Twig

by wildbow

  It wasn’t a bad suggestion, but Helen had dibs on this one. I gave her a minute.

  Too generous by forty seconds.

  Twenty seconds or so passed, and the noise stopped.

  While the rest of our people were recovering, some still staggering as though their middle ears were in tatters, I found my feet. The mental adjustments were much the same as the ones I’d made in the wake of Jessie’s fertilizer explosion at the ground floor of the flower place, so they were fresh in my mind.

  As I approached, I could see Helen holding one hand to the side of the speaker’s feet.

  “And him?” the speaker asked. His voice was deep, and it sounded alien amid the cacophony of noise that had erupted in the silence after his one-note noise. A chaotic storm of phantom sounds to offset the lone sound he’d produced.

  Helen nodded, smiling.

  I watched the speaker process, juggling complicated emotions as he lay there, Helen just in front of him, and me off to one side.

  “So be it. I am sorry.”

  Helen shook her head, glancing at me, and I picked up the slack where she was unable to speak. “You did exactly what you were supposed to.”

  “What do I do now?” he asked.

  “You cooperate,” I said. “But don’t look too happy about it.”

  Others were only just starting to recover. Some were creeping cautiously closer, wary of the noise starting again.

  “How?” Gordon Two asked, his voice too loud. I motioned for him to keep it down.

  “That’s going to draw attention,” the Treasurer said. He winced, working his jaw. “I think I have hearing damage.”

  “That can be fixed,” I said.

  “My own voice sounds like it’s far away,” he said. “Fuck.”

  “And you’re right. That’s a concern, drawing attention,” I said. I turned to the speaker. “Will it? Will they come for you?”

  “I don’t know,” the speaker said. There was a deliberate disconnect between is tone and the expression he decided to put on his face. He wasn’t very good at frowning. “I don’t think so. They might if they’re close, or if the mission changed.”

  “How?” Gordon Two asked, for the second time. “I keep telling myself I’m not going to be caught off guard, I won’t be surprised, you guys do things I’d normally think are impossible, but… how?”

  “Magic,” I said. “Helen magic.”

  I offered Helen a hand, and even though I wasn’t in the best shape myself, I did have it in me to help her to her feet. She offered me a brief curtsy of thanks in exchange, before clinging to me for balance.

  “That’s really not an answer to my question,” Gordon Two said. “That’s not a thing.”

  “But it absolutely is, isn’t it?” I asked. “The magic… it’s important. We had Berger, we traded him for a Helen. Look.”

  They looked. I was indicating the crowd of students behind us. The ones who had retreated and fallen, who had felt the impact of that noise the speaker had produced. Their ears hurt and their senses had been rattled, and now all was fixed. The speaker was under our thumb. As several of our strongest recruits moved up and helped haul the speaker to his feet, he pulled away from their grip some, but he didn’t have a lot of fight in him. Again, he wore that weird trying-too-hard scowl.

  He’d been made and trained to smile and dispense warnings, not to frown and express proper displeasure.

  So recently touched by the event, they now watched as we got the situation in hand once again. I gestured for us to move, and the lieutenants passed on orders.

  They would wonder. Gordon Two was a good barometer for what the greater collective was thinking.

  Wondering and wonder were two sides of the same coin.

  I gave Helen a squeeze, and I signaled the go-ahead.

  Reluctantly, cautiously, the speaker began to give us direction. This way, that way. Then he would need to stop to think or use a keen ear.

  With his restrained cooperation, now, we were able to head straight for what we were after. The wind blew cold, boots tromped without rhythm on the ground, and distant explosions and crumbling buildings marked the ongoing conflict halfway across this odd, prim, artificial little city.

  “How are your injuries, speaker?” I asked.

  “Speaker?”

  “Do you have another title or name?”

  “A letter and a number. The ones who made us sometimes like to dress us up and give us masks and titles if we earn them.”

  “Alright,” I said. “Would it be bad if I offered you something? We need you for a little bit longer. We can’t have your injuries or the elements causing any problems down the line.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Gordon Two—”

  “That’s not my name, but alright.”

  “There’s some people from Davis’ group that have supplies. Some are medical, but there should be blankets and jackets for in case we ran into anyone who needed it while we were running around, if they didn’t decide to pack light. I need you to grab some stuff, if possible. We’ll get this guy warm. Can you double check if we have anything we can use?”

  “Sure,” Gordon Two said, giving me a curious look. “I’ll ask.”

  “I’m fine,” the speaker said. “I’m built to endure.”

  Helen reached up, and laid a hand on his upper arm. He looked down at her, confused.

  “Consider this us giving you your own mask and title. To me, you’re speaker. You need a token of your time with us.”

  He looked concerned, but with Helen’s hand still on his arm, he seemed willing to let it lie. “Alright.”

  I gestured, to make sure that Gordon Two knew.

  “Speaking of titles, do you want one?” I asked the speaker.

  “No. I don’t not want one either. I do my job. I keep the Crown’s good citizens safe. I serve, and I am satisfied. I belong to a unit, and we march in step. If I die in pursuit of my duty, I know it is right.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think maybe that’s not so different from my own experience, way back when. My experience was more nuanced, don’t get me wrong, but not so different in the end.”

  He gave me a curious look. I opted not to elaborate.

  “We’re close,” he said.

  And we were.

  Whatever this was, it didn’t feel like what the speaker had called marching in step. It looked as though they had scraped the bottom of the test tubes and disposed of the detritus here. I could see a horde of stitched, and a host of men and women who looked surly, all of whom had been augmented or modified. All guarded the perimeter, sitting out in the cold, the bundling against the cold weather serving to hide the full extent of their modifications.

  Men and women with broken veins from head to toe, with hands modified to blend flesh and technology to give them massive claws. They would have more technology beneath the sleeves of their coats and shawls, to give them the strength to use those claws.

  There were women with whips built into their arms, with digits at the end, thorny in a way that looked like they attached to flesh.

  Men and women who were bloated, with what looked like organs externally attached to their bodies. The connection to the body looked tenuous, to the point that I wondered if the organs could be detached and thrown, or if they were meant to be broken.

  The stitched weren’t all military issue, either.

  It was chaotic, the assortment. Every time I looked, I saw more things that needed attention and watching out for. They were collectively on guard, protecting a building.

  We came to a halt, pausing to figure out how to approach this next part. Gordon Two arrived, and he arranged the coats and blankets across the speaker’s shoulders and back. Draping coats in place, he began buttoning the buttons of one coat through the slits of the next, so they formed a blanket of their own.

  It was ingenious, and it even seemed to please the speaker. He seemed content in this limbo, while our ow
n people peeked, and rumors were passed back, ideas and sentiment finding whispered voices in the midst of all of this.

  Many of the Beattle rebels were armed, but they weren’t eager to fight, and fighting this looked to be a mess.

  “What now?” the speaker asked, under his breath. I imagined he thought he was being subtle.

  It didn’t particularly matter, but it helped if he thought he was being subtle.

  I glanced a ways back, watching Jessie and our audience watch us.

  She was gesturing, asking if I wanted help.

  I signaled a no.

  “What now?” I asked. “We’re letting you go. And you’re going to pass on a message.”

  “You’re letting me go?”

  “You’ll go back to your people,” I said. “All you have to tell them is that the battle is over, it’s been decided.”

  “It’s not my job, to pass on messages like that, not internally,” the speaker said.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “In fact, it makes more sense if you’re the one that delivers the message.”

  “I should give your coats back,” he said.

  “No,” I said. I moved past Helen, who drew closer to him, and I adjusted his regalia of coats, fixing the pockets where they were supposed to be buttoned, fixing the lines. “No, keep them. But you should hurry. Go to your people before my people get restless. Pass on the message.”

  He frowned, and this time the frown was real, because he wasn’t trying.

  But he rose to his feet, and glancing back at Helen and I for a moment, he then picked up speed, jogging back toward the others.

  “So,” Gordon Two said. “Are you going to explain Helen’s magic? Is this a thing she does?”

  “She simply told the truth,” I said.

  “She can’t talk,” he pointed out.

  Helen stuck out her tongue at him.

  “Yeah, well, In the meantime…” I said. I indicated the speaker.

  “I know how this magic works,” he said.

  The speaker had been stopped by the guards at the perimeter. That was what was supposed to happen in these cases.

  “Sixty second fuses?” Gordon Two asked.

  “Or as close as you could get,” I said.

  I might have felt ashamed at exploiting our temporary recruit, but the canisters loaded into his pockets were of a less lethal variety, and he’d been meant to endure. Gas billowed from around him, and in his confusion, he span around, which only helped distribute the stuff. He might have cried out loud in his alarm, but the gas choked him, which also served to silence that voice.

  His unique clothing had been custom made to fit him. The odd weights in the pockets and the bulky nature of the raiment went unnoticed for an experiment that was unused to such things. He was large enough he wouldn’t reach behind his back.

  All that had remained was to pop the canisters and set the timers going. Helen and I had both done it between us.

  The cloud expanded, and in the midst of it all, the core group of the experiments and stitched guards that had gathered to meet this unexpected visitor were disabled, left reeling.

  I got the attention of my people with a raised hand, paused for dramatic effect, and then I gestured.

  Attack.

  Previous Next

  Gut Feeling—17.17

  The students Jessie and I had recruited weren’t soldiers. They weren’t fighters, and for some this was their first altercation. It showed.

  I wasn’t a fighter, myself. I knew how to hold a knife, I knew how to shoot a gun. I knew how and where to hit people where it hurt. But I wasn’t a fighter. I was an opportunist, and I’d learned to parlay that into the knife holding, gun shooting, hurty-hitting. That put me in an odd spot when I was now having to find and create opportunity while managing my people.

  The gas cloud had spread to a point and stopped, forming a haze ten long paces wide. Three fifths of the non-stitched enemies present had been affected in some way, coughing, sputtering, hands at burning eyes and orifices. Another fifth, perhaps, had caught whiffs, but the effects stopped at one eye being closed, or a bit of coughing.

  The stitched were backing away from the gas, and from the fear in many of their eyes, I could tell that a good share of them weren’t military grade. Others were remaining stock still, or kept their reactions mostly in check.

  That left me with a rough guess of there being a dozen experiments that weren’t incapacitated, a dozen combat-ready stitched and another thirty or forty general-use stitched. We had them outnumbered, but only by about forty individuals. That would change as the gas and its symptoms cleared up.

  This wasn’t an easy assault, exactly. They had undertaken some preparation before settling in. There were places at the corners and ends of the street where fences had been knocked down, where something that might have been a shack had been pulled down, and a square of snow-less road that might have had a carriage perched over it when the real snow had fallen. They had taken efforts to remove potential cover that anyone might use to mount an attack on them.

  Had we been a matter of five people, we could have used the cover that remained, but as a mob of a hundred?

  This was more Gordon’s bailiwick. I missed that doofus. All I could do was execute things as he would, and hope I didn’t futz it up too badly.

  “Everyone with guns, fire on the group to the right!” I called out. “Shoot! Doesn’t matter if you hit, just—”

  Someone fired.

  “Just shoot!” I called out.

  But with the exception of the one shot, the gunfire was delayed, hesitant.

  I knew that was the way it was going to be from the moment it had opened.

  “Keep shooting!” I called out, drawing my own pistol. I’d stowed it on the opposite side of my body as usual, so the movement felt unnatural. My damaged fingertips lacked full sensation, not helped by a layer of bandage and gloves pulled on over that, so that didn’t help either. I aimed and I fired in the general direction of the people I’d indicated, who were stranded for the moment on the far right of the gas cloud. The gun kicked in my hand, and as I continued running forward, I could smell the gunpowder and smoke of my own gun, and the traces of gas on the wind.

  The group to the right was smaller than the group on the left, which I was leading the others in charging. The group on the left was struggling more as the wind blew gas in their direction, but that wasn’t why I wasn’t prioritizing them.

  The key in this, my lopsided approach, was directing the bulk of our initial fire on the less threatening group. The rationale was that they were cut off from the others in volume and in sight. To them, they were being attacked, the gas blocked off their view of friendlies, and they were already demoralized. My hope was to turn that into a surrender.

  “Bea!” I called out. “You and delinquents, roof girls, Otis’ men, go right! Force a surrender! Don’t get too close!”

  That left six experiments of varying types and a squadron of stitched. The experiments didn’t have guns, but the stitched did.

  Stitched typically had handlers, and the handlers weren’t present, that I could see.

  An odd, ragtag defensive force, this. My eye was on the door and windows, expecting someone to come tearing out to shout out an order to shoot. There wasn’t one.

  I was watching for an experiment to show leadership skills and turn out to be the leader for this group. None did. They were separate and independent, rough-looking men and women who had been through the wringer a few times before they had been experimented on and made into weapons. They didn’t listen for orders, and didn’t even band together, not really. Women with whips attached to their arms pulled the whips in, holding them in hands, ready to fling them out. Men with fluid-filled sacs across their bodies shrugged out of coats, to have better access. I saw men with heavy muscles and bodies covered in thick hair longer than some women had on their heads.

  No leaders in their number.

  But the stitched that were
n’t looking entirely out of sorts changed their grip on their rifles, shifting their stances. They didn’t look lost or leaderless.

  I watched as one or two stitched turned, glancing at one of their number, who was coughing, drawing in a deeper breath.

  Aiming, I fired the last two shots of my pistol at him. The second of the two shots hit.

  The handler had been a stitched. Maybe high quality, a dead handler quickly revived so that his skills could be preserved, or an actual living handler dressed up like a reanimated dead man.

  As his head rocked back, knocking against the wall behind him, face and wall now painted in fresh crimson, his stitched looked more alarmed. Some of the soldier-stitched started moving of their own volition, making the call to aim at us.

  “Shoot!” I called out.

  I got two bullets fired at the stitched for my trouble. It was an unenthusiastic response from my side, but that was, again, to be expected. The nature of the mob was likely a problem, the shooters not having a clear shot because of friendlies in their way.

  The stitched responded, a mere four of the forty-ish stitched shooting. Of those four, some couldn’t see well because of the gas and its effects.

  But it was bound to happen, that with our mob being dense, the stitched having some ability to aim, students to the right and left of me stumbled and went down.

  That seemed to give the rest of the hesitant shooters permission to open fire. The most soldier-like of the stitched were now the subject of our retaliatory, defensive fire. The less soldier-like lacked leadership.

  I hated the moment, the nature of those few passing heartbeats, the lingering image of the shot students tipping over before my forward movement and the rest of the crowd to either side of me blocked off my view.

  It left me with a terrible, sick, angry feeling. A lot of it was directed at myself. The calculation, the fact that I was rationalizing that oh, only some would hit. That I rationalized that chance of a shot being immediately lethal was low, even if internal damage might be massive with the way Academy-designed guns had bullets that were designed to bounce around their victims. I rationalized that we were largely an army of the Academy educated.