Twig

by wildbow

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “There was another candidate. Number three. Hogarth? The one who acted as tutor to the aristocratic youths? She was warm. If Mrs. Fuller was willing, we could bring Ms. Hogarth on, and have a joint leadership. It would also help with getting more staff on board, while we’re so tight on time.”

  I nodded at that, thinking about it. I glanced up at Mrs. Fuller.

  “If I met the woman and found her acceptable, it’s not out of the question,” the matron said. In saying it, she was effectively saying she’d accepted what I’d said. She recognized the value in the mission. I no longer suspected she would let people know what we were doing here.

  I felt a profound relief at that.

  “It’s something of a relief to know I wouldn’t have to be the one to wipe snotty noses and tuck the little ones in.”

  I grinned at that.

  “Shirley will have the tea ready,” Jamie said. “Would you like to come downstairs before more children come running to us with problems?”

  I looked at the children, and I saw that many were hanging back. Beverly Fuller cut an imposing, intimidating figure. I imagined that with time, they would feel free to come to her with problems, and she would be quick to dismiss anyone who did so frivolously.

  As we made our way down the stairs, however, I saw Pierre and Samuel standing at the door.

  I glanced at Jamie, gesturing.

  “It looks like we may not be able to join you for tea, but I’m sure Shirley can cover things until we return,” Jamie said.

  Mrs. Fuller nodded, very stiffly.

  She wasn’t quite broken into our way of doing things, but I could almost see how she would get there.

  This would be fine.

  We walked right past Samuel and Pierre, and the two turned around to fall in stride to either side of Jamie and me.

  “Messages delivered,” Pierre said. He reached past me to hand a note to Jamie. “Couldn’t reach Fourth, and the youths at Wollstone Rock gave a very firm no.”

  “Damn,” I said.

  “It’s good enough,” Jamie said. He drew a paper out of his pocket, found a pencil, and scratched out a few options. “Same thing, but these groups. When you talk to them, say the same things, but let them know about the other groups that accepted.”

  “Can do,” Pierre said.

  Getting the pieces in place. Not just movable walls, but the people too.

  “Samuel,” I said, taking my turn. “Go inside. Introduce yourself. You can let the older woman know that you’re the person who is going to be directing the children her way. Have some tea. Take it easy. Until further notice, you don’t need to worry about anything. Except, wait, yeah, make sure the cranes are in the right positions, and make sure the carts are parked at the back like I’d wanted.”

  Samuel nodded.

  Getting everything positioned just right.

  If a Lamb didn’t curse my name before all of this was over, then I’d be gravely disappointed.

  ☙

  It had been twelve or so hours now since the train station had been blown up. Jamie had already worked out the train schedules. He’d figured the routes the Lambs would need to take, and the distance from the nearest city to here.

  The sun was hot and the city still smelled like smoke. Even the cast of it, all pale stone, seemed to have been tinted darker by the conflict two nights ago.

  Now the sun was setting. Jamie and I sat at our perch, me with my binoculars, Jamie slumbering while he sat precariously in the windowsill, across from me.

  The bulk of the work was done, the pieces in place, everyone had their script, so to speak, and the snares and tricks were all arranged.

  Looking at Jamie, I thought about how he represented peace. That, from the moment he’d wrapped his arms around me and let me know that he was there, that he’d left and he was supporting me, I’d felt relief and calm, with the idea that things would be okay.

  Happiness had come and went. There had been good moments. But the dominant feeling had been one of security. I’d felt okay for the first time in a long time, and that overrode even the lingering unease that came with my betraying the Lambs.

  But now, sitting and watching the sunset, knowing that there was a very dangerous and desperate man looking to hurt me, and the Lambs were coming to hunt me, I felt happy. I was catching myself smiling at nothing in particular. I wanted tomorrow to have come yesterday.

  I raised the binoculars to my eyes, watching as another train of wagons and cars came in through one end of the city.

  Nothing.

  I looked over at Jamie. I wanted to shake him awake and ask him what time it was. If it was time. If this was the moment I should really truly be watching.

  One of the carriages stopped at the very outside border of West Corinth. I raised the binoculars to my eyes again.

  There. A group of youths was departing the carriage. Stopping at the outskirts, so they could slip surreptitiously into the city.

  Duncan was the first to exit the carriage. He went to the back to lift some cages to the ground. He fiddled with them, releasing the occupants. Canines of a sort.

  Ashton was second to depart.

  I didn’t recognize the third boy, but his features were strange and he moved stiffly, and he was big for his apparent age.

  I didn’t recognize the first girl to step out of the train car either. She wore heavy clothing for the summer heat, with sleeves over her hands and a hood over her head.

  “Jamie,” I said, realizing belatedly that Jamie would want to see, before the group disappeared. When Jamie didn’t rouse, I kicked his shin.

  “Wuh?” he asked.

  I undid the bolt that connected the two pieces of the binoculars together, and handed him one half. He didn’t need to ask where to look—he’d been the one to work out the most likely path of approach, and I’d agreed it made sense, based on the Lambs’ psychology.

  I looked through the binocular-turned spyglass. I frowned as I laid eyes on the second girl of the group. Dark haired, her features funny.

  “They’re messing with us, Sy. It’s a decoy, a trick,” Jamie said.

  I looked over at him, then at the specter that had appeared beside him. She leaned forward, her hands on the windowsill. Evette’s features and clothes now mirrored that of the girl down there, as if to round out my thoughts.

  “They don’t talk,” Jamie said. “That’s the key thing. They’re very similar in the way they move. They’re mock-ups, but they aren’t very good at acting.”

  “And the timing is wrong,” Evette agreed with Jamie. “I’d take far longer to grow.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed with the two of them.

  I felt such profound disappointment I didn’t know what to do with myself.

  “It’s bait,” Jamie said, quiet. “They’re messing with you.”

  “It’s working,” I admitted.

  “The real Lambs are out there already,” he said. “Watching, looking to see how we might react.”

  I turned my focus to the other wagons, to the surrounding area, looking.

  “We should go,” Jamie said. He reached out. “Keep tabs on things.”

  “But where are the real Lambs?” I asked.

  Previous Next

  Black Sheep—13.1 (Lamb)

  The three recruits climbed out of the carriage to join Duncan and Ashton. Duncan squared his shoulders, straightened his shirt, and looked around, taking it all in. His pets remained at his side, harnessed, with chain leashes extending from the harnesses to Duncan’s hand.

  Abby watched and waited, her companions on either side of her. Ashton looked back at them and smiled reassuringly.

  “I should have known,” Duncan said. “I haven’t really worked with Sylvester or Jamie, mind you, but I should have known. It looks like a good share of this city burned down in the last few days.”

  The other girl, enshrouded in a hooded shirt with overlong sleeves, fidgeted nervously, then turned ar
ound as if she was going to walk away, before turning around again. Ashton went straight to her, clasping the extra length of sleeve in his hands as someone else might clasp hands.

  “It’s okay, Lara,” Ashton said.

  He had to move his head to peer beneath the hood, even though they were the same height. Abby emulated him, matching the tilt of his head. Crammed within each of Lara’s eyes were several lesser eyes, two visible, the other two only really visible when she opened her eyes wider, for eight smaller eyes in total. Individual pupils dilated to very different extents, each surrounded by gray concentric rings.

  Ashton drew in a deep breath and then sighed. “I know you don’t like new places, and all of this travel has been hard, but we’re close, and they won’t hurt you. They absolutely can’t and won’t.”

  Duncan surreptitiously glanced at the back of his hand. He did that when Ashton was making spores, and sometimes when Ashton wasn’t. Abby tried to pay more attention to Duncan, because Duncan was in charge. There was a hierarchy and in the here and now Duncan was the one to listen to.

  He looked concerned. He gave Ashton a curious look.

  “Lara?” Duncan asked, raising his free hand to cover his mouth as he spoke. They were supposed to do that when they thought that Sylvester might be watching. Sylvester could read lips. Abby did too, but it was because she understood the mouth movements better than the sounds.

  “She needs a name,” Ashton said, moving his hand to his mouth to cover it. All the mouth-covering made Abby restless.

  “We were explicitly ordered not to name it.”

  “I know. I’m disobeying orders,” Ashton said. “I have been for weeks now.”

  Duncan held back frustration, then worked through it before responding, “Why would you do that?”

  “She needed a name,” Ashton said, simply.

  “So I gathered,” Duncan said. Patience. “Why are you revealing this secret name now?”

  “Because,” Ashton said. “It’s stupid to not have anything to call her when we might need to say a lot very quickly.”

  Again, the barely-withheld frustration on Duncan’s part.

  “And because by letting you know now, you’re more likely to let it go because we need to focus on more important things,” Ashton said. Beside him, ‘Lara’ had stopped fidgeting so noticeably. Ashton’s spores were working.

  “Are you actually being shrewd?” Duncan asked.

  “No,” Ashton said. “Helen and I talked about it and she suggested it.”

  “I see,” Duncan said. He made a face, looking at the group of four. “I suppose she’s right. I’ll have to let it go.”

  Ashton nodded. He squeezed Lara’s sleeve, swinging his arm a little.

  “But why call it Lara?”

  It.

  “Because they called her a larval form and if you take the ‘v’ out of larva then Lara,” Ashton said.

  “Ah,” Duncan said. He looked at Lara. “Lara?”

  Lara’s head barely moved beneath her hood. A faint nod.

  Duncan moved his hand from his mouth to her hooded head, giving it a pat. “Alright. We should go. Grab your bags. Emmett, if you could take mine, it would be appreciated.”

  Emmett gave him a nod in response. The boy had the build of a stocky fourteen year old and the face of an eight year old. He was only slightly shorter than Duncan, who was three years his senior.

  “Follow,” Duncan ordered, leading the way off the main road.

  All of the buildings were pale stone traced with curling branches. There were lawns and gardens, but in many the grass had wilted a little. In others, there were pebbles and stones laid out to take up a portion of the yard, set so that rainwater would collect on the grass. Those yards were the healthier ones.

  Not so many trees. Abby liked birds and squirrels and some of the Academy-made things that sometimes lurked in the trees. She missed home, a little. Back at Sous Reine, she had slept in a lab and the lab had had a window, and she would spend hours at a time watching the things in the trees and how they moved. She had been on this world for eleven years, growing at the same rate a human did, and she had learned to identify every last one of the squirrels and birds who visited the trees, who their parents were, where they nested, and how they acted.

  Over the course of this journey, going from city to city with no explanation about why, she sometimes thought about the birds and squirrels and she would feel her brain go dark and would have fits. Ashton would come into her room, calm her down and in their own, strange way, communicating despite their very different brains and perspectives, he would guide her through the experience. Other times, when she judged that he was in a good mood, she would go to Duncan and seek the more rational, scientific explanation. She’d done it after having the fits the second time around.

  His explanation was that her brain was different, very like a human’s, but with more of some things and less of others, and there were a few parts that didn’t work like they should. When she experienced strong emotion, she had seizures. He’d called the sensation ‘feelings’, but she preferred ‘experience’, because it wasn’t so much something that she could touch as a room she seemed to pass through.

  So, with all of that taken into account, she had stopped thinking about the birds and the squirrels, even though that made the experience even worse somehow, and had tried to watch for other things to pay attention to instead.

  Duncan’s animals weren’t that interesting. They didn’t have much personality. No heads, no brains.

  No, she couldn’t see much of anything, or hear much of anything. She sniffed the air—

  “Smoke,” Abby piped up.

  “Mm hmm,” Duncan agreed. “Probably set the fires to distract so they could blow up the train station. I’m not sure why. I would be happy—”

  He paused to move his hand to his mouth, feigning a bit of a scratch of his cheek, while glancing quickly at nearby windows and alleyways.

  “—to have a conversation with the other Lambs and touch base.”

  Lara turned her head to him. The hood hid her eyes.

  He reached out and gave her head another pat. “Soon, Lara.”

  Abby scrunched up her nose at the lingering smoke smell.

  “When we get to Radham,” Ashton said, to nobody in particular, “We can spend more time with the others. We can teach you all things, like the gestures. There’s something nice about being part of a group.”

  “They aren’t part of the Lambs project, Ashton,” Duncan corrected.

  “I know. But that doesn’t mean we can’t spend time together and talk. We can all make each other stronger and better.”

  Duncan narrowed his eyes a little, thinking. “Mary.”

  “What?” Ashton asked.

  “Mary said that, I’m guessing.”

  “No, I said it,” Ashton said.

  “Mary probably said that about the Lambs making each other better and stronger, and you heard it, and you just repeated it.”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  “Yes,” Duncan said. He sighed.

  “Emmett can get stronger and Lara can become braver, and Abby can get fixed so she actually works.”

  Duncan looked at Abby. Checking to see if she minded. She didn’t.

  She had met the other Lambs, and Lillian had explained the situation, sitting with Abby and her makers. The Headmaster of Radham Academy was looking for experiments of a certain sort, and while the Lambs project had spent the last little while going here and there to look for two of their own, they would sometimes collect one of the projects that fit. Lara was one, Emmett was sort of one, and Abby had been the last to be collected, weeks ago, even though Abby wasn’t a successful project. The only reason she was being raised to maturity was the Sous Reine’s ethics board and the possibility that she might develop the talents she was supposed to manifest at birth.

  And now, with her inclusion in this odd group, she was the so-called ticket for her creators to have a better funded lab
at Radham.

  There wasn’t to be much danger, they were mostly meant to act as decoys. This group would go ahead, checking ahead and drawing attention, while the other group with Lillian, Mary, and Helen stayed behind. Abby knew she was here because of the way she looked more than because she was anything special. Black hair in long braids, her features distorted, her teeth wrong. Because she was the right age, and she was just obviously enough an experiment.

  “I don’t think I’ll get braver,” Lara commented. Her bag was the lightest, despite her wearing the most clothes, as a general rule. The strap of the bag disappeared inside the sleeve that hid her hand.

  “But you’ll get bigger, and more dangerous,” Ashton said.

  “I’ll pupate, and then I’ll change, but I don’t think I’ll be any braver,” Lara said.

  “No pupating until we’re secure within Radham,” Duncan said.

  “I know,” Lara said.

  They had to cross an intersection of side streets. Duncan stopped at the corner, looking around. Abby mimed him, because she was good at miming people. Still, she wasn’t used to cities. Academie Sous Reine had been surrounded by acres of farmland, all of it experimental crops and forms of cattle that had been experimented on. It had been great plains of one crop or another, or grassland dotted with animals, and trees, and green, punctuated by great wooden buildings.

  At the memory, she felt herself pass into the dark room, where a pressure pressed in on her and threatened to send her into fits.

  Ashton seized her hand. She was surprised enough that she forgot to feign surprise.

  He was pushing out calm. She closed her eyes, breathing deep.

  With some concentration and Ashton’s help, she was able to turn her thoughts away. The city was different. There were more details to pay attention to. More windows, any of which could have harbored their quarry.

  Across the street, an animal bleated. Abby stood on her tiptoes, looking to see.

  She couldn’t see it, but she could see the people. The way their heads turned, the expressions—