Twig

by wildbow

  Had it been Helen? She had always liked hair, combing it, the beauty of it, the aesthetic, young Helen being gentle one moment and chewing on his scalp or ear the next.

  Younger Gordon, in the earliest days, after his appointments when the pain was still a thing he hadn’t gotten used to, back when girls had been ick and Gordon had been a pal he confided in and trusted in moments of weakness.

  The opposite end of things, timeline-wise. Jessie? Fingers combing through his hair as if she could make it make sense, only for it to spring back up, wild and uncooperative? The intimacy between them had always been a thing they were constantly figuring out. He’d had relationships and flirtations with others, and yet the one with Jessie had felt the most like a real one, finding a faltering, eager, quiet way forward, not teasing but clutching for someone with need, when the rest of the world wasn’t looking.

  Had it been Mary, consoling him? The feel of fingernails against his scalp was a thing that suited her, like knives or crisp lace against tender skin.

  It might have been her, as he tried to place the sensation. She had been with him when he had lost Jamie.

  Jamie. There was a sharp pang at the fact that he was surrounded by people he had killed or played a role in killing but that Jamie wasn’t present.

  It felt so very unfair, especially given it was the one that mattered most.

  The sensation of moving from the line of thinking of the Lambs to his present circumstance resembled stepping from a doze in a warm bed onto a cold floor, from soft vagueness to reality.

  He wasn’t standing where he had been. He’d followed one of the guards. The teenager had walked a distance away from his friends, and was unzipping his pants.

  “Almost, Sub Rosa,” the Snake Charmer said. “Almost got in. But that’s what you’re good at, isn’t it?”

  Sylvester felt cold, empty. Loneliness gripped him.

  It would be so easy to act automatically. Dredging up and making up memories would be some consolation. He could live in fragmented sensations and ideas. Sub Rosa could give him that.

  She was security and insecurity, he knew.

  The guard was watering the weeds, at the point where the reclining lady’s leg merged into the earth. He sang.

  “We know what you’re doing, Liam!” another of the guards called out. “Don’t have to sing to cover up the sound!”

  The guard sang louder in response, prompting some laughs from the others.

  Sylvester was very still, random muscles cramping and twitching spasmodically, his bones aching where he rested his weight on them.

  The crowd around him had fallen silent, but for the Ghosts, who were free to communicate, unheard and encoded so only the other Ghosts heard them. It was a choir of girls who existed in odd sets, like bouquets of flowers, each with one redhead, one blonde, one Eastern girl, and so on, all wearing white dresses. They sang in a harmony of cricket and cicada chirps, nail-on-blackboard scratches and knife-on-plate squeals.

  The sound was unpleasant, and even though the day was nice enough, Sylvester was weary enough that the damp of the periodic drizzling rain and the wind combined to made him outright cold. The only Warmth was Sub Rosa’s body pressed against his back, with all its ridges and folds. The sensation of a hand running through his hair was almost hypnotic.

  “Go,” the Snake Charmer hissed. Sub Rosa gestured the same. Pushed forward and away, Sylvester followed the instruction.

  Sylvester was aware that the Falconer and the Devil flanked him. He knew the pain and danger they posed. Lethality on one hand, torture and agony on the other.

  He couldn’t stop without getting caught, and he couldn’t get caught, but in moving forward, he couldn’t sort out his thoughts enough to decide on a plan of action that wasn’t doing what the Falconer and the Devil wanted him to do.

  He thought back. The Snake Charmer. Sub Rosa. They wanted clothes, goals, security.

  It was Sub Rosa’s methodology that was in his mind as he approached his target. He reached for the back of the boy’s head and hesitated.

  “…and she drank, she drank, her wonderful compound, and now she joins in on all the gaaaaames!”

  At the next pause, Sylvester grabbed the back of Liam-the-guard’s head, using the forward momentum of his approach in conjunction with an arm-thrust to drive the young man’s face into the wall in front of him.

  The Ghosts changed their tune. Sylvester matched it, raising his voice, mimicking the boys’ accent, with something of a drunken drawl, to help mask things and play things up. “And old Sterling, he thought he was a king!”

  He smashed Liam’s face into the wall once again.

  “There are places that verse’ll get you killed, Liam!” one of the other guards called out.

  He ratcheted up the volume, “and so they’d help him home from town!”

  Liam reached up, fumbling for his arm. He struck Liam’s face against the wall again for good measure. He tried to keep Liam from slumping down into a puddle of his own piss. “He drank, he drank, her wonderful compound…”

  “Your singing needs work, my man! You’re getting worse by the line!”

  “…and now he wears the Crowwwwn!” Sylvester finished.

  He dropped to squat on his heels, and the Devil dropped to a position mirroring his.

  “Clothes, like the Snake Charmer said,” Sylvester said. Nobody liked to be ignored, but so long as he was doing what one of the others said, the Devil could hardly complain.

  He helped Liam out of his makeshift uniform jacket. All of the guards were wearing dark jackets and dark slacks with caps, some with Beattle crests at their breast, scavenged from uniforms hardly anyone wore anymore. He already wore slacks like Liam’s. The boots didn’t match, but boots didn’t matter.

  Sylvester donned the jacket.

  “You finally done making our ears bleed with that singing?” one of the others asked.

  Straightening, he put the cap on, pulling it on down low.

  Liam had a rifle propped up against the wall, and Sylvester borrowed it.

  He walked with a cocky swagger as he headed in the direction of the others.

  “You’re terrible, man,” the others said, as he rounded the corner, joking. “I’d listen to the sound of you pissing for the next week straight if it meant not having to listen to you for another minute.”

  “Maybe you like the sound, Matty.”

  They were smoking, barely paying attention to their friend as he returned.

  The clothes and the mundane nature of the moment meant that Sylvester had the freedom to draw just another two or three paces closer than he might have otherwise.

  He reversed the grip on the rifle and swung it by the barrel. The stock met one boy’s face on the first swing, sending a cigarette flying, and met the next boy’s throat.

  The stitched perked up at the violence. Slow to react, slow to move, it was big, it was strong, and it was dangerous. It shifted its stance.

  He hadn’t hit the one in the face very hard, all considered. Had that one reached out or tried to stop him, it might have complicated things. But he’d landed one blow to the other’s windpipe, and in the moment, his friend felt the need to tend to that.

  Sub Rosa was already standing by the gate.

  The Stitched lunged.

  Fast, strong, athletic. It wasn’t one to tire, and it wasn’t one to move with care for how it hurt itself in the course of its offense. Legs twisted in odd ways, and it had an odd grace in that, twisting on one leg and over-stressing one knee as it hurled itself at Sylvester, following him as he tried to duck around.

  Sylvester threw himself back against the wall.

  “Stitched!” Sylvester barked the order. “Obey me! The codeword is Gallows!”

  The stitched ignored him. He had to spin and throw himself out of the way as the thing threw a heavy punch.

  He caught a glimpse of Sub Rosa gesturing.

  “I know,” he said. “It was worth a try.”

 
; The damage to his body and his weariness made this simple encounter that much more dangerous.

  “They changed the words,” Percy observed.

  “I know!”

  The spark of anger and irritation fed into his next movement, driving him a hair further. The great bludgeon of dead flesh that flew past his head might have clipped him, had he not moved that extra hair.

  The stitched grunted, then adjusted its footing, getting ready to charge once again.

  “Stick to the plan,” the Snake Charmer said. Behind him, others were already heading up and into the Academy through the now-unguarded gates

  Sylvester did. He changed direction, and ran for the gate.

  Changes in behavior and pattern went a long way. The stitched hesitated.

  “Go after him!” one of the guards shouted.

  Too late. Sylvester passed through the gate and threw himself against a heavy door, hauling it closed. The gate was wide enough for a carriage to pass through, and the gates were large enough that they were meant to stop a runaway carriage that rolled down the sloping path to the Academy.

  The stitched brute slammed into it, and Sylvester bounced away from the door, sprawling on the ground.

  But the impact had been such that the gate was thrown back, rebounded off of the wall with a loud crack, and now swung shut again. Sylvester found his footing and helped it along. This time it hit the stitched and made it stagger back.

  He closed the gate fully and placed the rifle through the handles, buying himself time to get the actual lock lowered into place.

  Sub Rosa was waiting in one of the side tunnels to an area that smelled like a stable. He took that direction.

  “They’re not going to like that,” Percy said.

  “They won’t like much about what we do,” a young girl with sharp teeth said. The girl from the whispering triplets. Melancholy. “We’re not one of them. You knew it the moment you realized about the mutiny, Sylvester. We’re different, we’re a solution for their problems on one day and a problem for them to fix on another. It’s a sad fact that when humans divide things into us and them, we don’t end up part of the ‘us’.”

  Sylvester shook his head. “If any of you guys are going to earn the coveted spots in my head that I normally keep reserved for the Lambs, I really need you to be more constructive. A lot more constructive.”

  “I am being constructive,” Melancholy said. “Paul Parrot would agree with what I’m saying. Red might too. We have allies, and there’s a lot we can do with them. Capitalizing on that means recognizing that we aren’t a person. The Beattle rebels certainly don’t see you as a person. We let the Sylvester mask slip and now we’re a monster to them, a thing that wears the mask of a young man. We’re a thing to be pitied, a murderer, a strategic force of nature, chaos incarnate, a manipulator, a hero, a villain, or a target, and the label in question depends on who’s being asked. We will never, ever, ever truly win out over the label. We will never truly sell them on the full Sylvester package.”

  “We don’t have the resources to maintain the full Sylvester package,” Percy observed.

  “Not sold on the reductionist approach,” Sylvester said. “Seems sorta convenient for all of you and terrible for me. Food, clothes, getting into a better position? Sure. I’ll do that. I’ll bully my way into that. But I’m not about to buy your pitch.”

  “There’s a benefit to it,” Cynthia said. She was a little girl now, half of her face burned. She had been one of the last to show up that he could name.

  “Oh, Cynthia, how grand,” Sylvester said, sarcastic. “Yes, I’m going to take advice from someone who managed to start out as a major figure in a thriving, widespread clandestine organization and managed to whittle herself down into a shadow of her former self. Let’s see, let me think, you’re all about rage, a need to attack anyone, even those who could be allies, and desperation. Do tell me all about the benefits of this course of action.”

  She fell in step beside him. They weren’t on the main road that led through the interior of the Academy to the ground floor of the main building, but they were moving in parallel to it, stables and kennels on one side, the periodic warbeast snorting and huffing in response to their presence.

  Cynthia’s hand grasped his shirt. He hunched over, hauled forward, as she brought her face closer to him, her cheekbone brushing his. All he could see of her was the burned part.

  She murmured in his ear, “You can’t do what you want to do alone. You’re not functional without.”

  “No kidding,” Sylvester said.

  “And when you’re you, Sylvester, what the hell happens, do you remember? Jamie the first? Lillian? Multiple times? Jamie the second, in West Corinth? Mabel?”

  Sylvester’s retort died in his throat.

  His head dropped a fraction more. “Touché.”

  “When you walk your unique walk, you either end up alone or you end up in the company of a desperate few. That’s what I know. That’s the unique fucking perspective I can offer.”

  Sylvester nodded.

  “Cynthia had her soldiers,” Percy said. “We have your experiments. We know what to say to get them on our side.”

  “We recruit them, in service of goals writ large and small,” the Snake Charmer said. “Melancholy was right. Paul Parrot would remove anyone we named. If we wanted a girl to hold close, Red would oblige. There are rebels, delinquents, and freed experiments who only want to see us put something great into action. They’re talking about the fact that we carved Ferres up and they believe it’s right, or they’re sitting in the background, believing it without the opportunity to say it.”

  “Hold on a second,” Sylvester said. He was listening to them, but he didn’t have the resources to pick everything apart, to challenge.

  They didn’t hold on. Voices overlapped.

  “I’m tired,” Sylvester said, and his voice was nearly drowned out.

  The quiet of the building was interrupted by the noise of tromping boots.

  “This would be so much easier if you guys were disagreeing more with each other,” Sylvester said.

  “They’ve been patrolling to find us, and even with our talents they’re getting close,” the Snake Charmer said. “We haven’t been able to sleep, we’re hungry, our mind is tired because you’re keeping your guard up, keeping us from practicing what we preach. As our resources dwindle, theirs consolidate. We know full well that we have two options. The first is to surrender right now, become an experiment under the thumb of people in lab coats. They’ll have good reasons, we harbor reasons to surrender. But all the same, if you were really willing to settle for that, you wouldn’t have left the Academy in the first place.”

  “You can’t surrender any more than I could,” Mauer’s voice broke through the noise. He had always been good when it came to making himself heard.

  Sylvester nodded, numb.

  “Any more than any of us could,” Mauer said. “Very few of the people you’ve encountered were the type to give up. Life struggles on. It persists, it adapts, and it gets dragged down into God’s Hell fighting every step of the way.”

  Sylvester was dimly aware of the technique. To hammer the enemy repeatedly with strong arguments alternating with the weak, and to save the key argument for the last.

  Mauer, naturally, was the key argument.

  “Fight, Sylvester. You’re trying so desperately hard to convince yourself not to, and you’re not finding good reasons.”

  Sylvester didn’t have a response. His eyes returned to looking at everything and nothing.

  “If you wait, if you don’t do it of your own volition, then you’ll end up in a corner, we’ll take action on our own out of necessity by rule of fight or flight, and nobody will like the end result of that,” Mauer said.

  Sylvester nodded.

  He knew what he had to do.

  He moved through the Academy by the back hallways, by ladders and stairwells reserved for faculty and other employees. There were peo
ple he ran into here and there, and he tried not to focus too much on the fact that he didn’t remember how he’d dealt with them, only minutes after he had run into them.

  There wasn’t much traffic on the arm, that led from the shoulder of the academy to the administration quarters. But he was a distinctive silhouette, even wearing the guard’s improvised uniform.

  “They’re coming,” Cynthia said. “Don’t go giving up now.”

  “He isn’t,” the Snake Charmer said. “We aren’t.”

  Sylvester went to his own room, and washed off the worst of the blood. He collected clothes at Percy’s instruction, discarding the guard’s jacket at Cynthia’s, and exited the room while still buttoning up his shirt.

  A squad of soldiers waited on the bridge as he made his return trip.

  Davis was among them.

  “Sylvester.”

  “Sorry for the mess,” Sylvester said.

  “Jessie said to be prepared and to keep an eye on you,” Davis said. “I could’ve done better on both counts.”

  “I don’t think you can be blamed,” Sylvester said, as Sub Rosa stroked his hair.

  “I’m blaming myself,” Davis said.

  “I didn’t even expect things to fall apart this badly,” Sylvester said. “If I can’t anticipate it, how could you?”

  “Right,” Davis said.

  “Not saying you didn’t help it along, what with the whole mutiny and all…”

  “Wait, mutiny?”

  “You might say you don’t like being in charge, but it’s a power trip, isn’t it? And it’s familiar, the Academy running the show—”

  “Sylvester, no. That wasn’t it at all.”

  “—screen mad old Sylvester out, take charge?”

  “You asked me to. You asked me to lie to you and pretend that everything was quiet and calm, and keep the exciting stuff off your radar, so you wouldn’t undertake any risky stunts.”

  “Maybe,” Sylvester said. “Maybe you know that’s exactly what to say to make me doubt myself.”

  “Sylvester,” Gordon Two cut in.

  “Hi Gordeux,” Sylvester said.

  “That’s not my name, but yeah, sure, hi. Listen, speaking as a guy who really didn’t join to wage a war against any outside enemy, let alone an inside one… can we take it easy? The Lambs will be back any time.”