Twig

by wildbow

  “Give us just a little bit of time,” Mary said.

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  Dog Eat Dog—18.9

  I wasn’t good at being alone.

  I tossed and turned. I hadn’t slept for a few days, and I was at the point where I was looking to sleep and I couldn’t. Somewhere along the line, I had tried to force a mental image of one of the Lambs into the bed beside me, only for my scattered thoughts to turn to the fighting and violence.

  I was really, really hoping that the blood that soaked the sheets next to me was an imagining that wouldn’t go away and not something real that I couldn’t remember the source of.

  “Ferres,” I spoke, my voice feeling very small in the professor’s expansive bedroom.

  “What is it?” I heard the voice.

  Well, she sounded snippy.

  “Well, you sound snippy,” I said, voicing the thought.

  “Can I help you with something, Sylvester?” she asked. Less curt than before. She sounded tired.

  “Did you go into this with dream of doing good? Was it always about the art?”

  “Oh, so it’s the personal questions now?”

  “I could ask you other questions, but I think you’re one of the people that’s furthest from my comprehension.”

  “It was both, but the art was a constant throughout. From my first days in Academy prep, I would trace the diagrams and sketches in the textbooks. The diagrams inspired by Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, only with the Wollstone ratios applied, the anatomy sketches, the sketches of chimerical work, the dog variations with different second and third ratios.”

  I could visualize each of them, even if I had little experience with those things.

  “When you apply to the Academy, it isn’t invite-only, but they ask you to prove your knowledge, and you don’t get that knowledge without having practical exercise first. The Academy prep schools help, but it’s not an absolute. Especially for a young lady, at the time I was seeking entry.”

  I closed my eyes. “A steeper hill to climb.”

  “It’s the very start of a long series of small political games. You need someone to help, and either you prove yourself as a cut above, or you put yourself in that individual’s debt. The latter is often better than the former.”

  “Is it?” I asked. I was trying not to think, to let my thoughts ease down, and listening helped. The question was automatic, just keeping things going, more than anything I analyzed.

  “If you’re a cut above, others will look to cut you down. If you’re in someone’s debt, then that someone is motivated to help you move on to better things. I was both, but I hid my strengths. I paid attention to the local professors, and I gifted some sketches to the one I liked most. Art based on an article of his I didn’t even understand at the time. That was my in. My inspiration was always my way in, always something I had in play for each turning point in my life.”

  “What part of it was about doing good?”

  “I put a smile on that man’s face. I created things that made people smile and marvel at the wonder of our world.”

  “You created those things at a cost. Each smile paid for with someone else’s tears. For self aggrandizement.”

  “Ah, and now we move on to the verbal abuse.”

  “Are you deflecting?”

  “No,” she said, and she sounded that much more tired than before. “No, Sylvester. By all means. Castigate me. Attack me with words.”

  I was silent. Something about her tone…

  I opened my eyes, and in the doing, I realized I had company beside me on the bed. I wished I recognized them. There was a boy, his sandy blond hair parted to one side, wearing a long raincoat of the sort that students liked, long enough to touch the top of his shoes. The style served to emulate the flutter and majesty of a proper white coat. He sat on the bloodstain, hugging his knees.

  A girl lay beside him, sprawled on the bed, graceless, arms and legs bent at odd angles. Her red hair was slicked close to her head, wet, and she wore very plain, basic clothes in far too many layers, an undershirt worn over a slip, worn over a dress. Her throat had a choker at the neck, a collar held close to the neck by a ribbon, a buttoned uniform collar around that, and a looser collar around that, low enough it might have shown decolletage if she hadn’t been so ensconced, and if was old enough to have any. Her legs were nearly lost in the folds of a slip, a plain dress, and a pleated skirt.

  She was more modest than many of the random girls that appeared to me.

  The room was lit only by the light of the moon coming in through the window, but the red of the blood on the other side of the bed was very clear. As I shifted position, the girl on the bed raised her head a fraction, and I could see the blood on the one side of it, both dry flakes transferred from sheet to skin, and the still-to-dry damp of it. Some of it had found its way into the corner of one of her eyes, diluting through the moisture there to color the one eye red. If she’d blinked, she might have blinked it away, but she didn’t. She only stared at me.

  “Ferres,” I said, to distract myself.

  There was a pause.

  “What can I do for you, Sylvester?”

  Well, she sounded snippy.

  “Why don’t you seem to care if I call you out on your amorality?”

  “Pot and kettle, isn’t it, Sylvester?” she asked. I heard her yawn.

  “Is it?” I asked.

  “They don’t have names when they come to me, Sylvester. They don’t have histories.”

  I reached out for the hand of the girl in the layered clothes. She wore fingerless gloves over regular gloves over elbow length ones. It took me a second to trace my finger down the long gloves until I touched her upper arm.

  She was ice cold.

  I felt a stab of fear, pushed harder, as if to push through, and she pulled away, slipping from my finger as wet soap might. I followed, lunging across the bed, and was immediately put in mind of a comical scene of me trying to grab soap, it slipping from my hands to pop into the air, my second grab doing the same, my third grab repeating the effort.

  That image made me think of the Lambs laughing, gave me a fleeting memory of the Lambs all together, no Ashton but Gordon and Mary definitely there. All of us in the sun, somewhere away from Radham, stripped down to underwear for the boys and slips for the girls, while we were washing ourselves and our clothes at the edge of a river. I’d done it on purpose, for laughs.

  The memory was too short lived, too incomplete.

  The laughter didn’t echo in my head as I thought of it. The Lambs didn’t appear. There was only the boy and the girl I didn’t recognize, the boy hugging his knees while looking at me with narrow eyes. The girl had fled my touch and was now curled up at the corner of the bed furthest from me, leaning against the foodboard, watching me half the time, spending the remainder of the time glancing down at Ferres, who slept in the cot at the end of the bed.

  “A bit of a reach to say they don’t have anything to them, Ferres,” I said, after I remembered the conversation I’d left trailing.

  I heard Ferres shift position.

  “What’s done to the children on the Block is done long before I get involved.”

  And if you weren’t dipping into that particular stock, others would, and nothing would change. If enough people stopped, it would raise questions and would break the unique life cycle of the nobles…

  I frowned.

  Those weren’t my thoughts, but they were conclusions that were in my head, and they were conclusions in my head because we’d had this conversation before.

  “You know, Ferres,” I said. “If you want this to let up, maybe you could start thinking more about your answers. Then I won’t have to hammer you with the questions.”

  “The answers are honest, Sylvester. Keeping me up for hours with lines of questioning won’t mystically make the truth any different than it is.”

  Hours?

  I reached out for the boy with the narrow eyes, then thought twice abo
ut it.

  “Maybe I’m trying to wear you down,” I said.

  “If you are, you’re doing an exceptional job at it,” she said. “I have to ask, to what ends? What do you want from me? Because I’ll supply it. If you’ll stop waking me up every five to fifteen minutes, I’ll give you whatever you want.”

  “I want to know what you’re keeping up your sleeve,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. “Of course.”

  The springs on the cot creaked as she shifted position again.

  It was an odd answer. Of course.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Of course.”

  Blood had transferred to my hand sometime around the point I’d reached out for the girl in the layered clothing. I wiped it on the sheets, and then stared down at the trace streaks of blood.

  Restless, I swung my legs off the bed and stood.

  “And now for the pacing,” Ferres said.

  Wanting to prove her wrong, I didn’t pace, but instead strode across the dark room and into the washroom.

  I stopped in the doorway. Ferres was in the tub, wide awake, staring at me. She wasn’t drugged, either. There were three children huddled under the sink, whispering together, two boys and a girl. Another girl perched in the window, swaddled in a blanket.

  I pushed forward, driven by a desire to avoid being seen hesitating, a desire to look confident and strong. Whether it was Ferres in the other room watching me from the cot, or this Ferres watching me from the tub, I wanted to look as though it was business as usual. I headed straight for the sink, bent down and washed my hands, the moonlight streaming in through the open window striking white tile behind, which helped illuminate the pale bowl of the sink. It made for contrast with the pink ribbons that streamed from my hand to the drain as the blood washed off.

  I washed my face, then straightened up, leaning heavily on the sink.

  My eye traveled to the chain by the toilet, where a number of tools dangled, stuck through the spokes. Scalpels, a small hand saw, a pen, a tin kit that would contain a needle and thread. More littered the side of the tub and the floor around it, sitting in spatters of blood and unspooled coils of bandage.

  It would have been dangerous to leave Ferres unmedicated with so many tools within arm’s reach, yet this wasn’t dangerous at all. Ferres wasn’t sitting up in the tub. She lay within it, eyes only barely capable of peering over the edge. Both of her arms and one of her legs had been surgically removed. Streaks, smears, droplets and aterial sprays of blood painted the porcelain and tile near her.

  The whispering of the children beneath the sink continued, as a constant refrain.

  “What does it take to get you to talk, I wonder?” I asked the Ferres in the tub.

  She closed her eyes, and it was a timid, trembling close, as if she couldn’t quite bring the two eyelids together, because every impulse in her body was keeping her in fight or flight mode and she couldn’t quite bring herself to let her guard down and actually close them tight.

  Then again, a moment later, as her teeth chattered, hard, she screwed her eyes shut, flinching in reaction to something I couldn’t see. The room was warm, not cold.

  It was the Ferres in the other room that answered my question. “What if I’ve already talked? What if I’ve told you and you’re simply forgetting, and we go in this dark, miserable, sleepless circle over and over again?”

  I bent down, touching my hand to a bloody handprint on the tub. It matched my own.

  The bloody fingerprints on a scalpel that had fallen and come to rest beside one of the tub’s clawed feet were my own, as well.

  “I’m pretty good at figuring things out,” I said, to both of them.

  “You are. Your memory might not be that far gone, Sylvester,” the Ferres in the other room said. “But there are things you want to forget, things you hold on to and things you let slip away. Perhaps this is a thing you’re willing or wanting to let slip away.”

  I shifted position, turning around and sitting on the bathtub’s edge. The Ferres in the tub flinched as my hand moved toward her face, stopping at the tub’s edge before gripping it harder than was necessary. The flinch had been as dramatic as if I’d swung a club directly at her, not casually moving my hand within a foot of her head.

  The girl in the window had company, scratching and scraping while making high-pitched noises. It fled under the swaddling blanket as I glanced up at her. Not so dissimilar from the grabbing-soap touch, only it was sight.

  I glanced toward the door, beyond which the Ferres in the cot lay, supposedly shackled to the foot of the bed. I looked the other way, at the Ferres in the tub, who shrunk back from my gaze like a small child that had shirked their homework, only far more grave.

  I looked between the two, smelled the blood in the air, and heard the scritch-scratching of the thing in the window, listened to the three that were huddled under and around the pedestal sink.

  I heard the chattering of teeth beside me, and changed the angle of my head slightly.

  “Please,” the Ferres in the tub whispered, as if she’d read something into the angle of my head.

  I still held the scalpel with the bloody fingerprints on it. I changed its angle so it caught the scant moonlight from the window.

  “Please,” she said, more insistence.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “In exchange for my card? One I might have already tried giving you, only for you to refuse it?” Ferres asked, at the same time she spoke in the reediest whisper, “Please don’t take my other leg. You’ve already taken my hands.”

  I paused, closing my eyes, trying to stop, to take it all in isolation. Which had spoken first? One of them had spoken to fill the silence around when the other had. One had had natural timing in response to my question, the other had been squeezed around it, and I knew I had the ability to decipher that.

  “Could I convince you to let me and my favored students go free?” “Even if they replace the arms, there’s no guarantee they would fix the nerves. I’d have to relearn how to use my hands. Relearn how to create, practice medicine, relearn how to draw, if it’s even possible.”

  “Stop talking,” I said, irritated that they had interrupted my train of thought. “No.”

  They stopped. The whispering had stopped, as had the scratching and the high pitched sounds.

  I wanted to bury my face in my arms. I felt profound loss, and it had been especially pointed since I’d thought about the Lambs at the riverbank, since a little while before it, when I’d imagined someone singing me to sleep and failed to recall who it was.

  I stood, reached for the door, and felt how slick the doorknob was.

  Carefully, I toweled it clean. I washed my hands and the towel at the same time. More pink water down the drain. A slick doorknob and pink water and a bloodstained bed I couldn’t pin down as real or not.

  I remained stone faced, using all the tricks to keep my expression straight. I took deep breaths and as I washed hands and towel-cloth together, I was careful to use measured, controlled motions, so neither of my hands was ever just there, not touching something. So long as I had my hands on my hands, the towel, or the sink, I could use those things to steady them. Ferres, wherever she was, was watching, and I couldn’t give up my upper hand there, if I had it.

  The little girl that was stroking her pet while she sat in the window, the three whispering children by the sink, the boy with the raincoat, and the girl with too many clothes were all watching and they felt hostile.

  I wasn’t sure anything would or could happen with that hostility, but I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t or couldn’t, either. I’d already dealt with one loss of control, and I didn’t like the idea of what might happen if these ones found their way to the driver’s seat. It didn’t feel like they liked me very much at all.

  It was well beyond the point of being very much ready for the Lambs to get back and greet me in their individual ways. I would have settled for one of the Lambs in my head paying a visit. I would
have settled for them coming when called, except the last time—

  I thought back.

  The last three or four times I’d tried, I’d had small disasters. Other things instead. Things that bothered me and left me unsure enough that I didn’t want to push any further. The bloodstain on the bed was one of them. If it was one of them.

  I took a deep breath, and it was hard to get the breath around the lump in my throat. I hung up the towel, then dried my hands, before stepping back into the bedroom. I got myself dressed.

  The whispering and scratching in the other room was getting more intense.

  I looked at the two on the bed. The girl with the layers of clothing smiled at me, and it was oddly motherly, and the feeling that she was dangerous wasn’t any less intense.

  Ferres said something as I headed out the door of the room. I wasn’t sure which one it was, and I didn’t particularly care. I slammed the door shut behind me, as if somehow that could keep the new visitors where they were.

  The slam had drawn attention. Students on the bridge, now coming down the hallway at a run.

  What to say to that?

  “Problem?” the one in the lead asked.

  He was flanked by three others. He was one of ours, I knew. Rebel. Two of the others with him looked like they were Hackthorn students. Defectors, ones who thought it was better to stick with us than to be prisoners. The fourth wore a uniform I didn’t recognize, like a military cadet.

  I smiled, shook my head, and tried to figure out how to respond. “No problem. Underestimated the weight of the door.”

  “I’ve done that myself now and again,” he said. Very light, very easy. “What’s going on?”

  What to say, when I wasn’t sure what the scene inside was?

  Best to be vague.

  “Could you handle the professor while I take a walk? I need her tidied up and in one piece. You can send for help if you’re not comfortable with it.”

  “Yessir,” he said.

  “No need to call me sir,” I said. I gave him a half smile.

  “Yessir,” he said, clearly joking. That got a proper smile from me.