Twig

by wildbow

  Evette looked at the rows an columns of shelving, and the shelves that lay against the wall, to either side of the windows.

  “Later in the evening,” Mauer said. He reached a set of bookshelves that rested against the wall, found a catch, and then hauled on one shelf with his oversized arm, before switching to his good arm to haul on the next shelf. They swung away, hinges screaming their rusty cries. “The doors would open. The partygoers would make their way to the Block.”

  The Block was downstairs. The set of stairs leading down was wider than any of the hallways at Lambsbridge orphanage had been long, leading into a basement.

  Evette saw the first of the corpses, lit by the lantern.

  She saw the next, all tangled together, arms and ribs interlocking, making it impossible to see where one of the skeletal remains ended and the next began. Not because they were modified. No, they had simply been embracing as they’d died, huddled together. The bodies had collapsed into each other.

  Behind Mauer and Evette, Mauer’s men ignited lanterns and lit candles. Slowly, the area grew lighter. Slowly, Evette, being sure to keep the light behind her, was able to make out the details.

  Bodies littered the area.

  Mauer was a man of words, very effective words, but he’d been unable to convey this scene. It was something he’d needed to show, not tell.

  The corpses had dessicated, or been devoured by bugs and by vermin. There were so many, dropped where they’d stood, crumpled on the floor in awkward positions.

  “The Block, based on what I was able to find out,” Mauer said. “Was an event held at this location once every two weeks. We counted the bodies of at least eighty children and twenty grown adults here. Our doctors tested the remains and it suggested they were all drugged to be complacent. One by one, they would have their numbers and ratios rattled off, along with grades for psychology, wellness, nutrition, and more.”

  We came from a place like this. Sylvester did. Jamie did.

  “After each one had their numbers read out, the bidding would start. They would be dragged away, very frequently to be experimented on. Modified. Quotas for the best, the healthiest, the brightest, all were demanded and met. Money changed hands, and that money went to the Academies and the Crown, with a share going to procurers. An endless supply of test subjects, fed through this engine.”

  Evette looked around. She could see the bodies, and she could easily imagine it was a hundred.

  She could imagine it was more.

  “You’re clever enough that I’m sure you can figure out what Genevieve and I figured out,” Mauer said.

  The count was wrong, her gut told her. Then, as she looked at some of the bodies, she realized that there were piles that were misleading. A pile of two adults could easily look like three children.

  But she saw the black fabric of a lab coat, and she moved it, looking closer at the long-decayed corpse, all bone and dried-on tatters of flesh that the mice and rats hadn’t elected to eat.

  Academy people had died too?

  She looked around at the bodies, and she realized what had unfolded.

  “They killed them all,” she said. “All of the children. All of the adults. And then they killed themselves?”

  “Yes,” Mauer said. “The bodies were still cooling when we made our way down here.”

  She could look at Mauer, and because he wasn’t trying to hide it, because the pieces were all there, and because he’d hinted at it, she could see how it all came together.

  “They killed all of these people, then themselves, all because you came looking? Burning bridges before you could cross them?”

  “Yes,” Mauer said, sounding very tired again, even as he tried to put a kind of emphasis on that.

  It was, in a word, the end of the story Mauer had been trying to tell her. The final stroke of the picture he’d painted before her.

  “No leads? No clues?”

  “Some,” Mauer said. “We chased down what we could. There were two, with one we intended to hold in reserve.”

  “In reserve? Then this trail isn’t cold.”

  “It’s very cold, as trails go.” Mauer said. “There were two people who knew the full story about how this worked, and just why they had a protocol like this in place. One of the two people was the Duke of Francis. I put a bullet in him, destroying his brain. Word from within the Infante’s castle is that he drools and doesn’t eat unless a tube is pushed into his throat.”

  “Leaving one person,” Evette concluded. Her mind caught up, drawing connections. Whisperings of the word ‘Noble’ found their way from Jamie’s mouth to her ear. “Oh.”

  “The Baron Richmond,” Mauer said. He knelt, his hands moving in a gesture of supplication before he touched a child’s skull, one that had been picked clean by vermin. He took a moment, praying silently, then stood. “You utterly destroyed the man, and with that, you left Genevieve and I with no people to chase, and no people to interrogate. I’d happily spared him in hopes of getting answers at a later date. Not so. I thought I had time to apply pressure on him.”

  “Not so,” Evette echoed Mauer. She felt a damaged, non-functional, broken heart plummet into her stomach. The false heart in her bag continued to pump away.

  Evette looked at Mary, who stared down at the bodies.

  “Percy led you here. He bought from this place, once.”

  “He had a friend from the days he attended Radham, who gave him access. It was a way for him to get the funds he needed to maintain his enterprise. Given the chance, Genevieve hoped to slip into their ranks and observe things herself. We never got that far.”

  “Sylvester asked the Baron, once, about what happened to the children,” Evette said.

  “Did he? What did the Baron say?”

  “The Baron laughed, and took this to his grave. I think he liked the idea we’d find our way here, and we’d stumble on this scene, or one like it. Maybe the bodies would still be warm.”

  Mauer was only half listening. One of his men had approached, and now whispered in his ear.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  Evette nodded.

  “It would be hypocritical to blame you for your part in this when I had the other lead killed. I believe you when you say you want to solve this particular riddle. My only concern is that you will get in my way. Swear to me that you won’t, and I’ll leave you here, to make your way.”

  Evette couldn’t swear it. Not without consideration.

  She looked down at the sea of bodies, dropped where they stood.

  “I want you to comb this place for evidence. I want you to find what you can, Sylvester. To share the information, or even covet it for yourself. Search out answers elsewhere. Whoever bought from this place years ago has found a new place to go for the purchase of test subjects. I want you to find them, if you can. You could do it with my blessing. I want to let you. But I need you to promise you won’t get in my way.”

  She was being asked to make the choice.

  She nodded. “I won’t.”

  “I wish you the best of luck, then.”

  She remained in the graveyard, watching as Mauer and his men made their way up the steps to the library. In a minute, they would be getting into their carriages, riding off to fight the next battle in an unwinnable war.

  Evette spoke to her phantoms. “Two different people were able to find this place, but something was important enough to keep under wraps that they had loyal Academy people kill themselves.”

  “It doesn’t add up,” Jamie said.

  Evette shook her head.

  She moved her hand from behind her back. Her fingers were crossed. She uncrossed them.

  She looked at each of her phantoms in turn. She stopped by meeting Mary’s eyes.

  “You don’t intend to keep your promise of leaving him alone,” Mary said.

  “Not at all,” Evette said. “Does that bother you? I know promises are important to you.”

  “Promises from the heart are
important to me,” Mary said.

  Evette nodded. “Let’s go save Shirley, then. And see if we can’t get my actual heart working again, without them asking too many questions.”

  Previous Next

  Thicker than Water—14.11

  We have nothing left to lose.

  We always knew this time would come.

  Wyvern takes a hold in the mind. It leaves behind residue. It collects in the body, stunting growth, taking resources away from other things, as the body heals, sequesters the toxins, and filters them.

  Things are steadily lost and worn down. With effort, with concentration, and with mindfulness, there’s a way to recover, to keep up. Rebuild as things fall, with time and effort. Keep the memories, the faces, the skills, the overall construction. Practice, repetition, and care make much of it routine.

  But the fact was that it was hard to rebuild faces when Sylvester didn’t want to face those same people.

  Now the faces were slipping away, and it was getting harder to rebuild.

  It had been in the cards from the beginning. From the first time he had snuck a glance at his own file, he’d known what was in store for him. He would be the last to expire, and it wouldn’t be by way of dying.

  Sylvester’s memory had always been faulty, but it would get worse. Accrued detritus would hit a critical mass in some lobe of his brain, and he would lose things. It would be a steep drop, but it wouldn’t be a swift one. Very different things.

  He had decided, very early on, that he didn’t want his brain to be his undoing. He’d made something of a decision around the time Mary had joined, and he’d made that a promise to himself at a later point.

  It was around then that Sylvester had started to take on a different approach. He’d always been willing to get hurt in the process of achieving goals, especially when it was something that could be readily mended. Flesh was cheap, and experienced medical care could be bought in any back alley. But he’d started to wrap his head around the future, the day his memories and thoughts started slipping.

  He’d been eleven, around then. Though he wasn’t wholly sure of that, anymore. He’d never known his actual age, and, somewhere along the line, he’d started to realize the impact of Wyvern on his size, and he’d mentally adjusted his age. He’d drawn comparisons between his behavior and thought processes off of Wyvern with that of other children he’d met, in the mice.

  But he’d been in that vicinity. Eleven. Twelve. Maybe thirteen. Probably not.

  Regardless, it was a young age to start thinking about how he was going to die, but he’d decided it would be in a blaze of glory. Not a slow and lonely brain death.

  He had refined a style. He had made the moments of glory more important. He had figured out tolerable risks and the ways to do the most damage.

  On a level, during his extended winter and spring in Jamie’s company, they had been working on the task. The blaze and the glory.

  “We didn’t expect it to be this soon,” Evette said, to herself.

  The borrowed shirt was far too large, and fell down around the knuckles of her hands even with the sleeves rolled up. The weather was warm, the rain cold, and as the bag that she carried got soaked, she could feel her blood run cold. Not because of any emotion, but because the external heart itself was getting cooler, because the tubes that ran into her body weren’t warmed by surrounding flesh. It might have been only the difference of a degree, a degree and a half, but it could be felt in the areas where the tubes entered the body at the collarbone and beneath the ribs, much like how her hands felt cooler than the trunk of her body.

  She could have caught or stolen a means of riding back to the Infante’s place, but too many things were about timing right now. The countdown, Shirley, needing to set things up, needing to prepare herself and to prepare Sylvester…

  The moment of glory was at hand. She wouldn’t try to die, but if it happened, then it wouldn’t surprise her.

  This was what she was for.

  Helen, Mary, and Jamie had been recalled and were accounted for. The edges were rough, the details unfinished, the complete pictures warped and tainted by subconscious thought and feeling, but they were there.

  If she had another Lamb to

  The walk gave her time to piece together others.

  Gordon. She put him together, piece by piece. Hubris, too, not because he could contribute to any discussion or add anything particular, but for the sentiment. He’d earned his place.

  She had to work harder when it came to Lillian. What had the others theorized? That Lillian was Sylvester’s compassion, his ability to care?

  Important, when it came to Shirley. Even if it was only to have her there as a reminder, standing off to one side, her back forever turned.

  She worked on the other Jamie, for much the same reason. Because without him, she didn’t think about the dance, about cooperation. Without the newer Jamie in his spectral, imagined form, she walked her path alone.

  She walked alone regardless, whether she was missing Jamie as the spectre or the real Jamie. It was only a question of degrees.

  She developed Ashton, starting with the thoughts and feelings that went hand in hand with Ashton, the nascent foetus that had grown in the vat-like plant structure. The rest of him grew and reached forth from that central point.

  One by one, she collected each of the other Lambs, who she had known for such brief periods of time.

  Then, all of that done in the course of an hour long walk, silent, staring only at the sidewalks and roads in front of her, her mind entirely elsewhere, rainwater soaking through cloth and flesh to the point that it felt like it saturated her bones, she had the Lambs start to talk.

  Those things were all there. The individual things that each of them represented. They were accessible, even if the faces and fine details weren’t, even if the figures were bent in odd places or tattered or bloody.

  Surrounded by her carnival of imagined Lambs, Evette had them babble, talking over one another, no one voice louder than the others.

  The same tools were available, simply a little clumsier to access, slower to respond, while needing a little bit more effort before they cooperated or before any one thing could be dwelt on.

  Evette let the chatter wash over her. Her mind wandered, in a sense, but it wandered in a measured way.

  “What are our priorities?” Gordon asked.

  “Health,” Helen said. “We’re literally heartbroken. We need a doctor.”

  “There’s no shortage of those in New Amsterdam,” Gordon said.

  “We need an effective doctor who can treat us in time for us to get back to Shirley,” Helen said. “That’s harder.”

  “That’s harder,” Gordon said. “Whatever happens, we’ll be expected to report to the Infante. Harder still.”

  “We can condense it,” the younger of the Jamies said. “Turn two problems into one. We go back, and we explain to the Infante…”

  Evette navigated the crowd. There were experiments being led around as pets. Some were humanoid, others weren’t. The night life was active, and the fact that she was still young, appearing as a boy no older than fourteen or fifteen, it drew odd looks. The state of her clothes and the encrusted blood here and there probably didn’t help.

  The others were still going on about the way to handle the discussion. She paid enough attention to pick up the salient points. As they got closer she would construct it into just enough of a plan that she knew what to do, without overdoing it to the point that she would collapse and go to pieces the moment the Infante did something unexpected.

  Because that was a thing he did.

  “Ashton?” Mary’s voice had a different tone, enough that it caught Evette’s ear.

  Ashton, Lara, Nora, and Mary weren’t part of the ongoing conversation in any capacity. No, they were focused on something else entirely.

  There were any number of explanations as to what was going on there, but Evette had a sense of what it might be. Detached ob
servations, fear and concern, with an eye on the mission at hand.

  She crossed the street at the next opportunity, not actively looking around, but still keeping an eye out with her peripheral vision.

  Then, at that same intersection, she took another path to cross the street, still keeping something of an eye out.

  “They’re experienced,” Mary said. “Professional. Watch the crowd.”

  She didn’t watch the crowd, exactly, because looking directly at anyone would tip off the pursuer. But she did pay attention to the directions they were looking.

  The pursuer was positioned in such a way that they could watch, while using the crowd as cover. But they weren’t invisible, and people glanced at them.

  “Is it Mauer’s person, keeping an eye on you?” Lara asked.

  “Is it the Infante’s spy, watching to see what we do?” Nora asked.

  “Or are they going to hurt us?” Lara asked.

  “Or kill us?”

  “We’ll take precautions on those last two questions,” Evette said. She turned away from the little cluster of people, so they weren’t even in her peripheral vision, and changed course.

  “What about the first two questions?” Lara and Nora asked.

  “I’m thinking on that,” Evette said.

  “They weren’t flawless. They didn’t blend in completely,” Mary said. “They’d either bumped into someone, were being indiscreet about trying to look for Evette, or they were odd enough to draw the eye. Possibly an experiment. It’s possible they’re dangerous. An assassin instead of a tail.”

  The other Lambs commented. Gordon, Jamie, Helen…

  She took in the babble, and she started plotting, reconsidering old ideas, but now using the fact that they were being spied on and followed.

  That was something they could use.

  “We can make our move,” she said.

  She had the attention of the assembled group.

  “Let’s go back to our lab.”

  There was no more room to stall, not any more. Evette looked for a taxi carriage and flagged it down.