Twig

by wildbow

  “You should have told me, nubmunch.”

  “I would have, but I don’t want to give you added stress when you’re doing this.”

  “Well, it hardly helps if you’re just wrestling with it on your own and I suddenly can’t figure you out, between all the distractions and you acting funny. You end up suppressing everything until you snap. Stop bottling.”

  “Okay,” she said. And then she stopped talking. A moment passed. She added, “We’re sitting here, waiting for the perfect timing, and I’m trying not to think about the mail Jamie read that crossed General Ames’ desk that talked about travel being suspended for certain locations, or additional countermeasures, or the fact that if they’re doing this textbook, we don’t have very long before they start releasing Academy-grown monsters into these woods. I worry that this all goes wrong in a second, or worse, that this is how we while away the little time we have.”

  “We’ll manage,” I said. “Helen would probably even get a kick out of us being attacked by Academy experiments. Might do to see if we can’t set up traps, now that I think about it. Something to occupy ourselves with.”

  “Helen’s only at seventy-five percent,” Jessie said. Her posture changed slightly. I imagined she closed her eyes, and now that I had connected to the fact that she had dropped a second memory, my mental model of her was making a lot more sense, with less surprises. I’d thought it was me, after being out here too long.

  “Seventy-five percent of a Helen is still pretty gosh-darn amazing,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  “It is,” Jessie said. “But…”

  She stopped talking, and I saw her hand shake a little as she balled the gloved hands into fists.

  Ah, here we went.

  Well, what were the odds it would be a problem? It wasn’t like we’d seen another living thing that wasn’t one of us for the last week and a half.

  Jessie screamed, top of her lungs.

  The scream reached through the forest, and it was oddly muted, even without accounting for the mask, the hose, or the filter. In an ordinary forest, the hard surfaces of trees would have bounced back the sound, but the sheer amount of dust caked on every surface and the thickness of the dust in the air dampened the sound.

  I wanted so badly to hug Jessie, tight as possible, to speak into her ear, to say something reassuring and intimate and make it better. I ached to do it.

  I could see Lillian, and I knew that on a level she represented compassion, but a part of me still ached for Lillian’s absence. I could see Ashton. It was almost as if the scream was bringing the others out.

  All I could do was stand, wood breaking away where it had been striving to attach me to my seat, leaving jagged spikes and splinters where it had broken. I walked over to Jessie with the branches snapping and breaking beneath my boots, and took her hand.

  The forehead of my mask clacked against hers.

  She stopped screaming. No longer taking the background to Jessie’s anger and frustration, the hissing wind and pained creaking and breaking of trees resumed.

  “I hate this,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “If it turns out that my scream screwed all of this up, gave us away, then they’ll probably mutiny.”

  “Probably,” I said. “But you needed to scream.”

  “I don’t like being weak. I don’t like being this frustrated.”

  “You’re too damn stoic all the time,” I said. I made the masks clack against each other again.

  In the distance, a tree branch broke and fell.

  “Incoming,” Helen said.

  It took a minute for ‘incoming’ to reach us. Two of our rebels, all in quarantine suits.

  “All good!” I called out. “Don’t shoot us!”

  They stopped running.

  “Sorry,” Jessie said. “Losing my mind in here.”

  “How’s the watch shift?” I asked the two rebels.

  “Mind-numbing,” the larger of the two said. “Already looking forward to whoever’s coming to relieve us. I dropped my watch in the dust and branch bits beneath the perch and it took me fifteen minutes to find.”

  I scuffed the ground with a boot. I couldn’t even see dirt beneath the detritus I’d kicked aside.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Tell you what. You two walk Jessie back. I’ll take watch with Helen.”

  “Yeah?” the smaller one asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, emulating his accent a touch. “Go on.”

  Jessie hesitated.

  I pushed her arm, “Go on. We’ll be fine.”

  “I’ll send some people to keep you company,” Jessie said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “And we’ll talk after. Get caught up. Cover all the bases.”

  She nodded.

  I wanted to give her more support than I could here.

  Helen and I left the cards behind and we began the trudge to the perch.

  We climbed the tree we had nailed rungs to, and we took our seats in a thicker cluster of branches.

  It wasn’t until we were settled that I noticed one of Helen’s sleeves was still floppy, no arm in it. The hook swung like a pendulum.

  “Are you stuck?” I asked.

  “Noo,” Helen said, implying she was. “But no, really, I’m fine. Thank you, sir.”

  “You’re very welcome, madam.”

  A solid fifteen minutes passed in relative silence. Helen started humming, playing with how her filter was making her voice buzz a bit around the edges, and I joined in with my own variation. Somewhere along the line, I started playing with my hand over the end of the air hose, near the filter, which I probably shouldn’t have been doing, but it allowed for some interesting stop-starts.

  I could track the time by way of the watch that had been hung from a tiny spike of wood near my head. Fifty minutes passed, as we went back and forth, elaborating. Then we both trailed off.

  Five minutes passed before Helen spoke.

  “I spy with my little eye… something black and dusty.”

  I pointed. “Funny shaped branch over there.”

  “Yes. Then… I spy with my little eye, something black with only a little bit of dust.”

  I pointed. “I think it’s a dead thing in a tree that had leaves fall on it and made it crispy-ish.”

  “How long before you get one wrong?” Helen asked.

  “I can see about three more interesting things. So… until you pick something boring.”

  “Oh?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well then,” she said. “I hear, with my little ear—”

  “—a particularly crackly bit of wood?”

  “Something creaky that isn’t a tree,” she said. “That’s pulled by a warbeast.”

  I perked up. “Really?”

  “No,” she said.

  I deflated.

  “But yes,” she teased. “Really.”

  I perked up again. “Well peel my cat and call me a bastard. How far away?”

  “Not far,” Helen said.

  “Well dang,” I said. “Just one? If it’s more, I’m going to need to see how fast I can catch up to the others and if we can get back in time, maybe further down the road.”

  “Just one,” Helen said.

  “You’re sure.”

  “Positive,” she said.

  “I actually feel bad,” I said. “And I don’t feel bad about much. Jessie’s going to be so annoyed she missed this.”

  We climbed down from the tree, and we lowered ourselves into the shrubbery.

  Helen’s gestures, partially masked by the gloves, gave me a good indication of when to expect them.

  The wagon appeared, a rhino-like warbeast with two horns bigger than I was on its head and a chin-spike below trampled the fallen leaves and branches that buried the road, and it pulled a heavy wagon behind it. Industrial strength everything, from the heavy duty wagon itself, almost a rolling vault, with heavy wheels. The thing was meant to plow on. If it broke
down, then the lone driver wouldn’t be able to fix it.

  As it rolled past us, we pounced. I latched onto the side, and Helen grabbed on next to me, before tumbling down, disappearing beneath the front of the wagon. Any scratching or scrabbling on her part was drowned out by the noise the wagon made as it rolled over innumerable branches, leaves, and the fragile carpet of builder’s wood that knit them together.

  Five. Four. Three.

  The man screamed.

  Right then. My models of Helen weren’t that great either.

  I tried to make up for the time differential by moving faster, a little more haphazardly, gloves and boots slipping on the dust-caked surface. The worst that could happen was that I might slip, fall, and roll under the wheel.

  I managed to avoid that, grabbed the seat, and hauled myself over.

  Helen had pierced his hand with her hook, latching on, and had grabbed him with one hand. He was using his free hand to fumble for a gun that was positioned in a spot which was really meant to be reached for with the hand that Helen currently held.

  I threw myself forward, stomach skidding on the dusty seat, and reached him just as he pulled the gun free.

  I batted the gun out of his hand before he could get a grip on it. It was lost, off to the side, in a sea of branches and dust. I might have said that people two thousand years in the future might find it, but I somehow couldn’t picture it. Not the people part of it.

  The resulting scuffle was short. Helen asserted her grip and adjusted the hook, and I seized his other arm in one of my own, and once we had him secure, the fight mostly went out of him.

  His breath wheezed through the air filter.

  “You have options, Mr. Driver,” I said. “Most of them are pretty good.”

  I could see him taking that in.

  “This gets a lot more pleasant if you cooperate,” I said. “There isn’t a friendly face for a hundred miles around. All you need to do is talk to me.”

  “What do you want to know?” he asked.

  “They expecting you on time?”

  “Give or take an hour,” he said. “Horny Anne here is very regular, but the road isn’t. We sink into the soft spots.”

  “Good,” I said. “Good, that’s just the kind of answer we need. Do you have a horn? Anything that would make a lot of noise?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Trumpet. It fits onto my air filter.”

  He fumbled at the side of the wagon. Helen took one hand off of him to grab the trumpet, showing me. She pressed it between her body and the side of the wagon and began fumbling with her air filter.

  “Good,” I said. “Perfect. Is there anyone further back down the road?”

  “No,” he said. “Like you said, not a friendly face for quite a distance.”

  He sounded a little bit depressed about it.

  Good. Perfect.

  “If you’re lying, then we do something terrible, you know that right?” I asked. The rush of the capture, after so much dang waiting, it was making me heady, and that translated into me sounding almost excited at the prospect of doing something terrible, which was great.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know it.”

  I nodded.

  “Now let’s talk security measures. Anything I need to know before we borrow your wagon and take it to its destination?”

  “Ah,” he said. He paused.

  “Ah?”

  “I’m telling you this in good faith,” he said. “Pay isn’t good enough, I love my Crown and country, but I like living too. So I want you to know I could’ve stayed quiet and you mightn‘t’ve noticed.”

  I would have noticed, I thought.

  “Out with it,” I said.

  “It’s in my forearm. Metal, grafted to the bone. They have seahorse-eye things that look through my arms and read the numbers. Has to be the right metal too.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That sounds about right.”

  “This was my last trip,” he said. “Ever since this black shit started springing up everywhere, it’s misery distilled. Of course something like this happens when I tell myself it’s my last trip before I find another way to make money. Of course.”

  “You’re fine,” I told him. “We’ll try to minimize the damage.”

  “Tooting,” Helen said.

  I raised my eyebrows behind my mask, and then winced as she raised one hand, trumpet attached to the end of her hose, and blew.

  It wasn’t a lips-on-trumpet noise, but something more artificial, a braying note that changed as she adjusted the keys.

  The sound carried.

  Helen took her time before stopping.

  “Dam—”

  Helen made a smaller ‘bwat’ sound.

  “Damage?” the driver asked.

  “Well,” I said. “Can’t trust you to take me where I want to be without saying anything, so… best way to go about this would be to borrow your arm.”

  “Uh.”

  “Then we can keep you for a while, we’ll reunite you and your arm as fast as we can, and then you’re sort of complicit, or we let you go and you can go home, and maybe you get pity points, but you also have to scrounge up to get a replacement arm, and that’s a whole mess, and there’s a third option where you kick up a stink and we put you down.”

  “Uh,” he said. “I’d kind of like my arm back sooner than later.”

  “Perfect!” I said. I was still fairly excited at the victory. “Perfect, good. That even means I can share the dirty details on what we’re up to, and I can ask you questions without having to mask what I’m asking. Let’s talk about your cargo, and what they tend to do with it when you arrive.”

  “Are you going to hurt people with this?” he asked. “Is it going to be another one of these black wood bombs? Inside the city?”

  “No,” I said. “And if you want, you can watch what we do. We’re just going to take a barrel we’ve got stashed away somewhere not too far away, and it’s got a label on it that’s of the type that makes people want to keep it sealed—”

  “Stow it somewhere dark with a lot of ventilation,” Helen added.

  “—and I can tell you, it’s going to be me, her, and one other person in that barrel,” I said. “We just want into the city, Mr. Driver, and they’re being rather ridiculously paranoid about letting people in or out.”

  “You want in the city,” he said. “What does that matter? What’s that going to do? Who’s that going to hurt?”

  ☙

  Present

  I woke, and my arm was numb. It spawned a dozen small moments of terror as I wondered if Wyvern had prematurely started to physically affect me. There was a pressure on my chest, too. The numb left arm and the pressure coupled with an almost nauseous twist of my stomach made me think heart attack.

  But it wasn’t. It was Jessie, lying beside me with her head on my shoulder. The covers were thick, down-filled, and heavy, and the two of us were relatively small given the massive size of the four-poster bed.

  I almost hated to get up when I had this. This was entirely new. I knew part of it stemmed from insecurity, but having Jessie this close wasn’t so usual.

  Her hair was so messy, and I was just about the only person who got to see it like that. She had dents on her nose where her spectacles usually sat, and she had scars reaching around her neck and at her chest where her nightgown didn’t wholly cover her, and I knew that again, I was one of the rare few that got to see it.

  Moving glacially slowly, I began to extricate myself, moving the pillow, trying to get it so her head transitioned to the pillow. She was a fairly light sleeper, all considered, so it took extra caution and carefulness.

  I didn’t manage it. Jessie stirred and woke up.

  She smiled, and that smile was nice to see.

  “Tried not to wake you,” I said.

  “You did a terrible job,” Jessie said, yawning. She stretched.

  I reached over, grabbing her stretching hands, and stretched myself, waving her arms one way and
the other, while she collapsed back on the pillow, rolling her eyes at me.

  “Come on,” I said. I tugged on her hands. “Up. We’ve got so much to do.”

  “All day, every day,” Jessie said.

  I let go of her hands, and we both rolled off of opposite ends of the bed.

  There was a folded towel on the dresser, and I grabbed it, slinging it over one shoulder before pausing at Helen, who had curled up in an armchair, contorting herself. Her face was only partially fixed. I nudged the chair, being careful.

  I trusted Helen when she was awake and in full control of her faculties. I didn’t trust sleeping Helen. Sleeping Helen had broken my hand two weeks ago.

  Helen didn’t wake so much as she transitioned smoothly from rest to animation. She uncurled and stepped off the chair, heading straight for the little kitchen in the corner of the room, to prepare tea and likely to raid the pantry for breakfast cookies.

  All good. There was a lingering feeling of dread at this point, of Jessie waking up blank, or Helen being even more troublesome on being woken, even pouncing from the chair, but this? This was perfect.

  I walked into the adjunct bathroom, which was far too white for my liking. I walked past the woman in the tub, moved a bowl beneath the sink, washed my face, and fixed my hair as best as I could without wax or oils.

  I took a minute or two to preen while the washbasin filled up, before I turned my full attention to the woman beside me.

  Her eyes were wide enough to show the whites, and they looked in different directions, which was a nice touch, I thought. Her mouth was ajar, her breathing shallow, and she sat there like a broken doll. Her hair was in disarray, normally short and carefully curled, a natural brunette, and her nightgown was soiled at the lower parts. She had relieved herself in both senses at some point in the night, and it left a runny trail that painted a line in the direction of the drain, but hadn’t actually made it all the way down.

  Collecting the bowl of water, which proved heavy, I carried it over to the tub, and I splashed it into the tub. It got all of the urine and only some of the other mess.

  “Good morning,” I told her.

  She didn’t respond.

  “This can end at any time,” I said. I put the bowl back under the sink and set it to fill again. Grabbing a spare towel, I threw it over the woman’s head, and then began relieving myself in the toilet. “You don’t get anything by being stubborn.”