Twig

by wildbow

  Now my approach brought me up around the side of the bridge. Unless they were outside or actively leaning out the window, which they wouldn’t be in this gloom, they wouldn’t see me standing right at the door.

  I pressed my hand against the wall, visualizing.

  If they were the type to lead from the front, putting themselves between ally and enemy, so their allies wouldn’t flee or surrender, then they would be by the door. Standing guard not just against potential incursion, but against potential excursion.

  I set a stick of dynamite into the wall above the door. Then I took a moment to judge the construction, and decided against using the second stick. Mauer’s urgings to kill were in the back of my mind, and I was happier with playing it safer. I hung my jacket over the stick to keep it mostly dry, and lit the wick, which was now sheltered from the downpour.

  Swiftly, I ducked down under the side of the bridge. I clung to the exterior wall, with the idea of putting the thick and sturdy bridge and the fingers of the Lady of Hackthorn between myself and the imminent blast. I was glad that the nature of the growth of the arm and bridge and its interconnection with the dormitory building gave me sturdy handholds.

  The blast was more intense than I’d anticipated. It wasn’t intense enough to send me flying, but it did knock me for a loop, my thoughts and senses rattled.

  I gathered myself together as quickly as I could, and rose, climbing. The blast had affected the ones sitting in chairs a short distance from the door, damaging thick exterior walls with the shockwave knocking them out of their seats and sending them sprawling. They’d been hit worse than any of the others, and now some of those others had already rushed to the defense and aid of the two stunned individuals.

  They didn’t even see me. They’d taken it for a cannon shot or mortar rather than anything else, as far as I could tell, and the idea that an enemy might be right outside the door, on a cracked bridge, it didn’t even occur to them.

  I threw the smoke canister, throwing myself into the room a moment later.

  I disabled, rather than hurt or maim. It was a fight in smoke and gloom, only a few moments after an unexpected explosion. Nobody was about to open fire on what might include friendlies, and I suspected that even the students that were hurrying into the dormitory lobby to see what was going on were still unaware that there was even a person present.

  I pushed away the helpful bystanders, grabbed the ones who had been sitting by the door, and hauled the first and most active of them back.

  He didn’t have a sense of balance, and getting him to move where I wanted required only a few timely pushes and shoves. He tumbled to the ground, and I used the shackles Davis had given me to connect him to the railing that ran along the bridge.

  “There’s someone there! They’re attacking!” A girl called out.

  “There weren’t any alerts!”

  “There’s one hundred percent someone there! They got Eric and Neil!”

  Feet tromped on floorboards.

  I screamed, and I made it the scream of someone who was being hurt. A gargly tortured person scream, or the scream of a person who’d just been stabbed.

  “Neil!” the girl who’d spoken before shouted.

  Guess I knew who she was sweet on. Poor Eric.

  The scream had given hesitation to people who had been relying on this pair for their forward momentum.

  I grabbed the second of the pair and hauled them back. They weren’t as responsive and they weren’t trying to climb to their feet, so I couldn’t direct their movement. I had to drag, and I wasn’t strong enough to drag someone. I got him a few feet, and then I noticed the smoke was clearing up.

  “Where’s Tommyboy?”

  “Tommy’s upstairs.”

  That was another problem. Small in the grand scheme of things. I tugged again on the heavy lad, dragging him closer to the door, then finally got him close enough to his buddy’s ankle.

  I wasted no time in immediately heading to the wall. Every part of my fingers and feet protested, my stomach clenched into a knot as I made yet another climb.

  Tommyboy or Tommy was the very first person they thought of when their leadership disappeared.

  They were a trio, very likely. They might have thought along the same lines we were thinking, in choosing to take shifts, to conserve strength, and play the longer game. Tommy had rested so he’d be more alert later.

  He’d have heard the explosion. What had I seen inside? I tried to think of the lobby and its layout, and to correlate that to what I knew was outside.

  Damn my short memory.

  I made my way to the first window. It was shuttered, and the latch for the shutters were inside, but that was easy enough to fix. A swipe of my knife through the gap lifted the latch. I had a chance to peek through.

  I saw Tommy run by, flanked by a small crowd of students. The lobby was an open room with stairs running along one side, leading further up into the building. Tommy made his way down to the lobby, and stood well back from the door as he stared at the scene—a destroyed door and slightly damaged frame and exterior wall, the other two shackled to the bridge outside. It wasn’t no man’s land, but it wasn’t safe either. To help them they needed to step outside, expose themselves to gunfire or other dangers.

  There was a girl in an Academy uniform talking to Tommy, telling him about me, no doubt. That something had been there in the wake of the explosion, pushing her away.

  Their focus was on the outside.

  I simply needed to be where they didn’t think I would be.

  I drew my gun, mindful of what Mauer had said and taunted me of, shifted my position, and then broke the window with the gun handle.

  Before they could react, I had my gun trained on Tommy, pointing at him through the window.

  Slowly, he raised his hands in surrender.

  “You’re going to put out the fire. Whatever you can’t put out, you let die.”

  I could feel the tension, see the people exchange looks. So very many eyes were looking to Tommy for guidance. It said a lot that his hands were already up.

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice carrying to me.

  Taking out these individuals was the lynchpin here. Tommy raised his hands in surrender, and without the forward impetus of their leadership, everything in flux, the rest lost heart.

  I signaled for Davis, with my best sharp whistle. We had ears that would catch it.

  ☙

  “Some of the ships are staying out there,” Pierre said. “I thought about being more stern about coming back, but I don’t do well with confrontation. It feels unpleasant. I don’t like being the one that’s staying put while others are moving.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Not the part about you being uncomfortable, but if that’s what they want to do, it’s good.”

  “It’s a lot of resources we have to put in, to ensuring they have food, that they’re not overtired out there,” he said. “It feels very spread thin.”

  “It’s really fine,” I said. “It’s about control, isn’t it?”

  “You usually use that word as if it’s an epithet,” he pointed out.

  “Well, look who’s paying attention. But it’s really fine. They want to play their part, have a role in this. They’re keeping an eye turned outward, for external threat. If it reassures them, let them.”

  Pierre nodded.

  We sat at the dining area above Lab One, below the top floor where I’d had a view of the fire and Davis’ efforts to organize his rebel soldiers. This was the heart, a fantastic place to see just about all of the movement here and there through the center of the Academy.

  Paul, formerly Poll Parrot, was sitting with other kids, eating. He’d had too many surgeries in the last few days, and he looked drawn out, not enough body fat, but he was smiling, laughing. He ate with one hand. Even with good students and doctors turned to the task, we’d only salvaged one arm. The other was a stump, and we would fix that soon.

  He sat with Mauer, w
hich was my own affectation, a younger parallel. He ate with soldiers, which was his own affectation, a good indicator of his mindset, that the anger was still there, and the possible direction he might take from here.

  There were others gathered. Many of Ferres’ experiments had been glad to get their modifcations removed and undone. Some of the more extensive ones had been harder to fix, put off until later, or until we had the resources. We didn’t have a spare human face for Red Riding Hood. No arm for Paul.

  “Do you think I should go under the knife?” Pierre asked.

  “Not my decision to make,” I said.

  “Might be that I’m thinking about it,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  It had been so long that I’d known him, that I hadn’t asked. I’d felt like I couldn’t. That it would be crossing a boundary.

  “If you told me to, I probably would, and I’d probably be happier for it,” he said.

  “Maybe I like you the way you are. Maybe you like you the way you are.”

  “That’s true,” he said.

  I saw some students come down the stairs. It wasn’t an outright defection, but some of the students from the dormitory had changed their minds about things. They were working for us in a limited capacity, with a strong guard. Fearing for their security more than they likely ever had in their lives, they’d taken the security we offered over the security they had as prisoners.

  “An Academy can’t run like this, you know,” Lillian said, from further down the table. She’d seen me looking. “With only a few hundred, when it needs more. Even this small defection, it’s not enough.”

  I agreed, but I didn’t want to go and talk to Lillian when I was sitting and eating with Pierre. That would look curious, give others more reason to worry.

  There was so much more to do. Power and control. The students we’d herded elsewhere were elsewhere as a group. The were banding together, becoming factions unto themselves. The fire at the top of the one dormitory was one thing. There was another dormitory that was actively trying to fight back. We had access to the Academy’s guns and arsenal, we had barricades and the warbeasts, chemicals for gas and more. They had sheer numbers, and weapons of a medieval sort, improvised and fashioned using resources they’d had in the dorm. Curtain rod spears, pokers, knives and clubs made from bedposts.

  The others had wanted to gas them, but I was hoping that we could get them to expend their strength and stamina. We needed to turn some of them. Everything was about appearances here.

  On the topic of appearances… I watched Mabel hurry down the stairs, taking them two at a time, one hand on the railing so she wouldn’t take a spill. She gave me a glance and a smile.

  “She’s going to avoid me,” I said.

  “Did things sour?” Pierre asked.

  “No, not sour, exactly,” I said. Mabel saw me and gave me a little salute.

  I gestured. Come. Sit.

  Brain work. Mabel signaled. Hands.

  Research she couldn’t leave alone?

  She didn’t glance back at me before hurrying on her way.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t push it. Just bothers me sometimes,” I said. “People avoiding me.”

  “I’ve experienced that too,” Pierre said. “Sometimes it’s the way things are.”

  I nodded.

  Someone settled onto the bench next to me.

  Bo Peep. Twelve or so, dressed in borrowed clothes that were too large for her.

  Reaching up and over, she took hold of my arm, hugging it.

  “Hey critter,” I said.

  Her head rested against my shoulder.

  I shifted my position, and I hugged her closer.

  “Still haven’t gone under the knife, huh?”

  She shook her head.

  “S’alright,” I said. “Another time maybe.”

  She shook her head again.

  “No?”

  “No,” she said. Her voice had a bit of a croak to it. Newly fixed vocal chords. “No more surgeries.”

  I looked over at Pierre. His expression was unreadable, but his ears had an angle that made me think of worry.

  Well, she wasn’t the only one who had expressed the sentiment.

  “Well, would it bother you if I said that at least you have the best head of hair in the world, so if you’re going to keep it, it’s a pretty neat thing to keep?”

  She shook her head, then said, “But it’s a head of wool.”

  “I stand corrected,” I said. She nodded in response, her head rubbing against my shoulder.

  I wasn’t sure it counted for a lot, that she said she wasn’t bothered. I could have told her pretty much anything, and she would’ve bought it. I’d rescued them, and that counted for an awful lot.

  I wasn’t sure that was a good thing, that I had their absolute trust.

  “Did you just need a hug?” I asked her. “Always an option.”

  She shook her head, then seemed to remember that she had a voice, and that she wasn’t largely limited to head movements and gestures. She stated a simple, “No.”

  “No? Not always an option? Or you didn’t need a hug?”

  “I wanted to say,” she said, and then she hesitated. She pulled back a bit and looked up at me anxious. “Can you stop talking?”

  “Stop talking?” I asked. My head went through all of the paradigms, trying to figure out the angle I was supposed to interpret that. Did she want the hug, without words attached? She was five or so years my junior and that wasn’t really a thing. It was—

  “Stop talking to them,” she interrupted my thoughts. “People who aren’t there?”

  I opened my mouth to respond, then stopped. It hadn’t been an angle I’d considered.

  No Lillian at the table. That much I’d known. But no Pierre either.

  “It makes me uneasy. It makes others uneasy too, and I don’t like them being uneasy with you.”

  “It’s okay, Peep,” I said, jumping in before she could say any more. “I get it. I get it. I’m sorry.”

  She nodded, and then she hugged me tighter.

  I gave her mop of wool a tentative, reassuring pat, and she nodded again, as if this was good.

  Setting one elbow on the table, fingers pressed against my mouth, I used my other hand to stroke her hair while she sat next to me, clinging to me.

  Sitting next to Paul, Mauer looked my way.

  I thought of the conversation, about moving forward and about stopping.

  I don’t think I can stop, I thought. Let’s at least hope the others are moving forward.

  Previous Next

  Lamb I (Arc 18)

  Mary stood atop the wall. There were people on the other side, keeping their distance from the Academy’s vat beasts, which paced back and forth, shoulders brushing against the walls.

  The beasts, by contrast, had been replaced recently. They appeared similar to naked mole rats, but they had teeth, claws, and bone hooks at their joints that would have done any predator proud. They were somewhat lopsided, and they had muscle to spare beneath their pink flesh. They had sunburns, even though the rain from Radham reached the town. Not technically warbeasts, they were mass produced in vats, expendable, entirely instinct rather than training. They patrolled where there were scent markers, attacking anything that came too near, and they left a scent marker. Once the first batch had been walked along the patrol route, they were collectively good to guard that route.

  The haggard and dirty people didn’t look particularly scared of the beasts, which meant they had been there for some time. They’d had time to get used to the things and learn how they behaved.

  They’d also had time, Mary suspected, to get desperate. Enough so that they’d started flirting with the idea of fighting the beasts. There were many who were gathering poles for more tent construction, each pole sharpened on each end so they could be planted in the ground.

  That’s the lie, anyway, Mary thought.

  That lie was what kept the peace for the
moment. Refugee and Academy both pretended the sticks weren’t spears being stockpiled for future incident. Both sides hoped for a resolution that didn’t have one.

  The patrol of the vat beasts had turned grass at the base of the wooden wall to a thick soup of mud. A hundred feet of grass separated the band of mud and the beasts from the refugees. Trees had been chopped down and pieced together into haphazard shelters, and some material had been used to erect tents, but the omnipresent rain and the sheer number of refugees posed their own problems. Tens of thousands of people were out there, Mary guessed. Tens of thousands of people had to walk, they had to eat, and they had to go to the bathroom. The ground level of the refugee camp was quickly becoming a sty, any ground not covered already by some form of shelter quickly becoming a stew of mud, shit and piss.

  On the other side of the wall, Lillian was hanging back while a group of doctors talked with the town’s city council and prominent citizens. The ground there was a wicker-basket weave of grown wood filling the plaza. There wasn’t much mud at all, and the rain had washed away most of the dirt that had been tracked in when others had entered or exited through the gate.

  Vats sat by the wall, as did the wagons that had brought them there, and the stockpiles of food and chemicals to sustain them. More vat beasts were within, and yet more creatures sat near those. A circus show of monsters and beasts lurking near where the food was handed out and where the overhang of the wall’s edge helped keep the rain off them. They included all types, from the aquatic to the reptilian to mammals. Most were hairless and mostly unclothed, and most were bipedal, drawing inspiration from their creators.

  Mary’s thoughts touched briefly on what Sylvester and Jessie had said about the Block. Her thoughts touched briefly on the vague image of this noble that supposedly shared blood and history with her, and the glass coffin the noble had laid within.

  How many of those monsters had been human once? How many others had been pieced together from components that were obtained from human donors? Any one of them could have benefited from root cells, muscle transplants, or sections of brains, if not whole brains then molded with drug regimens.