Twig

by wildbow

  “It was fine. I was mostly thinking. Not that that was easy either. You worry me sometimes, Sy.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I was talking to you,” I said.

  He gave me a funny look.

  “You’re sleeping more, I don’t sleep much, I got lonely,” I said. I shrugged. “So I talked to you.”

  The funny look remained, intensified briefly, and then broke, with Jamie turning his focus wholly to stowing away his clothes with more intensity than before, as if he was annoyed.

  “Don’t—not that shirt,” he said.

  “It’s a good shirt,” I said, shoving it into his bag.

  He sighed, pulling it out. I was about to fight him over it, but he neatly folded the shirt and put it away.

  Once we had him packed, he stood. They’d gotten another of the cover-all suits out, and we pulled the things on, tying them down in places we were supposed to tie them down, and putting the masks on.

  I was still fixing the little things the crows were telling me I’d done up wrong when Jamie, dressed and okayed by the woman crow, got the scrolls from the music machine and carefully stowed them away in his bag.

  I supposed I’d have to get another scrollphone when we arrived at our next semi-permanent destination.

  “Ready?” the female crow asked.

  Jamie and I checked with each other, then nodded.

  The crows headed out.

  “I really don’t want to get sick again,” Jamie said, hesitating at the door.

  “I know,” I said. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Not to worry.”

  Jamie almost flinched as we stepped outside into the sunlight. It was warm, but something about Tynewear now seemed hostile and dead, less a glittering beetle shell and more a husk. The parts were mostly there, but the color had dulled, little things were missing and broken, and it lacked animation. It had been bleached by sun, lack of care, and by the dust and fine splinters that had been shed by the creaking walls that sectioned the city off into districts. Windows were no longer glimpses into stores, restaurants and homes, but glass panes with sheets hanging behind them. Trash collected here and there, in corners and by the sides of the roads. Cracks and peeling paint that would have been dutifully mended before had been left to get worse.

  The city smelled like tentacled waterborne warbeasts had been left to rot and were taking two months to do it, with a chemical undertone from the sprayers they were using to blast the plant into oblivion whenever they spotted a red flower. We were outdoors, but it didn’t smell like fresh air, even past those other odors.

  I looked at the crows. “You said they wanted to get ahead of the problem? It’s not under control?”

  “It’s spreading. Every time it seems to slow down with one city, it picks up in three more. Most of the west coast has felt the bite. Big cities, too. Las Reinas is going the wag of Lugh.”

  “Have they found out who did it?”

  He gave me a curious look. “You think someone did it?”

  “Feels mean enough, my uncle said,” I said.

  That got me a throat-noise that sounded vaguely like the agreeing sort.

  “The rebel groups are apparently to blame, but with the way it’s going out of control, people are saying the group that’s responsible doesn’t want to admit it.”

  Jamie glanced at me.

  It was disappointing that there wasn’t anything more concrete. A lot of my dialogue with Jamie over the past few months had been musing about where Fray, Mauer and the nobles individually stood, trying to figure out what their next moves would look like if they were the source of this red plague and what their moves would look like if they weren’t.

  Figuring out where the Lambs would find themselves was a not-insignificant part of that thought process.

  “Did the plague touch Radham?” Jamie asked.

  “Little ways off, that. Do you have family there?”

  Jamie nodded, once.

  “They handled it well there,” the crow said. “They handled it well here, believe it or not.”

  They handled it well here?

  I half-turned, still walking with the group, and took in the scene.

  Half of the city was burned. Maybe a fifth of the city was overgrown, now, tinted red with an overgrowth of the red flowers, but those areas were contained by walls that seemed to be holding steady. For reasons I couldn’t discern, possibly a lack of bodies, the remainder of the city was dotted with red flowers here and there, but the infection hadn’t quite managed to get a foothold.

  Part of the city still stood, I supposed. The rain had made a difference. The quarantine measures had helped keep things constrained. It hadn’t been great to be in the city during, but…

  “I’d hate to see the cities they handled it poorly,” I said.

  “Mostly the cities where the Academy doesn’t have as much of a hold,” the lead crow said.

  I glanced at Jamie again. I knew he could read my mind on this one, after all of the discussions. One point toward this being the Academy’s work, then.

  It was a long walk to the ‘gate’, where we joined two hundred other survivors. Jamie and I joined the tail end of the group, and remained silent for several minutes, watching the crowd and the crows that stood on the fringes.

  The crows gave the signal, and counted off people. Twenty five men, twenty women, and five children going with the women. Fifty in all. Each was led single file into separate tents.

  “You’re tense,” Jamie observed.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “For different reasons, I think,” he said. He rolled his shoulder, wincing a little. “What are you thinking?”

  “That maybe the academy wants to clean up this mess. Gather up the people, infected or not, and eliminate the problem.”

  “You’re not sure, though. You said ‘maybe’.”

  “I said maybe,” I agreed. “I don’t get that feeling. I just… I guess I can’t wrap my head around why they aren’t doing it. Did leadership change? Or did circumstances change while we weren’t paying attention?”

  Jamie nodded. I thought he was dismissing me or he hadn’t heard, as his eyes roved over the crowd. In the end, however, he pushed his glasses up his nose, and remarked, “Jamie made note of something Gordon said, once. About how important people are to the Academy. That without them, it falls to pieces. We can say that people are often expendable, especially in cases like Lugh, but what if it’s bigger than a city?”

  “They create crows as a unit to go and collect the people, just in case this situation ends up being so bad that they end up needing a few hundred extra people?”

  “If it’s spreading like it’s spreading, and they get a few hundred to a few thousand people from every city, that adds up,” Jamie said, his voice muffled by the mask.

  It was sobering to think about.

  I glanced back at the city, and at the areas of it that were clearly overridden.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Do you feel good about our odds?” Jamie asked, indicating the tents that waited.

  I drew in a deep breath, and winced. That damn chemical smell made it impossible to smell most of anything. I saw Jamie draw in a deep breath as well.

  “I don’t smell blood or shit,” he said. “Not much, anyway.”

  I nodded. “We’ll go ahead then.”

  It took a while to get far enough along. More people appeared behind us, better-dressed sorts from the cliffs, the higher-income area that had been less touched by plague. They were also the ones to push their way forward in the crowd. Jamie and I didn’t fight particularly hard to get ahead in the line. We’d waited months already to get out, and the way I saw it, the longer we waited, the more tired people would be. Tired eyes wouldn’t recognize a face as being from a wanted poster.

  Finally, we were included in the people sent forward and into the tents. There, we disrobed. We were checked over, poked with rulers to move our arms and legs this way and that, and then given clo
thes to change into, still covered in the powder. My clothes didn’t fit well.

  I worried they would look at my bag, but they just blasted it, outside and in, with enough powder to asphyxiate anyone within five feet of the bag, and then let me claim it.

  I didn’t see how it went for Jamie, but he took a little longer to make his way through, and looked deeply uncomfortable, hunching over slightly with his arms folded, as he emerged. I clapped a hand on his shoulder.

  On the other side, mercifully, were benches and seats to sit on, gathered in a loose fashion around long tables with food. The faint babble of talking I’d heard while in the tent became a low roar.

  The gesture of offering food and rest, nice as it was, spooked me as much as anything. That the Academy was working to curry favor. Them offering a small kindness, to me, was as if the bastard professors that were in charge had talked among themselves and had openly admitted that things were unstable enough that they couldn’t afford a riot or a problem on the ground level.

  We made our way through the maze of tables and benches and found Chance, Drake, Candida and Lainie, sitting with a few of the girls from the brothel. Shirley was among those girls.

  On seeing me, Shirley hopped to her feet and threw her arms around me in a hug. The suddenness of it made some of the collected powder puff out around us, from beneath our clothes. Her hair had grown out a touch in the last three months.

  “I cannot believe they let you walk out of there,” Lainie said, sounding very much like a girl who had gone to school with the elite and taken classes in snobbery.

  “Don’t sound so disappointed,” I said. With a bit of an edge to my voice, I added, “Really.”

  “I’m not disappointed,” she said. “I’m not very enthused either.”

  “Ha ha,” I said, without humor.

  “I’m glad you’re alright,” Candida said. “Thank you, for bringing us supplies last week.”

  I waved her off, plunking myself down on the bench. Jamie sat with me.

  To go from months of relative isolation, talking to a half-dozen people at a time, at most, to being in the midst of a crowd again, it felt strange. Stranger still for the bustling city to be empty, the outskirts to be where the denser portion of the population was.

  “The next train arrives in a few minutes,” Drake told us. “Listen, they’re gathering up the orphans. The children without parents to look after them. There aren’t many. The last train came through and they didn’t put any on there, letting the number build up instead. Elaine was on the cusp of being put on that train, but with Chance vouching for her as an older sibling—”

  “They released her into my custody. If I’d been a year younger, I’d be on there,” Chance said. He gave me a pointed look.

  I was younger. Or I looked younger.

  “When they organized us into groupings of man, woman, and child, for the tents back there, I was a ‘man’,” I said. “I’m fifteen. Or sixteen. Give or take.”

  Jamie snorted. I punched his arm hard, in retaliation. “Estimated age!”

  “You’re young enough,” Chance said.

  “We’ll go on the train with you,” Drake offered. “Get you and Jamie out of here, while keeping you from going where those children are going.”

  I nodded. “Thank you.”

  “I know you can fend for yourself, but if you want help getting settled, then—”

  I was already shaking my head.

  “Didn’t think so,” Drake said. He looked utterly unsurprised at the refusal.

  “We turned them down too. We’ve imposed for too long as is. Lainie and I were going to leave around the time the plague hit, ended up cooped up with those two for a few months.”

  “Sorry,” Candida said.

  “We’re going north,” Elaine said.

  Chance added, “I have some friends over there who’ve offered me a bit of work. Lab assistant.”

  “Best of luck,” Jamie said.

  Chance gave him a mock salute.

  “Where are you going?” I asked Candida and Drake.

  “One of the big cities,” Candida volunteered. “Not sure which, but one with a big Academy, since they seem the most able to deal with the plague. We even thought we might get on the train and just see how each city looked before deciding whether to get off.”

  “You won’t get much of a chance to do that,” Jamie said. “Crowds at the front of the train, fighting to get to your luggage in time… I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  Candida nodded, frowning a little.

  “I don’t want to push you or anything,” I suggested. “But if it was all the same to you, could I suggest Radham?”

  “Radham? Possibly. Why?”

  “Your appearance has changed, and if you kept to the right areas, I don’t think people would recognize you as the Baron’s would-be wife. Even if you were only there for a short while, I could do with someone I trust passing on a message,” I said. “You could say hi to Lillian while you were there.”

  “I’d like to do that,” Candida said. “But you talking about people recognizing me has me nervous, now.”

  “It’ll be fine,” I said. “I can tell you where to go and what to do, and give you tips on disguising yourself.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I feel like I owe you, so—”

  “You don’t owe me Jack shit,” I said. “You helped with the situation in Lugh, which was heroic, and endured the Baron, you gave me your trust, and—”

  “You—” she started.

  Jamie stuck his hand between Candida and me.

  “We’re friends,” Jamie said. “Friends don’t count favors.”

  I hesitated to agree to that, and I could tell at a glance that Candida was hesitating for very much the same reason. As we both recognized that we were very much on the same page, we relaxed. Candida laughed, baring sharpened teeth, and it was a good sound.

  “I’ll pass on the message,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Give me a few minutes to think of what it would sound like. Probably something simple.”

  She nodded.

  From there, as if we’d laid out the key things, we settled into easy conversation. None of us were easy companions, we didn’t mesh particularly well, but we’d been pushed together by circumstance and we’d stayed together for a fair amount of time, with a lot of emotion and tension binding things together in the midst of that proximity. Detaching took some work, talking things through in a kind of prolonged goodbye.

  “The madam of the house stayed behind, a captain with her ship. She wants to make sure everyone makes their way out without trouble, and then she wants to get things sorted out. Say goodbye to the house. From what I hear, they won’t be letting us go back,” Shirley said. “Tynewear is being evacuated, and nobody will be allowed back in. They’ll bury it.”

  “Are you going with her when she leaves?” Jamie asked.

  Shirley shook her head. “I think there are other girls who will help her get established somewhere else, but that’s not me. I love her, don’t get me wrong. She’s a dear, and she’s one of two people who’ve ever really cared about me in any way. I want to say goodbye to her, but I don’t want to stay with her much longer, I don’t think, or I might find myself staying at her side until I’m old.”

  She took a deep breath, then clenched her fists in front of her, as if miming some display of strength.

  “Stretch those wings. Take a leap of faith,” I said.

  She smiled at me. “Not a big leap. I was wondering if I could come with you for a time?”

  I raised my eyebrows at that.

  “Sy is pretty intolerable to be around for extended periods,” Jamie said. “I’m Academy-augmented, I’ve had just about my entire lifetime to get used to him, and I can barely tolerate him.”

  “I’m tougher than I look,” Shirley said. “But I want to learn things so I can face the world, and I like what Sylvester has to teach.”

  I glanced at Jamie. “Pla
n C?”

  He sighed.

  “Plan C?” Shirley asked.

  “Building something,” I said. “If you want to stay on for a while, it… wouldn’t wholly conflict with what we might end up doing.”

  “Yeah,” Jamie said. “You’re going to regret this, but I’m not saying no.”

  Shirley smiled, as if she was only hearing the good parts.

  The conversation continued, meandering here and there, and I took a bit of a backseat as Jamie did more of the talking. It was like he’d revived a little, surrounded by people. I’d have to surround him with even more good people to keep him in high spirits.

  My thoughts preoccupied along several tracks, many having to do with the list of targets and the notes in my bag, I found my eyes wandering through the crowd, looking at the people and analyzing them.

  As I heard the train whistle, I saw the collected orphans of Tynewear getting guided along into a waiting train car. I thought for a bit about my own origins, and about the original Mary Cobourn, and the Baron’s mocking refusal to answer when I’d asked where the children were going. I knew that while there wasn’t much I could do to disrupt those particular orphans getting on that particular train, but that I wanted to be in a position sometime in the future where I could keep those children from disappearing.

  Plan C was to start a rebel faction. Put ourselves on the map, in a position to have leverage, and be invited to meetings. In the wake of the plague, I expected it would be very easy to get people on our side.

  Either way, I wanted soldiers of my own as something of a buffer when the Lambs came calling.

  Previous Next

  Lamb (Arc 11)

  “Calipers, measurement… twenty five point four.”

  Duncan moved the calipers. His ‘dog’ startled a little at the movement. The thin tentacles that formed its head and extended down its back and sides drew in, coiling, ready to reach out. He had to stop moving for a moment, waiting.

  Why had it done that?

  Did it perceive the calipers as a weapon?

  Keeping his head and body still, he moved only his left hand as he wrote on the back of a page in his notebook. Caliper reaction, Ano#3. Does it see calipers as claw/bite? Instinctive or learned? If former, what aspect of chimera provided? Will that impact training? If latter, where did it learn?