Twig

by wildbow

  “Are you alright?” Fang asked. “Because that—”

  Bea elbowed him.

  “Stop doing that!” Fang said. “Your elbow is sharp. You’ll penetrate my suit, and then I’ll die.”

  “Warm?” Jessie asked, speaking over Bea’s response, as if the pair weren’t bickering.

  “I used the little stove thing to warm the clothes. The fresh clothes were a nice thought. Thank you.”

  “I wish I could have done more,” she murmured.

  I shook my head. I reached out, and I gave her hand a squeeze before dropping it. Then I turned to the others.

  The shackle had been undone from Florence’s air hose. Otis now had Charles by one shoulder, and Archie had Florence.

  I gestured to Jessie, outlining the plan.

  She nodded.

  We started walking, and the others followed, very naturally, our ‘muscle’ managing the hostages.

  It was good to walk, to be with my people, my collection of rogues and scoundrels. We retraced our steps, moving carefully to the fringes of places we’d already been. The rain pattered down, and the light was fading.

  We moved around the circumference of the street where I’d sat for so long. There weren’t any signs of people.

  As we moved back toward the hotel, we spotted the group. Six squads of soldiers and Berger, with several stitched in tow. It looked like someone high ranking was with Berger.

  “He cares enough to recruit a small army to look for you,” I told Florence.

  “He cares about his reputation,” she said.

  “Mm,” I said. “Five minutes haven’t started yet. You guys want to head down the street? Get a head start.”

  “Head start?” Rudy asked.

  “Trust me,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Can do.”

  I did like Rudy. Good fellow. I wanted to do right by him. I wanted to do right by a lot of people.

  “You should go too,” Jessie said.

  “Hm?”

  “You’re tired, you’re slow. Let me.”

  “You’re slow in general,” I said.

  “Today, you’re slower. But you did good,” she said. “Lean on me. For the next little while, we take care of each other, right?”

  I took that in. Then I exhaled. I nodded.

  I gestured at the others, and I led them a ways away.

  As plans went, it was a simple one.

  Jessie whistled, loud, and I belatedly realized she’d have had to have removed her mask to do it. We summoned Berger, and we fled, drawing him out, forcing him and his army to approach the signal.

  When he rounded the corner with an army at his back, we weren’t there. Jessie signaled again.

  We repeated the process again.

  It’s like training a dog, I thought, with a kind of grim satisfaction. Want the treat? Want it? No, you’re doing it wrong, figure it out!

  Seeing Helen and Ashton might have put me in a bit of a mood, like that of a cat playing with its food. Not that I liked comparing myself to a cat. Dogs were better. Other things were even better than dogs. Birds were bottom-rung, of course.

  After we’d gotten settled, seen Berger with his army following, and finished getting our next head start, Jessie waiting behind to be in Berger’s earshot, I found a moment to touch Florence’s shoulder.

  “How many times do we do this before he can turn around and go home? If it’s just that he’s protecting his reputation, couldn’t he just leave, say we were luring him into a clear trap?”

  “He might,” she said, as if she really hoped he would.

  “Charles?” I asked.

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  In the distance, Jessie whistled.

  She gestured as she ran to us. The enemy had split up, to better head us off.

  I gestured back. Silence.

  She nodded.

  We found a hiding place, perhaps a little too close to the slash of red across the city. Then we waited.

  With Jessie having handled the worst of the running, I volunteered to do the spying. I climbed a building and edged across the roof until I could see them. I kept the stove-lamp with me and held it close.

  It took perhaps fifteen minutes, but the two army segments convened. I signaled Jessie, and Jessie whistled.

  This time, they didn’t come running after us.

  This is the moment of truth.

  I kept one eye on Berger’s route back. He didn’t take it. No, this time, Berger approached alone. He walked rather than jogging, rain running down his black quarantine suit with its long coat built in. I remained where I was so I could watch and see if the army came. If they did, I could signal the others and escape.

  They didn’t come. I made my way to the ground. I wanted to be present for this.

  Berger approached the group, who had the children hostage.

  “Father,” Florence said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize,” he said. “Not when I’m this angry. It will taint every apology I hear from you in the future.”

  She barely seemed mollified, as far as I could tell with the quarantine suit. Was she happy now? Was his appearance a show of love that she hadn’t expected?

  I walked up behind him.

  “Berger,” I said.

  “Sylvester,” he said. With the group in front of him and me to one side, he half-turned and then backed up a ways, so he could keep both me and the group in his field of view. “She let you go.”

  “No,” Jessie said. “We took her hostage, bug and all. We watched everything.”

  “Somehow, I’m not inclined to believe you. The simplest answer is often the right one.”

  “Then know that every time you doubt her instead of believing the truth, you’ll lose standing in her eyes,” I said.

  “Hm,” Berger said. He sighed. “So. I suppose you’ll be wanting the first deal you proposed? You take me into custody? I provide what you want, and we go on from there?”

  “It gets a little more complicated, because you played that stunt,” I told him.

  He spread his arms. “How complicated?”

  “Hey, Rudy,” I said. “There’s a body in the snow there, isn’t there?”

  Rudy looked over at a human-shaped lump of wet snow on the ground. “Sure.”

  “Turn it over so we can see it?” I asked.

  He used one foot to pry it off the ground, then kicked it so it lay face-up.

  “Sorry, mister,” he told the body.

  “You die,” I told Berger. “And you get your kids.”

  “I die?”

  I pointed at the corpse. “That’s you. Or they’ll think it is. You give up title, name, reputation, the black coat, the status, dignity, pride, everything. I get to do what I want with you. In exchange, the two children are safe. You can keep them close, or you can let them go. They’ll go back with the army over there.”

  “You’re making my uncle a slave?” Charles asked. “This is the deal we worked for!?”

  “Shush,” I said. “I’m negotiating.”

  “No need to intervene, Charles,” Berger said. He was holding himself differently now. It was as if he could feel the weight of all those things I’d talked about, the years leading up to this point in his life, and he was taller for it.

  “The alternative,” I said. “Is—”

  He raised his hand, silencing me.

  I fell silent.

  “There are things I can’t betray. What you talked about, with Mr. and Mrs. Block—”

  “It won’t go that far. But you will betray Crown and Academy, obviously. We’ll be discreet enough it doesn’t go back to the children.”

  He nodded.

  “You don’t want to hear the alternative?” I pressed.

  “No need,” he said. “Send them to the soldiers.”

  “Father,” Florence said. “You—”

  “Go,” he said. “Tell them I’m dead, as ordered, o
r I presume these Lambs might actually kill me, to give the Crown less reason to pursue.”

  “You presume right,” Jessie said.

  “We won’t see you?” Florence asked.

  “You would have been at school anyway,” he said. “And this isn’t up for discussion. Go. Attend your schools. Do me proud, in case I’m allowed to return, because you certainly didn’t make me proud today.”

  That seemed to take the wind out of Florence’s sails. Charles was a little less crestfallen, going by his posture.

  I looked at them. They had their answer. Their father and uncle was willing to sacrifice himself and his everything for them.

  He was still a jerk, but I couldn’t make water into wine. I spread my arms a little.

  The two children left, rather reluctantly. I, meanwhile, took my heater and cracked it open. I doused the body in oil. Rudy had more in his bag.

  I reached up and tugged off Berger’s mask, and I put it on the body. He took it one step further, and he removed his jacket from his quarantine uniform. We turned the body face-down and laid the jacket over its back, before putting more oil on it.

  I lit a match and tossed it.

  Jessie drew her pistol and fired it. Berger’s ‘execution’, and our excuse to get the hell out of this city, which had intentionally been afflicted with plague by sources I still hadn’t riddled out.

  We had our tutor, doctor, a shot at project Caterpillar, and a way to refine the plan to use the information about the Block. We had Shirley and our gang leaders.

  Our fortunes in getting out of the city and a full night of cutting away plague would tell if the cost was too high.

  Previous Next

  Head over Heels—16.11

  We made our way across the least-bad patch of plague, as the Treasurer and Berger gauged it. Here, the shadows of the buildings and the collection of things on the streets contributed to an accumulation of wet snow. The plague crept through the water, tinting it red, and it crept beneath the snow.

  Where our boots pressed the snow down and crushed tendrils of the ravage underfoot, we left crimson footprints, no different from any footprints I’d ever made after wading in blood.

  “Professor Berger,” the Treasurer spoke.

  “Yes?”

  “You wrote the articles on radical, division-free in vivo pattern editing, if I remember right?”

  “I wrote four out of the five. I had my hands full when the fifth deadline was approaching, so I had a subordinate write it. I demoted him and sent him to Alyeska when he missed the point.”

  “The point, professor?”

  I wanted to slap the Treasurer upside the back of the head for using the title and being all polite.

  “What do you think the point was?” Berger countered.

  “Being able to inject someone with a pattern change and have it take immediate, drastic effect, without overloading the system or having to load the system and wait for the cells to divide.”

  “I’m asking you the point. Not a summary of the article’s title.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, Professor,” the Treasurer said.

  “I see. You brought up the articles for a reason. Maybe you’ll impress me by saying something interesting about them?”

  The Treasurer was silent.

  “Or you won’t?” Berger asked, almost imperious.

  “I thought it was an interesting, unconventional article. When things are advancing as concretely as they are these days, we don’t see much theory. Especially from people with strong reputations. I thought it was commendable.”

  “It wasn’t,” Berger said, sounding exasperated. “As a matter of fact, I regret writing it, because it was a failed project that has seen endless streams of sycophants and brown-nosers approach me and fail to demonstrate how clever they are. ”

  “Hey now,” I said.

  “It’s fine, Sylvester,” the Treasurer said. I could tell from his tone that it wasn’t. “I want to hear this.”

  “If you’re sure,” I said. I turned to Berger. “You’re really not interested in making friends while you’re here, are you?”

  “I wouldn’t mind, but I’m selective about who I call a friend,” Berger said. He exhaled. “I’ll ask you this—”

  I jumped in. I was sure to match Berger’s tone and even his hand gestures, speaking in sync as he asked, “Why did I write it?”

  I got a few glances from the others. Jessie looked over my way and gave me an annoyed look. Berger looked even more displeased, which was even better.

  “Are you taunting me now?” Berger asked me.

  “Predicting you,” I said. “Not taunting.”

  “Sylvester did that for a month or two, a few years back, when he was showing off to Mary, who had just joined the Lambs,” Jessie said. “It was, by all accounts, obscenely annoying.”

  “Did I?” I asked.

  “You did.”

  “Well, it’s not meant to taunt. Look, Treasurer—”

  “I have a name,” the Treasurer said.

  “Let it slide,” Gordon Two said. “Take my word for it, just let it slide.”

  I ignored the both of them. “I’ll explain, so you don’t have to put up with Berger picking at you and tearing you down. How’s that? Either you guess what our hostage is driving at and he feels vindicated, or you get it wrong and he gets to condescend to you as he pontificates on his true intent. So let’s skip all of that, and we’ll approach this discussion from a constructive angle.”

  “Really, now,” Berger said.

  “Deny the man his fun. Look, here’s how it goes,” I said. I cleared my throat, and I did my best to mimic Berger’s speaking style. I moved my hand, using my finger as a conductor might work with an orchestra, while I explained, “I wrote that paper with a particular intent. It was an exercise, a riddle I posed to the Academies across the Crown states. I don’t believe in theory, and I hoped students would challenge me on my points and suggestions and dare to tear my idea to shreds. I put several clues in the work to get them started. I hoped and even still hope that a bright mind might appear before me and do just that. The disappointment is part of why I stopped after writing five of the six—”

  “Four of the five,” Jessie corrected.

  “—papers,” I finished. I paused for effect.

  “Not wholly wrong,” Berger said. “I’m frankly pleased you assessed it as a test without even knowing what it is.”

  “I assessed you, not the article-whatsit,” I said, before jumping back into Berger-voice, “But wait! I’m not quite done. See, the student I demoted was the perfect patsy, he allowed me to avoid facing my own mistakes. I failed to realize that a riddle that nobody gets isn’t a good riddle, it’s a failure of the teacher, not the student. I didn’t even have the confidence to see it all through. Every time a student approaches me about it, it reminds me of my own failings.”

  “This is getting more than a little childish,” the professor said.

  “For those of you on team Sylvester and Jessie who haven’t had the benefit of dealing with the upper class, that’s polite-talk for ‘I just lost the argument, but fuck you’,” I remarked.

  Berger didn’t deign to respond to that.

  In retrospect, I might have played it off a little better if I hadn’t had a note of venom in my voice. I’d been too harsh in tone, too angry. I was tired.

  Snow fell, and the sun was going down, casting the world in shades of pink and gray. The sun combined with the stones of the street radiating heat were why we were trekking through slushy puddles and not light snow. On the edges and in the shadows, the snow had settled. With nighttime, I suspected the city would get a light layering of white.

  Glancing back, I could see our steps into the paper-thin layer of white snow were still leaving congealing, crimson footprints.

  The plague had found root here and there. A dead horse was a basis for one outcropping to really flourish, spreading to the nearby tree and houses, a
morass of crimson vines. In another place, bodies had fallen as a group, no doubt shot en masse. The actual nature of the heap could only be inferred, as snow and vines made what lay beneath hard to identify.

  “We should cut back,” Berger said. “Take a detour. It’s too thick here.”

  I looked at the Treasurer—not because I didn’t believe Berger, but I did want to ensure that Berger hadn’t torn down the Treasurer too much. Showing I cared about his interpretation might be what he needed.

  “I agree,” he said.

  “Past a certain point, it gets tricky to navigate,” Jessie said. “I’m trying to think about which streets would be better or worse.”

  “Based on what?” Berger asked.

  “When I looked over the city from a distance, I could see how it was laid out, just going by rooftop. I’m thinking about chimneys, which had smoke, which rooftops looked more residential, how narrow the streets were, wind direction…”

  She went on. The Treasurer chimed in, and I didn’t hear him. My eyes were fixed on one heap of bodies.

  With the way the vines and growths flexed and adjusted as they grew, it was hard to tell, but had that been movement?

  I broke away from the group, striding forward.

  I had to cut away growths to dig for it.

  Yeah. I had seen a small movement that hadn’t been a vine.

  Lying beside a stitched horse, vines knitting the horse’s body to hers, was a woman, twenty-five or so. Her hair had been done in an ‘up’ do and the vines had worked their way into it and pulled it down. Fine tendrils crawled out of her mouth, nose, and one tear duct, covering much of her face. If I unfocused my vision, it might have looked like a bad burn. It was worse.

  The small movement hadn’t been her, but was a baby, one that hadn’t been on this earth for a year. The arm stuck out near her face. Tendrils had already seized it. The mother looked up at me. One eyeball didn’t move, too firmly seized by tendrils, the other tracked me.

  She made small pained sounds, then looked in the direction of the baby.

  It wasn’t crying. That was a bad sign.

  “Can you talk?” I asked.

  Breathing laboriously, she managed a, “Yes.”

  “How is the pain?”