Twig

by wildbow

  I was gauging things as best I could, trying to figure out how much I had them, and how much I could push them before I lost them. These people had seen me at near peak performance, but showing them Sylvester Lambsbridge at his darkest would be the fastest way to lose things.

  I dropped the stern appearance, smiled, relaxed, and then turned back to Bea. I held up another envelope. “Third letter. Courtesy of the student council.”

  Bea gave the student council a glance. “Should I wait?”

  I shook my head. “Tell your people first, let them disseminate the full package. Because this? This is something to get angry about. The student council had this, they already talked about it. The measures taken against students, the security forces, the campaign against the student’s reputations, it’s something that has to be factored in.”

  She nodded.

  “Also, be warned, there are experiments in play. You saw me dealing with one. The Academy will have a few. If anyone starts asking questions and they aren’t a student, make sure people know they aren’t to get the time of day, or they should be lied to. When you slip away to the meeting place, you do it discreetly.”

  “Alright,” she said. She took the letter.

  I asked a question I already knew the answer to, “Where’s Neck?”

  She indicated a direction, then got Neck’s attention.

  I walked with Bea in Neck’s direction, away from the group.

  “Spread it slowly from a different direction than Mabel did. Far end of the school,” I said, murmuring.

  “Alright,” she said. “Thought there would be something like that. How hostile should we be when reacting to anyone asking questions?”

  “Don’t be. That’ll get them riled up. Spread false information. None of the major groups are around, so give them false locations. Have others give false information.”

  She nodded.

  “Good luck,” I told her. “Stay out of trouble. If I have to break people out of prison again, it gets harder.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  I raised an eyebrow. Neck looked surprised too.

  “For standing up for me.”

  “Ah. Cracks are going to show sooner or later. Students here were set against each other from the first attendance. I’m glad to have a chance to start telling people how dangerous that is now.”

  She smiled a little.

  “And you’re welcome,” I said. “Bring everyone you can when you’re done. I gave you the meeting place?”

  She looked like she was going to say something, then smiled and nodded. “Yes.”

  “Good,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”

  She turned back toward the group. “Roof girls, troublemakers, delinquents, with me!”

  I turned to face those who remained. The student council, some members of the greenhouse gang, and some of the angrier protesters who’d gotten themselves arrested.

  I opened my notebook, and I made some notes. One for Bea. One for… what had her name been? Mildred? Maple? Mable. I drew her head, with the straight hair down one side of her face, tucked behind her ear on the other side. Sheriff’s daughter. Happy triangle above her head. She was sharp, and she was sharp in a way I liked.

  I put a circle with a happy triangle in one corner above her head, then put a question mark there.

  I checked my destination, and was happy to see I’d included notes on how to get there, with a few sketched landmarks.

  I looked up at the group, closed the book with a slap, and then used it to point the way.

  ☙

  Pierre fell into lockstep with me as we made the final approach to the building. The thirty students in my entourage seemed a little taken aback by it.

  “I found your students,” the rabbit-headed man said. “Was the most curious thing, their choice in graffiti.”

  “Oh?”

  “Something about rabbits. Then when I approached to ask them about it, they said they were waiting for me.” He scratched his head, between the ears.

  “I was thinking we could have that be a signal from here on out.”

  “Signals only work if they’ve been communicated to the person receiving them, Sylvester,” Pierre said. “Or if they at least make some degree of sense.”

  “Well, it’s been communicated now.”

  “I’ll never understand how your head works, boss. Jessie’s at the rendezvous spot, for the record. Fray has run into some trouble.”

  One side of his mouth moved in what might be intended as a smile, but looked more like the twitch of a dying muscle on a severed rabbit’s head.

  I raised a hand, two fingers extending, interrupting Pierre before he could say anything more. “I assume she’s still managing?”

  Pierre didn’t miss a beat. It helped that his face betrayed zero tells for those who hadn’t known him for a few weeks already. “She’s managing. Trouble with the Academy. Jessie can tell you more. But I should run—I’m running interference, keeping our foes from the prize for just a little while.”

  Our foe being Fray. Perfect.

  “Thank you, Pierre. You’re a gent.”

  He swept into a bow, taking his initial steps backward. A moment later, he was running at a speed that could rival a speeding carriage.

  We approached the rendezvous point. It was an old, magnificent building, set at the intersection of two major roads near the edge of town. Not that we lacked for a good exit. The town sprawled around a bay, and was surrounded by dense forest and mountains. There were regular ships coming and going, mostly fishing vessels and some cargo boats.

  I pulled on the board, and the door opened outward, the boards not actually nailed into anything.

  The building was an old hotel. The ugliest bits of furniture had been removed, the rest of it, mostly wood, had been left within.

  The Rank and the stray’s children were present within. The Rank were strewn here and there, lounging, while the children were clustered around the bar in the corner where some initial amount of food had been laid out. Rudy and Possum were closer to the children than to the Rank. All watched as I entered, the rest of the students behind me.

  “Sylvester,” Junior said. “And the student council.”

  “Be good. Look after them. Don’t say anything we’ll all regret.”

  Junior leaned back, smiling. “I’d be more worried about their reaction to the Rank than the Rank’s reaction to them. Last I heard, there were sore feelings.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” the treasurer said. “We don’t devote that much energy to thinking about you.”

  I looked between the groups, and I said, “Do I need to separate you all?”

  The answer was a unanimous silence, with only a few shaking heads.

  “Ignore each other. Please,” I instructed.

  The students settled into their places. The Rank had the center of the room, while the student council took a point off to one side, between the bar and the front desk of the hotel, where a battered old grand piano still sat. There was a bench, and there were a number of stacked chairs off to the side. They began pulling down the chairs and arranging them into a loose circle.

  Other students found other points nearby. Some gravitated toward the children, others toward the Rank, and others toward the student council.

  Factions would form, inevitably. I was just hoping we’d get that far. The balancing act continued.

  Gordon Two lingered closer to me, not sure what he should do. Rudy and Possum approached, too.

  “Where’s Jessie?” I asked the room.

  “Upstairs,” Rudy said. “We talked briefly.”

  I nodded.

  “This is bigger than I thought it would be,” he said.

  “Cold feet?” I asked, wondering just how big he thought it was.

  He shook his head.

  “The children okay?”

  “They keep taking food and stowing it in their pockets,” Possum said, voice a hush. “Jessie sends them out in groups
, and the group that was leaving when we showed up just came back. They emptied their pockets while they were gone, and now they’re loading up again.”

  “Let them,” I said. “If they end up staying while we leave, they’ll be happy to have it, either to keep or trade. If they stay with us, then it’ll take a while for them to realize that the food won’t run out.”

  “That’s so sad,” Possum said.

  “I’ll catch up with you all in a minute,” I said. “Touching base with Jessie first. Be nice to each other. Talk.”

  I looked back over the room, looking for any signs that things might boil over while I was gone, then jogged up the stairs.

  I found Jessie at the end of the hallway. I’d been worried she had drifted off. She was only staring off into space.

  “Hallo there,” I greeted her.

  “You took your time,” she said, turning. She smiled. “Productive?”

  “Very.”

  “Good,” she said. She feigned sternness. “Because every minute of peace that you had to do your thing was hard earned. Keeping Fray corralled and stalling her has been a heck of a task.”

  I snorted. “Watch your language.”

  “She’s not stupid. She started realizing that something was up when she turned around and the Rank had disappeared on her. Shortly after that, I had to tip off the police. The men we saw are Crown, by the way.”

  “I’m already aware,” I said, smiling.

  “I’ve been interfering with them, too. We intercepted one group and got ahead of their messages. I had to lead a raid on the post office.”

  “Well look at you,” I said.

  “It was a narrow scrape, but we were able to find someone she was communicating with and point people in her direction. I assumed you didn’t want her outright captured.”

  “Nope.”

  “It was a delicate operation, keeping her under pressure and steering her away, without getting her caught. Undertaken on a hunch, no less,” she said. “I did beautifully, if I may say so myself.”

  “You may. Don’t let me stop you.”

  “You went incommunicado for just long enough that I had to worry. I heard some noise about the Academy and assumed it was you.”

  “Extending trust, as a Lambsbridge orphan ought to do,” I said. I leaned against the wall on the other end of the window. “I’ll have you know that I have co-opted the vast majority of her plan. That army of six hundred I promised? I predict we’ll be half or two-thirds of that amount by the day’s end. We’re seventy-five or eighty percent of the way to being done already. We just need to deal with Fray and actually mobilize, and we’re set.”

  “That’ll do,” Jessie said.

  “And I had to deal with Avis, who took a combat drug and murdered a few people. Actually landed my shot, brought her down without killing her.”

  “Good.”

  “And I saved a few lives that Fray would’ve probably missed as collateral damage in her plan.”

  “Rudy did mention, in a roundabout way.”

  “And I orchestrated a prison break, and even broke Avis out in the process. Work of art, really.”

  “I expect nothing less,” she said.

  “And of course there’s a noble in town. Not even a lesser one, and I faced him down. I had to fight dirty but I won. I think I might have figured out the fighting thing. Crossed a threshold. There’s another noble out there, but I’m wholly confident I can duel her and win.”

  “Excellent,” Jessie said.

  “The noble had a primordial pet, can you believe it? And I fought it hand to hand. With tooth and fingernail, while it had fangs an armspan long and talons that could have cut a horse in half. I had to use a combat vial I got from Avis and gnaw my way through the thing until I got to a vital structure. It tasted horrible.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “But I had an epiphany, and I think I came up with a seventeenth Wollstone ratio—”

  “There are fifteen.”

  “I discovered the sixteenth too, Jessie, but that’s from one of the more minor adventures of the last couple of hours, and I’m covering the broad strokes here, don’t you see? I came up with a seventeenth Wollstone ratio, divined the fundamental pattern of the primordial, and gnawed my way into the key parts to disconnect the greater whole, and thus killed an unkillable thing, all while fighting to keep the talons and fangs from eviscerating me. Those moments of brilliance were with combat drugs fuzzing my brain, mind you.”

  “That must be where these scratches came from,” Jessie said, reaching out to touch my lower eyelid.

  “A very astute observation,” I said.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “So, all in all, I think I win, but I’m not sure.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “Well, you have some reason you’re hiding up here instead of staying down there. I half expected to come up here and find you asleep again.”

  “No,” she said. “Not sleep. Just thinking.”

  “Thinking is important, when we’re doing what we’re doing,” I said. “But you’ll have to share particulars, or I’ll be claiming victory in our game of one-upmanship here. Killing a primordial and a noble a matter of minutes apart from each other is kind of hard to top.”

  “You didn’t say it was a matter of minutes,” she said. “That’s amazing.”

  I bowed a little.

  “But I can top it,” she said. She said it in a way that made my heart sink. I had an idea what she was going to say. “I dropped a memory.”

  I placed my forehead against the window.

  “In his writing, Jamie described it. This same experience. The first one was a portrait. He dropped three in total before…”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I remember the portrait during the Sub Rosa thing. I don’t remember everything that clearly, but that really scared me when it happened, so I remembered it.”

  “It scares me too.”

  “I don’t remember the others, but I read about them enough times in Jamie’s journals.”

  “I feel like it’s a countdown. As if just like him, I’ll be allowed two more, over the next three or six months, and then time’s up, just a week or a few days after that.”

  I swallowed, and it was a hard, awkward sort of swallow.

  “Hey, Sy?” she asked.

  “Hey, Jessie,” I said. I managed to sound normal.

  “I don’t have a lot of time. I don’t want to kick up a fuss. I don’t want to pressure, or force things, or ask things of you, and I definitely don’t want anything that happens between us to be an act on your part.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Except, I’m really wondering.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And I’m sorry I have to wonder.”

  “Don’t be,” I said. I drew in a deep breath. “I don’t know. But there’s a jumble to sort through in my already unusually jumbled head. Can we tackle this? This big thing with Fray?”

  Jessie nodded.

  “And I’ll think about it harder and more clearly when I’m not thinking about Fray and how to stay on top of all of this. Because I’ve told different things to a half-dozen groups and three of them are downstairs. But I’ll give you your answer. I promise.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Jessie was so often my rock. Reliable, someone I could go back to. My anchor in the storm that was ever active in my head and my immediate surroundings.

  But she looked like she needed a rock, and I was happy to oblige.

  “C’mere,” I said. “C’mon.”

  I wrapped her in a hug. Not the first I’d given in the last day, but certainly the most important.

  “Am I supposed to play along with the story and tell you you smell like primordial bile?” she asked.

  “It was more stomach acid than bile,” I said.

  She nodded, her head rubbing against my shoulder. “Terrible.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Previo
us Next

  Bitter Pill—15.13

  Jessie and I made our way up to the halfway point on the stairs so we could look down at the crowd. We took in the scene.

  Two hundred students, with more arriving by the minute.

  The leaders of each of the individual groups were all present, by our request. Pierre had told them to gather. As such, we had Ralph and Mabel for the Greenhouse Gang; Davis and Valentina for the student council; Junior, Rita and Posie for the Rank; Bea and Neck for the rooftop girls and delinquents.

  There were others. Clay’s men, Otis’, Archie’s, and Frederick’s. The prisoners hung near them. Some of the recently released prisoners were affiliated with one group or the other.

  Rudy and Possum stood off to one side, near the Stray children, while Gordon Two stood near Pierre and Shirley.

  I used my notebook to help keep track as I indicated each of the people and giving Jessie the names she hadn’t already been told.

  “…that’s Rudy and Possum over there. Possum’s a nickname. I think we’ll be able to count on them. Then Gordon Two.”

  “Gordon Two?” she asked, archly.

  “Also Gordon the Second, if you want to go that way. Felt fitting.”

  “We only just got over the new Jamie-old Jamie confusion, and you start this?”

  “Don’t get all fussy now.”

  “You tend to bring fussiness out in people, in the same way that being an arsonist brings out the ‘fire is bad’ attitude in others.”

  “I’m an arsonist too,” I pointed out.

  “Yes you are,” she said, sighing a little. “We should get this under control.”

  I nodded.

  We were out of earshot of the assembled students as we had our conversation, but we had their full attention. Ears were strained. Eyes were on us. The buzz of conversation was minimal at best. They were agitated.

  I could look at the crowd, fuzz out my vision, and focus on movement and spacing, and I could intuit, to a degree, the restlessness and degree of motion. I could see where people remained turned toward friends, looking at Jessie and me over or along their shoulders. They appeared in clusters, in places where groups mingled. The Greenhouse Gang was among them. The patterns and shapes made by those clusters looked like cracks and fissures running through the collected mass of students. Suspicion, dissent, and the vast pool of anger and frustration threatening to turn toward Jessie and me.