Twig

by wildbow

  “Hello captain,” the Mercy said, lowering her head a little. When she looked up again, it was still one bloodshot eye peering through messy hair.

  “Hello, experiment. You seem to be in a bind,” Jessie said.

  The Mercy laughed at that, a surprisingly human sound, perfectly fitting to the moment, for someone who was in a bind but who did find the word choice amusing. I wondered if she’d been human once.

  “Do you want help?” Jessie asked.

  The Mercy nodded. “Please, sir. Or ma’am.”

  Jessie reached for her boot, where she’d tucked a knife into the strap that cinched the boot tight against the leg. She held it out by the handle.

  The Mercy took the knife, and proceeded to use one hand and the knife to flense the skin off her body.

  “Where’s the rest of your unit, experiment?”

  “They left me behind,” the Mercy said. “I’m a little slower than some.”

  “Where are your clothes, then? And your weapon?”

  “The clothes got blood on them,” the Mercy said. “The blood started to smell. I lost my weapon along the way.”

  “When you say smell, you mean it smelled like plague?”

  The Mercy nodded. “I think it likes how I taste.”

  “Could be you’re in the wrong place for it,” the Treasurer said, from the sidelines.

  “Could be,” the Mercy said. She flashed the Treasurer a smile, which was fairly dramatic. She only had scraps of flesh on her head where it met her hairline. I wasn’t sure, and I was trying to look afraid, which meant averting my eyes and looking less closely at her, but her scalp might have been something that wasn’t skin. Artificial.

  She tore off the skin over her breasts, and then with the help of the knife to cut connective tissue, removed almost a third of the skin from her upper body and her previously untouched right leg.

  From there, it was an easy process to get the rest. Skin at the feet, skin at the arms. She stood there, shaking from cold and from pain, the one eye we could see lacking eyelids. Flayed.

  Slowly but surely, however, things were filling in. The blood flow was stopping, the darker grooves between muscles and muscle fibers smoothing out.

  No, probably not human at any point. Just very high quality work.

  Work with biological processes that fast meant biological demands.

  I gestured at Jessie with a hand the experiment couldn’t see. Food. Man. Eat.

  As if reading my mind, her eye fell on me.

  “He’s not for eating,” Jessie said, firm.

  “He’s supposed to die,” the Mercy said. “They all are.”

  “It’s not your place to contravene my orders, experiment,” Jessie said.

  “He’s supposed to die,” the Mercy said, more firmly, insistent, as if she could will Jessie to agree with her. “I need food, and I need clothes, and he has both. I’m hardy, but not that hardy.”

  “He has information,” Jessie said, still firm. “He knows something about the standoff at the Little Castle.”

  “I see,” the Mercy said. “Captain, ma’am—”

  I liked that Jessie in stern librarian mode was coming across as a ‘ma‘am’, even as covered up as she was.

  “—You know one of my roles is getting information,” the Mercy finished. Her skin was almost starting to look like skin. More in some areas than others.

  The way she said it, I knew she meant torture.

  Find the cats and cockroaches who could become long-term carriers, check for information, eat them. A tightly contained, efficient process cycle. The torturing for information and the eating could even be folded into one another.

  “We need his ongoing assistance,” Jessie said. “Emphasis on ongoing. I’d prefer it’s enthusiastic assistance.”

  “It’s very enthusiastic assistance now,” I said. I feigned fear and concern for my own hide, though I knew full well that the others had guns. “I very much appreciate you not feeding me to her.”

  “Make yourself useful when the time comes,” Jessie told me, still sounding as authoritarian as she ever did.

  The Mercy curtsied, which looked strange given she was stark naked, new skin beaded with wet snow.

  Then, rather than march off to go find her next mean, she sagged, leaning hard against the nearest wall. Her breathing was getting less heavy, but she looked very tired. She had maybe half of her skin now. The rest of it looked more like the result of a moderate scald than a fresh flaying.

  She was an efficient little machine, from what I could tell. Strong enough to tear her own skin off, the particulars of her physiology and metabolism finely tuned and balanced.

  It made me rethink how to approach the rest of the Mercies.

  “I’m put in mind of the adage about the scorpion and the frog,” Jessie murmured.

  “Hm?” I asked. I drew the connection. “No. It’s fine.”

  “I know for a fact that you like girls, Sylvester.”

  “This is not untrue,” I said.

  She moved closer, talking quieter, “I know you like unusual people, you feel an affinity for experiments, and the Tender Mercy right there is both. Your desire to take care of others is proportionate to your age, and she’s close enough to our age I can imagine you likening her to the other Lambs.”

  “I hadn’t actually,” I said.

  I’d come close, but I hadn’t.

  “I’m not saying you shouldn’t help her, but I am saying that I’m thinking of the scorpion and the frog.”

  “She could be useful,” I said.

  “She could be. So could a lot of people. There are a lot of people in this city who need help. We can’t save all of them. We might not be able to save her.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But—”

  But I didn’t have a good argument.

  Jessie was patient, giving me time.

  The Mercy was crouching down now. She used water from a shallow puddle and cleaned herself as a racoon or rodent might, wetting her hands and wiping her new skin. Wetting hands and wiping. She bent her head down and used the same method to get the blood out of her hair.

  “I just worry that if I leave her behind like this, it’s going to be one of those nagging memories that sticks in my head, taking up valuable real estate.”

  “Why?” Rudy asked. “She’s a killer.”

  “So am I. So are a lot of the people I grew up with,” I said.

  “You actually want to bring her with us?” Bea asked, sounding alarmed.

  “Temporarily,” Jessie said. “Only temporarily.”

  The Mercy, hair mostly clean, looked up at us. She’d caught that. The skin around one eye had grown in too thick, pinching it shut, and from the way she kept her hair, covering half of her face, only the one eye showing, I suspected it was intentional. She kept washing and fixing her hair with her hands as she watched us.

  “We don’t have to,” I told Jessie.

  “Valuable memory space,” Jessie said. “You said it yourself.”

  The Mercy’s fingers worked furtively. She set her now-wet hair, and it moved in a way that suggested it had to be close to frozen. Hair on the one half of her face hung down, covering her one eye. The hair on the other side was tied back, braided or knotted without the help of cord or pin.

  “We’ll find you some clothes,” Jessie said. “And we’ll find you some food.”

  The Mercy nodded, a quick motion. She moved away from the wall, and she stumbled a little as she walked. She held Jessie’s knife, and she didn’t give it back.

  Hardy, yes, but the cold did get to her. She joined our group, looking at each of us. She watched me as if affronted by my existence.

  I pulled off my coat, and held it out.

  She didn’t take it.

  “Is there a reason you’re refusing his offer?” Jessie asked.

  “No, captain.”

  “You wanted to kill him to take his clothes before, but you won’t now?”

  I could underst
and what Jessie was doing, maintaining her fiction. Still, it was disappointing.

  Doubly so, that even after taking the coat, which only barely long enough to cover everything that needed covering, she looked at me as the young man who shouldn’t be alive.

  She turned her attention to Jessie, bowing her head a little. “Thank you, captain, for your kindness.”

  “Will you warm up if we get you more clothes? You’ll need to give that coat back.”

  “I think so, captain. I can resume hunting.”

  Jessie glanced at me.

  Resuming hunting wasn’t great.

  “You’d need to eat on a regular basis?” Bea asked.

  “Every two hours at a minimum while I’m active and using skin like this,” the Mercy said. “Hourly is recommended but I don’t think anyone does. It takes time.”

  “Were you made in New Amsterdam or Trimountaine?” I asked.

  “Winthrop Academy in Trimountaine,” the Mercy said. She gave me a surprised look. “How did you—”

  “Like I said, he has information,” Jessie said. “And it’s not that hard of a guess. High quality work.”

  The Mercy seemed bewildered by that. “Thank you, captain.”

  “How accurate is your ability to smell plague?”

  “Not very, captain. Only when it’s active. But it helps.”

  Rudy offered her one arm for support. It made for an odd picture.

  I was careful to walk behind and to one side of her. If I’d walked directly behind her, she couldn’t have looked at me while maintaining her stride. Instead, I was able to gauge just how much of her attention was on me.

  I was disappointed that it was as much as it was. That the look on her face didn’t change.

  Too single minded. Too efficient an encapsulated system, perhaps.

  I looked across the street, not meeting this Mercy’s gaze. I saw Fray, and I thought of what Fray had told me about. It had lurked in my mind.

  The places the Crown destroyed, the cats and cockroaches. Continents laid to waste. I imagined a future where this plague had taken the Crown States. Fields of red flowers, with vein-like vines constricting the trees to death, crawling over stones in varying thicknesses. I imagined the landscape devoid of humans, but for a few survivors.

  Would the Tender Mercies survive? Foraging for food, interacting, breeding more Tender Mercies?

  It was a grim, quiet sort of picture. I wasn’t sure how to place it.

  We found more bodies, killed in the street, then dragged off to one side to be piled on the welcome mat of one house.

  The Mercy cast off my coat, letting it fall in the snow, and hurried over to the bodies.

  I could see her excitement as she found a red and white checked dress.

  “I wonder,” I said. I picked up my coat, shook it off, and pulled it back on.

  “At what?” Jessie asked.

  “I wonder at the timing. The Tender Mercies are a… novel answer for this particular plague.”

  “Too fast a development?”

  “Too… easy to imagine where it goes. Remember when we first discussed the plague? It’s too clear that it was designed, and designed by a talented hand. Which makes me think two things. What if the person who created the plague created the Mercies? I mean, that’s a fairly obvious conclusion, right?”

  “Intuitive enough,” Jessie said.

  “But I had a second thought, and I’m just putting it out there… what if they didn’t? Beattle rebels, feel free to chime in, correct me, but there seems to be a lot of variance in the project. The man with the very thick skin Jessie talked to, the one with the heavy brow and chin, then this one… it’s the early stages of things, when an established project of this kind of quality should have nailed down those ratios.”

  “You’re not wrong,” the Treasurer said.

  “They started down one path, then made an abrupt turn, to put things on a different course and answer a need,” Gordon Two concluded.

  “Reminds me of someone,” Jessie said, looking at me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. That’s what I’m thinking. But this is a lot of effort and a small population of a very resilient, loyal set of people that they clearly invested a lot into. Whether you imagine they were made to answer the red plague or they were made to answer something else, maybe something else that the Academy might have released in the same vein as the plague, isn’t it really easy to imagine creatures like this adapting to the new environment, keeping things mostly operational in the meantime, and then handing things back over to the Crown in a few decades or a century? Doesn’t that seem like a much better use for what these Tender Mercies seem to be?”

  The others were silent. Our eyes were on the Mercy, who was pulling on boots over stockinged feet.

  “A bit fanciful,” Jessie said. But she gestured maybe.

  I gestured the rest of my thought at Jessie while I worked through the idea. Fray had suggested the Crown was prepared to wipe whole regions off the map, given the chance. Now I was wondering if they weren’t already preparing to do so? Were things proving too hard to pin down? A nation too spread out, with too many active rebellions and too many dead nobles?

  The Tender Mercy approached us. She’d donned a red and white dress under a black coat, with red stockings and black boots.

  The look she gave me was an ugly one.

  “If it weren’t for him, we would have left you there,” Bea said.

  The look didn’t change, but there was more confusion.

  She wasn’t human, in the end. But she didn’t own the wrongs she committed and the ugliness that drove her.

  It was hard to convince myself not to shoot her, or to justify having helped her.

  I felt like I understood something I hadn’t, about what the Mercies might be, or how they functioned, but I felt like this was a lose-lose situation. Saving her, letting her die.

  “You’re under strict orders,” Jessie said. “To spare the civilians.”

  “Why?”

  “There might be a cure among them,” Jessie said. “It’s why we want the professor.”

  The Mercy narrowed her eyes.

  “Pass on word. Gather any others you see,” Jessie said. She reached to her belt, and fumbled at a paper that stuck out.

  I moved closer and picked it out. There were several. I caught a glimpse of each.

  Letters. Penned out in various handwriting styles. Each signed with different names. Official orders, forged using details from memory.

  Jessie picked one and handed it to the Mercy.

  “I can’t read,” she said.

  “I’m one of several who have letters like this. We’re here to get it to the higher-ups at the other end of the city. I’m passing that responsibility onto you. Show that letter around.”

  She frowned, looked at the paper, and then looked at me.

  No fondness, no understanding. Only confusion at my existence.

  I might have agreed with her, if the timing were different.

  The small Mercy strode off.

  “The Little Castle is there,” Jessie pointed. Two streets down and two streets over. Easy to miss amid the peaking, snow-covered roofs. “We’re close.”

  She was trying to distract me from the subject of the Mercy. A creature I’d wanted to identify with.

  I bent my brain to the task of helping Shirley, and pushed the thought of the experiment ninety percent of the way out of my head.

  In the moment before I succeeded, I saw Fray.

  Fray alone. Fray without rhyme or reason, still indistinct.

  It meant something. I wasn’t sure what. Did it have to do with the Mercy? A runt of an experiment, feeling lost without her people, caught up in things bigger than her?

  Leaving things as unresolved as they were nagged at me, and I suspected my limited space for memories might well be more occupied thinking about her, despite our attempts to prevent that very thing from happening.

  Or did Fray’s appearanc
e have to do with the bigger things? My suspicions about the Crown, the measures they might take? Or was it about the dawning feeling that Pierre’s intuition had been right, in that this noble-employed professor was an important factor in answering these questions, and that ignoring him in favor of Shirley might not be the easy answer we’d hoped for?

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  Head over Heels—16.5

  Stalemate.

  For the most part, the Academy forces had formed a perimeter around the city. There were two places we were aware of that they were busily gathering their forces. Two points of contention. The first was the train station, where a train was being held hostage. The second was the Little Castle.

  It was a nice building, looking much as if a doctor had somehow taken a manor and a castle and blended the two into an appealing sort of building-chimera. This architectural chimera was wounded, scarred and scorched by flame, with holes in the walls where something had exploded, bringing down wood and stone. The rebels had invaded it, making their way inside, and if they’d planned to accomplish something and then get out, they’d only completed the first objective, if they’d even gotten that far.

  Now there were rebels in the windows with guns and there were Crown soldiers parked by barricades all around the building. The soldiers were all wearing the quarantine outfits, and were accompanied by what I assume were very disposable stitched and warbeasts, as well as a scattered few Tender Mercies.

  Jessie had written letters while in the carriage, presumably during the handful of periods that we’d stopped, much as we had with the warbeast. She and the Beattle rebels approached the Crown forces, and she handed over one letter.

  I watched through binoculars as a man in a quarantine suit with decoration on his lapel fumbled with the letter, working to unfold it. He took his time reading it, and then he handed it back.

  The wind whistled as it blew down the otherwise quiet street.

  Jessie didn’t move, waiting dutifully. The others mostly took her cue, but someone I was fairly sure was Fang was antsy. He moved his weight from foot to foot.

  It took a kind of courage to wear the mask with confidence, knowing what the scores of people around you would do if they could see beyond it. Fang didn’t have that kind of courage. There were people among the Beattle rebels who had their talents, and I was enjoying seeing those talents emerge. Bea drew people in, particularly strong people, if not the most capable. Important distinction. Davis knew parts of the textbooks by heart and was good at both execution and teaching, and his role as student council president suggested he was a strong leader. Valentina had a good hand for surgery and a keen eye for relationships, which had secured her the vice presidency.