Twig

by wildbow

  “That’s a really tired argument,” Sylvester said. “One I’ve read in books. Or my bookworm friend said they were in books. I’m not a super avid reader.”

  “As arguments go, I think it stands,” Mabel said.

  “I hate this girl so much,” Red said, from the other side of the room. “She acted sweet, like it mattered, while she was so brutal and unkind when it counted. She just did it to look better, not because she ever cared. When nobody was looking, she was lazy, rough, more inhuman than anything we have in the stables. I want her to look as ugly on the outside as she is on the inside.”

  “There’s justice in that,” Sylvester said.

  “I don’t agree,” Davis said, “and that’s beside the point, either way. We need her. At this stage, we could get her to cooperate, I think. We can do what we need to do for the greater plan.”

  “And you, Betty? What say you? Favored student of Professor Ferres, on the fast track to your black coat, and you probably would have gotten it. You were complicit in the block, you told me it was… well, I don’t remember the particulars of what you told me.”

  “The children asked for it. I mean—I mean,” Betty stuttered. “They gave permission. They knew what it involved.”

  Sylvester looked at Red and Paul. “Convinced?”

  “No,” Paul said.

  “It’s the way things have been going for decades. Since Professor Ferres’ was my age, and since her mentor was my age.”

  “That’s even less convincing,” Sylvester said.

  “Yeah,” Goldilocks said.

  “If you’re going to do the kind of work the Academy wants to do, it involves children. It allows you to do more, it opens doors, it saves lives indirectly.”

  “I think you’re just flicking ink at the paper and hoping it makes a sensible argument,” Sylvester said.

  “Please,” Betty said. “It’s the way things were, and the pressure was high. There was never a moment where I could stop and take stock, because I was always rushing forward. It was only ever little steps toward—”

  “Toward this?” Sylvester asked. “Being at the mercy of your creations?”

  “She took my face,” Red said. “I’m thinking I take hers.”

  Her knife went to Betty’s nostril, the point sticking within. As the knife moved, Betty craned her head, trying to avoid being cut.

  Eventually, unable to keep raising her head to move in concert with the knife, Betty was left to grimace, then wail, as the knife pressed against the skin. In the moment the skin reached its limit, the knife flicked out, and Betty collapsed, blood dribbling to the floor.

  The voices of dissent weren’t dissenting. Mabel, Davis, Gordeux, Shirley…

  Sylvester held the floor. It was up to him. Hackthorn was his, as were the people who resided within it.

  Red was looking at him, wanting approval and guidance.

  “I think we need to invent something suitably horrible to do to her,” the Fishmonger said. “A parasite, or we make her a parasite.”

  “Or we execute her and put her on display. A grisly scene,” the Devil said, in his monstrous voice.

  Sylvester could imagine. He could get away with it too. The dissenting voices were quiet, and he was fairly certain his faction overwhelmed the Beattle Rebels now. Defectors turned rebel now turned… horrified. Disheartened.

  Betty could so easily be made into something less than human. It was an Academy tactic, the horrible fates that only a scalpel could bring, one she had wrought in an indirect way.

  His eye fell on Fray, who stood off to one side.

  With Evette, for a third time. Still as solemn as Evette was smiling.

  He wished he had the other Lambs here.

  We can stop here, he thought. The Lambs would want me to, wouldn’t they?

  He asked the question of himself and he wasn’t positive of the answer. No figure stood in the crowd that he could turn to and figure it out. Fray, maybe, but Fray was silent and cryptic. Evette, but he didn’t want to give Evette an in.

  “Sylvester,” a voice came from the crowd.

  It wasn’t one of his rebels. It wasn’t one of the experiments, like Itsy Bitsy or Bo Peep. Not someone like Shirley or Pierre.

  She was just out of surgery, and even like that, she was partially confined and held firmly by two students.

  Ferres.

  “Was this a plan?” Sylvester asked Davis.

  “Plan?” Davis asked.

  “To bring her here. To challenge me with her.”

  “Kind of. She said she had something vital to tell you.”

  “Oh, I know what she wants to tell me. It was a mistake to bring her this far.”

  “Mistake?”

  “The last time I heard what she had to say, I took her to pieces. This time—”

  This time I’m the person everyone’s listening to.

  “Cover her mouth,” Davis called out.

  The student did. A moment later, he whipped his hand back, blood spraying.

  Surgical enhancements. Ones made long ago. The blades had been inserted into cheeks, and now sprouted, like mandibles. No longer held by one of the students, Ferres sprawled.

  “Sylvester!” she called out, her voice shrill, wild in way that only a doctor who’d had her hands taken from her could sound.

  A hag or a harpy incarnate. As students fell on her, trying to manhandle her, she arched her body, forehead on the ground, limbs shielding her head and mouth, fighting for the chance to speak. Her voice took on an eerie, fevered pitch, “You could have saved them! If you’d only realized, you could have saved your friends, all those years ago!”

  Previous Next

  Enemy V (Arc 18)

  “If I offer you tea, will you resist?”

  “Resist?” Sylvester asked. “You could have said refuse.”

  “I could have, I didn’t.”

  “No tea,” Sylvester said.

  “Having watched you for the last few years, I’d like to think I know you.”

  Sylvester nodded.

  “You’re loyal to the others. When you broke in and searched through records, you looked at theirs, too. Maybe you looked for theirs specifically.”

  Sylvester frowned.

  “You’ve been subtly fighting me every step of the way since. You’re upset and angry and you don’t have a direction to point that sentiment. It’s why I chose the word resist.”

  “We never had this conversation.”

  “We’re having it right now,” he said.

  “I never sat in…” Sylvester looked around. He parsed the space as an office, the window with its branch-framed glass looking out on Radham. “Here. You never offered tea. This subject never came up.”

  “Your memory isn’t that strong, Sylvester.”

  “I can’t remember things, but I feel like if we’d had this conversation, I would have done something with it.”

  “Maybe you did, Sylvester. Maybe you ran away. Maybe you resisted in ways that went beyond refusing tea or not telling me things about your companions.”

  “And?”

  The question went unanswered. In the unlit space, the impossibly dark shadows on the other side of the desk were now unoccupied. The question was swallowed up.

  Sylvester would have turned his thoughts to the task, but they were scattered. This place was one room in Radham, and all of his lines of thinking were in Hackthorn, stalled, or poised and waiting to be allowed to act, like bullets in the chambers of rifles.

  He, too, remained where he was, poised, while the once-fine machinery of his mind operated by accident more than design. A windmill in a windless valley, turning slightly because too many birds had gathered to roost on one blade.

  He could have acted or brought things to resolution, but he didn’t trust any of his trains of thought. Mauer’s voice was too persuasive, and Sylvester lacked the resources to really sort out the words that sounded right from the ones that were right. Cynthia was too angry, too wounded. The
Snake Charmer was too short-term in thinking, Percy too long-term.

  All of the ones he understood were problematic, by dint of what they were. Others were problematic because of the great and terrible unknowns they represented. Fray. The devouring child.

  Sylvester stood in the room, watching as the light moved across it. Noticing a change in details, he turned to face the window.

  Evette leaned against the wall, the curtain to one side of the window wreathing her.

  Being noticed was the prompt for her to move.

  She set down a syringe of Wyvern. The usual dose, far higher than most managed. More than even Fray took.

  Then she set down another, a short distance away.

  With a snapping motion of her fingers, she set the heavy syringe to spinning on the table. She did the same with the first.

  Sylvester already knew how this turned out.

  And.

  The syringes came to a rest, the points aimed at Sylvester.

  And even though this isn’t an accurate memory of long ago, because I have no accurate memories of long ago, I know how it turned out.

  I connected dots and I showed my hand. He realized, and the next time I had an appointment…

  Sylvester turned, touching the door handle. The room was locked.

  When he turned back toward the desk, Evette was gone. The room was empty, the windows open and curtain billowing. The syringes were depleted.

  If I hadn’t revealed my hand, if I had escaped the room, if I hadn’t let them poison my brain with more Wyvern, hold me in captivity, mold my brain and brainwash me, if I’d somehow remembered or found a way to leave a message to myself…

  Ferres’ voice echoed in his ears.

  If I only connected the dots again. If I let myself connect the dots…

  It was at a time like this that Sylvester badly wanted to see the Lambs, to recognize their faces, to have them as concrete points he could arrange in this visualized space he was using to construct—to reconstruct the thought process.

  The expiration dates for the Lambs never made sense.

  Why raise Gordon up to be someone who would be exceptional? What had Gordon said, toward the end? He never got to shine? Never got to…

  Sylvester groped for it, and all he could think of was how hard it had been to hear Gordon ask for his dog and be unable to give him that in the moment.

  He turned his thoughts toward other things. To Gordon thinking about defecting to Fray, the way he’d started saying ‘god’ and ‘damn’ more, if only to swear. All around the time that he had started to dwindle.

  Helen was created and raised by one of the best Professors in the Crown States, yet would never truly grow up to be of an age to use those talents. She was created to be a wife, a companion to a narcissist Professor.

  The only Lambs where expiration made any degree of sense were Mary and Sylvester himself. Sylvester because he imbibed poison, and Mary because she had been grown fast, and she would burn out fast. The irony was that neither of the two had originally been part of the plan.

  The expiration dates weren’t an unhappy coincidence. They were there by design. A hand tilted the scales, as loyalty came into question. That same hand had been on Lillian’s scales, in a different way.

  Was that the reason for the appointments? To adjust what needed adjusting, to ensure that a leash of a different sort was maintained? Or was it all part of the same leash, that constrained them? To keep them in one area, geographically, and to manage lifespans, so a rebellious creation would be limited in the damage it could do?

  If I’d only realized, I could have done something about it.

  Gordon could have lived. Jamie could have lived.

  Maybe whatever is happening to us now could have been averted before it started.

  Sylvester stared into the darkness at the opposite side of the large desk.

  “It’s all about control in the end,” he said.

  “Sylvester.”

  Sylvester opened his eyes.

  “Whatever you’re thinking about doing—” Davis said.

  Sylvester shook his head.

  Ferres was on the ground, struggling. They were using cloth to bind her mouth shut. Her face was blossoming like a flower—the blades at either side of her mouth had only been the first stage. Now everything unfolded endlessly from a central point in waves of skin, bone, small organs, and jagged metal points. She whipped it this way and that, to make the act of getting the gag in place as difficult as possible. The noises she made were alternately muffled and screeching, but she formed no more complete words.

  She’d said as much as she needed to say, really.

  The effect carried to the exposed skin of her arms, her exposed calves, and her feet. She was a primordial in fast motion, the subject of a powerful and dangerous drug.

  Sylvester turned, to look more in Davis’ direction. He became aware that the primordial was there, standing right behind him, almost touching him, looming in a way that meant Sylvester stood in its shadow.

  The Primordial was poised, like so many of the others, bullets in rifle chambers. He held limbs and parts that looked like pieces of other primordials that actually looked like primordials. One was held out, as if proffered to Sylvester, and it twitched and kicked.

  He wanted to eat.

  He wanted to eat with Sylvester.

  Jamie, Gordon, Helen, Mary, Lillian, Ashton, Duncan, and all the little ones. Lara, Nora, Abby, Emmett…

  The ones who weren’t dead or broken enough to be headed there would die sooner than later.

  There were two ways to handle that. The first was to face his own culpability, in a time and place where he had no tools to manage that.

  The second was to turn his attention to the culprits.

  “Sylvester,” Davis said.

  Sylvester turned to Davis.

  The student council president had been so handsome, once. A fine pair when put together with Valentina, who wasn’t here anymore. But days of fighting had injured him. A scar covered part of his face, marring one eye. Combat drugs he’d taken to improve his focus and coordination were likely responsible for the exaggerated vascularity on the other side of his face.

  “You’re in control, the Academy is yours. You’re right. All of this is… much worse than I’d thought. The nobility, the role of the professors, the way the system is rigged, the lies we were told…”

  “Davis,” Sylvester said. “It doesn’t feel good, does it?”

  “No,” Mabel was the one who responded. “But that’s no reason to—”

  Sylvester didn’t miss Davis’ hand motion, telling Mabel to stop.

  “It doesn’t feel good,” Davis said.

  So that was it. Manipulation. Currying favor.

  Sylvester was very aware of the Primordial’s proximity. He was increasingly aware that wherever he looked in the crowd of young Academy students, there were modifications, scars, injuries, and stitches.

  Ferres was akin to a lamprey with its rings of teeth, but instead of teeth they were modifications, alterations, weapons, and poison. Weapons of the Academy spilling forth as from a fountain. They welled out in a constant, endless wave, and as they flowed out, they tainted other things. They marked students, they colored the building.

  Hurt sat in the base of Sylvester’s throat as he saw it, he knew it was whatever the Primordial represented in his own head, going to work. Recognizing the enemy, seizing emotion and pain and helping him to adapt, to grapple with things.

  Ferres didn’t have retractable mouth-parts. She’d simply bitten the hand that had tried to silence her. Davis didn’t have a scar. Mabel didn’t have modified eyes to help her already exceptional perception.

  A defense mechanism? A last-gasp mental shift with Wyvern?

  The premise was simple. If the students weren’t people anymore, if they were only tools, ugliness, and extensions of the same engine that had hurt him for the entirety of his life, bringing Sylvester and the people closest to
him to their lowest points, to points they didn’t always surface from, then it would be so much easier to hurt them.

  “It’s horrendous,” Davis said.

  “I’m going to pretend you’re not trying to manipulate me as you say that,” Sylvester said.

  “I am, for the record. I’m worried about what you’re going to do in the next couple of minutes. A lot of people are. So I’m trying to manipulate you into not doing whatever we’re worried about. But that doesn’t mean I’m lying. For a very long time, even until today, you were someone I couldn’t ever really understand. But I think I understand you more than I did, even if I’m also really not sure about what you’re planning.”

  As he spoke, the veins crawling across his face grew darker, bursting. Sylvester looked away.

  “Everything you’re feeling, betrayal, feeling like a part of your life was spent in service to the Crown, feeling like people close to you were betrayed, I’m—not to belittle what you’re feeling—”

  Sylvester paused.

  “I get it,” Gordeux said. Sylvester was… relatively sure it was Gordeux. “I don’t want to speak for everyone, but I wouldn’t say what I’ve experienced and felt really compares. A lot of us got the short end of the stick, and you got a shorter one than most.”

  It was the Devil who spoke in Sylvester’s ear. “A short joke. Kill him for it.”

  Sylvester’s hand twitched and he had to fight the impulse that followed. He shoved it into his pocket, hunching over a bit to ensure it was really crammed in there.

  Problem was he had a folded blade in there. He’d forgotten that. He’d accidentally gone and armed himself, now.

  “I’m with you,” The thing that had been Davis said. He was speaking very carefully now. “I’m on your side.”

  Sylvester nodded, numb.

  “What do you need from me?” the thing asked.

  “Ferres,” Sylvester said. “Did—damn it. I took her hand. We needed it.”

  “We found the hand and reattached it,” the thing said.

  Sylvester nodded. “Good. She’s not going to cooperate in the way we need her to cooperate. Preserve her brain, keep her alive in a way that we can get information we need from her, keep the hand there for now. Take whatever else you need to make us a Ferres-alike. We just need to fool them for a little while.”