Twig

by wildbow

  “Did you retain anything?” Jamie asked.

  “They changed the way I think.”

  “How so?” Jamie pushed.

  I expected every push to be too far, to hit a sensitive spot and make her hostile. Didn’t happen.

  “I feel like I see everything side-on while everyone else sees it straight-on,” she said. “Like the props and backdrop in a play. I was taken into that lab and the world looked normal, and when I was let go, I saw that there weren’t any buildings at all. Only cardboard cut-outs of building faces with nothing real behind them.”

  “You don’t get along with Sylvester. Because of… the unique angle you see him?”

  “He’s a liar. Even when he speaks truth it sounds like a lie, and I don’t know if he has told the whole truth once a single time he’s spoken.”

  “That’s downright—” I started. Jamie gestured.

  “He’s a deceptive person by nature,” Jamie said. “That’s what they made him into.”

  I wanted to grab him by the collar and shake him. That’s optimal ground to build rapport! Draw connections between her and me! Draw connections between her and yourself. You’ve both been mistreated! You were permanently changed! Common ground!

  He went on, “What if the reason he looks strange to you is that he’s askew to start with?”

  “That’s not how it works,” she said. “In my head or how I see people.”

  “Why not? Educate me.”

  “Because I’m not wrong about things,” she said.

  Ah, the stonewall. That perfect conviction.

  “You’re right about him. You’re just following it to its logical conclusion, and that’s not right,” Jamie said.

  I sighed.

  Noreen was quiet.

  “He’s destructive and devious. He’s vicious. I feel the need to point out that he’s killed an awful lot of your enemies tonight. He’s devastatingly intelligent—”

  “Thank you, for that,” I commented.

  “—and he’d have no compunctions about using that intelligence to attack you, if he thought it was for the greater good. And he has a warped and often convoluted sense of what that greater good is.”

  Noreen nodded.

  “But there’s nobody I trust more,” Jamie said.

  “You just said he was a liar.”

  “He is. And I trust him. He’s dangerous, and I feel safest when he’s at my side. He’s warped, and his existence gives our lives a real kind of structure, in a way that was eerily lacking while we were under the Academy’s thumb. He’s terrible in any fight that lasts more than two seconds, which is a sad and remarkable step up from how bad he used to be—”

  “Hey.”

  “—and he’s the last person I’d want to go up against, if I set all emotions aside and had to pick someone to fight in a serious way. He’s the darkest-minded bastard I know and he makes me laugh. I’ve never been more isolated than I’ve been since I left everything behind and joined him, with whole months going by where he was the only person I talked to, and I’ve never felt less lonely.”

  I shifted uncomfortably, turning my eyes to other things in the surroundings.

  Jamie might have seen the change in my body language, because he changed course very abruptly. “I could go on. I won’t, because we’re about to get to the horse and wagon he wants to use. Sylvester is a twist of a person, Noreen, like the twist in a book. You can’t expect the typical conclusions based on those facts you get at first.”

  “I don’t like him,” she said.

  “I’m right here.”

  “I don’t like him a lot of the time either,” Jamie said, in a way that sounded like he wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying anymore. He seemed to come to at the last moment. “And we’re here. Garage.”

  The garage was by a house, with a stitched horse within, hooked up to voltaic wiring. The door had an upper and lower half, with the top half left open, so the horse could stare out and beyond. The lower door was closed and padlocked.

  I immediately went to the padlock. Jamie was right behind me, with Noreen trailing behind.

  “You don’t like me, but?” I asked.

  “What?” Jamie asked.

  “Don’t pretend you forgot. You don’t forget anything, remember? You just went on a whole thing about how you can’t stand me, but you wouldn’t stand for anything else, you think I smell like butt but you wish your morning tea smelled like I do.”

  “Ha ha,” Jamie said, without a trace of humor in his voice. Almost the opposite. “Leave it, Sylvester.”

  The padlock was easy. I popped it open. “I’m just saying—”

  “Don’t say. Leave it.”

  I opened the door, and did a walk around the carriage, seeing how well it fit my purposes. The owners had left the horse with a cart still hitched up to it. There was a bench and a back section with room for stuff to be stored, with four short walls to keep the cargo in bounds, and a door at the rear end, hinges down at the base, so the door swung down. Nice and easy for groceries and errands.

  “It’s going to bug me if I don’t get the answer. You still complain about books you never got to finish. Leaving me with only one piece of the puzzle? That’s brutal.”

  “Remember the ten thousand times I’ve told you I’d get back at you for tormenting me?” Jamie asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Not sure if you don’t remember or if you’re already begging for mercy, but this is part of the retribution, Sy. I’m not telling. The more you push, the less likely I am to answer. Don’t push.”

  “Or you might actually realize you don’t like me after all?” I asked. I disconnected the wires that were hooked up to the stitched animal.

  “Let’s go with that,” he said.

  “I’ll torment you five times over for this. These scales don’t balance,” I said. “I’ll win. I’ll cheat and be as unfair as all get out if i have to, but I’ll win.”

  “I know,” Jamie said. “I resigned myself to that fact long ago.”

  I found the reins, and experimentally led the stitched horse out of the garage. It was obedient. The brain of a horse barely compared to that of a human, and this was a brain that had been carved up to make room for voltaic wiring and to carve away the bad behavior and tics that tended to crop up when turning lower-intelligence animals into stitched. There were often things like horses stomping their hooves in one spot for so long that they destroyed their legs, or dogs getting caught up in a rhythm of barking at their own barking, until they did irreversible damage to themselves. The go-to solution was to identify the part of the brain responsible and carve into it until the tic stopped.

  I turned around and hopped off the back of the cart. I hurried back into the garage. I identified some suitable containers. “Help me with these.”

  Noreen and Jamie helped me load up the cart with the packages and containers. The choice one was a large cube of manure wrapped in paper. There were metal cans as well.

  In my quick perusal, I found some oil, meant for greasing the cart’s wheels. It was a small container. Far too little to do what I wanted. But it was a thing of beauty that brought everything together. This would do.

  I found some dry rope and loaded it into the cart.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “You drive. I prepare. Straight to them. Try to keep to grass instead of the road, where you can.”

  Jamie nodded. He took the reins. Noreen hopped up into the rear section, sitting on the corner right behind Jamie.

  The cart moved. The horse was in better shape than most stitched horses I’d come across, but I imagined that was the norm in a city like this. That, or I wasn’t keeping up with the trends. We’d spent six months in Tynewear, where there hadn’t been many horses or carriages, and I’d been distracted for almost a year leading up to that.

  Noreen was quiet, looking out at the city. I couldn’t figure her out, but Jamie apparently had. That annoyed me. Still, if it meant she was going to be coop
erative, I could accept it.

  “You know how to use guns?” I asked Noreen.

  “No,” she said.

  “Pull that back, aim it at the other guy, pull the trigger. Six shots, then reload,” I said. “Here’s the gun. Here are the bullets. Put those in your pocket.”

  She took the spare gun and bullets.

  Still didn’t understand or trust her. I wasn’t wholly certain she wouldn’t put a bullet in me right now, for reasons I’d never understand.

  But Jamie seemed to understand it, and he didn’t protest, so I was willing to accept that.

  I took the rope, and I began forming a large knot. I wedged the knot into one of the metal containers, then shoved it inside. I cut the rope off about a handspan from the top of the can.

  “A fuse?” Noreen asked.

  “Yes.”

  “But it’s not a bomb,” she said. “That’s a container for applying chemicals to plants.”

  “It’s not important if it’s a bomb or not,” I said. “What’s important is that they think it’s a bomb. Hold that.”

  She held the container. I applied the oil to the fuse.

  “Keep it in the cart,” I said, as I set up the next container. “I’ll do the rest.”

  I did the next container in about two-thirds of the time I’d taken with the first, and did the third container in less time than that. I flew through the process, distracting myself with the task at hand.

  “We’re close,” Jamie said. “We lost a lot of time. They’re not far from the train station. If they ran for it, they could be there in five minutes.”

  I nodded. I could see the vague shapes of the people in the gloom, roughly three blocks out. They’d formed a line, fanning out to cover more of the city, with weapons at the ready. We were at one end of that line. Jamie had an idea of what I wanted to do now.

  Jamie pulled the cart to a stop. He looked back at what I was doing.

  “That fertilizer is going to burn,” Noreen said.

  “We know,” Jamie said.

  “It’s going to do more than that,” I said. The fertilizer was the last thing I had to handle. I used the long spout of the oil can to push the knot into the center of the bundle. In the process, I put a fair amount of the oil in the center of the cube. I turned the thing on its side and stomped on it, compressing the loose, smelly material down into a more compact package.

  “We should go,” Jamie said, still keeping one eye on what I was doing.

  “Go,” I said.

  “About their guns,” Jamie said.

  “They have guns. We have cart,” I said. I cut off another length of rope, then handed it to Jamie. “Extend the reins.”

  Jamie looped the rope through the reins, moved off of the bench and back onto the lower part of the cart, using the three borders as cover. He held the rope, then flicked it. The horse started walking.

  Walking was not good.

  “Hi-yah!” he gave the command, with a hard flick. Nothing. “Gallop! Hard gallop! Go on, boy! Let’s move!”

  The problems with stitched horses. They weren’t so able to figure things out.

  “Hurry on!”

  That did it. The horse picked up speed in a way that seemed off-kilter with what a normal horse might do, as if it had to ease into it and remind itself what it was doing, instead of being an animal that instinctively wanted to run.

  But it was galloping now. Hooves trampled and wheels rolled over grass, then made a moment of noise as they passed over a footpath leading up to someone’s door, returning to silence as we steered toward the grass again.

  A tree meant we had to move onto the road for a moment.

  “Heads down,” I said. “Jamie, make like you’re not going to come close to hitting them. Runaway carriage.”

  Jamie steered us away from the group. This was the rightmost flank of the line that was moving through streets. The buildings here and there meant that they would be split up into a series of groups in a rough line rather than be a straight row of thugs and soldiers.

  “Gun ready,” I said, for Noreen’s benefit. “Jamie, run us right at ’em.”

  “One sec,” Jamie said.

  I lit a match, and held it to the oil soaked wick of a container. It ignited. “Jamie!”

  Jamie spoke, “Getting the timing right, and—hold on!”

  He steered us in a sharper turn. One wheel momentarily lifted off the ground as the stitched beast changed course, and our collected containers and items slid off to one side. I used one leg to keep them in place, while Noreen’s crouched form kept them from sliding down the slight incline and all tumbling out behind us.

  Which was all well and good, because the horse hit something, and everything jerked violently, the front end of the cart hit solid objects, and then the wheels passed over the large bodies of at least one man.

  It was a group of five, and we’d run over two and clipped a third. I tossed the can with the lit wick out behind us.

  “Fire!” I called out to Noreen.

  Some of the men we hadn’t hit had guns. Given the choice between aiming and shooting at us, running for dear life, and trying to deal with the apparent makeshift bomb, most chose the latter two options. I could see one man running and drawing his gun, one eye on us, and aimed for him.

  I clipped him, but didn’t put him down or change his mind about shooting at us. Before I could aim and shoot again, another bullet caught him. Jamie, not Noreen.

  In the moment of panic that came with being trampled without warning, shot at, and left with a seeming bomb, the men didn’t seem to know what to do, all in all. Jamie took the reins again while Noreen and I emptied our guns at the group. I managed to hit the one who was doing the most work with the bomb, trying to put out the burning fuse, and the man closest to him simply took over the task, gripping the bomb and hurling it off to the side.

  I aimed carefully and put a bullet in him too.

  “Coming up on the next group!” Jamie called out. “Six!”

  Noreen wasn’t a good shot, and she wasn’t fast at reloading. But when I reached out and touched the latch at the side of her gun, opening it up so she could slot the individual bullets in, I could see that her hands were steady.

  The group we were charging for opened fire, hitting the cart several times and even catching the horse once, spraying the three of us in the back of the cart with thick, congealed blood. All the while, Noreen’s hands were steady.

  Jamie, operating blind with his head beneath cover, changed direction at the last minute. I felt the collisions as we hit people who had moved pre-emptively out of the way and thought they were safe.

  I tossed out the next can. Jamie’s arm reached out past me. His forearm rested on my shoulder, his hand extending past the front of my face, finger pointed. He gestured. Four.

  I aimed my gun.

  As the heads and faces came into view, just barely visible as I looked over the rim of the wagon, I aimed and shot. A sudden jump of the wagon spoiled the last of the four shots.

  Noreen, emptying the cylinder, managed to graze the one I’d missed. I popped my gun open, reloaded a lone bullet, and aimed, exhaling slowly as I lined up the sights and squeezed the trigger.

  I missed again, but the thug seemed to decide it was better to favor discretion rather than valor, and made a run for cover.

  What a disappointment. It would have been a nice moment. I could imagine Gordon clucking his tongue at me.

  Jamie peeked, then stood up, one hand on the wooden rim of the wagon. I followed his cue, standing up and looking back at the group we’d laid low to see that none were standing or even paying attention to the fake bomb, let alone shooting at us.

  I reloaded.

  “Horse is okay?” I asked.

  “Horse is okay. We should have a contingency plan for if it takes a bad shot.”

  “Plan had. We toss all the explosives and run for it.”

  “I’ll rephrase. We should have a good contingency plan, Sy.” />
  “It’s not going to be easy to take down. It should have a metal plate in its head, like most stitched animals do. Bullet has to travel awful deep and awful accurate to hit the right spot in the torso to put down a stitched, and the mooks have guns for shooting down people, not stitched.”

  “That’s not all wrong,” Jamie said. “Rounding a corner, then next group.”

  I ducked down an instant before he did. He’d waited just long enough to see, and to get a mental picture.

  “Largest group yet,” Jamie said, one hand holding the rope against the top of the wagon. “Devil, I think, and Apostle.”

  I heard the gunshots. A large caliber sound, sounding like something that came from a rifle. I could feel it hit the side of the wagon in a way that made the other bullets pale in comparison.

  I ignited the fuse for the block of fertilizer.

  It would be so easy to get the timing wrong, or to let the burning fuse touch the wrong part of the block, where I’d soaked the thing with oil, and start off the chain reaction.

  I dropped onto my back, facing the sky, held the block, and brought my legs up. While I wasn’t gripping anything, I slid toward the tail end of the wagon. The bumps as we collided with those who’d been too slow to dodge out of the way jarred me further, moving me in unpredictable fits and starts.

  But those impacts were a good cue.

  I heaved it out and kicked it out in the same motion. Jamie veered into a wild turn as I threw. I slid hard into the side, to the point that I couldn’t even tell if my toss had been a good one. For a moment, I thought we would tip.

  I’d lost track of my gun. Rather than find it, I dug out another one of the guns I’d confiscated from the thugs.

  I sat up enough to see the group. Fifteen or so in all, scattering.

  I saw the Devil, already making his tactical retreat, ducking behind cover. Not even recognizable in comparison to Colby. He was shirtless, and his muscles stood out, with veins standing out from beneath his skin as if he had an infestation of parasites crawling through them. His teeth were exposed in a snarl that seemed more permanent than a response to the current situation.

  I saw the Apostle, moving for cover at the other side of the street from the Devil, looking to escape the bomb. The gun he held looked like an Exorcist rifle. I aimed and fired, and he seemed to see what I was doing, because he threw himself to the ground.