Twig

by wildbow

  “I’m glad you lived too, but that’s not the point.”

  “Most of the time now people will think I’m a very strange boy, instead of wondering if I’m an experiment, and that’s without me pushing them to feel one thing or another. Sometimes they even think I’m normal.”

  Abby busied herself with stealing some of Ashton’s blanket, settling in beside him. Quinton the lamb found a space between their legs and settled in. She figured out what she wanted to say and told him, “You’re not very normal.”

  “But that’s what I’m saying. I’m a xyloenterate-calceoenterate hybrid mass with a very thin approximation of human pattern to help me find the right shape only. I can mostly defend myself, I can get food, I can find warm places to sit. I can understand the greater world. I can read, even if I sometimes hit snags and stall on some sentences until I ask for help. Considering I just had to survive to make people happy, I think I’m doing very well.”

  “One second,” Abby said, working to get comfortable without disturbing Quinton too much.

  Ashton waited patiently.

  “There’s more to it, Ashton.”

  “Is there?”

  “Didn’t you tell Lara and Nora that we need to do a good job? That our survival and success depends on proving our worth to our superiors?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you don’t see how you’re missing the point?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  He had to interpret the look that Abby gave him. That was annoyance. Frustration and annoyance. Anyone else would have known immediately, but he did need to figure it out some. He also needed to figure out why she was frustrated and annoyed. He thought through the conversation—

  “You’re sort of proving yourself wrong on the ‘I’m good at sitting and thinking’ thing.”

  “I am not.”

  “And the good at everything thing.”

  “I am not,” Ashton said.

  “But you can’t just say you eat and you’re warm and you mostly look human so you’re happy.”

  “But I am. Good Simon says—”

  “Oh lords,” Abby said.

  “He says your feelings are your feelings and you’re the only person who gets to know and decide what you feel. He was talking about grief over the death of a pet in that book, but I think it applies to happiness too.”

  “How about this? I’ll speak your language. Good Simon, book six.”

  “Good Simon and the Small War.”

  “Sadie gets mean, and what’s the lesson at the end of the book?”

  “That you need to weigh your wants, needs, and feelings and make sure that they aren’t keeping your betters from doing their jobs.”

  “It’s supposed to be that you have to watch that your wants and feelings don’t infringe on the needs, wants and feelings of others.”

  “But in the story, the new teacher that Sadie is mostly being mean to is supposed to be allegorical,” Ashton said. “She represents the hard working and well-intentioned leadership we have in the Crown and the Academy and the story is really about how we need to listen to them and then everything is better.”

  Abby leaned back against the tree. She stroked Quinton, fixing some of the blanket so that Quinton was better covered. The lamb was falling asleep now.

  “You’re not supposed to recognize the hidden influences and meanings and take them as fact, Ashton.”

  “I grew up with the books, and when the world and the people around me seemed very strange, I thought about the books. I think it would be strange to rely on them that much and miss something like that.”

  “My point is,” Abby said, a little more agitated than before, “You can’t just say you’re happy and leave it at that. You can’t set the simple things as your end goal.”

  “A lot of people are unhappy because they don’t have the simple things like food and shelter. Quinton is very happy because you take care of him, because he has those things. Why am I not supposed to be happy for that same reason?”

  “Because, just like Sadie failed to pay attention to the feelings of the teacher because she was focused on her own feelings, your acceptance of basic happiness might mean you don’t try hard enough and then one of the Lambs or Lara or Nora or Emmett or me get hurt or die, because we do dangerous things.”

  “What have I done that’s wrong on our past jobs?”

  “Nothing major, but sometimes you’re… clumsy. And I know I sound hypocritical, saying that,” Abby said.

  “Okay.”

  “And I worry when you’re clumsy with words or doing things.”

  “Okay. I’ll try harder with those things.”

  “Thank you,” Abby said.

  “You could have just asked me to do that from the beginning.”

  “It’s about something more, Ashton. I want you to have the right reasons. If you have a greater goal or a… I don’t even know. A drive, those things make it different.”

  “There’s a difference?” Ashton asked.

  “One pulls at you, and the other pushes you,” Abby said. “But either one, they make it so you don’t have to be told or taught. You start doing things and growing without needing to be urged to, every part of you starts working toward it, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in big ones. It refines you.”

  Ashton mused on that for a little bit. Then, just to keep the conversation moving, he asked, “What’s your goal?”

  “I want to grow up,” Abby said. “I want to get all the way to as old as I can be before I expire. I want to stay out of danger so I can live as long as I can, and I want to live a peaceful life with animals all around me. I’d like it if some of you were there with me. I was thinking maybe it could be a place for warbeasts to go when they’re done fighting, but a farm would do too. A place like Sous Reine.”

  Ashton’s mind whirled, piecing together the scenario from constitutent elements.

  “I can see that,” Ashton said. “I can take all the pictures I have of you in my head and it’s very easy to put together scenes of you doing that and being there.”

  “It’s nice of you to say so,” Abby replied. She smiled.

  “I try to be nice, but I wasn’t trying there. I was just saying the truth,” Ashton said.

  Abby only smiled. “I’ve missed these talks.”

  “It’s good I didn’t frustrate you so much that you had another fit,” Ashton said.

  “Almost,” Abby said. “I asked you to wait a moment a few times to let it go away.”

  She raised her knees up and hugged them. The movement of the blanket didn’t seem to disturb Quinton. He remained fast asleep.

  “My new doctors are having people teach me to fight and use guns,” Abby said. “I don’t think I’m going to get my goal. I think I’m going to fight sometimes, and then I’m going to have some times when I get to do what I want.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ashton said. That was what people were supposed to say in situations like this.

  “I’m sorry too,” Abby said. “I don’t like it.”

  “Was that why you came to sit with me? Do you want to talk about it more?”

  “No, and no, I don’t want to think about it too much,” Abby said.

  “Oh, okay,” Ashton said. He decided to politely ignore the fact that it did sound an awful lot like she wanted to talk about it. He reached down to give Quinton a scratch.

  “I came to find you because I wanted to ask if you wanted to meet my new friend,” she said.

  “A new friend?”

  “Come on,” Abby said, a little more excited and upbeat. “Come see.”

  “You just spent all that time settling down, and now you’re getting up?” Ashton said. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  Abby took Ashton’s hand, and she used every muscle in her body to help haul him to his feet, while he didn’t cooperate at all. She scooped up a protesting, bleating Quinton and then stood there, looking satisfied, her odd features set with a smile while she huffed a little. A mom
ent later, she was tugging him away from his spot.

  Ashton cast a forlorn glance backward at the nest of blankets he’d made. It hadn’t been as nice as being inside and near the fire, but inside was noisy, all students and new people and they kept on pestering him and complimenting him on his hair. The tree had thick cover that meant only a few droplets fell on him, and his jacket and hood protected him from those. He liked the unpredictable tapping of droplets on his head.

  Caldwell was a small Academy, set deep in the woods. It looked like a castle, and it was about as cold as one. Ashton joined Abby in passing beneath a statue that had long turned green-black, depicting a doctor working with a stitched on a table, crowing his victory with arms outspread. The lightning from the voltaic systems around him was done up in silver, for contrast.

  The students here were a grim sort, the kind that wanted to work with stitched. Others worked on projects that needed to be kept away from civilization, but permissions for that sort of work were doled out sparingly. Pale, dressed in dark uniforms with student’s lab coats, damp with the freezing rain, they walked in something that would’ve been a single file march if it wasn’t for the periodic clusters of friends or lab partners talking, keeping pace with those behind and in front of them.

  Some in the single file march reached out. They put coins atop what had become towers of coins at the foot of the statue. They couldn’t stop without being jostled by students behind them, so they had to move quick, place the coins, and not disturb the towers that had come into being in front or to either side. Some of the lower parts of towers closer to the feet of the scientist had been there through enough seasons to have become a single unit, fusing together through heat, cold, and the chemicals in the rain and snow.

  Coins in the wishing well, payment to the shrine, but it was enough of a departure from prayer and close enough to being a token of tribute to the Academy and Crown that it was permitted.

  Abby, Quinton, and Ashton paid little mind to the lines or the marching orders, and they had no tribute to give. Abby led the way in a kind of determined way, heading for the gaps, steering through, dragging Ashton behind.

  Some students cussed, and Quinton bleated out an equally rude reply.

  “This way,” Abby said.

  The castle-like Academy was perched on a hill, and the hill had a number of rocky outcroppings. Abby led the way to the edge of the campus, where the buildings ended and there were only intermittent cliffs, rocks, and bits of grass that were stubbornly persisting through winter.

  Abby hopped down, and she skidded a little ways down the cliff.

  “Come on!” she urged Ashton.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “Come on!” she said.

  He hopped down. Abby caught him.

  “I was walking Quinton, I wanted him to get exercise, so I brought him down this hill. We were exploring together, and we found this.”

  Abby drew Ashton’s attention to a hole in the ground. Two rocks had parted, and a shaft extended all the way down into pitch darkness. Humid steam rose from the space.

  Ashton liked the humid steam. It was warm, when everything else was a wet sort of cold, even indoors. He was rather less sure of the black abyss that Abby was now crawling into.

  “Abby,” he said.

  Abby disappeared, bringing Quinton with her.

  “Abby,” Ashton said, at the same volume. “You’re supposed to respond when someone talks.”

  There was no response.

  Ashton puffed out a cloud of annoyance, then descended into the pitch darkness. The stone was wet and slick, the spaces small enough an adult couldn’t have climbed through, and, the further he descended, the more branches he ran into. He’d taken them for roots first, but they had a rigidity he was very familiar with. Builder’s wood.

  He heard the rasp of a match, and he saw the flicker of flame.

  A moment later, bioluminescence kicked in, the walls of the long corridor responding to the light of the flame with a dull yellow light of their own. It was a horizontal shaft, the ceiling arching overhead, builder’s wood supporting the shaft all the way down.

  The entire tunnel smelled like the fluids they used in a stitched.

  “It responds to touch too,” she said. “That’s how I found out about it at first. Quinton stuck his nose into it and it glowed.”

  She touched her hand to the wall. The handprint glowed.

  Ashton tried it. The wall was clammy, the residual glow left by touch a bright, warm color. He liked the contrast of the two things. He traced fingers along the wall, and watched patterns emerge.

  “Ashton,” Abby said.

  “I like this,” he said.

  “I wanted to show you something. This wasn’t it.”

  “This could be it. This is nice,” Ashton said. “This is good enough.”

  She took hold of his arm, and she set about dragging him, to the best of her ability. One of her arms held Quinton, however, and Ashton was as committed to staying put as he had been to anything.

  “What I want to show you is neater,” she said.

  “I think we’re in an area we’re not supposed to be in,” Ashton said. “Or an area that they forgot about or wanted to forget about, or an area that they tried to seal like they seal the bowels in Radham, and they missed one crack in the wall. It’s probably better to stay where we are.”

  “Please?” Abby asked. “Leave that wall alone, and come with me?”

  “You keep taking me away from warm spots and pretty things,” he said, but he allowed her to lead him.

  They walked down the length of the corridor, and they passed down a flight of stairs. The bioluminescent algae didn’t creep along the stairwell, so their descent was a dark one.

  At the bottom of the stairwell, Abby lit another match. The cavern was larger, the glowing surfaces well out of reach, a cavern roof twenty feet over their heads. The moisture had collected in areas, and the cave looked like the night sky. The cavern itself was rocky, with an uneven floor littered with pebbles.

  Abby whistled, a low sound, very well done, and then repeated the process, this time more of an insect sound. “Here girl. Let’s see you. Say hello to Ashton.”

  An outcropping halfway across the cavern floor parted. Three eyelids on one eye moved back, and they had a distance to move. The eye’s surface itself, flat and not rounded, would have taken twenty paces to cross. A cloudy membrane covered the eye, a three-piece protective membrane.

  “I call her Princesca,” Abby said. “She probably has another name, but I don’t know it.”

  “Hello Princesca,” Ashton said, dutifully. He waited several moments, and then decided, “I don’t think she can understand me or respond.”

  “She’s half-asleep, poor dear,” Abby said. She bent down and she gave the ‘floor’ a rub. “Buried under everything in a cold and wet place like this. I think most of her body sprawls under Caldwell.”

  “I don’t think we should be down here,” Ashton said.

  “I know,” Abby said. “But when you all go off and hunt Sylvester, and it’s just Emmett and me and Nora and Lara, I miss you and the other Lambs. Emmett tries to listen to me and he does a very good job, but I don’t want to bother him too much and sometimes I need to talk about things I don’t want to bother him with. Princesca is a good listener too.”

  “I think it might be better to bother Emmett than to bother Princesca,” Ashton said.

  “I’m good with animals. When she looks at me, I can see her pupil. If you walk a few minutes down through the tunnels you can find another eye that’s even clearer. The tension of her skin relaxes after a little while of me talking.”

  Abby rubbed the floor, both elbow and hand touching it, the rub using the whole length of her forearm, clad in her jacket.

  “She likes you?”

  “I think so,” Abby said. “I have to talk in a particular sort of voice and I need to spend a little while here to make it work, but she likes me.” />
  “That’s good,” Ashton said.

  “I think she’s bored, and she’s lonely, and she’s very tired. Whatever it is they’re using to keep her docile and sleepy is… not easy, or not pleasant. I felt bad for her, and that’s when I started thinking about what I wanted. Not in the now, but in the future.”

  “Ah,” Ashton said. “You’re going to need a bigger stable if this is the kind of warbeast you want to take care of.”

  Abby laughed.

  With the faint and distant light, Ashton could see Abby’s face change, and with every moment that he thought he might have grasped what that particular combination of brow, eye, cheek and mouth expression was supposed to mean, it had changed, moving from one thing to another.

  The laughing face was distant and she didn’t sound very happy as she said, “Between you, me, Quinton, and Princesca, I feel like all the things I want are very far away.”

  “I’ll help you get there,” Ashton said. “I’m good, I have what I want, I can help you with what you want. I’ll help Emmett and Nora and Lara too, and the Lambs as well.”

  “Bleaah,” Quinton said.

  “Quinton will help too,” Ashton said. “He’s soft, and he can listen.”

  “I know,” Abby said. “Until he gets too big, and then we get Quinton the Fourth.”

  “Or a girl Quinton,” Ashton said.

  “Or a girl Quinton,” Abby said.

  Slowly, Princesca’s eyelids drifted closed. Fluid bubbled and oozed out of the cracks between them as they sealed shut.

  “Shh,” Abby said, giving the floor another rub.

  “You seem sad,” Ashton said.

  “I miss home. I miss Sous Reine and people who spoke German, English, and French. I miss the stables and the squirrels. The people who worked with me there loved me, even if they weren’t there for me. Here, you’re all there for me… until you aren’t. People keep coming and going.”

  “Don’t get too upset,” Ashton said. “You’ll have another fit.”

  Abby nodded emphatically, before rubbing at her nose and then her eye with the back of her hand.

  “You’re scared of having to learn to use guns and weapons?” he asked.

  “It feels like a big step I don’t want to take.”