Twig

by wildbow

I clapped a hand on his shoulder as I passed him.

  I realized only as I passed by that the young man in the military uniform was closer to being like the three children under the sink or the girl in the window than to being one of my rebels or any of the Hackthorn defectors.

  There were others here and there. They stood on the bridge, a lot of them children in cadet’s uniforms, a lot of them urchins who could’ve been mice, given the chance.

  Each sighting and each face I couldn’t recognize was another weight on my chest.

  It almost made me tear up when I saw Evette, standing at the archway at the edge of the bridge. She smiled as she saw me.

  The feeling that welled up in my chest was one of fondness, of familiarity. Another Lamb.

  That was her trap, perhaps, to stage things so I had nobody I cared about close at hand, only for me to bump into her and be caught by surprise. It very nearly worked. I’d almost let my guard down. Almost.

  The surge in my chest became all the more hollow as I walked past her without glancing her way.

  I wasn’t sure of the time, but it was late at night. I was summarily surprised to see my rebels gathered. All of the team leaders, plus one or two more that had taken up leadership positions as our numbers had swelled with defectors. None of the defectors carried weapons, but it was an uneasy thing all the same.

  There was someone else present. Another face I didn’t recognize. He was larger than anyone present, though very clearly younger than anyone else here, and he was very much like Evette in how he was put together, only to a whole other level. Evette was unattractive by conventional standards, even ugly, to be unkind. At the same time, something about her was alluring, if one could step away from human standards.

  This fellow who sat across from me was that many times over. It was hard to look at him and awkward not to look at him, given his size and presence. When I sat at one end of the long set of tables that had been pushed together, I was effectively sitting opposite him.

  “Sylvester,” Davis greeted me, as I pulled my chair in.

  Was there something in his tone? Had I somehow caught him off guard?

  Mutiny? No. I didn’t get that vibe. Not exactly.

  “Handling things?” I asked.

  “You’d like how much progress we made,” Mabel chimed in.

  “Yeah, we’re handling things,” Davis said.

  I smiled to myself, even if I didn’t feel a whole lot like smiling. They’d met and were moving forward and they were doing it without me. Because they didn’t trust me.

  I couldn’t even respond to Mabel with certainty because I wasn’t sure she was actually present. What would it look like if I answered someone who wasn’t there, in front of everyone?

  “Need me for anything?” I asked.

  “Don’t think so,” he said. “The people in the south Dorm are making noise like they might play ball. One of them is suggesting we poison them.”

  I had to be so careful about how I talked and who I talked to. Was I absolutely positive he had said that last line?

  “That sounds positive,” I said. I made my expression a little amused.

  “The line of thinking is that if we poison them, something mild that will definitively be in their system, they’ll be loyal, and if things go sour and we lose in what unfolds next, they’ve at least got an excuse for having defected.”

  “When what they want is better food and not worrying about being raided,” Bea said.

  I nodded at that.

  “They’re willing to cooperate under that condition, and Junior thinks we can balance it so it works,” Davis said.

  “South dormitory is mixed boys and girls?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Davis said. “They’re pretty reasonable and haven’t been much trouble.”

  “Good,” I said. “That’s really good. That should be enough bodies to put on a good show?”

  “Should be,” Davis said. “We’re just talking about how we want to tackle the negotiations.”

  Without me.

  Negotiations were something I was fairly good at. Was the idea that I would scare them away?

  But Davis was putting on a show, so I wouldn’t look bad to the people who didn’t know I was being kept out of the loop, and I didn’t gain anything by getting in his way.

  “Sounds good,” I said. “Who’s handling it?”

  “Davis and me,” Mabel said.

  “Perfect,” I said.

  To Davis’ credit, the discussion moved on, and he looked entirely natural with me sitting in. It was almost enough for me to wonder if I’d had the wrong impression on sitting down. Then I saw the wary look, as he glanced my way.

  The people at the other end of the table were talking, while the young boy with the strange features steadily ate from his plate. While the collective focus was elsewhere, Davis leaned closer to me.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I shook my head and smiled, even though I didn’t want to.

  “I’m saying this with full knowledge of how it sounds, but there is something that probably only you can handle.”

  “Ah, I’m being asked to leave?”

  “No,” he said, very quickly. “No. Not at all. But in lab one?”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “It’s just a little out of hand.”

  “I got it,” I said. “All fine.”

  Heads turned as I pushed my chair back, the Beattle rebels glancing my way. I made it look as if nothing was wrong, and gave them a mock salute. “Keep up the good work.”

  Most of the smiles I got back were genuine ones.

  The large boy watched me as I headed to the stairs, taking them two at a time.

  Madness reigned. The inmates were in charge of the asylum. The natural order overturned, with the most troublesome faculty and students in the cages, and the experiments in the hall between them. I could hear the shouts and banging on bars well before I entered the hall.

  Red and Paul were somewhere near the head of this storm. There were students present too, and not all of them were Beattle students, either. A small handful looked like they had been Hackthorn students.

  Taking the leap and ending in too deep? It was easy to do, when they felt the need to prove themselves.

  There were others too. Ones who didn’t feel comfortable with the students upstairs, who didn’t feel safe enough to retreat to their beds at this late hour, and couldn’t quite bring themselves to join this collection of fifty or so. Bo Peep was among them.

  There were shouts as I was recognized, even cheers, and it was a warm thing. Dangerously so.

  I touched Bo Peep’s head as I passed her. I snapped my fingers in the tap code I could remember for the three blind mice.

  Red wore the face of an undefined prey animal, with the eyes of someone that might be alright with killing, and she threw her arms around me, burying her face in my neck. I could smell alcohol. The tighter she squeezed me, the more I felt like I could breathe. She was laughing for reasons I couldn’t decipher, and it was like I was underwater and she was supplying me with much needed air, only it was good humor, transferred from chest to chest.

  Holding me close, rather than shying away.

  As she spun me, as if to pull me into the dizzy, spiraling, crazed festivity of prisoners turned captor, I could see a glimpse of Bo Peep. She’d been paying as much attention as anyone and I could see the concern in her eyes.

  I put hands on Red’s shoulders and I moved her away. I gave her a brief kiss on the forehead to let her know I wasn’t mad, because I didn’t trust myself to speak.

  Goldilocks was at one of the more packed cells, and she held a broom. She was jabbing it through the bars, aiming for bellies, for sides and armpits and groins.

  Someone inside the cage grabbed onto the broom, and immediately, it became a tug of war. Two or three people inside grabbed at the broom, and one of the delinquent Beattle students joined Goldilocks in wrestling for the broom, to pull it back out.

 
I approached, and I grabbed the broom at the middle.

  I turned my attention to the people within. Two faculty members.

  “Let go,” I ordered.

  Their grip already slipping away, they did. As the broom came free, pulled by Goldilocks and the student, I gripped the end. We stopped, now me on one end of the broom and the two of them on the other.

  The picture made everyone more or less stop what they were doing.

  “You’re scaring the little ones,” I said.

  The likes of Goldilocks and Red had the decency to look ashamed. I wasn’t sure about Paul, or about all of the students. The pair let go of the broom, letting me take it into my grip.

  Just needed a little sanity.

  “I gotta ask you to leave them alone,” I said. I looked into the cells. I could see where some were soaking wet. Some were bleeding, if only a little. “We need them, and in an ideal world for everyone involved, they’ll be cooperating. This doesn’t encourage that sort of thing.”

  I could see Paul’s feathers ruffling. So to speak.

  I thought of the little mutiny upstairs as I paced. I approached Bo Peep and she rose to her feet. She hugged me from the side, and I set my hand on her head.

  How did it go? So many of us exited the world in a way similar to how we came into it? Teetering this way and that on unsteady feet, shitting ourselves, not fully at grips with the world?

  I wasn’t about to exit this world the same way I’d come into it. Not as a pet experiment of Academy people who thought they got to make the calls. I wasn’t sure that was the direction this was going, but I didn’t want to take it lying down if it happened, either.

  “I need to know I can trust you if I need you,” I said. Bo Peep clutched me tighter in response to that.

  The words were heavy on my heart, sitting right beside my desperate, unspoken desire. I needed the Lambs back sooner than later, to save me from the forces that were aligning against me, whether it be the ones in my head or the rebellion I’d drawn together.

  Previous Next

  Enemy II (Arc 18)

  “I wonder sometimes, sir, at the darkness and the quiet.”

  It was anything but dark or quiet, Mauer observed. The wind had picked up, the rain came down as the faintest of drizzles, and the dogs were barking. Three of the four other people present were seated around a tall fire that had been given far too much wood. Isaiah, Wil, and Limps. Dalton stood with his arms folded, but would soon resume pacing, his face illuminated by the blazing fire.

  But Isaiah wasn’t talking about the darkness and the silence here. Not in the physical, tangible way.

  “I don’t think He’s silent,” Mauer said.

  “I didn’t mean to insinuate—” Isaiah started. He stopped as Mauer raised a hand.

  “Let me continue. I don’t want to imply you’re wrong to say this, and it’s a good point of discussion. Let me think of how to gracefully word this.”

  It was important to choose words carefully with Isaiah. The man was a competent soldier, a remarkable shot, and if told to march he would march until he was physically unable, and from that point the man would crawl.

  It was possible that if the Academies were to conduct their tests, that they would find something wrong with Isaiah’s head. Mauer himself had spent some time trying to decipher the young man, after discovering how very sensitive he was. Isaiah would kill without remorse, but would sulk for weeks after a stern verbal rebuke. He was one of the more common people to show up when Mauer sat himself by the campfire, perhaps too eager to ask for guidance and too unlikely to seek his own.

  Mauer had met Isaiah’s mother once upon a time. He would have liked to have her counted among his flock, as she was a woman from one of the countries to the south who had participated in the fight against the Crown. She had sought out the meeting, and much of it had been to evaluate Mauer. In exchange, while Mauer hadn’t outright asked, he had been able to verify that Isaiah had been this way since he was small.

  Isaiah was nearly thirty, but he looked very much a boy, here, leaning forward, waiting for his answer like a boy wanting his forty pence in allowance. Though Isaiah’s deep brown skin, very green eyes and chin with a deep-set dimple had any number of young women cooing over him, Mauer knew Isaiah was entirely innocent. He was a peculiar lad.

  “Whether He makes himself heard relates to whether we listen. Again, this isn’t to say you’re wrong, and I know you read your passages, I would never say you don’t try.”

  Isaiah nodded.

  “But hearing Him is a skill. It takes time and practice to learn that you hear him not with your ears, but with your heart,” Mauer said. He touched the fingers of his good hand to the respective body parts. As if to remind him of its presence, his other arm almost vibrated with restless pain. “All of you four have already come that far. Where it gets harder is when we lose sight of how open we are, or if other things stand in the way.”

  The others were listening. Limps was an old man, an infrequent visitor to the campfire since Mauer had picked up the habit, one who rarely talked without being addressed first, and didn’t seem to need much more than a friendly voice late in the evenings. Limps was the hardest to speak to, because he gave so little feedback, outside of a nod. Best to leave him be.

  “Fear. Doubt,” he said. The words were meant for Isaiah. He said them as if he spoke of fear and doubt that might be experienced by the smallest child in the deepest darkness. The next word was for Dalton, spoken to address a man, though Dalton was but an adolescent. “A desire for revenge.”

  Dalton, by contrast, had only been visiting in the last week, six visits in the last seven days, after years of being content to follow orders and keep mostly to himself. He was a teenager, and when the Academy had wrought its mass sterilization, Dalton’s mother had spontaneously aborted the child she was carrying. Dalton had spoken of it to Mauer once, when he had first joined, had shed no tears when describing the blood and the two funerals that had followed. Mauer had his doubts the miscarriage and the death of the mother had to do with the drug, but he wasn’t about to argue that a good soldier’s reasons for joining the war were wrong. He wouldn’t take that belief away from Dalton when Dalton had nothing else.

  The boy had no family but the other soldiers now. He kept company with a few soldiers and camp folk his age and with a fury of a different brand than Mauer knew. The boy didn’t sit, but mostly paced, periodically leaving, only to return and throw something more on the fire. He wanted badly to confess something, Mauer surmised, or to seek advice, but it had been a week and he hadn’t voiced it, whatever it was. Dalton’s anxiety was the reason the fire had been made as large as it had.

  “Other needs and wants,” Mauer continued, and he said it as if it was to nobody in particular, but it was a statement meant to come to rest between two particular ears.

  He didn’t look at her, but he somehow doubted Wil had received the message as intended.

  “Even I feel I need to look inward and double-check myself,” he said. “Think twice about what I’m doing and why, and if I’m serving God.”

  “Yes sir,” Isaiah replied.

  “Would you like some tea, reverend?” Wil asked. The timing of the request and her blithe tone suggested she wasn’t taking his hint. She didn’t want to take his hint.

  He deigned to nod. “Just bring me the hot water. And please, again, I must insist you not call me that.”

  “Yes, o’course,” she said, in a way that suggested it had gone in one ear and out the other. She went around the group, offering tea. Only Limps accepted the offer.

  She dressed like a soldier, she followed orders, she knew her guns, and she called herself Wil rather than Wilma. Mauer didn’t welcome vulgar talk in his immediate vicinity, but he knew soldiers were soldiers and he had overheard men talking about willing cunts and wet holes, trying to bait something out of Wil, and they had been effectively silenced when she had gone on at length about twitching rods with eager dew at
the tips, about hardness meeting softness and, turning their words back on them, her own ‘wet cunt’. He’d had words with her after that, about how she was conveying herself, how he expected more of her, yet as effective as his words usually were in giving guidance and direction, he worried she heard only what she wanted to hear.

  It was almost as if she wanted to be dressed down, as if her insolence begged it, because it was attention. In the midst of it she took his words and gave them an entirely new tone and order, taking away their power.

  Wants and needs.

  What was more, she straddled a line of propriety and masculinity with very clear distinctions that likely made sense only to her. She played at a male vernacular, but when she spoke her voice was soft wherever she could get away with soft, and whether soft or delivered as an order or insult, she spoke with an especially country Crown accent of a sort normally heard an ocean away. She normally wore her uniform clothes, but given a chance she would flaunt a dress, often flaunting at him in particular.

  He tried to let her be, to not feed her the attention, but she often appeared at these campfires, at an hour when many had gone to bed. The pain of his arm often kept him awake, and rather than lie awake, staring at the walls of his tent, he came out here, to listen to those who needed listening to, to offer prayer and reassuring words. Wil turned up almost as often as Isaiah did.

  She was gone for the moment, but she would soon be back with the tea.

  Isaiah spoke up, “Is it possible that, given where we stand, it’s harder to hear Him than it was?”

  “Where do you think we stand, Isaiah?” Mauer asked.

  “I worry about the plague, and this blighting, which is almost a plague unto itself, sir. I feel as though we’ve meddled too much in His creation, played at being God, and He’s pulled away from us.”

  “No, Isaiah,” Mauer spoke. “Not so. It is them who meddled, them who played at being God. You and I, Dalton, Limps, all of us, we’re fighting. We’re fighting on His behalf.”

  The words felt hollow on his own lips, but he could see the effect that they had for Dalton and for Isaiah: Dalton’s anxiety eased and Isaiah seemed to find strength and direction in that.