Twig

by wildbow

  “You remember right,” he said. “You’re breaking me out? This gas is about me?”

  “In small part,” I said. “You caught our eye.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Sammy isn’t going anywhere just yet,” Skinny cut in, with a nasty tone to his voice. “Sammy has other obligations.”

  “That so, Sammy? Should I just move on to the next person on my list?” I asked.

  “I just keep getting in deeper,” Samuel said, mournful. “I’m not a killer.”

  “The murder rap says different,” I said.

  “I bought memorabilia, it was restricted material, I was supposed to spend a year in. But I couldn’t hack it. They offered protection.”

  “And we’re still offering protection,” Skinny cut in. He turned to me, “You let him out, you gotta let me out. And I can give you two more names.”

  “I see,” I said, more or less ignoring Skinny. “I know the general story, Samuel. You got out, you still had a debt to pay. They put you to work smuggling. You got caught for that, you got taken in, and found yourself on the wrong end of a guy with a shiv. You walked away alive, he didn’t. He had friends, and you need more protection, which means more debts to pay out when you get out of here, if they don’t decide to ease the tax burden and either hang you or sell you to the Academy as a guinea pig.”

  “Seems about right.”

  “They won’t be hanging him,” Skinny said. “We’ve got lawyers, and our lawyers have his back.”

  He sounded so excited, as if he thought he was getting out.

  “Sammy,” I said. “I want that brain of yours that spent eight years smuggling things past the Academy. Tell me, do you want out?”

  “I get the feeling I’d be trading one master for another,” he said.

  “You would,” I said.

  “Getting in deeper.”

  “‘Ey!” Skinny said.

  “Probably,” I said. “But you could see your mother and make sure she’s looked after.”

  “We’ve already pledged to make sure she’s alright!” Skinny said. “So fuck you!”

  He was on edge, now. I suspected he could sense the direction this was going.

  “You have two options, Samuel,” I said. “Either you can trust me and my ability to let you simply walk out of here, or you can trust him, and his promises. Maybe I’m biased, but they sound pretty hollow to me.”

  “Fuck you, you little faggo!” Skinny screeched. His hand flew out past the bars, toward my face. I stepped back out of the way, avoiding the shiv he held.

  “If you want out, knock out Skinny here, Samuel. It’s the last time I’ll ask you to do violence, I promise,” I said.

  Skinny pulled back, wheeling around, pointing the shiv at Samuel, his back to the bars.

  I stepped in close and drew my own knife, sliding it into one kidney, my other hand reaching through for his shirt and grabbing it to keep him in place as I stabbed the next.

  Paralyzed by pain, he fell to the floor of his cell.

  “Nevermind that,” I said. “Needed to distract him. I’ll never ask you to do violence, Samuel. I’ll never put you out in the field. I need advice on some points, for some jobs. I’ll compensate you fairly. We’ll get your mom set up.”

  There was no sound or movement within the cell.

  But then the shadow appeared. Six feet tall and wide enough his hips could scrape against both sides of an open door as he passed through, his facial features and everything else sagged on him, as if, on top of all of his weight, gravity weighed twice as heavily on him. It pulled his brow down at the outer edges, in a permanent frown or sympathetic look.

  “Let me out,” he said, quiet. The nearby cells had fallen silent, listening in.

  As I put the key in the lock and hauled the door open, there was an uproar from others nearby, who realized what was going on. Threats, promises, boasting, and self-aggrandizement filled the cell block.

  Samuel seemed to shrink into himself in the face of the criticism that wasn’t even aimed directly at him. Most of it, anyway. I handed him one of the gas masks.

  I’d released prisoners before, as a distraction. Here, however, it would be too problematic. I was trying to build something. We had to be selective.

  Two cells down. Was that left or right?

  “The runner,” I said.

  “I suppose that means me,” I heard. “Yes.”

  “Fast response.”

  “I’m fast. It’s what I’m about.”

  “Lookout and scout for hire, if I remember right?”

  “And someone thought I was too expensive and got bitter, turned me in. Yes. What do I need to say to get you to let me out of here? I agree. I accept the deal, whatever the terms.”

  “Are you alone in your cell?” I asked. I couldn’t quite tell with the smoke, and it looked like there were two people in there.

  “Yes.”

  I put my key to the lock and hauled the door open.

  I watched as what had appeared to be two people turned out to be one augmented person. Arms and legs had been extended and modified, so that he walked on tiptoes. His feet were as long as my forearm, the heel and ankle were where my elbow would’ve been in that same analogy. Lanky didn’t even begin to describe it.

  His face was what threw me, though. Not a mask, but surgically altered. He’d given himself the head of a rabbit, complete with floppy ears. The hair was a touch sparse, though. It wasn’t like a drawing of a talking animal in a children’s book, though. The appearance of an overgrown, balding rabbit head with bulging, weeping, bloodshot eyes and open mouth failing make vaguely human expressions was disconcerting, to say the least.

  Jamie had only given me two gas masks, when we were hoping for three recruits. Rabbit here couldn’t wear one, so he would have to suffer.

  “I like you already,” I said. I turned around, looking. “One more. Seven… right side, if I remember right.”

  In the time that it took me to walk past the sixth cells and make my way to the seventh, they’d managed to count. I heard a, “Wait, we’re seven! And we’re on the right! Hi! Hi kid!”

  “Hi,” I said.

  “I’m Anthony, and I know mechanics, handyman stuff, I can drive cars—”

  “Wife beater!” someone else shouted.

  “Fuck off!” Anthony shouted.

  “The businessman,” I said. “I’m looking for him.”

  “That’s me,” I heard. The businessman approached the bars. He put a hand on Anthony’s shoulders and Anthony reluctantly backed off, giving him space. The businessman was Japanese, his hair a mess. “Hello, Sylvester.”

  “We’ve met?”

  “No, but I’ve heard of you. You know who I worked for before.”

  “The Spears,” I said. “Cynthia.”

  “I assume you’re looking for someone to help with accounting?” he asked.

  Something about his tone and attitude…

  “Could be,” I said. More cautious than before.

  “It’s a little more complicated than me abandoning former ties like Sammy there is doing,” he said. “There are concessions to be made, negotiation—”

  “No,” I said, cutting him off. “Thanks for letting me know.”

  With that said, I turned my back on him.

  “Hey!” he said, to my back, “I’m open to talks!”

  I ignored his ever-more-plaintive cries as I left him behind.

  All of my individual instincts were telling me he was a bad choice. Good on paper, reading about and researching his exploits, but not someone I wanted.

  Two recruits was good enough for now. A bit piecemeal, but we would manage.

  We made our way to the end of the hallway, and I shut and locked the door.

  “Shutter,” I said. “Reach up.”

  The Rabbit didn’t even need to exert effort to reach up and grab the shutter that I would have had to climb the door to get ahold of. It was practically at eye level for him.

>   “What next?” Samuel asked.

  “We wait,” I said. “And I tell you this. I don’t have many rules. Most are the ones you’d expect, given what we’ll end up doing. Treat me and mine with respect. That goes double for my devastatingly attractive secretary.”

  “Secretary?” Rabbit asked.

  “But listen, because this is serious. The boy you’re about to see? If you so much as give a hint as to his existence, I will have to kill you. He is a ghost, and he will remain a ghost until I say otherwise. This is the big rule.”

  I saw Rabbit’s head move up and down in a nod. Samuel was still and silent.

  He didn’t like the threats of violence. That was fair. So long as the message sunk in.

  Jamie appeared out of the fog. He was doing well, shifting his weight to minimize the noise of his footsteps. He so reminded me of the old Jamie, given his posture, holding a foot-thick ream of folders and papers to his chest.

  “Got it?” I asked.

  “Transfer papers, prisoner files, and open cases. We should be able to get a good lay of the land, here and in other cities and prisons. We’ll be able to handpick who and what we want, instead of going by what the papers say.”

  “Perfect,” I said.

  “Nice to meet you two,” Jamie said. “The accountant didn’t work out?”

  “No,” I said, simply.

  “Okay. This way. To the basement.”

  “Basement?” Rabbit asked.

  “We had people dig a hole in,” I said. “From a nearby cellar. They only breached the floor today, and most of the mist is coming from there. It would take a miracle for them to find the hole without the gas. With it? Like I said, we’re just walking right out. Maybe a bit of crawling.”

  “Ah,” Rabbit said. “I’m claustrophobic.”

  “And they’ve got the place surrounded, with warbeasts and everything under the sun ready to move at a moment’s notice. If you want to go overground, feel free,” I said.

  I saw his ear and one eye twitch as he contemplated the options. Stay? Make a run for it? Get buried alive?

  “You don’t want to go overground,” I said. “Come on. This way. Endure.”

  Previous Next

  Dyed in the Wool—12.2

  Our carriage slowed as it pulled into the makeshift stable. I began to put away the first aid kit and mirror.

  Pierre was already hunching forward, his shoulders threatening to graze the roof, his neck more horizontal than vertical. His elbows had no place to go, so his arms dangled between bent knees, hands touching the floor. I was learning to read his body language, and even if common sense hadn’t told me, I’d know he was uncomfortable by the way his ears twitched.

  Already in an uncomfortable position, he leaned down even further to peer through the window at our destination.

  “Under construction?” he asked. There was a human mouth behind his mask of rabbit flesh, either black by ethnicity or tattooed that way. I hadn’t looked closely enough to say one way or another, but it made his mouth hard to see behind the mask.

  “Work in progress, all of it,” Jamie said. His eyes were on the files. He barely seemed to glance over each one before moving on to the next. Occasionally he’d held up one of interest while I swabbed at my nose or ear. Now he was gathering the files together again. “We’ll be a minute before we stop. There’s a garage and stable under construction, but we have to make our way past the piles of material and the work crews to the back.”

  “Work in progress. Are we core components in this work?” Pierre asked.

  “You are not,” I said. “You’re pieces of a puzzle we’re still putting together. They’ll wonder if you’re core components in the plan, and if that misleads them, then that’s a good thing.”

  That got a nod from Samuel. He almost seemed relieved to not be a core component.

  “There were other people of general interest in other cell blocks, but they were isolated, one person of interest to each cell block, and it wasn’t worth the trouble or the time to go, especially when we weren’t sure. Block F had three of you. We did our research on you, asked around, and got some particulars before visiting.”

  “The only person who would have particulars on me would be the people I was working with,” Samuel said. “Them or my mother.”

  “Yep. We had tea with your mother,” I said. “We went over a second time and brought cake, asked a few more questions. After that visit we arranged a grocery delivery service and a house cleaner. At our expense, not hers, don’t worry.”

  Samuel seemed more concerned at hearing that, not less.

  “Was there a need?” he asked. “Were you so sure you’d bring us onboard?”

  “We had no idea,” Jamie said. “But Sylvester had a good gut feeling, and apparently his instinct when we’re starting out and carefully apportioning out every dollar we earn is to spend money on unfamiliar old women. There was a bit of a need. Your… prior employers sent her money, but going out was hard for her, she fell behind on things.”

  “You make it sound like me spending money on something like that is a problem. It’s an investment,” I said. “The grocery service and the cleaner were referred by the local church. A small and powerless church, but it has ties to the local community. That tie is important.”

  “It’s still coming out of your personal luxury allowance, Sy.”

  “Yeah? Coming out of my luxury allowance? When’s the work team coming to help unwedge my boot from your rear end? Huh?”

  Jamie gave me a very unimpressed look. He glanced at the pair sitting across from us.

  I grinned, to make it clear I was joking. “It made sense, gave me a chance to talk to the minister. We need some ins with the locals more than anything, and this opened the door.”

  “I’m not disagreeing,” Jamie said. “But the reality is you’re terrible with money when money is limited. You’re used to having an near-endless supply. This is a good lesson. Weigh the benefits. Yes, you got to talk to the minister and now he likes you, I assume. But we effectively have a steady drain on our finances for the indefinite future. Is that worth it?”

  Not that indefinite, I thought. “When it’s a drain we will more than make up for later. “You know I can go and just get a few thousand if we’re short. It’s harder here, but not impossible.”

  “I know. But if I’m deducting from your fun money, then maybe, somewhere along the line, you’ll stop, think to yourself that oh, hey, look at that, if I give this random person money and help them out to accomplish some tertiary goal, it’s going to be an inconvenience and risk to us.”

  “We’ve stopped,” Samuel pointed out, diplomatically.

  “I know we’ve stopped,” I said, sighing. “But we just had an adrenaline-fueled job where we broke out some prisoners and looted heaps of confidential records from a major Crown facility, and apparently when Jamie’s riding the emotional high of a wild success, the first thing he wants to do is ride my ass.”

  “Sy, that—” Jamie started. He put a hand to his face, then changed his mind about what he was going to say. “No.”

  “No?”

  “The reason I’m making an issue of this is that I now feel like we’re finally free of the distractions of the job, so we can focus again on all of the little details that have been piling up in the meantime.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “But let’s not bicker in front of the new hires. We’re done, we succeeded, and we’re back. Let’s get them settled.”

  “Let’s,” I said, agreeing with a smile. I reached over and opened the door, gesturing for Samuel to step out.

  The carriage had parked in the rear yard of the property. Walls surrounding the area protected us from prying eyes that might see and report Pierre, not that there were many. We were situated on the edge of the city.

  A prior building had stood here, but the roof had been removed and replaced, with room for a third floor. The sides were also being extended out with four rooms each. Two crane
s had been erected to help move material up to the third floor and rooftop, and scaffolding and ladders had been erected so the builders could set the panels in place for the builder’s wood to grow between.

  “A lot of watching eyes,” Pierre commented, with a bulging eye on the building crews. “I feel exposed.”

  “You’ll feel less exposed when you’re inside,” I said. “Later, we’ll have you running errands for us.”

  “Running sounds good,” he said.

  The double doors that led onto the brick patio just outside was unlocked, and I pushed them open with a bit of dramatic flourish.

  The first floor had high ceilings. The main room was open space, twenty paces across and thirty paces from front to back. The back door was behind us, a recessed fireplace to the right, some scattered armchairs and piled up building material in the middle, and the front door ahead of us. Off to the left, one of the workers was putting a false wall in place over the door that led to the cellar.

  “How’s it coming—”

  “Nathan,” Jamie murmured, without missing a beat.

  “—Nathan?” I finished.

  “This is not what I normally do,” the man said. He turned and gave me a look, as if he was angry and I was at fault. “I had to take some of it down, pull it apart, fix it. It would be easier if you did not want things so seamless. It will be convincing to anyone not looking for it, without being perfect.”

  “The people that hidden door is meant to fool are very good at seeing seams, and they’ll be looking for it,” I said. “Keep at it.”

  He gave me a curt nod in response, paused, then said, “And the walls on wheels?”

  “When you can get around to them,” I said. “I’ll put together the rest of that particular setup once you’ve got the walls in place.”

  He scowled, looking more frustrated than before. He gave Pierre a wary look before turning his attention back to his work.

  “The more I see, the more questions I have,” Samuel said. “I’m afraid to ask.”

  “This may become a battleground,” Jamie explained. “Sylvester wants to put things in place so we have options if it does. Unlike our disagreement over spending money on your mother, this is one case where I have no problem just nodding my head and signing off on it, however whimsical he’s being.”