Twig

by wildbow

  Helen, Duncan, and Ashton were all having what seemed to be a civil conversation, with none of the blood or terror that Duncan had prophesied. Ashton seemed to be leading the discussion.

  Mary and Emmett and the communication experiments seemed content to talk, still.

  “You’re the expert when it comes to Wyvern,” Lillian said, ending the break in the conversation.

  “In a way.”

  “Sylvester of the past, he was a mosaic. Blank, mirroring people around him. Adjusting how he learned and copying things, picking up skills and figuring out the ones to retain with his rapidly dwindling retention. Until things leveled off, and more of his personality and nature solidified.”

  “Accurate,” Lacey said.

  “He picked up some things from enemies, but he mostly remained in a kind of equilibrium. He adjusted, adapted, and focused on molding himself around the Lambs. Sometimes he forgot things, like lockpicking, to pick up other skills. As we lost some Lambs, he changed his approach. Consciously or unconsciously. Tried to fill in for Jamie. Became far more aggressive after we lost Gordon.”

  “You’d be more familiar with that era than I am.”

  “That’s the Sylvester of yesterday. But—” Lillian said, pausing. “But what’s he like today? What’s there, when he’s this independent? He has help. He has the rabbit man. The other man, Samuel, who he collected from prison. Did he get them to emulate them? Who else is he copying? Or—”

  Lillian stopped there.

  “Or is he not copying anyone?” Lacy finished.

  “I don’t know what to expect, and that terrifies me. Who is this Sylvester we’re about to face?”

  “I imagine he’s adapting to work well with whoever he has near him,” Lacey said. “I would say that, based on what I know, what I’ve read of your mission files, and what you’ve said, that he tends to mirror or conform around strong figures. Big personalities, major players, people he’s impressed by.”

  “The rabbit feels more like a pawn.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” Lillian said.

  Based on the signs she was seeing, Lacey was suspicious that Lillian’s combat drug was a variant on liquid courage. Mood altering, with some minor benefits to coordination, to strength, stamina, and the ability to tolerate pain. A mild drug, by most metrics, one that could be given to new soldiers and conscripted civilians to make them combat ready. Emotional highs came with more focus and less confusion. Flight fed fight. All emotions did.

  Still feeling the influence of the drug, Lillian was more confrontational than she might otherwise be. That would fade fast. But that confrontational attitude was fed by other emotions, and it wasn’t terror.

  Whether she was aware of it or not, Lillian was wearing her heart well on her sleeve. She hadn’t taken the classes on hormones and mood that Lacey had specialized in. Lillian’s anxieties, her hopes, her broken heart that hadn’t quite mended, all were bleeding through in a single color.

  It would be better to stay silent. To discourage this relationship and game that Sylvester was trying to foster with the Lambs. Lacey opted to speak, instead.

  “In the early days, Wyvern shaped him on the most fundamental levels. Or it helped him shape himself. In the days you came to know him best, it helped him shape his ever-shifting role and skills, and it helped him conform and adapt to fit the team’s needs. He focused a lot on all of you. I would guess that he committed what he wanted to keep. Right now, I would surmise that Wyvern is being turned to other focuses. Whatever it takes to put his greater plan into play, he’s using Wyvern to help facilitate that. Leadership, maybe, longer-term planning. I don’t know.”

  Lillian didn’t say anything to that. She seemed to ruminate on it.

  “Lillian,” Lacey said, even though she suspected she shouldn’t. “He’ll have shucked off many of the traits or adaptations that he needed to be a member of a group of five or six Lambs. Everything he needed to be a loyal agent of the Academy, for that matter. He’ll have dropped some pretensions and he’ll have picked up others, and he might well have changed how he acts or presents himself. Some things hold true, however. His treatment of Duncan shows that.”

  Lillian smiled a little. “His treatment of the new boys and girls, too.”

  She was looking in the direction of Abby and Quinton.

  “I think, if you were to talk to him now, Lillian, you’d find he’s more Sylvester than the Sylvester you knew. Everything he wanted to be, in part, that he’s now free to build up, and, on the other hand, all of the other parts of him that were buried by other things, and those other things are free to fade away.”

  “Why do you somehow make that sound like a bad thing?” Lillian asked Lacey.

  Lacey smiled, “Did I?”

  “No. Yes. Almost.”

  “I’m not sure myself. He apologized to me, you know.”

  “Did he?”

  “He also said I was one of the half-decent doctors,” Lacey said. “Damned with faint praise.”

  “High praise!” Lillian countered, grasping at Lacey’s sleeve. “Not the highest praise, but for Sylvester, that’s a kindness. He resents just about every doctor out there, whether their coats are white, gray, or black. Exceptions for some of the illegitimate sorts in lab coats, rogues and enemies we’ve encountered along the way, but even where he likes them as people, he dislikes them as doctors. To call you half-decent is the sweetest thing!”

  Lacey frowned. She also noted that Lillian’s mood had visibly lifted after the mention of Sylvester being more Sylvester than before, which made her deeply regret saying anything.

  “You don’t sound as if you believe me,” Lillian said.

  “I believe you. Still, I can’t wrap my head around the idea. If I’m half-decent, and this is high praise, what in the King’s name is actually decent in his eyes?”

  “Me,” Lillian said. “Not the me of now, but the ideal me he wants me to become. It sounds so conceited, saying that. But it’s his conceit that I’m admitting to, not mine.”

  “You don’t sound upset about it.”

  “Because I’m not. It’s flattery, much like what he said to you. And I plan to do my ultimate best to live up to that expectation. It’s a… shimmering outline that stands in the distance ahead of me. Every day I study, every time I coordinate well with the Lambs, every time I’m kind, I feel like I get closer and closer to filling it. It’s something I already wanted for myself, but it means a lot to have someone believe to that extent.”

  Lacey’s smile found its way to her face, and it was a genuine smile. But at the same time, she felt a twinge of jealousy, and a knot of despair.

  The poor girl was in love, it was plain to see.

  There was no way that would end well.

  “Talk to me about your final project,” Lacey said.

  “Another deflection?” Lillian asked.

  “Blatantly. Chances are good that he’s watching and listening in somehow. If you keep talking about him like that, his head or his heart is going to swell up and explode, and we won’t be able to bring him in alive, like all of you are so keen to do.”

  Lillian’s giggle was nice to hear, after some of the tension of the long discussion.

  Their conversation mercifully turned to muscle types and arrangements, stand-ins for muscle, and structural elements. The conversation, as such, whiled away the remainder of their walk, before Mary raised her hand to give the signal, and the group fell silent.

  Lacey didn’t know the signals, but she could draw conclusions.

  They were close.

  “Stay close,” Lillian said, grabbing gain for Lacey’s arm. “Abby, you too, come here.”

  Duncan, too, broke away, retreating to join their group. Mary, Emmett, Ashton, and Helen remained at the group in the lead. At Mary’s instruction, the pair of Lara and Nora split up with one going to Mary’s group and one to Lillian’s.

  Once they were organized, they moved more cautiously as a whole. Conv
ersation ceased, and everyone’s attention was focused on the greater danger. Mary’s group would move up a distance, and then they would signal for Lillian’s group to catch up.

  In this way, they approached to within a block of a building in construction. The building was swaddled in cloth drapes and scaffolding, and construction had obviously been interrupted at one point or another,because branches of builder’s wood had grown and then been ignored. Without being cut, they had continued to grow day by day and week by week, at a fraction of their original speed. Now branches wove their way into the scaffolding.

  It probably looked worse than it was. The branches could be cut back. Construction could be readily resumed once the budget dispute or other problems were resolved.

  In the meantime, it was a fortress. A building of stone, with men perched here and there on the scaffolding and the ledges and wall-tops that the incompleteness of the building provided them. Taken on their own, they might be taken to be construction workers or men simply hanging out and shooting the shit. With the knowledge that the Devil was within, however, it was more ominous. Those men were likely armed.

  They collectively shrank back into meager shadows as a group of people moved by. There was no telling if they were threats patrolling the area or civilians going about their business.

  Mary signaled. Lillian translated.

  “Stay.”

  They stayed. They watched, and they waited as Mary led her group toward the building at an angle they were less likely to be seen. They found a way to cross the street in a cart’s shadow without being too exposed, then disappeared as they approached an climbed from an angle that Lacey couldn’t see.

  But, in the wake of that, Helen and Mary could be seen on the scaffolding. It was all wood, and it seemed to creak, because men turned their heads and shouted, but the girls soon found a rhythm. Helen distracted, while Mary clung to the underside of one set of boards, and a strategic kick to break a board or a stab between the slats served to bring a man down. For the next batch, they switched roles, and Helen could be seen climbing with uncanny ease on the underside of one shelf, while Mary drew the attention.

  Helen got her hands on one man, and, with one hand clinging to her handhold, dangling, she used her other three limbs to mangle him.

  “Does it bother you?” Lillian asked.

  “Yes,” Lara said. Or was it Nora?

  “Yes,” Abby said. “I don’t like violence. But it doesn’t bother me as much as it once did. I could get used to it.”

  “Oh?” Lillian asked. “I’m surprised at that. It sounds like you want to get used to it.

  On the scaffolding, Ashton walked along one set of planks with excruciating slowness.

  “I do,” Abby said. “I don’t want to be powerless forever.”

  “There’s more ways to power than violence,” Duncan said.

  “For you, and for Lacey, and for Lillian, maybe,” Abby said.

  She didn’t say anything more.

  Ashton remained very still, five feet below one of the men, who was keeping an eye out for Mary and Helen, both of whom had disappeared inside the building.

  The man’s searches grew ever more erratic, before he recklessly stumbled in a direction, twisted around on hearing something inside, and missed his footing.

  He hit a sash-like drape of of cloth that was supposed to cover a window that hadn’t yet been installed, but had been tied at the bottom to help secure scaffolding. It might have broken his fall, but he hit it at a bad angle, and he didn’t move very much at all on landing.

  In a matter of a few minutes, with Mary’s group reconvening here and there, the guards were systematically disposed of.

  Mary appeared on the scaffolding, found where Lillian’s group was, and raised a hand signal.

  “Let’s go,” Lillian said. She’d finished putting on her gloves.

  “Go?” Duncan asked.

  “Into the building, up the scaffold. It’s the safest place to be, I think. Up high is usually better.”

  “With no escape routes,” Duncan observed.

  “There’s more to it. Sandwiching them. Having the vantage point. Just trust us,” Lillian said. “You have to trust.”

  They trusted. They made the approach, less careful than Mary had been, but there were no more people on watch.

  Emmett waited by the ramp that led up to the first section of scaffold. From there, they made their way to Ashton, who joined them as they made their way up to the upper floor.

  The interior floor wasn’t entirely complete, and ladders stood in places where stairwells would later be installed.

  The top floor was only struts and beams, lengths of wood knit together by builder’s wood, and incidentally reinforced by one branch from the overgrowth of wood from an outside section. The wind blew through the missing sections of wall.

  They crawled along the beams and struts. As they did so, they could see Helen and Mary on the fourth floor, below, moving with caution, their communications experiment sticking close by them. Through gaps here and there, other figures could be seen and heard on lower floors.

  “Headmaster,” their Nora/Lara experiment whispered. Transcribing. “You have very little room to negotiate. Lara says his voice is weird.”

  “The Devil?” Lillian murmured.

  “The Devil: The thing is, while I may not have your children, I do have the gentleman you entrusted with their care. Under duress, he has told me he has squirreled them away. He is the only one who knows where they are, according to him, because you foresaw this very circumstance. You knew I’d find you and I’d want to use you. But… now we have a conundrum, don’t we?

  “The Headmaster: I don’t see why you’re focusing on this, when your people are being cut down by the score.

  “The Devil: My people. The ones that were worth keeping, I’ve kept close. Half of the police force is mine. A full two thirds of your office is loyal to me. There is nobody in this city who can die, who I cannot replace. Short of the city being leveled, I will not lose any power. Do you understand? I have my roots in everything that this city is. I have been working to set those roots for longer than you’ve been in office. All the power you think you hold is a joke I’ve let you entertain. I can see in your eyes, your eye, rather, that you’re realizing this.

  “Either your man will break and he’ll divulge where your children are, or he’ll eventually expire from this duress I’ve applied. If he does, even you won’t know where your children are. Your only option, the only thing you can do, is to capitulate. You’re going to do everything I’ve told you and more, and then, when you’re done, I’m going to torture you to death.

  “Headmaster: What?”

  “The Devil: You crossed me. You got in my way. You die. But if you capitulate, I might let your children live. I might even be generous in making my decision if you entertain me, sir. How much damage can a man do to himself with a knife, I wonder, before he decides his children aren’t worth it anymore?”

  Lying beside Lacey so as better to see through the gaps in the floor, Abby raised her hands over her ears. She didn’t have Quinton. Emmett wasn’t here either. Were they outside, where there was less chance of being heard?

  Lacey put a hand on Abby’s back, her best effort at being reassuring.

  “The Devil: Don’t think about using that knife on me. I’ve taken measures. If I do not appear to the right people at the right times, then others will act on my behalf. Money will go to bounty hunters and bounty hunters will, given time, come for you and yours, and for all the rest of my enemies. The man who has squirreled your children away and secured them in a cellar or vault somewhere will die, and your children may die of thirst as they wait for you to return.”

  Lillian raised her head. She reached out, and touched Lacey’s upper arm.

  Lacey followed Lillian’s line of sight.

  On the other side of one of the cloths was a silhouette. A tall man with rabbit ears.

  The silhouette passed with
scarcely a sound. The creak of wood could well have been the wind moving the scaffolding.

  But as it passed, a figure remained.

  “The Devil: Now, take a moment, because the screams from outside really should be—”

  Lillian reached out, and put a hand over Nora’s mouth.

  The figure reached out and pushed the cloth aside. Sylvester. He peeked through.

  The group was lying across beams and across the meager sections of floor that had boards in. Nobody could rise to their feet fast enough to give chase, and the situation was precarious enough that nobody would dare make noise.

  His hand moved. A series of gestures.

  Then he ducked behind the curtain, so to speak, and followed the rabbit.

  What did he get from me, if he didn’t get the lies? What aspects of his personality came from me?

  “I. Help,” Lillian translated the gesture. “Of course. He wants to play at being a proper Lamb again.”

  Previous Next

  Black Sheep—13.8 (Lamb)

  -He’s here.—

  “He’s here,” Lara whispered, translating, her eyes wide. Her claws were biting into the wood she was lying on with enough force to cut through her sleeves and dig notches into the surface.

  She was scared, she was overwhelmed, she was looking for Ashton and Abby and Duncan and Emmett for support, especially Ashton and Abby, because those two were like her and they were almost a trio and Ashton calmed her down with his spores while Abby calmed her down by being Abby. But they weren’t here and she was with Helen and Mary now.

  She’d suggested going with Helen and Mary, because she didn’t want to diverge. If she always went with Duncan’s group and Nora always spent time with Mary’s group, then they would become different individuals, and different could be bad. Ashton had said it wasn’t bad, but even though she didn’t remember her first sisters dying she remembered saying goodbye to the last two.

  She and Nora called the first one as Whisper, because her communication wasn’t very strong, and the second one was Tremble, because her fear response was the strongest. She remembered how they sounded, and the brief moments of contact they had had when moving between the tanks and the metal tables where they were measured and examined. She remembered how they tasted when they were fed to her.