Twig

by wildbow

  The Infante was as evil a man as she’d ever come across, if it was true that he was leveraging plague and black wood to grind away at the Crown States, so it could be left to go fallow for future generations, if he was complicit in the Block.

  She felt almost nauseous, her heart hammering, as if she was facing down any of the worst monsters, and its sights just so happened to be set on her. Except it wasn’t any monster, she was fairly sure. It was the decision. Every passing minute made it worse. Striding away from the street with Mary in tow made it worse still.

  She remembered a desperate Sy calling to Jessie for help, and for an instant, she considered doing that.

  In that, at least, she found a glimmer of an idea. It wasn’t an answer, or even a path to an idea, but it beat doing nothing. She gestured, indicating a building.

  It was, as it turned out, a mostly empty building, guarded only by a skeleton crew. It was government, a local politician’s office, and she didn’t even need to flash her badge to get in. The white coat fluttered around her legs, and it counted for a great deal.

  There was that, at least.

  “It’s early afternoon?” she asked. “Hard to tell with the weather and my nap.”

  “Early afternoon,” Mary said.

  Lillian nodded.

  She made her way through the empty office until she stood at a desk. A telephone sat there.

  Picking up, she pressed the button.

  “Operator speaking,” the voice came across fuzzy, in and out from half second to half second, waxing and waning in time with the cumulative heartbeats of a school of organisms somewhere along the line. “How may I connect you?”

  I want to speak to my father, Lillian thought.

  She set the earpiece down on the hook, and then stared at the phone.

  She couldn’t even say it aloud.

  Everything about her just felt like a morass of things she thought she wanted, sitting in the way of things she wanted but couldn’t wrap her head around.

  She thought through all of the thoughts she had tried to articulate as they’d left the apartment. The difficulty in deciding. The fact that she’d be disappointed in herself and she would be disappointing people like Sy and Mary who had given so very much to help her find her way, if she didn’t carry forward to get her black coat.

  But she would be disappointed if she didn’t go.

  It all contributed to her feeling trapped, panicking as the walls closed in and none offered anything good.

  What would she have said to her father? What would he have said?

  That he was upset that she hadn’t reached out in months. Their relationship had foundered ever since she had learned they had tried to delay her from getting her black coat. If they’d had their way she wouldn’t even have her white coat now.

  “I remember when Sylvester left. He said goodbye to me, and then he grabbed you and left to go fight the Baron.”

  “Yes,” Mary said.

  “I remember he said, if I couldn’t get my black coat, it would kill me,” Lillian said, and her voice was quiet. “I can’t even remember how I worded my response, if I even verbalized it, but I know I wanted so badly to say no. That he was wrong. I wanted to say it and I saw the look on his face and I told him yes instead.”

  “You do, I think,” Mary said. “You want the black coat.”

  “Did, maybe,” Lillian said. “I think I wish I’d gone with him. I wish more of us had gone with him. Maybe we could have done more about the plague, or stopping the black wood. We could have done something about the Duke.”

  “We all did what we thought was right at the time.”

  That was it, wasn’t it? It was the complete wrong answer and it was the complete right answer at the same time.

  What had the Head Doctor said? That she hadn’t looked at the big picture. She’d tunnel-visioned in.

  She’d failed to keep the key points in mind, the most important lessons she’d learned.

  Trusting the other Lambs was one.

  She wanted to go. She might even be able to convince Mary. The questions, the doubts, even if Sylvester was as bad as Jessie said, Sy, Jessie, Helen, Duncan, Ashton, Mary, they could all help find the answer.

  They were so capable when they were together.

  But how to even communicate that to Mary?

  She felt relief and new fear in conjunction, and she knew it was close to what Mary had felt on deciding her direction only to have it threatened. The sick, nauseous, trapped, zoatoan feeling hadn’t left Lillian’s breast since Jessie had been shot, and it was only now abating.

  Which made it feel almost ten times worse as the front door to the building opened wide. Hinges creaked and groaned in the opening, because the hand that pushed the door moved the door at an odd angle, bent the metal and tugged at the screws and nails. The door would deform from the action.

  The Infante was capable of gentleness, and he’d chosen to damage the door.

  He spread his arms, as if to welcome himself more than to greet them, magnanimous.

  “Lambs,” he said, and his voice reverberated through the empty space.

  Automatically, Lillian dropped to her knees. She could feel the floor of the building shake with each heavy footstep of the noble. As she stared at the ground, her eyes were wide.

  “I believe you’ve heard,” the Infante spoke. “This town has fallen to plague and blight.”

  It was a set of statements that played into each other, and they implied two very bad things.

  That the Infante knew about the Duke, for one, and that they’d been communicating with the man.

  And that he’d condemned this town.

  “A tragedy, to be sure. A great loss for the Academy. Every single resident has been lost, slain by circumstance, you Lambs included.”

  Previous Next

  Dog Eat Dog—18.10

  “Sylvester,” the voice was firm, and the speaker was both male and young. “Wake up. We have a lot to do.”

  I draped my arm over my face, so I could shut out the light and block the world. My eyes were damp, as if I’d been crying, yet I’d been firmly asleep.

  “Sylvester.”

  I almost spoke, responding, before I shut my mouth. Speaking was dangerous now. At any point, it could spell disaster, talking to someone who wasn’t there. I had allies I needed to preserve and other allies who could very easily become adversaries if they lost any more faith in me.

  I let my arm fall from my face, and blinked my eyes dry as I could get them. An arm draped across my neck, making breathing and sitting up more difficult than they had to be. I slept in a pile with a number of others, and I couldn’t name very many of them.

  If the hallucinations and twists of the mind were always bad, always hostile, it might have been easier. I could have steeled myself, turned my brain to the task, and found a way forward. I wanted to believe that. But they weren’t always bad or hostile. They supported me, they kept me company, and they kept me warm when I felt cold.

  The sensations were largely imagined, I knew. The touch, the feel of clothing on skin and skin on clothing, of breathing into someone else’s hair.

  I’d slept, at least. Going by the light, it was dawn. That meant… three hours. A step forward from no sleep in the two days prior. We were sleeping in a barn, apparently, in a pile of old blankets draped over a haystack.

  Red Riding Hood lay on one side of me, her breath sour with last night’s alcohol. The girl with the layers of clothes spooned me, her arm the one that had been making it hard to breathe and to rise. There was a redheaded girl and a girl from the Eastern Crown States that I couldn’t place or name, a boy who slept with his back to me, and two delinquents, one of whom had done the body modification thing, with two sets of horns and some scarification of the forehead.

  There were bottles and some food on the ground. I could only remember parts. A whirl of hallucination and dancing, of the Hackthorn experiments and delinquents. I’d wanted to ingratiate mysel
f, to ensure I didn’t burn bridges with the ones most likely to hear me out and not fall back into Academy ways of thinking. I’d had something to drink, but the effects were somewhat muted. It had been a dizzy spiral down into sleep and rest.

  “All we want is a voice,” the boy at the doorway said. He’d been the one to urge me awake.

  A voice?

  The hallucinations wanted a chance to speak?

  He shrugged with one shoulder. He looked angry but didn’t have a seeming target for that anger. The night’s festivities had left him with dark circles under his eyes. He was the one I’d seen on the bed in Ferres’ room, with the yellow raincoat that vaguely resembled a lab coat, like aspiring Doctors sought. He wore an apron beneath it, and I didn’t miss that he’d stashed a knife in that apron. He looked at me, “That’s the plan? You don’t get shut out of things, we get a voice.”

  “And us woebegone fairy tales get our chance to be on top for once,” Red Riding Hood said. She sat up and stretched. “Get some catharsis. Get some revenge.”

  “Yeah, if that’s what it comes to,” the boy in yellow said. “Not that I care, but I’m willing to do what’s necessary to get where we need to be.”

  “Try to sound less like a jerk,” Red said. She looked at me. “The sleeping hero awakes. Good morning.”

  I looked between the two, blinking, trying to sort out the conversation. Was she not-?

  “Hm?” I grunted, quizzical.

  “I said I slept surprisingly well considering this blanket smells like wet dog and old cow. Good morning, sleepy hero.”

  I didn’t want to respond, to get caught up in things. It would be too easy to ask a question and be offered another statement that begged yet another question. These hallucinations were a product of my mind and I was one hundred percent aware that my mind was very good when it came to that sort of thing.

  I almost didn’t want to move. I was surrounded by mostly girls, I was cozy, and I worried that once I started moving I wouldn’t be able to stop.

  The decision was almost made for me. Our conversation had stirred others.

  “It’s too early,” one of the delinquents said.

  “If Sy wants to get up, we get up,” Red responded.

  “Fuck Sy up the bumpipe with a lumpy branch,” the delinquent said.

  I cleared my throat.

  “…With a not-lumpy branch, then.”

  “You’re quiet,” Red said. “Are you mad? Did I bother you, last night?”

  I barely remembered her role in last night. I shook my head.

  “Not up to talking?” she asked. “You’re in pretty good company then.”

  Beside me, the girl with the layers of clothing reached up, using her fingers to tidy my hair.

  I shook my head a little, running my fingers through my hair to fix it, and then stood up, extricating myself from her.

  “We’re up!” Red said, full of good cheer, and that same cheer played into the groans her voice was eliciting.

  I walked straight for the open door to the barn, where a rain barrel was set beside the boy in the raincoat. I saw Bo Peep on a bench by the door. She watched me, eyes large, and drew her feet up from the ground to the edge of the bench, so her knees were tight up against her chest.

  I gave her a wave, even though I didn’t want to gesture, even mundane gestures, for much the same reason I didn’t want to speak. After a moment, she waved back.

  Red reached out for her, as if to muss up that woolly head of hair, and Bo Peep swatted at the hand, far more forcefully than necessary.

  Had I done something? Had Red? Was Peep jealous?

  There were so many questions and I wasn’t sure I had the resources at my disposal to answer them. I felt rested, I was only a little hungry, and yet I’d been awake for a few minutes at most, and I had already faced a number of challenges. The energy and focus I had were things I’d need to ration for the day ahead of me.

  I’d need to save up a number in case I faced a larger crisis. Mutiny, combat, an uprising from the Academy we were holding hostage, another downturn in my mental health, or if the accumulated positive elements of my mental landscape turned on me… if the Lambs appeared, real or not, and if they weren’t friendly or kind, it was something that could leave me in shambles if I wasn’t prepared. I needed to be ready, whatever the day brought.

  The irony was that devoting time and attention to conserving mental and emotional resources was in itself draining those resources.

  The boy in the yellow coat stood at the rain barrel with his hand out, letting the water run off the gutter and into his open hand. I watched as he clenched that fist, squeezing out the water. Beyond him, the sky was mottled with clouds just thin enough to take the blue out of the sky and thicker clouds that looked almost black. The sun had risen just enough that the light came from one direction but didn’t color the sky pink.

  “We can’t let them ignore us, Sylvester,” he said. “It’s what they do. They marginalize, they set up a system, and then they twist it to their favor. Power and control.”

  I plunged my head and shoulders into the water of the rain barrel.

  Cold. I kept my head there, where the rest of the world couldn’t bother me, gripping the edge of the barrel with more and more intensity as the cold crushed in on my head and stabbed through skin to make my skull hurt.

  I withdrew my head and straightened.

  The moment my eyes opened, the boy in the yellow coat was rushing me. I stepped back, and in the doing, I cracked the back of my head against the edge of the door. He grabbed me by the collar.

  “You little shit! You think you can ignore me? Right when I was saying we get a voice!?”

  I raised my hand to grab him, to pull him off me, and in the doing I brought it up to where the rain barrel pressed against the exterior wall of the barn. How to get my hand around that simple obstacle was a thought process that eluded me in the moment. Realizing I had another hand I could use took me a full second.

  As I raised it, Red brushed against my arm, approaching the rain barrel. She put her hands in and flinched. “Lords and ladies, that’s cold! You put your head in?”

  I shrugged. I realized I had one hand raised halfway up, and I’d left it hanging there. The phantom in question was no longer there, no longer grabbing my collar. The snarl in thought process that had made getting my right hand up and out of the space between me and the rain barrel was gone.

  She bent her head down and splashed it, yelping as she came in contact with the water. She had been modified to have facial features reminiscent of a deer, rabbit, or another prey animal, the fur was soft and so fine that the places where fur started and ended weren’t clear, brown-gray fur blending into brown skin with the fine and sparse hairs that all people had. Her eyes were larger than normal, more expressive, and they had almost natural makeup with black skin at the edges of the eyes, the dramatic highlighting of the furrow by the tear duct, and long black eyelashes.

  She’d wanted to go under the knife and she likely would, but she wanted to have an actual, normal face, and working out that particular puzzle out was a task that would take more than a week, if scars were to be avoided and all features were to look normal.

  She smiled as she stepped away from the rain barrel, face beaded with moisture, and she ran her wet hands through mostly dry hair. “Are people going to wonder where you’ve been, hero?”

  I almost kept silent, but I worried my silence would be just as worrisome as my speaking here.

  “Hero?”

  My question coincided with the bulk of the group exiting the barn. Bo Peep and the girl with the layers of clothing among them. I saw the triplets, who I’d first seen under the sink, whispering to one another. Paul was present too, and from the straw stuck to him and to Goldilocks, I was guessing they’d found a secluded corner of the barn to bunk down in.

  I watched a boy of fifteen or so twirl a stick with his fingers. He looked a little more worse for wear, as if he’d had more to d
rink and a few other things beside and he’d woken up with the worst hangover, for the past one hundred days. He contrasted that with very posh clothes and blond hair that he’d slicked back, close to his head. He spooked me a little. He was closer to the whispering triplets than to any of the others, and he set my instincts in overdrive.

  That might have been his role. Putting me on edge, representing something alarming without actually clarifying that something.

  “You saved us,” Red said, smiling.

  “You did,” Paul said. “We owe you a lot.”

  “Mm,” I grunted. I stood back while others took their turn with the water barrel.

  “He’s not talking much,” Red said.

  “Alright,” Paul said, firmly. “Well, we’ve got a few like that. We’ll manage.”

  He seemed to make it a statement, meant for the group, as if to ensure that I wouldn’t be looked down on, or so I wouldn’t run into trouble. Maybe it was self serving on his part, ensuring his group was fine. Maybe it was that he was actually an alright person.

  “We’ll manage, yes, as we get done with all that we need to get done,” spoke the boy in the yellow raincoat.

  “Speaking of, where are we going?” Goldilocks asked. “What’s next on the agenda?”

  “I want to stay,” Bo Peep said.

  “Stay?” Paul asked. “Laze around in a musty barn all day?”

  “We can’t stay,” the boy in the raincoat said. “There’s an agenda.”

  “There’s stuff to do,” I said. I didn’t want to be accused of ignoring the boy in yellow again.

  “There are things that need doing that only we can do,” one of the triplets said, almost echoing the boy in yellow. His voice sounded as though he had a cold, in contrast to the indistinct whispers. “We’re talented. We have to put those talents to use.”

  “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m hungry,” Red said.

  “I’m alright with being hungry,” Bo Peep said, more insistent. “Let’s stay where we are. It’s safe.”