the sugar cube melt on my tongue.

  “Are we leaving this time, or do you want to wait and see?”

  I watched as the Crows emerged from the house, with a family of three in tow, each member of the family wearing a kind of disposable cover-all with a mask on their lower faces. I’d seen that particular family as I roamed the city. A short ways into it, I’d realized they were frightened of me, as if I was some kind of bogeyman. I wondered if I’d been seen walking around with a knife in hand or blood on me at some point.

  As scared as they had been of me, the family talked openly with the crows, who seemed to be talking back. One crow put a hand on the family patriarch’s shoulder. Reassuring.

  “We can leave,” I said, after swallowing. “Going to suck, leaving our place behind. I’ve grown attached.”

  “Yeah. We spent more time here in the last six months than you spent at Lambsbridge in the year before we left. The road trips and the little, stupid missions,” Jamie said.

  I craned my head, looking over the room. It was easy to let things slide when there was virtually no chance of anyone stopping by. Papers were strewn everywhere, some weighed down. The entire place was sealed, but there were tiny drafts here and there, and having wood in the stove tended to stir the air around and send some papers floating this way and that. The weights were handy.

  “Thinking about our notes?” Jamie asked.

  “Be nice to have,” I said.

  “You have me,” he said.

  I glanced at him and rolled my eyes.

  “You want the papers, fine,” he said.

  “It’s good for organizing my thoughts,” I said. I walked over to the music player and set the scroll to turning. Music filled the place. That done, I picked my way through the papers by hand, taking them up in a specific order while being especially careful of where I set my feet so I wouldn’t kick any of the paperweights. The papers were organized with a pattern in mind, and the paperweights had a general theme that helped me trace the intent of each note. Knives and some guns for targets, books for information, and so on. I didn’t want to stub my toe on a tome that was holding down a corner of four different papers, and I definitely didn’t want to kick or step on a knife with bare feet.

  I collected papers in one hand while holding my tea in the other, walking a precarious path across the floor.

  “You’ll have to get those through whatever they have in place for getting people out of quarantine,” Jamie said.

  “It’s worth it,” I said. “I have things I want to do. I don’t want to lose track partway through.”

  I collected the last of the major target orders, carefully kicked and slid a few of the dangerous items I’d used as paperweights under the bed, and then paused, surveying to decide what I’d need to sort out next so that the papers were in some sort of order.

  While thinking, I took a sip of my tea, then grimaced. Getting cold, and it was bitter with only a quarter of a cup left.

  I walked over to my bed, and balanced on one foot, bracing my left shin against the bed as I extended my right foot out. I picked up a sugar cube between two toes, extended the cup, and dropped the cube in, only wobbling a little once.

  “You’re so gross,” Jamie said.

  I grinned, “I had a bath an hour ago. How dirty can my feet be? And so what if they are dirty? Oooh, germs! Wait, germs don’t affect me. Oooh, parasites—”

  “You’re lame too.”

  “—Parasites don’t affect me. Dirt? What did a little bit of dust or dirt ever hurt anyone?”

  “A lot, actually,” Jamie said. “Even here in Tynewear, sufficient dirt in the right place can gi
ve the red flowers a chance to grow.”

  “Semantics,” I said. I bent down to pick up more papers. I used my toes to seize a knife handle, passed it up to the hand with the papers, and used that hand to put the knife on a table.

  “Not doing anything to shake my mental image of you as a hairless monkey, Sy.”

  “Ha ha,” I said. “It’s not like you’re going to get off your ass and help me, is it?”

  “Nope,” he said. “I can remind you to disable the traps before anyone comes knocking, though.”

  “Good point!” I said. I put the papers down on a table and made my way to the door. I’d set up a few traps there to be safe. I disarmed the makeshift incendiary traps, and put a lid on the mason jar of chemicals I’d set beneath a dangling string of cloth-wrapped packages.

  The pounding knock on the door made me jump a solid foot in the air. Jamie laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world.

  Rolling my eyes again, I swiped a hand at him, and banished him to the recesses of my imagination. The ass-end of it, I liked to think.

  I took a second to catch my bearings, listening to the music playing in the otherwise quiet apartment, before I opened the door.

  Crows loomed at the front of the house. They were flanked on either side by stitched. In any other circumstance, I might have wondered if they were the equivalent of mob enforcers, ready to pound my face in. They had that aura of menace and intimidation. The curtain surrounded the doorway.

  “We’re evacuating the area,” the lead crow said.

  I hadn’t even had time to get things cleaned up and sorted out. The place was riddled with things I didn’t want them to see, and there were a dozen more things I wanted to grab before I left.

  I remained silent, thinking.

  “Are you sick?” the man asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Roll up those sleeves,” he said.

  I pulled up my sleeves. He indicated my legs, and I pulled them up, too. I lifted up my shirt until it was at my armpits.

  “Good enough. We’ll give you a more thorough looking over at the gate,” he said.

  I nodded obediently. “Can I get ready?” I asked. My thoughts were turning to ways to stall. I wanted to get things in order before I left.

  “If you don’t take long,” he said. “One bag, no more. And you’ll need to wear this.”

  He reached back, and one of his fellow crows handed him a sealed bag, presumably with one of those simple, disposable suits inside it.

  I took it. I put up a hand to tell them to stay, but they ignored it, inviting themselves in. They closed the door behind them.

  I felt hostile. Protective of the space. Nevermind that it was largely furnished with stolen goods, packed to the gills with incriminating evidence, and had traps specifically set out to catch nosy individuals off guard.

  No, none of that really mattered, even if these guys seemed intrusive and nosy. No, what mattered was that this was my place. A place Jamie and I had shared. The very first place that was ours.

  These strangers just letting themselves in and acting like they had a right to be here was like a provocation, one that I instinctually wanted to answer in homicidal ways.

  I just wasn’t sure if I could get away with it. I bit my tongue.

  “Unusual number of guns and weapons lying around,” the lead crow said. “What are the papers?”

  He was turning his attention to the desk with the stack of papers detailing all the people I was interested in killing and doing terrible things to, people I wanted out of the way, people I wanted to interrogate for details that would help me find and kill more important people… nine out of ten of which would look very bad to someone in service to the Academy.

  I didn’t say anything to that, not right away. Instead, I pulled off my shirt, then undid the button of my pants. I shucked off my underclothes as well.

  “‘hem,” another crow said. A woman.

  I looked back at the crows, and saw they were all averting their gaze. I’d successfully gotten the attention of the lead crow, and then made him feel uncomfortable enough to turn his eyes away.

  “My uncle rented this place. He got a lot of weapons because we had food and he knew a lot of people didn’t. He wanted to be ready if they got desperate and came after us,” I said. “He got sick, went out, and didn’t come back.”

  “I’m sorry,” the woman crow said. “Why are you naked?”

  The question was so disjointed in contrast to the condolences I wanted to laugh out loud. I didn’t.

  “I’m getting changed before I go out. I don’t know when I’ll have the chance again and I wasn’t wearing my good clothes. It’s fine, isn’t it? You’re all doctors?”

  “We’re soldiers, not doctors,” the lead crow said. “Soldiers with some training on quarantine procedure.”

  “Oh,” I said. I feigned being in more of a hurry to get some underclothes, slacks, a shirt and a sweater on, with a note of embarrassment. I grabbed a bag and began getting clothes together.

  I grabbed a few papers from here and there, anticipating the question well before it arrived.

  “What’s the story with the papers everywhere?” the lead crow asked.

  “Memory game,” I lied. “The things I put on top are part of the game.”

  He glanced at the stack of papers I’d put on the desk.

  “Staying sane,” the lead crow observed.

  “Not in the slightest,” I said. More for my benefit than for theirs. “Cabin fever.”

  “Not a good joke to make in the wake of a plague,” the third crow said. Quiet up until now. A taciturn fellow. “Joking about ‘fever’.”

  “True,” I said. I saw the lead crow look again at the papers. I suspected he was going to reach for them and snoop. I added, “It looked like you crows were all going down the other side of the street. I thought you wouldn’t come knocking here until the next time around.”

  “Crows?” the lead crow asked. He sounded almost amused.

  I was amused, in my own little way, that I could drop that tidbit, create a little question, and command the man’s attention. Just like my temporary nudity. Successfully nudging their attention away from the papers each time.

  “It’s what I called you. I saw you come before, a week or so ago, and I shouted, and you didn’t come knocking on our door,” I said.

  Creating another question. Leading them by the nose. That, and I was curious why they’d come knocking here. I’d thought I had time, and was very annoyed to be wrong in that.

  “Your neighbors across the way said there were lights on in here at night.”

  Ah. The family.

  Sometimes the most obvious answer was the right one.

  I gathered my things, and walked over to the desk, picking up the stack of papers. I slid them in between clothes and the side of the bag.

  “My uncle said I should keep his work notes, so I can find family members after we leave,” I said.

  I felt like I’d pushed things too far. Something about their body language and silence.

  I didn’t need a jacket, as we were nearing the end of spring.

  I walked away from them, nervous, and approached Jamie’s bed. I kicked it, hard.

  Jamie was already lying on his side, head on his pillow, looking out at the room and my side of things.

  “We’re leaving,” I said.

  “I know, I heard,” Jamie said. He worked at sitting up, testing one shoulder that I knew was tricky after the surgery. He wore a shirt, but I could see the multitude of faint scars and the shiny burn scar with some branching paths running off of it where I’d jolted him with a live current. The scar at his collarbone was a particularly bad one.

  “You have someone there?” the lead crow asked. “Is he sick?”

  “No,” I said. “He’s okay.”

  “What’s he doing in bed in the middle of the day?” the crow asked.

  Recuperating. Sleeping more, because it’s the closest thi
ng he can get to treatment now, for consolidating memories.

  I left Jamie alone as he got himself out of bed. I’d chosen to wake him up later as part of my stalling tactics, and now capitalized on it. While Jamie got himself ready and fielded a few questions and some light investigation, I managed to slip a few weapons into the bag, while collecting a few more of the important papers.

  “—scars?” I heard a crow ask.

  “I was sick. I recovered,” Jamie said. “In a loose sense of the word.”

  “How?”

  “Knife, voltaic current through the worst areas. Stopped my heart, apparently.”

  “Who handled all of that?”

  “A doctor. He worked in a brothel,” Jamie said. “He was apparently one of the only ones to figure out a way to deal with it.”

  “Wasn’t easy or pretty,” I observed. “We almost lost you a few times.”

  Jamie looked at me and smiled.

  “Alright. We’ll keep an eye out for him,” the crow said.

  It sounded ominous enough that I wondered if I should steer them away from Marv. But the fact was that Marv had eagerly taken on the job of treating who he could, using what I’d told him. I’d handled some of the cases like Jamies’ had been, that seemed impossible to save, but Marv had plugged away on it. Keeping his hands and his head busy, as I understood it.

  “He’s not in trouble?” I asked, to double-check.

  “No. He’s not the only one to figure something out. But they said to keep an eye out for anyone who figured out ways to stave it off or remove it, they want to share knowledge. You said he was a doctor?”

  “Student doctor, I think,” I said.

  That got a nod.

  Hopefully they would pay for that knowledge, and Marv would get a leg up. Money, or status, easier access to better classes.

  Jamie finished pulling on pants and a shirt, ran his hands through his hair, and then cleaned his glasses. He bent down to get clothes out and I bent down to help him.

  “Sleep well?” I asked.

  “You talk to your ghosts incessantly,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I take it that’s a no?”