Twig

by wildbow

  Then she lurched forward, one mini-step that crossed half the distance between us, before she bounced away, hesitant.

  I put my arms out and wrapped her in a tight hug.

  Odd, to offer such a thing. Odd, for someone to accept the offer. As the saying went, any port in a storm.

  The storm was raging right now.

  “S’alright,” I murmured.

  Rudy stood off to one side, looking very puzzled. I gestured for him to wait. The crowd looked like it was moving, heading in the direction of the Academy’s main buildings. If something happened, that was fine. So long as the key elements remained in play. They could lynch Yates for all I cared. The Horse would probably avoid such a fate.

  The rooftop girls and some delinquent groups would steer the destruction and keep things from getting too out of control, because they were the out-of-control element.

  This was fine.

  It took a couple of minutes for the girl to stop crying into my shoulder. She’d noticed the mob leaving.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Don’t be,” I said. “How do you feel?”

  “My friend left.”

  I nodded. “Everyone’s preoccupied. I wouldn’t blame her too much.”

  “Except you,” she said. “Who are you?”

  “Sylvester,” I said. “My buddy here is Ru…dy?”

  “Rudy, yeah,” Rudy said.

  The big, tough looking guy seemed to put her less at ease rather than more at ease.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I’ll leave you alone. Thank you for the shoulder. I’m just going to go back to my dorm room and think.”

  “The shoulder was freely offered, no need for thanks,” I told her. “Listen, I’m walking in the same direction the crowd is. How’s about I walk with you, and we go find your friend? We’ll reunite you two, I’ll give her a smack upside the head, and she can give you that shoulder to cry on for a longer-term basis.”

  The crying girl gave me a wary look.

  “I’ve got a complicated situation going on and I’m not looking to pester girls, and Rudy here is more concerned about his sister than about the ladies, honest.”

  “The way you say that makes me sound like I’ve got dishonest intentions about my sister,” Rudy said.

  “No idea what you mean,” I told him.

  “Who are you?” the girl asked, giving me a more serious look.

  “A bystander,” I said. “I heard you tell your friend you were alright, and it was a really, really bad lie, okay? I’m good at sussing out truth from lie, and that one was child’s play. I don’t think you should go back to your dorm room and be not-alright all on your lonesome there.”

  She took that in, digested it, and then gave me a small nod.

  “I’m Sylvester,” I reminded her.

  “Helen,” she said.

  “Oh, that’s going to confuse me,” I said. “I know a Helen. Do you have any nicknames?”

  “Kind of? Friends at my last school called me Possum.”

  “Possum?” I asked.

  “It’s a long story, and we knew each other from prep. We were immature kids and there were lots of long stories, and this one stuck. I know it’s a bad nickname, but it was the first thing that came to mind.”

  “See, now I want to get to know you, so I can hear that story,” I said. “It’s not bad at all as nicknames go. In my humble opinion, anyone worth knowing would agree on that.”

  I could see something faint change in the region of her eyes as I said that.

  “You couldn’t get it to catch on with your friends here, huh?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t say anything about that, though.”

  “You didn’t need to,” I said.

  “He’s good at reading people,” Rudy said.

  “And the fact of the matter is,” I said. “Teenagers are dumb. Really really dumb. I and many scars I have and haven’t had removed can testify on that front. And some, even some who might well be very good friends, can be really, really dumb and fail to see what a great nickname Possum is. Right, Rudy? Back me up here.”

  “It’s alright,” Rudy said.

  “Thank you.”

  “My friend aren’t that good. They’re sort of…”

  “Boy crazy? Distractable? Oblivious?”

  “Preoccupied, like you said before,” Possum volunteered. “I think that’s the generous way of saying it.”

  “Listen, would your friend—” I paused pausing to interrupt myself, “One sec, would you walk with me, miss Possum?”

  I offered my elbow. She took my arm, latching on with both arms, much as she’d clung to me to cry on my shoulder.

  We walked, with Rudy trailing a step behind.

  “If I outright told your friend you needed a proper hug and cry, would she be a friend?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Possum said. Then, quieter, shy, she added, “But I’d be embarrassed.”

  “We’ll see about it either way,” I said.

  With her clinging to me, I was able to set the pace, and I set a pace where we were able to catch up to the crowd. Already, there were a few signs of broken windows on buildings with lettering marking them as being Academy.

  Broken windows were fine.

  “How do you do that?” Rudy asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Back when you said ‘you couldn’t get your friends to like the nickname’ or whatever,” Rudy said.

  “What about it?”

  “You did it with her. Found her in the crowd, knew exactly what to say.”

  “I’m just paying attention,” I said. “That’s all.”

  “You did it with me. You didn’t offer me a shoulder to cry on. But what you said, it’s like you read my mind.”

  “Nah,” I said. “The way you hold yourself. Are your arms or hands up? Probably guarded. Hunched over or looking down? Then there’s the way your expression changes, both the major parts and how they go together, and the small-scale changes. A twitch here, a movement there, or tension in another place. It communicates a lot. Tone, word choice, context, and what your face is doing while you talk, there’s obviously a lot there.”

  “I can’t tell if you’re an angel or a devil,” Rudy said.

  I smiled.

  “You don’t hear much talk like that nowadays,” Possum said.

  “I grew up in a town so small we joke the Crown didn’t see us when it took over,” Rudy said. “Some churching, still.”

  “That’s marvelous,” Possum said. “And so is being able to study all of those things.”

  I smiled at her again.

  It was a lie, though. Yes, those things factored in. Yes, they were something I’d seen in retrospect. But I really hadn’t had to look that hard. There had been something dark at play in their eyes. I imagined Death was there.

  There wasn’t much talk of that particular horseman these days either. Jessie’s influence more than anything. Or Jamie’s. One of the books they’d been talking about at some point, though that one had had a different horseman as the focus.

  There were more students walking in the opposite direction of us now.

  “Greater concentration of students,” I said, indicating. “Can you hear it? A shift in the sound of the mob?”

  “No,” Rudy said. Possum shook her head, agreeing with Rudy.

  “Look at the way those students are moving. They keep looking back. They keep their hands up, but it’s fleeting. Reach up to tug at the uniform jacket, there. Hand on head there. Defensive, but not a steady defense. They’re not sure what to do with themselves,” I said.

  “Why?” Rudy asked.

  “Something’s happening. Thinking about context, that something is probably that the Academy is responding to the riot.”

  “You say that, but we’re still walking in that direction,” Rudy said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Is that a problem?”

  “Nah,” he said. “Just making sure.�
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  Possum clutched my arm tighter.

  My suspicions were correct. The Academy was in play, and much as I’d observed outside of the library, there were more forces present than what Beattle should have been able to provide on its own. The crowd was maintaining its own momentum. It shed some of its people, yes, but others were joining in from elsewhere, trickling in from different places in this scattered Academy to vent their frustrations. Things would change when student and Academy both brought their experiments to the table.

  The Academy would have the upper hand then. I’d need to turn the tables more decisively before then. I was suspicious the student rebellion wouldn’t be quashed entirely, but we’d lose far too many people this way.

  “Come on,” I said. “We’ll find your friend, and then I’ve got work to do.”

  “Work,” Rudy said.

  “If you’re not keen on doing something like this in particular, it’s fine,” I told him. “Take the ten dollars. Buy your sister something nice, make that what you do tomorrow.”

  “Nah,” he said.

  “Nah,” I echoed him.

  “I’m with you if you need me,” he said.

  “Good answer,” I said.

  And an answer I’m glad to have, I thought, as I disengaged from Possum and stepped up onto a short wall to get a better vantage point to see over the crowd.

  The Academy security forces were in the process of dragging the student council into a carriage, while others held the students back.

  “The student council went and got themselves captured,” I said, hopping down from the wall. “We’ll track ’em back to wherever they’re holding people. There’s someone else there I want to see to, while I’m at it. Two people, if I’m lucky. I went and recruited another person with the same name as an old friend of mine, and I left him behind. With some luck he’ll be found there.”

  “You want to break into a jail?” Rudy asked.

  “Is it an actual jail-jail?” I asked.

  “I imagine so. Falls within the outer reaches of the Academy sprawl,” Rudy said.

  I puffed out my cheeks for a moment, then nodded. “I’ll manage.”

  I spotted one of the rooftop girls in the crowd and signaled her.

  I’d told them to keep an eye out. They would have already touched base with a lot of the delinquents and questionable sorts the Rank hadn’t messed with.

  The ball is rolling. It’s going to take far, far more than this to stop it, I thought.

  Previous Next

  Bitter Pill—15.11

  I took notes in a notebook I had borrowed while I watched people come and go from the local jail.

  We were a twenty minute walk from the Academy center and I could hear the noise the students were generating. Smoke was rising from one point, and the riot was in full swing. Only a few thousand students, all in all, but they weren’t happy.

  The people I’d gathered for this particular task looked restless. They wanted and expected to be out there, working alongside the rioters.

  These were the delinquents, along with Rudy and Possum. I’d given Rudy the task of finding Possum’s friend and told him to meet up with me later, and he’d ended up bringing her with. The friend hadn’t been found, and she had decided to stick around.

  I wasn’t sure I agreed with her being a part of this, but I could only do so much at one time.

  A carriage pulled up. Two security officers strongarmed someone who looked like they’d taken a combat drug. They weren’t the first, and they wouldn’t be the last. Combat drugs were cost effective for a small Academy like this one.

  I made a note, circled the description and drawing of the guard driving the carriage, and drew lines connecting it to other mentions. I drew a cross-hatch and made a line connect it to the cheek of his drawn face.

  Looking around, I saw Rudy standing close by. I moved his arm, checked his watch, and then went back to my notebook to add a note about the time. Two o’clock shadow.

  Rudy, looking over my shoulder, commented, “When I first saw you taking notes, I thought it was a good thing. Then I looked and I saw what you were actually doing, and I lost all of the confidence I’d gained in you and then some.”

  I looked down at my notebook. There were drawn faces with key features for distinguishing the guards, with nicknames attached. Text was organized into blocks, and shapes, symbols such as circles, diamonds and triangles served as shorthand. Lines connected ideas, with some thinner, some thicker or reinforced, and some unintentionally sketchy. More shorthand shapes surrounded or were drawn to intersect different parts of what I’d laid out. It was a very crowded page.

  I turned the page over, tilting my head to look at the image on the backside. Lines extended to the edge of the page and wrapped around to refer to text and the sketched out image of the jail itself.

  “It’s not that bad,” I said. “My memory is a weak point, and sometimes when I’m juggling something bigger I’ll do this so I don’t need to devote as much brainspace to doing what I’m doing. A representation of my thinking.”

  “You have very disorganized thinking,” Rudy commented.

  “It’s actually very organized,” I said. “Look, see, this shape—”

  “Upside-down ‘L’ shape?”

  “A gun, come on,” I said, annoyed. “See the trigger?”

  “It’s very sketchy, so it’s hard to tell.”

  “It’s sketchy because I’m not sure if the gun exists. But the way the scowling man carries himself and wears his jacket, I’m reasonably sure, so it gets a mention. So there’s a gun, and it’s drawn with a line connecting it to the block of text about his behavior. He’s aggressive. We’ve seen him three times. Always the first one to the carriage, right? He’s like a stitched fresh from the wire, despite the scruff on his cheeks suggesting he got up early this morning. And the line passes through this text—”

  “Which makes the text hard to read, I have to say.”

  “Exactly! On purpose! Because that’s text about his buddy, and I put the text there in advance so I could sort of cross it out if I wanted to, which I suspected I might do. Now look how it also touches the down-triangle.”

  Rudy screwed his eyes into a fierce squint.

  “Okay, so the down triangle is weakness. Just like up triangles are strengths and diamonds are resources and so on. All very logical when you think about it.”

  Rudy stared at it, his eye searching the page. I turned the page to show him how it connected to the back.

  “Nah,” he decided.

  “Yah!” I countered, emulating his tone. “Now look, here’s the neat part. Draw a curve, imagine a line, a course of action that touches on all these shapes in a row. Down triangle, down triangle, down triangle, down triangle… all of it clustered around things that relate to this side of the building. See where I’m going with this?”

  “Nah.”

  “This is how we break them. The up arrows, their advantages, like gun, like this carriage tends to have a lot of uniforms, they flow this way. It crosses here—”

  “I think,” Rudy interrupted me, “That the longer you try to explain it to me, the less I”ll understand it or believe in you.”

  I frowned at him.

  “I think,” he said, very firmly, as if he wanted to soften the blow.

  “I need you to concede that it’s actually a brilliant piece of work. Then I’ll leave you alone,” I said.

  “Hmm,” he said. “I’ll give you the benefit of a doubt.”

  “Okay,” I said. I paused. “Tell me it’s really quite sophisticated.”

  “That might be stretching the truth.”

  “Lie to me if you have to. I just want to hear it.”

  “It’s not a lie either,” he said. “But fine. It’s really quite sophisticated.”

  I grinned.

  I glanced at my delinquents, then turned a few pages in the notebook, looking over my notes for them. A list of faces, names, nicknames, and some names un
derlined where I’d remembered them long enough to write them down. Rudy was one.

  “Why does someone as smart of you need a cheat sheet for the people working under him?”

  “Like I said, my memory isn’t great,” I said. I glanced at the delinquent king and the top rooftop girl, then checked the sheet.

  “I have down triangles around my head.”

  “Yep,” I said. I moved my hand so my thumb blocked the associated text. “You have up triangles too.”

  “You don’t need to block the words. I can’t read your handwriting,” Rudy said.

  I snapped my head around to look at him. “Hey. Just struck me, how’s our Possum doing?”

  “She’s good.”

  “Why don’t you check on her?” I asked.

  “If you want me to go away, I’ll go away,” Rudy said.

  “No, no,” I said, lying. “But why don’t you go check on her? Help her keep watch. I don’t want her to be alone for any long stretches.”

  “Arright,” Rudy said.

  “Glad to have you with,” I said, as he walked away. “Really. Thanks.”

  His reply was unintelligible.

  I looked down at the notebook, then made a note by Rudy’s face.

  Honest. Calls me on my shit.

  I spent longer than I would have liked to admit when it came to deciding what kind of triangle to draw. I ended up drawing two overlapping ones.

  The delinquent king was Neck. He made a pair with Bea, the top rooftop girl. They were, by the whisperings I’d caught and a number of observations I’d made, a troublesome pair when put together, and hard to put apart. From the moment that we’d gotten this show on the road, they’d been a pair. Old colleagues, friend rather than fancy, and each one prone to making the other behave badly.

  Bea was the top girl because the others were scared of her when she was alone. She was far scarier when paired with Neck. She had been over the top angry long before this whole thing unfolded, I suspected, and Neck was fuel on the fire. She validated him and I suspected she knew him better than anyone and she remained fond of him, which had to matter a lot to him, when he was an odd sort.