Twig

by wildbow

  “I think you’re losing sight of what you came here for.”

  “…This,” she whispered. “This would be the sort of instance where I could give someone a happy ending.”

  “Except you came here to have a conversation with me, you said. You’re talking in woulds and coulds.”

  She laid her head down across his chest, and she pulled his arm down and in front of her, so the length of his forearm was parallel to her body, hugged close to her, his wrist between her breasts. The revolver was close to her chin, but his hand was too mangled to do anything particular with it and the angle of the shot was such that it put his own head in the line of fire.

  “My passions are reserved for God and for justice,” he said. “For seeing this greater battle through. I’d say I’m sorry to disappoint, but in this instance I’m really quite glad.”

  “I’m interested in the battle too,” she said. “Hot blood pumping, muscles tense, the blood, the screaming. It’s all very lively and interesting.”

  Again, inflection and emphasis. She wasn’t talking about seduction, she hadn’t been from the start, aside from the teases. That left him to wonder what she meant by ‘first time’, when he had little doubt she meant violence.

  Execution with an emotional component?

  “Again,” he said. “We’re getting distracted from what you came here for. A conversation?”

  “A conversation,” she said. “We would like your assistance. We’re staging something.”

  “What are you staging?”

  “If I told you, you’d interfere. We might welcome some of your involvement and interference, but not at this stage of things. For now, we want to get their attention. We have to be indirect. We want you to allow one of your own to get captured and it’ll need to be someone they know you’d miss.”

  “To what end?”

  “They’ll confess that you knew about a girl that had attained immortality in Lugh. That the Baron took her with the intent of marrying her and obtaining her secret, and she fled when the Baron died.”

  These things were truth. He had paid attention to that whole proceeding. He just couldn’t see where it all led.

  “What do I get out of this?”

  “A victory. A true, honest to goodness victory, Reverend. And it will be one that has implications for the world.”

  “A hollow victory, if it’s one I can’t even see the shape of.”

  “It’s a victory, and whether it’s hollow or not doesn’t matter. Unless you’re about to tell me that self-aggrandizement or pride take higher priority than besting them?”

  “No. I won’t say that.”

  “We’re prepared to leave you the secret of the Block,” she said. “As an incentive.”

  To say that she now had his full attention would have been disingenuous, as she’d already had it as part and parcel of having his arms in her deathgrip. Still, he hadn’t expected this.

  This was everything he wanted, vague and unfulfilled as it was.

  “I could be convinced,” he admitted.

  “Yeah?” she asked, raising her head. In that instance, she sounded very much like the little girl again, and not the young lady of eighteen to twenty years of age.

  “Tell me what I need to do, exactly.”

  “You sacrifice your pawn, someone you can trust to endure under pressure. Someone who will experience torture and drugs and will convey only what we need you to convey, either because they’re that capable or because you can manipulate them to that degree. They’ll tell the Crown that you, the Baron, and others were interested in a miss Candida Gage, who was an imperfect immortal. She’s in Brichton. They’ll look there and they’ll follow the trail elsewhere, finding their way into our trap.”

  “They’re not gullible.”

  “But this will be very convincing,” Helen said.

  He considered. He weighed the merits.

  “I’ll want to be in touch.”

  “We’ll arrange that,” she said.

  He had plans in the works, but they were hollow ones. Gathered students, projects, wars on multiple fronts, targeted assassinations and kidnappings. The problem was that so much of the Academy had condensed. There were more resources in a smaller area, and it made doing the things he wanted to do that much harder.

  It was a choice between this vague errand or a hopeless series of battles before his army crumbled in entirety. The sacrifice of one of his people versus committing the entirety of them to a losing fight.

  “Alright,” he said.

  “It can’t be you that you send, you know. They’d be suspicious, and you’d draw more scrutiny than the message did.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “Perfect.”

  That statement uttered, she remained where she was.

  Somewhere outside in the camp, someone was rising early. Likely one of the cooks. They scuffed the dirt with their footsteps.

  “However,” Helen said. “We might have run into a difficulty.”

  “If you’re concerned I’ll stab or shoot you the moment you let go, then we’re starting this arrangement on a bad foot. There needs to be a modicum of trust,” he said. He was careful not to point out his injured hand.

  “No,” Helen said. “I’m having trouble letting go.”

  “What brand of trouble?”

  “My mind accepts that I need to,” she said. “My body doesn’t agree.”

  Her breathing had changed.

  “I’m afraid I may break you, despite everything,” she said. “I was worried about this.”

  “This seems like an oversight,” Mauer observed, though he was more nervous than he had been since the beginning. Was this everything coming full circle from where it had started in Radham?

  “It wasn’t an oversight. It was very sighted,” Helen said. “We knew I might have this difficulty.”

  “A grave mistake then,” Mauer said.

  “There were no good answers. Had it been Sylvester you wouldn’t have heard him out. Had it been Jessie, you—”

  “Who?”

  “Jamie. Had it been Jamie, there would have been difficulty communicating. You occupy different wavelengths.”

  Ah, the one who had read off the list of the supposed dead, to destabilize his hold on the mob in Radham.

  “And putting Jamie-Jessie here raises its own questions, because then it’s either Sylvester visiting the others, and that isn’t about to go well, or it’s me visiting them, and I’m not so sure I’m equipped to visit them and then leave again, or to say everything that needs saying. And if any of us stayed behind—”

  “You’re rambling. Not that I particularly mind knowing just what you’re all up to, but I’d rather address this crisis of yours.”

  She flinched. “Please choose your words carefully. The way you said crisis, it almost made me snap.”

  Words?

  “What words are a problem?”

  “The word problem is. So is crisis. Strong words, words that mean trouble or bad things. Threats and provocations.”

  Were his words, a gift that God had given him, going to now be his end?

  He fell silent, waiting. She was breathing very rapidly now.

  “I’m trying to be still,” she said, her voice soft. “I’m trying to be easy, to be quiet, when every inch of me is wanting culmination, in its bloody, bent glory.”

  Mauer waited, tense. He wasn’t sure those last three words were the sort of words she should be saying. Challenging her might have ended up being the provocation that made her ‘snap’.

  “Mr. Reverend Mauer,” Helen whispered.

  “That might be one too many titles,” he said.

  “I need you to do something for me,” she said.

  “I should be able to oblige,” he said, picking words to sound nonthreatening. It wasn’t as if he was in a position to refuse.

  He was very cognizant of the fact that not long after the cooks were awake, others would check on him,
or would expect him to be up and about. He didn’t sleep much by habit, and his staying in bed would make others worry. It would make them knock, and intrusion was entirely something that might provoke this Lamb.

  “As I ease down, I need you to be still,” she said. “I’m going to let go of you, and I need you not to do anything. Don’t flex a muscle, don’t move too quickly, don’t move slowly. If you do anything, I might react reflexively, and then you’re broken up into useless little bits, or we’re at the very least right back where we started.”

  “You need me to be still?”

  “I need you to relax, utterly, so I can follow your lead. I need you to stop fighting.”

  Stop fighting.

  He hadn’t done that in a very, very long time now.

  “I don’t know if I’m capable,” he said, modulating his tone to sound nonthreatening.

  “Your life may depend on it, sir,” she said.

  “If I was capable of it, I would have done so at some point in the last decade, and I would have… given up entirely,” he said. He was still trying to avoid aggressive words, like fighting, war, and ‘died’. “I wouldn’t be here before you now.”

  “That does pose a problem,” she said. “I’m very terribly sorry.”

  Her hands were trembling as she held him.

  “We’ll try,” he decided, knowing that it was a task they were bound to fail together.

  “Trying,” she said.

  It was a glacial process, and one that was hard to measure, as she didn’t relax progressively or in a particular order. It was more as if she was holding steady, trying not to act, and gradually, muscle by muscle, she released her hold.

  The moment he had a meaningful chance, he would act. He wasn’t capable of proper surrender, not like this.

  He would act.

  She relaxed gradually, and the only sound was his own breathing and hers. She panted, and the pants grew further in between.

  If she took her weight off of him, he would act. If she let go of an arm, he would act.

  “I’m having difficulty moving further,” she said.

  And others were waking up throughout the camp. Was it closer to six now? Six thirty?

  How long before a loud sound spooked his foe here and drove her to act, explosively constricting around him, twisting his limbs out of sockets or snapping his neck?

  She’d stopped, and she was frozen now, so unwilling to move a muscle that she wasn’t willing to breathe.

  He still had the pistol in his ruined hand. What had been his good hand, something absolutely vital to him. His index finger was near the trigger, but the cartilage at the knuckle had been torn to shreds, and the finger might have been broken in one or two places. It wasn’t mechanically possible to pull that trigger.

  His other hand was empty, and she had covered that base too thoroughly.

  “Can I move my good arm?” he asked. “Just a small amount? It’s cramping.”

  He watched her eyes move. He watched her eyes stop short of looking directly at hand or gun.

  If he said gun, she would act, he suspected. If she looked at a gun, it might be the threat that activated her.

  “Yes,” she said.

  She knew about the gun. She knew what he had in play.

  His arm moved. He made it a few inches before she tensed up in multiple places.

  “Just a small amount more?” he asked.

  “A small amount.”

  Again, she tensed. He sensed the threat of it, read it in her.

  She couldn’t bring herself to let go, and he couldn’t move any further, nor could he surrender to help her in letting go.

  They remained like that for what might have been a minute.

  “Move your shoulder,” she said.

  “My shoulder?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  Like that, he brought his shoulder forward a fraction, drawing it inward. It was a movement on his part, and it drew a reaction from her, instinctive, when she was a small fraction of reason in a larger sea of something more dangerous.

  She moved her hands, seizing his shoulder hard enough to hurt.

  She’d let go of his arm, and he was free to aim the revolver. He didn’t.

  Instead, Mauer moved the revolver as if he was throwing a punch. He struck her in the shoulder, the angle of the strike meant to catch his own ruined finger to drag it against her bare skin, to pull at the trigger, to shoot.

  In the wooden hut formed from an overturned ship hull, the sound was impossibly loud. The pain of his finger was mild compared to what he was used to, but it distracted, took his mind out of the moment.

  He’d caught her across collarbone and upper arm with the bullet, and she’d released her grip on his other arm. He used the strength it afforded to reach out and grab her—and when she didn’t let go he aimed and used the revolver again, in much the same fashion, grabbing and pulling on the broken finger with his bad hand.

  She tumbled to the dirt floor of his quarters around the same time his people arrived en masse, having heard the shots.

  He stood, shaky, as they entered. His lieutenants, his best soldiers, all armed. The real Wil, and Dalton, and Isaiah and Limps.

  “Put the guns away,” he said.

  “I’m really not enjoying getting shot so much,” Helen said, from where she lay on the ground. She had a bullet through one wrist and another bullet through collarbone and upper arm.

  Mauer remained silent.

  It would be so easy to order her death. It would have been so safe.

  “Can you make your way back on your own?”

  “I can,” Helen said. Slowly, she picked herself up. She had to do it without much use of her arms.

  “Let her pass,” he instructed his people, and he made sure through tone that there was no room for argument.

  The crowd parted.

  He watched as she walked away.

  God had spoken to him through the mouth of a primordial, so to speak.

  It said something that his prayers were answered by a monster with the appearance of an angel, this time. It said something that he was being asked to sacrifice one of his own.

  He wasn’t sure it was something positive, but he wasn’t about to quibble.

  Previous Next

  Lamb II (Arc 18)

  Lillian stood from the bed, putting the bulk of it between her and Mary. She approached Jessie, only for Jessie to raise one hand, motioning for her to stop.

  Stopping, heart pounding, she turned to Mary. “What’s wrong with you!?”

  A part of her actually, honestly wondered if Mary would turn that gun on her. Mary had started out as an enemy agent, had then changed hands to the Academy for several months, as she was vetted and leashed, and she’d never really moved to the same tune as the other Lambs when it came to doubting their employers.

  It was a fleeting thought, one that ran in contradiction to the ‘we need more time’ line, but as it crossed her mind, she felt her heart as though it was a zoataoan life form, all frantically grasping limbs that simultaneously around the idea and recoiled from it. What if Mary was always on their side?

  No. But just as fleeting, just as heart-wrenching in its desperate, wild way, was the idea that Mary might have been genuine all along, but still be a trap, with a passcode phrase made to work in the event that the right criteria were met.

  Neither was right or fair… but neither was shooting Jessie.

  Jessie stood, leaning against the doorframe, one hand to the gouge in her leg. Lillian imagined the vascularity indexes, the blood maps and tried to use the shorthand to calculate Jessie’s height and body weight.

  “Let me bandage it,” she said. “You’re not in danger, but—”

  Jessie was already shaking her head. “No time.”

  “Exactly,” Mary said. She was still sitting on the bed, still had the gun in hand.

  “I’ll be around,” Jessie said. “There’s blood in the water, so I guess I’ll be dodging the sniff
ers.”

  “There are three,” Lillian volunteered. “Sniffers, I mean. I saw two of them getting fed, and usually it’s—”

  “Two at home and one on the hunt,” Jessie said.

  “Yeah,” Lillian said.

  “Lillian, I know I’m the odd Lamb out in a lot of ways,” Jessie said. “You could argue I’ve spent less time with the Lambs as a group than anyone. If people wanted to argue my attachment to the group isn’t as cemented in stone as it should be, I don’t think I could argue it. But you visited me a lot when I was…”

  Jessie floundered at that.

  “Blank and relearning?” Lillian offered.

  “Yes,” Jessie said. “I’d like to think we got along. We talked a lot.”

  “We did. Yes on both counts.”

  “You brought me books and articles and things to proofread—”

  Jessie paused as Mary stood from the bed, still holding the gun. One hand still to her bleeding leg, Jessie glanced over her shoulder to check the coast was clear.

  “…I’m in a weird place,” Jessie said. “I want so badly to say that I was cheering for you as much as anyone when it came to you getting your white and black coats, but I’m against unfair competition. Sy, Mary.”

  Lillian nodded.

  “I think back to that period when I was empty, blank, and lost, when I try to imagine you possibly giving up almost everything that makes you you. I empathize, I really do. I know it’s an idea that deserves a lot of time. But that’s time I don’t think we have. I don’t want to guilt you, but…”

  Lillian could finish the thought. “Sy.”

  “If you think back and think of Sylvester when he was struggling the most,” Jessie said. “I want to tell you that his good days these days are like that.”

  Lillian swallowed. “Yeah.”

  “Except I’d be lying,” Jessie said. “Because even on a good day today, he’s even worse than any bad day a year or two ago.”

  “I don’t think you saw him after he lost Jamie, Jessie,” Lillian ventured.

  “I saw him when he lost you,” Jessie said.

  Then Jessie looked over her shoulder and stepped backward through the door, before moving out of sight.

  That’s not fair, Lillian thought.

  None of this is fair.