Twig

by wildbow

  “Smoke. The soldiers are noticing too.”

  Berger looked up, then looked around. The plague growth on him pulsed, reacting to the movement.

  I could only see a small share of the soldiers in the camp, but it was true. They were looking around, alarmed. They were also looking upwind.

  The camp was placed so the slash of plague through the middle of the city was downwind, and any particles, spores, or whatever else might help the ravage spread wouldn’t be carried this way. But with the smoke being as pervasive as it was, growing stronger by the moment, it had to have a source further up the road, somewhere behind me.

  “Like I said,” Berger observed. “The initial strike is one we can’t trace back to them. A feint, of sorts, trying to draw away resources and force our hands. Smoke and fire alarm. They meet a primal need.”

  “What do we do?” Florence asked.

  “We carry on,” Berger said.

  The smoke was growing thicker by the moment, to the extent that it was becoming clear that the source was not small. Not by any means. A building had been set to burn.

  “Professor!” a soldier called out.

  “I’m busy,” Berger snapped the word.

  “Professor, we’re being urged to leave. We have to vacate the area.”

  “As soon as I’m done. They want to force our hands, and they might well have timed the fire to interrupt this very procedure I’m doing.”

  “It could well be, sir, they started the fire using oil. It went up quickly—we had men guarding the building and we didn’t even see them come or go.”

  “Of course,” Berger said. “We’ll go as soon as I’m done. Anything else will play into their hands.”

  “If you insist, sir, but—”

  “Hold on,” Berger interrupted. “Our men were guarding the building?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “The grocery store?”

  “Uh, yes sir.”

  “With the bodies still piled within?”

  “Yes sir. That’s why we were thinking we should vacate.”

  Berger stopped, remaining where he was. Then, decision made, he turned to the man, “I agree. Evacuate. I’ll see to the last of this and be with you in a matter of heartbeats.”

  The soldier nodded, then hurried off at a run. Everywhere, officers were ordering their men, and everything moved in its logical manner.

  “Why?” Florence asked. “Why evacuate?”

  “The attack on the train station and the rebellion’s earlier attempt at seizing it saw casualties. Some were afflicted with ravage. They stacked the bodies, afflicted and not, within the grocery store. As efficient as our masks are, they have their limitations. Burning the ravage spreads it. Smoke carries it. If we remain too long, the masks will fail. Our enemy knows this.”

  “Then—” Charles started. He didn’t know what to say. The smoke was getting thicker, filling the street.

  “We leave,” Berger said. “And, as I haven’t been given the time to finish with Sylvester, I’m afraid we’re forced to cut our losses. We’ll make do without our bait to set out in front of the enemy’s nose.”

  I felt the claws of the bug latch onto my back, a sharp sensation among the latest wave of pins and needles.

  I felt all sensation drop away from my body. Pins and needles, pain, cold. My body ceased to be. No warmth, no cold. Only oblivion.

  His hands tampered with the bug. I felt, I was pretty sure, the fingers finding the little rings with the silken strings attached.

  “Berger,” I said.

  Again, his hand covered my mouth. Gloved fingers dug into my cheek, hard and fierce.

  Standing as close as he was to me, he was able to murmur in my ears. “With luck, your allies are watching you, and my lesson will find its way to them. With better luck, they’ll try to save you, and they’ll find it’s impossible.”

  He pulled the middle string.

  The rush of cold that the mandibles had been pumping into my neck became something else, a vomit of heat. The sensation of nothing became everything. Every nerve ending flared to life, and then burned hotter. Heat and burning was the first sensation, followed by a wrenching. My entire body contorted as some materials did on an open fire, twisting up, straining and crumpling. Every joint bent to an extreme, too open or too closed.

  Parts of me popped, like water mingling with oil in a pot, and each pop was followed with an icy coldness, running alongside the searing heat. Every part of me was impaled with a hot poker or an icicle of impossible coldness. I felt parts of me tear open. I couldn’t tell if the wet sensation was blood from skin tearing itself apart or if it was simply an illusion.

  Pain and I were old, old friends. Few knew pain to the extent I’d come to know her during my appointments. All the same, we’d never been so intimately acquainted.

  I was able to pull away from it. I’d always been able to, to some extent. It was an artificial construction, to disassociate from the pain. It never made the pain less, exactly. It did help to make the thought process clearer in the midst of it.

  I’d never quite felt like the journey back would be so difficult as it felt it might be now.

  Berger removed the bug, so what was done couldn’t be undone.

  “You’ll feel compelled to try to eke in small breaths,” he told me, as he stood over me. “You could potentially stay alive for some time by doing that. Don’t do that to yourself.”

  There was a long pause. I twitched and convulsed, sweat rolling off the side of my head and into my eye socket, which was already wet with involuntary tears.

  “I did say I have some desire to minimize suffering,” Berger said. I could see him now, as he walked out in front of me. Smoke rolled past him, and with every trace of smoke that touched him, the plague on him grew, until he was little more than a tower of the ravage.

  The tower turned away, and led its children in the direction of the evacuating soldiers. He called out orders, and men answered in voices hollowed out by the masks and breathing apparatuses they wore.

  Movement wasn’t possible, nor was speech.

  One by one, the Lambs joined me. Mary, Lillian, Helen, Jamie, Jessie, Gordon, Hubris. All of the little Lambs hung back. Fray, Evette, and Mauer had the decency to stay away. All were dressed in dark colors. Mary in a black dress with black lace, ribbons in her hair. Lillian in a black coat, purely by accident.

  I wanted to round my thoughts together and come up with a parting message, if only to phantoms, but I couldn’t. I could disassociate, but I couldn’t operate on that level. I was left with only sentiment.

  The Professor was right. Without the bug taking over, I could manage a degree of breathing. It was a torturous process, straining as if I was lifting my own body weight, but to simply make my airway stay open, straining just as hard to draw in or push out a breath, making sure my jaw wasn’t clenched and my mouth screwed shut. When I failed on that last part, I snorted mucus out of my nose, or, worse, I snorted it back, and then the next few attempts were made more difficult by faint choking.

  My old friend and I made a game of it. To make it happen one more time. One breath in, one breath out.

  A series of herculean efforts to draw in a breath, to release it, and I made a game of it, betting against her, against this personification of pain that sat just out of sight, betting on myself, then betting against myself, predicting if a convulsion elsewhere would trip me up and complicate this particular round.

  Manage it five more times, I told myself, and I’d exert the effort and focus necessary to imagine Mary stroking my hair.

  Five times after that, the sound of Helen laughing.

  After that, and I was sure to order it so a lot of the better things came later, I chose the feeling of Lillian lying close to me, clinging to me.

  I continued the bets. I did the math with the chips to further distance myself from it all, even as every attempt got harder. As the chip count grew, I pushed thoughts out of my head, as to whether intentionall
y failing would be a reward for myself or the cost of losing my last chip.

  Fluids were accumulating. Mucus. Spittle I wasn’t swallowing or forcing out through my teeth. I was drenched in sweat.

  Five successful rounds of breathing, and this time it was Gordon’s voice. I couldn’t gather the words, but I imagined him cussing me out. Being infuriating, like he could sometimes be. Because it pissed me off, and I needed to be pissed off to push forward, just as I needed small moments of warmth to grope for.

  Five more breaths and… and then Jamie, sitting on his bed, mentioning details of the day that I’d forgotten as he scribbled in that notebook of his.

  Then Jessie, after that.

  I wasn’t sure what to ask Jessie for. I wasn’t even sure I was keeping count properly anymore. I might have been cheating myself.

  I willed the question, and a voice answered.

  “Florence.”

  Not Jessie.

  “It’s dangerous here, Florence. The smoke.”

  “Yeah.”

  I closed my eyes. That had been five breaths. Jamie, sitting on his bed. While I pieced the scene together, I focused on doing what I needed my body to do, to breathe the next set of breaths, and I knew that I was focusing more on properly imagining Jamie than I was on the breathing.

  “Why are you back here?”

  I know, I thought.

  Not that I could do or say anything to that effect in the here and now.

  “I don’t know,” Florence said.

  “That’s not a very good reason,” Charles said.

  “He… Sylvester whispered something to me, earlier. He said that he could pull a trick, with our cooperation, and I’d learn more about father in five minutes than I’d learn about him in five years. I almost got my hopes up.”

  “He’s good at playing that game. Sylvester is, I mean. Dad too, but it’s different. Stricter.”

  I was no longer lying in the cold street. I was on the floor in my room, a twelve year old Jamie sitting on his bed, taking notes on the conversation.

  He’d never been the most emotive little fellow, but I’d always felt like he’d really loved those times after lights-out, when he wrote by candlelight and it was just the two of us. They might have been his favorite times.

  It was hard to juggle the things I needed to juggle. Breathing, plotting what I would do with Jessie when her turn came up, in three more breaths. Paying attention to the two children.

  In. Out.

  Two more breaths.

  Jamie’s pen scritched on paper. He’d never been so fond of pencils, but he’d use them when he had to. He preferred permanence.

  In. Out.

  One more breath.

  “I want to know,” Florence said.

  “Uncle would never forgive you.”

  “I need to know,” Florence said.

  My vision was disturbed as my head moved. The pain flared anew, as if each individual kind of pain took on a new and fresh flavor in wake of the movement.

  Claws latched onto my spine. Florence held a bug, and she set it in place.

  From the timing of the breath, I suspected it was the drugged, poison-resistant bug I’d been given, discarded and retrieved by her. I imagined her carrying it about, cradling it as if it were a small dog, as she’d done with one of the others.

  The pain stopped, and the relief was so profound it dashed all of the individual illusions and sounds I’d nested around myself to pieces.

  “You had something in mind, didn’t you, Sylvester?” Florence asked.

  My blood rushed in my ears. The relief was so profound that I felt transcendant.

  “I’ll pull the string,” she said. “I don’t have a lot of patience. What were you going to do, before my father beat you?”

  I managed a short laugh, as I gasped for breath and tried to center myself. I could barely see. I was low to the ground, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but the smoke was making my eyes water.

  “Okay, I’m going to pull the string again now,” she said.

  “Florence,” I said. “The plan I had in mind when I told you all that… it’s still in place.”

  “Hm?” she made a sound, her voice hollow from behind her mask, echoing down the long air-tube.

  “Still in place. I told you, a time would come. I’d hold the strings. I’d need your cooperation, and I’d give you what you want most in the world.”

  “You told me you’d tell me more about my father in five minutes than—”

  “—than—” I started, only to cough. I might have aspirated something. My voice was rough as I finished, “Than you’d get in five years. Absolutely. I stand corrected. All the cooperation I need… is just for you to remove the bug from my neck and give me forty-five seconds. I’ll guarantee you the answer you desire.”

  “And if I don’t?” she asked, imperious.

  I saw Mary standing behind her, all dressed in black.

  I only gave Florence a small smile, and I waited. I enjoyed the transcendant relief, and I gathered my thoughts.

  “You have thirty seconds,” she said. “And that includes the time it takes to get control of your body back.”

  “I know,” I said, as the bug came free of my neck. Sensation flooded back into my body, in an inarticulate tide of stabbing and prickling sensations. “Charles?”

  The lockpick set had been attached to my hand, one pick having been driven under one fingernail. In my convulsions, it had come free, the fingernail pried off. Barely in control of my hand, I reached between my body and the road.

  “What is it?” Charles asked, wary.

  “Would you please do us a favor and start counting aloud for us?” I asked him.

  “Ah. Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight…”

  I’d asked him and chosen a wordy way of asking the question to buy myself seconds. I found the lockpick set, and found a pick. I moved, convulsing, and fumbled to draw the picks free.

  I’d maintained something of a grip on the ability to move despite the pins-and-needles distorted sensations of body, through everything. Now I worked those same feelings with numb hands to manipulate the picks.

  I had to trust these shackles were like ones I’d seen before. Standard issue.

  I coughed at the smoke and the fluids that had gone down the wrong way.

  “Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen…”

  The Lambs in black watched as I worked. Gordon, who had taught me the lockpicking techniques and then retaught them as I’d allowed myself to forget them, was watching, his expression stern.

  “There’s a simple answer about Berger that’s been eluding you,” I said. “One that I’m prepared to answer in a moment. Do keep count, Charles.”

  “You’re stalling,” Florence said.

  “Twelve, eleven…”

  “If I were stalling, I wouldn’t be giving you the answer you want well before count’s up,” I said.

  I rose to my feet, staggering a little as I did so.

  Then, still staggering, only intentionally this time, I lurched a little in her direction.

  The smoke wafted toward us, a cloud thicker than many of the others we’d endured. I lunged. I connected the shackle I’d undone to Florence’s air hose.

  For a moment, it looked like she’d release the bug she held. It would leap onto me. It would paralyze me, and it would all be over.

  That moment passed. Frozen, Florence held the bug firm. She’d realized very quickly that if I tumbled to the ground, paralyzed, my shackled arm would fall, and it would take her air hose with it. We were in the midst of smoke and plague. It would doom her.

  “Florence,” Charles said, only belatedly realizing what had happened.

  “Just a stupid little ruse? Taking me hostage?” she asked. “I’m disappointed.”

  “Not at all,” I said. I drew closer to her, and I wound the chain loosely around her neck, so I stood with her in front of me, the chain binding us together. “All is still going exactly as promised.
Give me the bug, now.”

  She hesitated.

  “Give me the bug,” I said, firmly.

  She passed it to me, and I gripped it firm. As my shaking hand seized it, it clutched at me, hook-limbs digging into my flesh.

  I held it in both hands, and as if I were tearing into one of the bugs or sea-bugs they sold in the markets as dinners for the poor, I twisted it in half.

  “Now we’re going to see how much your father loves you,” I said, my voice soft.

  Florence stiffened.

  I looked over at Charles, obscured in smoke. The fire had spread to a good ten buildings further down the street.

  “Is that a threat?” Charles asked.

  “No, Charles,” I said. “It’s the fulfillment of my promise. In the span of five minutes, we’re most definitely going to answer that question.”

  It had, in fact, been the plan from the moment I’d proposed the deal to Florence. I would find a way to take one or the other hostage, and by taking them, I would secure Berger, in the short term or the long.

  Getting Florence’s cooperation in freeing me from paralysis had been… a somewhat fitting interpretation of the deal as poised. In reality, I’d simply hoped for cooperative hostages.

  I waited, the smoke flowing around us, wet droplets still finding their way from the sky, drenching us. My hands shook, my entire body ached as if I’d been wrung out and beaten, and yet my mind felt crystal clear. I made it be crystal clear.

  “Then let’s go,” Florence said. She said it to Charles as much as she said it to me.

  Charles nodded.

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  Head over Heels—16.10

  I didn’t have to walk for long before I found the others. They had been watching from a distance, so I picked a safe direction to move in, the general direction that the fire and smoke were coming from, and I anticipated Jessie and the others moving to meet me there. It helped that I was slow, by dint of my exhaustion, how cold I was, and the fact that I was managing a hostage. Two, technically, but only one was actually in chains.

  “You had me worried,” Jessie said, as she stepped out from around the corner. We were close to the train tracks, which were close to the water, in turn. The burning building was two blocks to our west.