Twig

by wildbow

  I took my time disrobing. Parts of me were sore. I only had my jacket, sweater and shirt off when I heard the knock at the door.

  “Sylvester?”

  “Hi Mabel,” I said.

  “We’re working on finding people who are able and willing to do the examinations for plague. Not a lot are enthusiastic. The chance of catching the plague if the makeshift quarantine suits we’re making don’t hold up is only part of it. They’re more shy about having to carve it out if any red spots show, and I think they’re shy about working on the boss, which is why I haven’t found any volunteers to check on you.”

  “Alright,” I said. You’d think a bunch of Academy students would have a few people eager to be hurly burly with the scalpel. Alas.

  “I offered to look Jessie over. She said you would handle it later. Is that okay?”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “How’s Rudy?”

  “Not good,” Mabel said. “He—”

  She stopped there.

  “He?”

  “His injuries gave the plague some footholds. It’s turning an already difficult surgery into a worse one.”

  I hung my head. “Noted.”

  “If this goes badly…” she said, and she said it with a lack of confidence that suggested the ‘if’ was more like a ‘when’. “Do you have any orders? Requests?”

  “Possum will want to know.”

  “Helen is outside the door, fretting.”

  “I’m glad she’s there, even if I’m not glad about the reason for it. Can you round up one or two of her friends to keep her company? She worked in the kitchen, so if you can’t think of any names right off, you might want to check there.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Thanks. She was abandoned during her last crisis, I don’t want it to happen again. And while I’m making requests… Berger.”

  “He’s locked in his room. Davis is going to work with him.”

  “Davis? Remind me?”

  “Student council president.”

  I nodded. “Have someone outside the door. If it’s Davis, Valentina might be game. Give her a slate and some chalk. She eavesdrops, makes sure Berger doesn’t get sly, and she makes absolutely sure that every piece of every bit of equipment that goes in the room comes out.”

  “I’ll set that up. Do you want to talk to Rudy if he’s conscious when we realize we’re past the point of no return?”

  There was the if/when confusion again. Back to Rudy. I stared into the fire.

  “Yeah, just let me know. If they get in too deep and start panicking, let me know.”

  “Panicking?”

  “Past a certain point, it starts looking like a lot of wet red mess. Veins and vines, spots and blood splatters. The victim squirms because the drugs don’t work as well on plague victims and you don’t want them unconscious anyway, because they can feel the plague moving through their body, you want a heads up if they’ve got pain in one extremity or another. Even if your focus is on point and you’re doing okay discerning the patient from what you’re trying to cut away, they jump or contort once and you lose your place, or the scalpel slips.”

  “Oh.”

  Even through the closed door, I could tell that reality had just hit home for her.

  “When you go and check on them, maybe tell them I ordered one person to be on standby, resting while the others work, making sure people are staying sane and focused. Rotate out. They’ll probably say it’s not necessary. Insist. Because things will get hairier and they’ll need to step back and take a subjective look at how things are going.”

  “Alright, Sylvester. I might scrub up and get suited to help them.”

  “Actually…” I said. “I could really do with some freedom of movement. Get to Jessie, talk to Berger, make sure everything’s going smoothly. You said you were willing to check up on Jessie? Are you willing to check on me?”

  “Oh. I was trying to pair boy students with boy patients and girl students with girl patients.”

  “If you’re not comfortable with it—”

  “It’s fine!” Mabel said. Too loud in contrast to her earlier volume, too fast a response.

  “Or if I scared you off by talk of the nightmare the cutting poses—”

  “It’s fine!” she said, a little more authoritative and assertive. “It’s good. I’ll be fine. I’m going to go get someone to stay with Helen, check on Rudy, station someone with Davis and Berger, and get scrubbed up.”

  I listened as her footsteps retreated down the hall. I stared at the door until I could no longer distinguish the sound from other ambient background noises. The fire crackled, and a log resettled violently, sending sparks flying at the screen.

  The kicking feet raised my attention to Evette, who sat directly on the little cast iron stove, which was only large enough for the one log at a time. She wore a charcoal black sweater and dress, and she was smiling.

  Fray, still incoherent and abstract, stood in the shadows in the corner, watching, wearing her professor’s coat.

  “You’re a bastard, asking little miss Greenhouse Gang to check on you when you know she likes you,” Evette said. “Or is that why you asked her to do it? Are you corrupting the sheriff’s daughter?”

  “If you have to ask,” I said, “then I don’t know the answer. But I think it mostly has to do with the fact that I’m impatient.”

  “You’re lonely,” Evette said. “You’re doing worse and worse with being alone. Events like sitting in the cold with only the bug for company aren’t helping, either.”

  “Won’t disagree,” I said. I stood and I finished disrobing, undoing my belt and the button of my pants and then sitting on the bed. I tried draping myself along the bed, flicking the top sheet to only barely cover myself for modesty, gave the door my best sultry look, and then decided against it. Anyone else, and I might have tried to break the tension of the moment that way. Not with Mabel, when she’d been so good and sweet thus far.

  I sat back up, moved the sheet to cover myself more than was necessary, and stuck my feet straight out in front of me so they were closer to the fire.

  “You have a professor, who will be a great source of knowledge if he makes it through the night. You have a small army of students and they’re getting to the point where they’re almost on your wavelength. A poor substitute for Lambs, but they’ll do, won’t they?”

  Evette held a scalpel now. She bent down by my leg, sticking the scalpel closer to it.

  I felt a prick.

  “Is that me, or is it one of the red spots?” she asked.

  “Or is it phantom sensations coupled with skin constricting from the heat of the fire and the power of suggestion?” I asked.

  She scraped the flat of the scalpel against the skin of my calf, pressing hard enough that it broke skin. Focusing on the area, I could feel the pain there, now. I could contort my mind, and I was left eighty percent sure it wasn’t a phantom sensation.

  “You’re the Wyvern,” I said. “The delirious, dangerous part of me that wants to fling myself into danger. A part of me that doesn’t mesh well with the Lambs so much as it hopes the Lambs will mesh with it.”

  She moved the scalpel down, away from the leg, then slashed at the bit of my ankle joint that jutted out at the side. I felt the stab of pain there too.

  “If you can feel the pain of the plague, that means it’s already starting to crawl through you,” Evette said.

  She moved the scalpel, my leg jumped, and I moved it. I looked at the site she’d cut, and I saw the damage. It wasn’t plague, but a scrape. I’d fallen hard against the road when the Mercy had jumped on top of me. The skin had been shredded at the side of my calf and at the ankle.

  “Why do you hate me?” I asked, continuing my earlier line of statements.

  Evette wasn’t beside me anymore. I glanced back over my shoulder at her just in time for the scalpel to come down.

  I felt the stab of pain. She repeated the gesture, hauling the scalpel out, pricking,
or outright impaling, once every ten seconds or so.

  “I don’t hate you, Sy,” Evette said.

  “Then can you stop stabbing me?” I asked.

  She moved away from me, showing me the scalpel. The pricks and stabs of pain continued.

  “Helen represents instinct, Ashton represents sense, sometimes common sense, but given the way your head works, neither really represent reality, do they?” Evette asked. “None of the Lambs do. You understand them, you want them close to you, but me?”

  “I dunno,” I said. “I could’ve gotten along with the real Evette. I mean, I managed something with Duncan, and he manages to look like he just sucked a lemon and look smug at the same time, all the time.”

  Evette spoke, “But Evette was never going to be someone you got along with, because we can’t exist in the same space. If her project lived, yours died. You only became a Lamb because she aborted. We’re too similar and too different at the same time, so I don’t know that we would have fit together well. All that in mind, it’s only fitting that you use her to wrap your mind around things you don’t want to think about. Less cuddly things like the deadline looming over your head, the poison in your brain, your morbid and self destructive plans of action. The plague that’s crawling across your back right now.”

  The skin across my back prickled. The power of suggestion again?

  I resisted the urge to twist around and check. “Yeah.”

  “You can check. There’s no use acting brave with me and Fray over there. We know.”

  “Mabel is going to be here soon,” I said. “If it’s there, she’ll see. Doesn’t change anything if I know in advance or not.”

  “Uh huh,” Evette said.

  “I know I said I wanted today free and clear of insanity and mutiny. You’re probably edging in closer so you’re first in line if and when that door opens. I suppose it’s inevitable.”

  “I don’t care about that,” Evette said. “She might.”

  I looked over at Fray, a figure like the one that might appear in a dream, impossible to pin down or look directly at, the features still right, the positioning and attitude ambiguous.

  “Who knows what she’s thinking?” Evette said.

  “I wonder,” I said, studying Fray.

  My wondering was interrupted by a knock on the door.

  “Come in,” I said.

  I heard the door click and open.

  Wearing a rather ad-hoc quarantine outfit, Mabel let herself into the room. her mask and air supply were the only things that weren’t improvised. The rest involved rain clothing and copious amounts of tape. She set a medical bag and a bright lantern on the desk by the door.

  “You were talking to yourself?” Mabel asked.

  I pointed. “Evette, there. And Fray.”

  “I see,” Mabel said, faint changes in tone betraying concern. She closed the door, took stock, and then said, “And you’re naked.”

  “You’ve got to examine me, right?”

  She didn’t respond to that. I had the feeling that if blushes could radiate past filtration masks and goggles, she would be too bright to look at.

  Or maybe I was projecting Lillian onto Mabel. Mabel had a different sort of grounding. A different set of emotional strengths and weaknesses.

  She moved the lantern to the bedside table.

  “Am I supposed to greet your… friends?” Mabel asked.

  “They’re not friends,” I said. “Evette was stabbing me repeatedly, just before you came in.”

  “Oh. Oh dear.”

  “They’re figments. I think… they started out as something different, but lately, they’re representing something else. I have so many trains of thought chugging along through my brain, they… encapsulate important ideas or lines of thought. It’s easier to bring one out and think along certain lines, sometimes.”

  “Certain lines?”

  “Thinking in terms of strategy, or investigating, or cooperating with others in a crisis. Sometimes instinct, or acting, or simplifying my thinking. Each one is a… very complex sort of set of ideas, functioning independently. Sometimes in ways that I don’t want them to.”

  “I think I sort of get it.”

  “And lately, they’ve been shoring up my weaknesses, I think. Or they’re becoming weaknesses, if there’s even a difference between using imaginary people as crutches or just leaving the weak points exposed.”

  “I think there’s a difference.”

  “Yeah. Probably. Most recently, they’ve been representing my subconscious, when I’m being a little too conscious and tunnel-visioned. They’ll appear and remind me of something, or tell me to think along certain patterns. Except I don’t always know what pattern they’re supposed to represent.”

  “Didn’t you create them?”

  “I let the garden happen. I didn’t control what grew where. The current, big enigma is miss Genevieve Fray, imaginary version. I don’t know what she represents. She’s one of the biggest question marks, in my head and out of it.”

  “I’m reminded of the trick with memory they used to give us, with putting all of our memories in a different room or places in a room. A study trick for students.”

  “Jessie was a pretty literal interpretation of that trick, once upon a time. Except the rooms were real, and they weren’t rooms so much as actual compartments in the real world. But perhaps talking about the deeper points isn’t fair to her, if she doesn’t have a say. I want to respect her privacy.”

  In a nod to privacy, I adjusted the sheet that was draped across my lap. Mabel glanced down, then glanced up.

  “Ready?” I asked, as if I hadn’t noticed.

  “Let’s get this done, then,” she said.

  I nodded.

  She checked my hands first, which wasn’t necessary, then my face, which was. She got out a comb and started working her way through my hair, checking my scalp.

  “Shirley has spots,” she told me.

  I clenched my fist.

  “It looks like it’s in the early stages. It should be doable.”

  “She has a good doctor? Someone with a steady hand and a good eye?”

  “I think so. The others only had good things to say about him.”

  I nodded.

  “Otis and two of Otis’ men have them too. Mostly on the hands. The students working on them sounded optimistic.”

  “Who else?”

  “Professor Berger.”

  “It’s important that Professor Berger live,” I said. “We need someone good working on him, if at all possible.”

  “We need good people working on everyone,” Mabel said. “That’s the worst part of it, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “If it means anything, we have pretty good hands working on the Professor. Or at least, I think they’re good. He got pretty irate and insisted he would do the work himself.”

  “He’s cutting himself open? Without drugs?”

  “He insisted. We have two students on standby. The spots are mostly on his face and hands. He said he wants to work on his face in front of the mirror and do his left hand. He’ll defer to us for his right hand at the end.”

  “I really want to hear if he managed it or not. I’m not saying I’d think less of him if he gave up, but if he actually just managed to sit down and carve himself open. I did it countless times, while Tynewear was caught in the plague. It’s an infernal thing, the plague. I know bias colors my view here, but it feels like most of the time, it always demanded too much. It set its roots too deep.”

  Mabel didn’t respond. She continued working.

  I could read a lot from the feeling of her gloved fingers on my head, the movement of the comb, and the movements of the lantern.

  “How’s Rudy?”

  “Rudy isn’t good,” Mabel said. “I think it wouldn’t be good even if he was free of the plague.”

  I nodded.

  “He was delirious. Raving about needles and plants. I don’t think he was e
ven making sense of what was going on.”

  “He’s tough,” I said. “So long as he has a goal in sight, he’s a bit of a juggernaut. He’ll just plow onward.”

  “I just worry he can’t see very far, and he’s seeing less and less,” Mabel said.

  Ah, so was this it? She wanted reassurance.

  I wasn’t sure I had much to give.

  Perhaps in my own efforts to egg myself forward and gather the courage for this next part, I’d put too great a weight on her shoulders.

  “I know about the spots on my shoulder,” I said. “I know you’re staying quiet about it. If you don’t feel confident, you can go track down someone who is.”

  “You knew? You saw?”

  “Evette told me,” I said.

  “Evette again. I think I can do this. Rather than disturb it, I’m going to finish checking you over first.”

  I nodded.

  At her direction, I stood up.

  “Already checked the front bits, and if there was any plague there, I’d probably just ask you to take the scalpel to my throat instead,” I said. “But you can check my skinny behind.”

  She didn’t have a response to that. There was no cue that she was that ruffled, either. Maybe she wasn’t the blushing type. Maybe her feelings had been directed elsewhere.

  “It looks like it’s the back of the neck, shoulder, and the one side of your back,” she said.

  I grimaced.

  “Any tips before I get started?”

  “No special ones, only the pointers I gave to everyone else. Look for the spots where the tendrils are reaching into or out of veins and arteries or where the bruising surrounds places the plague set in a deeper kind of root. Those are key areas that you want to start at and work away from. If you’re partway through one part and you get interrupted or lose your place, go looking for another starting place, don’t get too fixated on searching.”

  She was getting her things out of the medical kit as I talked. I saw her hold a scalpel, her hand shaking a little.

  “Use your hands. It’s not a hard rule, but feel for the tendrils, they’re harder than veins and arteries, especially when they run inside veins and arteries. If it bleeds, it might still be a tendril, don’t let that make you second guess yourself, but if it’s easy to cut, it’s probably not one.”