Twig

by wildbow

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Fine. That’s all I needed.”

  He released me, then guided me by the shoulder, leading me toward the front door.

  “Abbot,” I spoke to the builder, as we passed him.

  “That’s not my name,” he said.

  “Over there. Above the wall-hinge. Put in a hook. Should be about three feet down from the ceiling.”

  “A hook?”

  “Like the ones we used for the ropes. I’ll do the rest later.”

  “Uh huh,” he said, giving me a look like I was crazy.

  Maybe I was.

  “Done?” Jamie asked.

  “Sure. Just, you know, trying to arrange things so we have a fighting chance. But that’s not important, no, we’ve gotta do that thing you’re trying to get my attention about.”

  Jamie rolled his eyes, dropping his hand from my shoulder.

  We approached the group of kids. Some were from Noreen’s group. They had that hardness to them, and I could spot the bulges of weapons and other things. Most of the youths had bags with them.

  The moving walls were a bit of a show for them, but it might have been unnecessary. Even in the wake of all that, they were looking around the building, taking it in.

  “Hi,” I said. “Sorry about that. Checking on the defenses.”

  “This place has defenses?” one of the boys asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “Ones that will see use soon. Not that it should impact you lot. Now, uh, again, sorry for the wait. Welcome home.”

  The very youngest of the crowd of twenty or so seemed to see something special in that word. The oldest and the better-armed seemed to react as if I’d subtly pushed them away.

  They had likely heard promises once upon a time, and those promises had been broken. That was fine. They might not stay, and that was fine too.

  But the option would be here. That was what was important. There would be safety and security here, so long as I could help it.

  “This is the sitting room. Common area, hangout, should be able to see people coming and going, have tea. Lounge around too much and you might get recruited for chores, because the kitchen and the dining room are at the east wing, just over there. West wing, you’ve got offices. Bathroom for the adults, area for first aid in case any of you hurt yourself, boring stuff.”

  I had their attention. That was good.

  “Go upstairs. Boys to the left, girls to the right. For those of you who don’t know left from right, blue means boy, pink means girl. Beds and bedrooms are first come first serve.”

  There was a momentary pause before the stampede broke out. The youths, who were aged eight to fifteen or so, stampeded up the stairs.

  “Second thing,” Jamie said. “Well, it was the first thing, but you addressed the new arrivals first. Shirley is talking to the fourth potential hire. They’re upstairs.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Excellent.”

  “At least the kids you just sent up there will be a good test for her,” Jamie said.

  “I’d guessed that was the first thing. I do actually remember a little,” I said. “We were expecting someone, and I’ve been thinking about how we need to get this nailed down if we can.”

  We walked up the stairs.

  “We need a lot of staff,” Jamie said. “We’re behind, and I don’t see things pulling together at this rate.”

  “Hmm,” I made a sound.

  “I know you want to find the person in charge before you recruit the staff to work under her, but… it might be time to clench your teeth and accept that we’ll have to take someone good enough instead of someone truly good.”

  “Hmmm,” I made the same sound as before, but with more consternation in it.

  “Do you remember that I told you her name?”

  “No.”

  “Her profession or general background?”

  “Nope.”

  “My concerns, hopes, any other notes?”

  “Not in the slightest.”

  “Okay,” Jamie said. “Because I didn’t mention any of that.”

  I slapped him lightly across the back of the head.

  “I deserved that. But you deserve so much worse.”

  “I do. What do I need to know about her?”

  “She was second-in-command of a detention center for young delinquents?” Jamie suggested. “Deputy warden. Taught the math classes.”

  “Really?” I asked, “That’s amazing!”

  “She did okay.”

  “How did you find her?”

  “I asked around. Sent letters around, really. Widened the criteria I was asking for, someone mentioned her in passing, I tracked her down.”

  “Now you’ve got my hopes up,” I said.

  Jamie raised his hand, fingers crossed, and I matched it.

  We reached the upstairs, which was in the midst of total and utter chaos. Shirley and an older, short-haired woman in a very staid gray dress stood to one side as the children ran this way and that. In the midst of that chaos, Jamie ducked away, keeping his head turned away from the guest.

  “Sylvester!” one of the youths asked. He was fourteen, and came with a girl that was his age in tow, holding her wrists. “What if we want to share a room?”

  He had to raise his voice to be heard over the noise an approaching smaller child was making. The child, a boy, was crying, and crying in a way that screamed ‘I want attention!’

  Before the fourteen year old could make the case for the co-ed room, the child began mewling out sobbing monosyllabic sounds that only barely formed a sentence. “The-huh-old-her-kids-they-th-they-took-my-ruh-hoom! You-you-said-fir-first-come-first-serrrrrve!”

  Now that he wasn’t having to form words, he was free to descend into a wail.

  The woman gave me a curious look.

  Wondering why they’re asking me, and the authority I have.

  Not perfect. But I’d tied my own hands. Might as well let her know I was the authority here.

  “Don’t talk to me,” I addressed both the child and the boy-girl pair, then indicated the woman. “Talk to her.”

  She looked surprised at that.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said.

  “I’m not saying you’re hired,” I told her. “But I want to see how you handle this. Test run.”

  “Ma’am,” the fourteen year old said. “Darleen and I have been together from the beginning. We stay together. There’s no other way about it.”

  “I—” she started.

  “Sylvester!” a teenage girl cut in, approaching from the girl’s hallway. “All the girls are taking individual rooms, and some were saying they weren’t going to have roommates, and—”

  I flourished with my hands, stepped back, and extended my arms and hands, as if to present the woman.

  She saw how the eight year old and the fourteen year old were addressing the woman, and she cottoned on. She immediately turned to the woman, her voice overlapping with the two voices of the boys.

  “That will be quite enough of that!” the woman spoke, with enough authority that several heads in the hallways turned and the din died down considerably. There were still sounds of squabbling in some other rooms.

  She had a good presence. Not Mauer-level, but for all her graying hair and the ankle-length dress with the high collar, she gave the me impression of someone who should normally have a rod in hand, ready to deliver very liberal canings to buttocks and knuckles.

  With all of that latent menace, she didn’t address any of the group. She turned her focus toward me.

  “Throwing me to the wolves without explanation or courtesy?” she asked me.

  I started to speak, but she talked over me. “Or, is it that you’re a wolf yourself?”

  She moved with care, slowly, so as not to startle, and touched my shirt, beneath my armpit. it only had buttons down to the collarbone, and hung loose. I wore a coverall with the upper portion down and tied around my waist. The holes in the knees and my bare feet meant I wasn’t baking in the summer
heat, even if I was sweaty.

  When I didn’t move or protest, she tugged the shirt up and away from my waist.

  Amid the sleeves I’d folded around my waist, I’d stowed a knife, gun, and three grenades. It was the grenades that seemed to give her pause.

  “I’m a mouse, not a wolf,” I said, meeting her eyes.

  “I know the slang,” she said.

  Where most of the people this far away from Radham don’t know it, or use different terms and signs. It was a point in her favor.

  “I’m concerned this isn’t adding up,” she said. “I was clearly misled about this job, and I’m not happy with that.”

  Shirley jumped in. “Sylvester is… he’s been in and out of orphanages all of his life. As troubled youth go, he’s a unique case. I did not know he would be so heavily armed, but—”

  “It’s okay, Shirley,” I said.

  Shirley sagged in obvious relief, that she didn’t have to come up with a way to salvage this situation.

  “This… project,” I said. “I’m managing it. But I won’t be managing it forever. We need someone to keep things running smoothly, keep the house standing. Keep the children from killing each other.”

  “Orphans running an orphanage?” the woman asked, imperious.

  “Supplying the funds and organizing it at the outset. Not running it,” I said. “That would be up to you, with a few ground rules in place. You can’t force anyone to stay, and if there are beds, you can’t turn anyone away. There would be rules for privacy, but—”

  “If I was put in charge, there would have to be curfew,” the woman said. “I would want to know where the children were at all times. I would require them to stay. That would be if I somehow overcame my reservations about what seems to be a very shady, concerning picture that is being painted before me.”

  She’s conservative, I thought. Dangerously so.

  I felt a welling disappointment. The same experiences that had left her with a keen eye for hidden weapons and the skills needed to keep people in line left her wary of… how to put it? Of situations slipping from her control. She’d no doubt seen how it could happen early in her career and it had left a mark on her.

  But that tight-fisted control represented too much about what I wanted to fight against, in the bigger picture.

  I formulated the words in my head, but they lay flat on my tongue, ready to be spoken. I could see the woman’s posture, the way she was critically assessing the building, and I knew, with near certainty, that she was going to tell people about us, in an effort to instill some order on this disorder.

  Would I have to kill her? I didn’t want to kill someone I respected.

  But, facing the reality that I might have to, I began laying the groundwork.

  “Shirley,” I said.

  “Yes, sir?” she asked.

  I might have winced at the word ‘sir’, but I could see what she was doing, and anything that would put the matron off balance and create an opening was just fine, even if it heightened her suspicion and pushed her away.

  “Would you prepare us some tea?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  There was a pause as Shirley disappeared downstairs.

  The matron turned to the children. The sniveling eight year old was first. “In a moment, we’ll talk to those boys, alright? If you were told the bed was yours if you were there first, then that’s a rule and it should be followed.”

  The boy rubbed at his nose and nodded.

  The boy-girl couple were next. “Are you siblings?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then I don’t see how it’s appropriate.”

  “It’s the way we’ve always done things! If she doesn’t sleep beside me, she—”

  He stopped, realizing there was more of an audience. The girl might have squeezed his hand.

  “—has nightmares,” he said, which wasn’t the original thing he’d been planning to say.

  “I notice that you’re doing all of the talking,” the matron said. “I’d like to hear from her. He called you Darleen?”

  “Darleen,” the girl said, nodding.

  “That’s short for what?”

  “Geraldine,” the girl said.

  “Then I’m going to call you Geraldine. I don’t like short form names. Geraldine, I want you to look me in the eye.”

  Geraldine tried.

  “Tell me, do you want to stay with him, or do you want to stay with the girls?”

  Geraldine opened her mouth, glancing at her friend.

  “Look at me,” the matron said. “Not at him. I don’t want the answer he wants you to give me. I want the answer from you.”

  “I… wouldn’t mind staying with the girls. It’s been a while since I had… nightmares.”

  Her voice dropped two notches as she said that last word.

  “Good. Then that’s resolved. As for you,” the matron said to the girl who’d snitched about the others hogging rooms, “I’ll find you after I’ve resolved the bullying.”

  The snitch nodded.

  The matron took the eight year old’s hand and led him in the direction of the boy’s rooms. No questions about whether she should or if she had our permission to depart the conversation. Just a very matter-of-fact assumption that she should have to handle this.

  I followed her. Jamie trailed behind.

  “I’m afraid I don’t recall your name,” I said.

  “Beverly Fuller,” the matron said, while Jamie, in the background, mouthed the name. She added, “Mrs. Fuller, mind you. I am happily married.”

  “You might have noticed there are few children for how much space there is,” I commented.

  “I have.”

  “There are more coming,” I said. “I’m about to volunteer some details about what the objective is, and I’m admittedly putting my trust in your hands—”

  To an extent, I thought. Because I’m boned anyway if you decide to talk, and killing you is on the table.

  “—and I’m assuming you have some fondness for children and said fondness fosters some sympathy.”

  “Oh?” she asked, arch.

  “Children are being collected, Mrs. Fuller. They’re being handed over to the Academy. They are being experimented on and disposed of. On the black market, children are being sold, again, for the purposes of experimentation. I’ve seen some of the monsters that were produced from that experimentation. I count one of those monsters as a close friend and mortal enemy at the same time. I am one of the experiments.”

  She didn’t turn her head, but she looked at me from the corner of her eye.

  I didn’t add anything more. I let the silence hang, letting her make the next move when it came to the conversation, while plotting the responses I would need to crack that conservative, stern facade.

  “At the facilities I’ve worked in, I saw many children go to the Academy,” Beverly said.

  “And?” I asked. “Were you complicit? Did it bother you?”

  “I wasn’t directly complicit, but I saw what my superior did and the people she talked to, and I wondered,” she said, her eyes forward, neck straight, chin set, posture perfect. “I thought about how a dozen a year might go to the Academy, but I’ve never met anyone who claimed what you claim, to have been one of them.”

  “They went in, and they never went out,” I said.

  “Effectively,” she said.

  We’d stopped outside of the room the eight year old had led us to. Beverly stood in the doorway, stared down some of the boys who were sitting on the bed, and without a word, she pointed to them, then indicated out.

  They obeyed, collecting their things on the way out. The woman gave the eight year old a push on the shoulder.

  So very easily handled.

  “Did it bother you?” I asked her. I already knew the answer, in part, because she had volunteered the information she had. She wouldn’t if it hadn’t stuck in her mind to some degree.

  “Should it?” she asked.

&nbs
p; Ah, but the question was a wall. A defense, thrown up to protect herself.

  “Speaking as one of the very few children I know who went in and came back out,” I said. “I’ve known an awful lot of death over the past seven years or so. I’ve experienced an awful lot of pain. On the flip side of that coin, I have inflicted more pain than you could wrap your head around, and I’ve killed an awful lot of people.”

  I watched her carefully as she took that in. She’d seen the weapons.

  “I will expire before I’m twenty-five. Very possibly before I’m twenty, because of what they did to me. I’m sterile, because of what they did to me. I will never have children, experience a family, or hold a job. I’m not saying this because I want pity. But it’s my reality. And I’m not alone in it.”

  She declined to give me a response.

  “I’m leaving before long. I will be in touch, as much as I’m able, knowing they’ll try to intercept my letters. I’ll support this institution and provide information and the funds. I might never have children, but I intend to leave my marks on the world. Among those marks will be this one. I will find the children the Academy is looking to collect and I will send them here. With some extra measures I put in place and, hopefully, some help from others, this will be a sanctuary. But it’s a sanctuary where the people here have to be free to come and go.”

  Still no response.

  “Some of my fellow experiments are going to come looking for me. They will come through here. You don’t have to keep secrets. You might even want to talk or cooperate with them. They won’t hurt anyone here. It’ll take a short time to wrap up everything in West Corinth, and when I’m done with that, I’ll leave, like I said. It is my hope that you will remain and maintain the peace and security of this place.”

  “Gritting your teeth, Sy?” Jamie asked, from the background.

  The matron turned to look.

  “Revealing yourself, Jamie?” I asked, annoyed.

  “I know you,” he said. “I know you’re not wholly sold. I was going to make a suggestion.”

  “An acquaintance?” Beverly asked.

  “Jamie is a friend,” I said. “My closest friend, really. Now the second child you’ll have met, who came back from the Academy. What’s the suggestion?”

  “I know you want to pick someone who is somehow everything you want this institution to embody, and I know you’re not wholly sold with Mrs. Fuller. You want someone who can be almost a mother, nurturing and supportive. Not just a disciplinarian.”