Twig

by wildbow

  It looked like our students were defecting, or enough were defecting that it was impacting how the enemy was handling them. Cynthia’s soldiers had to have seen us enter the city. They had adjusted and moved their forces, and moved against our people as we were getting sorted out. But the forces here were now holding position, which meant they expected company to arrive.

  “A gun to my head counts for a lot. I don’t know about you,” Valentina said. “But if they’re willing to give us work and shelter and do what Sylvester and Jessie were willing to, I’m willing to accept the gun as a motivator and do what I might be willing to do otherwise.”

  “That rebel group that’s sitting in the other room is ninety-nine percent male. Beattle, by virtue of association with all-girl’s schools, has a disproportionate fifty-fifty balance. Do the math, Valentina. They won’t necessarily want you for your brains.”

  “That can be taken two ways, Davis. Both are unflattering.”

  “Hold up,” the Treasurer said, talking over Davis’s response. “Stop.”

  “I phrased that poorly,” Davis said.

  “You did,” Valentina said.

  “Why don’t we give someone else a chance to raise their voices?”

  The discussion continued, with Mabel taking the floor. I moved on, with Jessie and Helen following behind. I could guess how most of the conversation would unfold, who would go where, and how things might flow from that point.

  The surrender hadn’t been enticing enough. The prospect of recruiting several hundred students had been. I wasn’t sure who had fought for it or against it, but they had made the offer and now all bets were off. Valentina and Davis were debating things with students as an audience.

  But they weren’t the voices I wanted or needed to listen to. The real danger was the rebel group that inhabited the building. They were the ones who were holding our people hostage.

  The trick was to navigate the vents until we found a point where we could overhear the rebels. It made for a lot of crawling through ducts, two fingers on one of my hands in bad shape, my shoulder protesting at my being bent over.

  I’d offered Helen a chance to sit out, and she hadn’t. I could most certainly do my share while she was struggling.

  We found a spot where acoustics brought noise into the vents, a crossroads between multiple vents, with the next best thing to an open space in the middle of the chosen sector. A ladder extending up was especially useful, because it provided headroom. Helen, Jessie and I sat there, Jessie in the middle. Helen clung to her and draped over her, and Jessie turned away from Helen to fixate on my shoulder, undoing sodden bandages.

  I called out, using those same acoustics to speak out to this entire part of the building.

  “Cynthia is dead or dying. The woman crawls desperately through the drains, and the giant is tearing up the street as fast or faster than she can move. She will make a mistake. She will get tired. Your leader will die, if she isn’t dead already.”

  All chatter had died down.

  Someone in the enemy ranks shouted out, “Where are you?”

  I was tempted to give a joke answer, but then Jessie pre-emptively elbowed me.

  I elbowed her back.

  “Cynthia is your lowest priority,” I spoke. “There’s a group of your people due east of here. They sent you ahead, or you reported to them. Franz led that particular group.”

  I let the words hang.

  There was more shouting and there were more attempts to provoke a direct response from me. Some even called out for me to show myself.

  That could come later, if they were especially uncooperative.

  “Franz is dead,” I announced. I paused, to give that reality some gravity. “The others… paralyzed. Eyes lost from sockets. It was messy and wholly deserved. I focused on disabling them. Smoke inhalation will have helped. The building is made of treated wood, so it wasn’t burning well, last we saw. There are two places you could be, and they aren’t here.”

  There were more shouts, more threats. There were several gunshots, aimed at the ceiling. From our vantage point, we could see down the length of most of the ducts. None of the shots seemed to penetrate the ducts themselves.

  They could come in after us, was the big threat, but that was a tricky proposition for all involved.

  “I’ve told you what I did to the others. That was for hurting a friend of mine. Use your imagination to figure out what I’ll do to you if you kill anyone important to me.”

  I heard more gunshots, and the timing was such that I was pretty sure that it was a response to my threat.

  Jessie pointed, however, and I could see the faint light that was coming into one of the long ducts near us, a faint shaft of light spearing up.

  Shooting at us, not at the kids.

  It was too difficult, with what went into sturdy buildings like this one. I could hear the frustration in the words they exchanged, even if they had been closer or louder so I could make sense of it.

  “Cynthia is desperate, a giant on her heels, and she’s resorted to crawling through ice cold water in the drains. Franz’s group burns. Every second counts. You can go if you let us slip the noose.

  “Never forgive,” I heard a voice. One of Cynthia’s diehards.

  “Then try forgetting, not forgiving. This whole embarrassing rebel-on-rebel episode has to stop.”

  There were more responses, more shouts, many vulgar.

  I could sense the change in tone though. I could hear the conversation between groups.

  “Killing me gets you small fame and a small bounty,” I said. “Then because you chose this, you chose to tie my hands and force me to act, you’re left leaderless. No Franz, no Cynthia.”

  It was, in a way, a turning of tables. They had been exploiting much this situation with our own rebels.

  All that said and done, the best thing to do was to be quiet. Opposing discussions continued and intermingled in a way that mirrored the debates I’d heard between Davis and Valentina. They started talking about the people who should go, if anyone went. Following that, the if disappeared, they started talking about more people going.

  I closed my eyes, my role done, and rested my head Jessie’s shoulder, my hand on her leg.

  We gave them time, and they used it to make their decision. They’d known something was wrong, I suspected. The communication and coordination was too great.

  When I emerged, I found the area empty. They’d left our people alone and vacated the area. A mutual truce.

  They were soldiers, but they were soldiers of a stripe that needed someone to follow. Threatening the loss of Cynthia gave them pause. Taking Franz would take away more security. With the first and second in command out of the picture, there wasn’t much to be said and done.

  The congregation of Beattle rebels emerged from the rooms they had been sequestered in.

  I met Valentina’s eyes, and she looked away.

  “It was good,” I told her. “Good bluff.”

  “That was a bluff?” Mabel asked.

  It wasn’t a bluff, but I wasn’t about to say it. If she was going to stick around after making a vehement case against going, I needed to give her the chance to save face.

  She smiled, and it wasn’t a sure smile, and I smiled back, with roughly the same confidence.

  Something would have to be done longer-term.

  Previous Next

  Gut Feeling—17.14

  Helen’s brother stood straight for the first time in a while, finally visible over the shorter buildings. His mouth was slack, his eyes wide enough to reveal the whites even from a good ways away. He arched his back so his belly stuck out, his arms down and away from his body, and he began writhing, rocking his upper body left and right.

  “What’s that about?” Jessie asked.

  Helen was sitting in a chair, with three of our student doctors tending to her. Her back was to the wall next to the window, but the window was in arm’s reach. She raised a hand and tapped the window clum
sily.

  “Hey Helen,” I said. “Want me to interpret?”

  She moved her hands in an abstract way, as if trying to reassure me. I was reminded of the doctors at the Academies who worked with clay to figure out the shape and ratios needed for a new creation.

  One of her eyes looked up at me to double check I was paying attention, then tapped her collarbone with one fist, only barely missing the young lady who was investigating one of the bullet holes through her ribcage.

  “You want to be clear… no. You’re clear, you’re sure?”

  She made a low, pleased gurgling sound in her throat, then, hands in stiff claws, she swiped the window.

  “You’re positive that he’s… scratching.”

  She pointed her hands up.

  “Scratching the sky.”

  She paused, looked down at her body, then looked up at me and reached for my chest. The other, intact Helen that only I could see was doing much the same from the other direction. I could follow the trajectories and figure out the destinations.

  “Nipple,” I said, quickly, before she could get a grip on me. Even if she was weakened, I wasn’t about to let Helen of all people flip my nip.

  I was really glad I had the translation thing down as well as I did, because her hand dropped away, leaving me intact and pain free. Bullet dodged.

  “Oh, I see. Have to say it with the right tone of voice. Ahem,” I said. I adopted a prim, Helen tone of voice, like she liked to do when she was being ridiculous. “It’s really quite obvious. In my expert opinion, he’s trying to scratch the sky with his nipples.”

  Helen moved her arms carefully so as not to interfere with the multiple ex-students working on her, and she managed a light applause.

  “Yes,” Jessie said. “Absolutely, that’s what he’s trying to do.”

  “He’s stiff,” I said. “He was hunched over and working hard, tearing up the road, and he just stood up and ooh, ouch, it hurts, but oh, not used to being mobile and active, he wonders how he’s supposed to deal with this? Not socially conscious or used to his own body at all, so…”

  I spread my hands.

  “…So he tries to scratch the sky with his nipples,” Jessie said.

  I smiled.

  Helen’s brother remained where he was, bending over backward, barely balanced, his arms dangling behind him, facing skyward. He wriggled for a moment more without righting himself, and then made a noise that carried over the city. A moan.

  Helen reached out. I caught her hand and squeezed it. “He’s just grumbling.”

  She gave me a weaker squeeze back.

  The ex-student who was working on Helen’s stomach sat back in the chair. He rubbed at his damp forehead with his forearm, his hands bloody to the wrists. I handed him a damp cloth from the bowl.

  “Thank you,” he said. Helen was sitting in the chair, her sweater cut off and her blouse unbuttoned, though the shirt hung so it covered her breasts.

  “Thoughts?” I asked him.

  “Terrifying,” he said.

  Helen gurgled.

  “That’s one thought,” I reminded him. “Without a second or third, it’s hard to mark out the points, draw a line and figure out where the thought is going.”

  “Uh, yeah,” he said. He looked at the other two students, both girls, who were working on the side of Helen’s face and her leg, respectively.

  Jessie spoke, “Terrifying because you’re not confident, because Helen is a marvel of science, because…”

  “All of the above? I had my doubts when you asked for the the best neogenesis students in the room, but that call was right on the mark. I’m pretty good with this stuff, I worked in a lab with graduate doctors putting together life from scratch. Soups, vats, artificial uteri, blends, picks, mashes, top-downs, bottom-ups, display pieces. Hell, I even got to watch over shoulders from the beginning as the G.D.s did a human lookalike from scratch. He couldn’t do anything except sit in a chair and look pretty, but it gave me a sense of what goes into this.”

  “Narcissus?” the ex-student who was digging bullet fragments out of Helen’s leg asked.

  “Narcissus two.”

  “I never heard about the second one,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, it was less groundbreaking.”

  “We need you to piece her together enough that she’s stabilized,” I said. “Just long enough that we can find someone with the skills to do a more comprehensive fix. Can you do that for us?”

  The student had a look in his eyes that reminded me of Lillian. I’d seen it when she was focused on her external muscle project. I’d probably worn it myself countless times. His thoughts were on the work, the science, the ratios and chemical names and the obscure names for components of a nonhuman body flying through his head.

  “All those things I mentioned? The soups, the containers, the top-down, bottom-up, take this working piece from this project and graft it to that one?”

  “All those things,” I said, echoing him.

  “All of the above,” he said. “It’s all in play. It’s like… I’m trying to think of how to explain this to ignoramuses.”

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  Mr. All-of-the-Above startled at the tone. “Oh! No, no, I didn’t mean that as an insult, only that you don’t know Academy science. You’re ignorant in that you don’t know.”

  “Quit while you’re behind,” the girl who was working on Helen’s face said.

  “Okay,” he said. “Sorry, Sylvester. Sorry Jessie.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, making a hand gesture that he should keep going. “Explain it to the ignoramus.”

  He was flustered enough he couldn’t quite seem to gather the thoughts necessary to make a good analogy.

  “If I had to take a stab at it,” the girl working on Helen’s face said, “If you gave me a maths problem, I could do it. I’m pretty good at maths. But there’s enough at work here that it’s like asking us to go through a maths textbook, front to back, there are a few curveballs slipped in here and there that might even qualify as end-of-term projects, and you’re asking us to hurry through it.”

  I pursed my lips.

  “We might need equipment,” Leg-girl said. “There’s something in the hip I’d have to grow a replacement for if it’s even replaceable. I think its an endpoint for one of three distinct systems that control how it moves.”

  “She,” Jessie said, voice firm.

  “She. Sorry.”

  “We’re being particular and sensitive because we’re tense,” I said. “Helen needs to come out of this okay.”

  “Three systems, you said?” Mr. All-of-the-above asked. “Hydraulic, pneumatic…”

  “And voltaic, I think,” Face-girl said.

  “Yeah,” Leg-girl confirmed. “The hip thing, I think it’s a hydraulic sub-system. Fluid-driven, with fluid being drawn to key points or released, to tense or relax other parts or exert strength. If one key point fails, others take up the slack in the hydraulic system. If the hydraulic system fails due to damage to too many key points, then the pneumatic and voltaic systems take over.”

  “Except too many systems have taken too much damage,” Face-girl said.

  Off in the distance, Helen’s brother had righted himself. He was being less careful about the city now, it seemed. He gripped a clocktower and was in the process of toppling it. It was sturdy in construction, but the only horizontal pressure it was supposed to endure was a stiff wind, not one of the world’s largest humanoids pushing on it.

  “Is she running purely off of voltaic strength?” All-of-the-above asked.

  Helen shook her head.

  The clocktower toppled. The resulting crash was most likely audible to just about everyone in the city. The building rumbled as though Big Neph had showed up and was shaking it.

  Each of the three young doctors stopped what they were doing, eyes wide.

  “It’s fine,” I said. Helen was tapping her chest, where a gaping hole stood out over her heart. “He
len is saying the heart-driven system is in working order.”

  “What?” All-of-the-above asked. “No, honey. You have a few heart-like structures and supporting structures, but the hydraulic system is most definitely not working.”

  Helen made a ‘ptah’ noise, then looked up at me, rolling the one eye I could see through the blood-sticky hair.

  “Be good,” I told her.

  She looked at Jessie.

  “You might as well show them,” Jessie said. “So long as it won’t kill you.”

  “Oh, is that how this works now?” I asked. “You ask dad and he says no, and so you ask mom? And since when am I the reasonable, conservative one in this pair, Jess—”

  Helen went limp, head lolling back, and blood began pouring out of her wounds anew, with one or two arterial spurts in places where there shouldn’t be arteries.

  The overlapping shouts and cries of distress of the ex-students drew attention from elsewhere, or perhaps they’d heard the crash of the falling building and were coming to alert Jessie and I. Four or so of them crowded at the door and on seeing Helen, they panicked.

  She stopped the bleeding on her own and began the process of pulling herself together, righting her head and sitting up straighter.

  It took a moment for the ex-students to gather themselves. The one at Helen’s leg spoke first, in a very quiet voice. “I would recommend not doing that again. You know yourself better than we do, apparently, but that put a lot of stress on an already stressed hydro.”

  “Oh,” Mr. All-of-the-above said. “Oh lords. Wait, if that’s the hydraulic setup doubling as cardiac while being entirely capable of functioning at standstill, is the pneumatic—”

  Helen gurgled, already nodding.

  “And voltaic?” he asked, indicating his head with one bloody finger.

  Helen nodded.

  He made a face like he was in pain. The other two ex-students didn’t look very happy either.

  “Thoughts?” I tried again.

  “Bad news is I don’t think I’ve ever been this out of my depth, and I’ve sat an exam for a course I hadn’t actually attended the lectures for.”

  “You can bullshit exams,” I said. “We need a liberal application of bullshit here. Just enough to postpone the final results.”