Twig

by wildbow

  “It was a girl, I think, in retrospect,” Lillian said.

  “There you go,” I said.

  “What happens when they’re mustered?” Lillian asked.

  “I don’t know. I think, even at their worst, they wanted to protect me. Or to keep me… intact, physically. Even if it meant carving through everything in my way. Maybe they’ll step in again if they think I’m in danger. Or if there’s an opening, or if I get jostled like a box of bugs, or after I’ve gathered my strength and they think I’m in good shape to do what they need me to do.”

  “I see,” Lillian said.

  “I feel very dangerously fragile, I hope that isn’t too unmanly a thing to say.”

  Lillian shook her head, then winced again, touching her neck. She wiped at her fingers with the handkerchief. “No.”

  “How bad is the aftermath?” I asked.

  “It’s not good. But I think people are turning to your lieutenants for guidance, informing their own reactions based on how those lieutenants react. Helen, and Duncan are doing a lot of the talking right now. We’ll have to wait and see what they say, but I think if the people you put in charge stay, a lot of the others will stay. They might not trust you to be leader, though.”

  “I don’t trust myself to be leader,” I said.

  “Some will leave,” she said. “We had a brief conversation about that, before I went to get patched up. I had to communicate through gestures. I think nobody really wanted to, but we had to acknowledge that it might be tactically better to not let others leave.”

  “Burn the bridge behind us, force cooperation?” I asked.

  “We decided it didn’t make a lot of sense,” Lillian said. “That might change, depending on how the conversation goes.”

  I winced.

  “Jessie and Mary are hunting down the experiments you freed. Jessie memorized the key phrases to bring them back in line, but they have to get in earshot to do it.”

  “Not all of them have key phrases.”

  “From what we were able to tell, you released four varieties of parasite, the flay stalkers, the shrieking ninnies, the rats-in-perpetuity, and the spiders of silence.”

  “Shrieking ninnies?”

  “Naked, tall, underweight people with oversized heads, nimble and fast enough to stay out of danger,” Lillian said.

  “Oh, I might remember them.”

  “They’re loud, and they use that loudness to make sounds like shrieking babies, keyed to be as anxiety inducing and irritating to humans as is possible.”

  “They’re pretty funny, yeah,” I said.

  “Ferres’ big projects went after them when they couldn’t get at the students or faculty,” Lillian said. “Along with the rats-in-perpetuity, the spiders of silence, and all the others.”

  “Those names. Rats-in-perpetuity, spiders of silence? Really?”

  “They had pretentious names for the parasites, too, but I’m not remembering them off the top of my head,” Lillian said. “It’s a school of students with an artistic bent. You picked it as your target.”

  “We wanted to fix Helen,” I said. “I wanted to fix Jessie. I—”

  Jamie’s face flickered through my mind’s eye, incomplete, the memory fuzzed around the edges.

  “Jamie,” I said, a thought as incomplete as the image.

  “Are you seeing him?”

  I shook my head. “I wish.”

  “What are you thinking, Sylvester? Where did Jamie come from?”

  “I… I went to pieces. Everything fell away, my thoughts mutinied against my critical thinking, and I think I realized things. About Jamie. About everyone, except maybe you.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t just your head playing tricks on you?”

  “I’m not sure of anything,” I said. “That least of all. I really don’t feel as if I should be as lucid as I am and I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’m not even positive you’re here right now.”

  The cup and saucer clattered slightly as Lillian placed them on the bench, to one side, so they weren’t between her and I. She scooted over, until her shoulder was pressed against mine, and then she lifted my arm and carefully set it over her shoulders.

  “There,” she said. “Does that help?”

  “Yes,” I said. I was fairly sure I was lying.

  She still had one of her hands on mine, from where she’d moved my arm. “You’re cold.”

  “A little,” I said.

  “Let me know if you get too cold, we can go inside,” she said.

  I don’t ever want to move or think, and I almost don’t want to say anything because I’m afraid I’ll break everything all over again. I’m afraid I’ll dispel the hallucination and I’ll be sitting on those stairs in the dark while rain falls on the glass overhead, my hands all bruised and hurting, my kidney and bladder failing because I’m afraid that having to go to the bathroom is just another head game.

  I don’t want this to change or stop in any way, except…

  …Except to have others here. To have Jessie, Helen, or Mary, or to have Ashton back and being odd, or even Duncan if it had to be him.

  But this was good, even if I wasn’t sure what it meant or what it was supposed to be, besides skinship.

  “What do you think you realized?”

  “That the expiration dates are a lie,” I said.

  With the physical contact, I could tell that she’d started a bit.

  “That’s heavy,” she said. “But you remember that Gordon expired, don’t you, Sy?”

  She asked it like it was really a possibility that I could have forgotten. I couldn’t blame her either.

  “It’s not that we don’t expire, but… more that we expire because they want us to, we’re rigged to fail and then they postpone it if we’re useful. Or they hurry it up if we become a concern. It’s control. It’s power over us. The fact it happens all around the same timeframe, only a few years apart, that experiments like Helen and Gordon are all about building up to a mature stage and then that gets cut short?”

  “The idea was that they would be pilot programs, and if they were viable then the Academy might try again.”

  “With Ibbot? Why not just have him get it right the first time? He’s good enough.”

  “He’s good enough but he doesn’t care. He can show it can work and leave enough in the way of notes for others to replicate for a second stage.”

  “Or he cares,” I said. “Everyone and their mother knows he created her with the idea she would be a partner for him, a toy for him to use if he wanted to get his snail wet.”

  “Ew, ew, no, ew. ” Lillian said. She physically squirmed under my arm. I squeezed her shoulders, and she drew in closer to me, her shoulder driving into my armpit as she shook her head. “I don’t want to think about Ibbot’s snail.”

  “As an idea, it answers more questions than it begs,” I said.

  “So that’s what Ferres was at,” Lillian said. “We heard fragments of it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I feel like, once upon a time, when I first learned about the set end date for the project, not the expiration dates but that things would only last until around the time I graduated, I wondered why. And then we got busy with the baby-things and then the singing doctor, and the spider-things, and the Snake Charmer, and… I was new and emotionally exhausted. I didn’t think about things for a while.”

  “But the expiration dates did come up.”

  She shifted slightly, her shoulder still digging into my armpit as she nestled closer, “I don’t know, Sy. I didn’t think about it much. I thought the Professors knew enough, and I didn’t want to question them.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think it was around the time I ran away, that I realized. I’d read the files, the first time, and I realized, and I tipped them off, and that was around the time I left. And then… I can’t remember exactly it, but I let myself get caught, because I missed the Lambs and I missed Wyvern. They gave me a double dose. I think they mol
ded my brain, to forget and to not think about it too much. Then they brought me back, and I looked for and found the expiration dates again, and that time I didn’t think about it, and…”

  I trailed off.

  “Maybe,” Lillian said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “It’s a pretty terrible maybe. If it’s true then Ferres is right and I missed something important. I could have kept them from hurting Jamie or killing Gordon, or I could have taken us to Fray, or we could have worked something out and organized as a team, or…”

  “You can’t blame yourself.”

  “If I learned then and I ran away, then I was stupid and I let fear take over, I left the Lambs instead of telling them, and I couldn’t ever forgive myself if that’s true.”

  “If it’s true, Sy,” Lillian said. “We don’t know. We can’t know. You can’t condemn yourself for something that’s as in doubt as this is.”

  “Wanna bet?” I asked her.

  She took my hand, her arm resting alongside mine.

  I could feel the tremor, the twitch. I knew it was the pain from whatever the Infante had done to her spine.

  “Hurts?” I asked.

  “It’ll be fixed soon,” she said.

  With my other hand, reaching over, I rubbed at her forearm, massaging it through her shirt.

  “I’ve missed you,” she said, her voice even quieter than before.

  “I’ve missed you more,” I replied.

  “Wanna bet?” she asked. Her voice was quieter each time she spoke. There was something in the question and I chose not to hear it. It felt like she was fading away, and I was afraid of pushing her that one little bit further away.

  But I used my one hand to massage her arm, and I listened to her words and I smelled her and I felt the warmth of her all along one side of me.

  “You have the best hands,” she said. Her head leaned against my shoulder.

  “It helps?” I asked.

  “It helps,” she said.

  We sat like that for a little while longer. Birds roosted on the railing a little ways in front of us. The clouds remained boring but I could have looked at them for days if it meant sitting with Lillian or Jessie or the others like this. Except maybe Duncan. Snuggling with Duncan would have been weird.

  “I could do with massages in other places,” Lillian said.

  “Is that so?” I asked, not sure what to say.

  “Maybe you should stop, Sylvester,” she said. I stopped, keeping my hands where they were, one hand entwined with hers, the other on her forearm. “If you keep going I might pounce on you and I don’t know what I’d do.”

  Her hand squeezed mine, hard.

  “I’ve got to be fair to Jessie,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “I think I know what her answer would be if I asked, but I’m not sure of much of anything right now.”

  “I know. You said. It’s okay. Do you want to let go of me, then, and we’ll figure it out later, if we figure it out?” she asked.

  I didn’t want to let go of her for anything. My hands remained where they were, our arms entangled.

  We were like that, silent and unwilling to move further away, when the others arrived.

  “We arrive, we’re here,” Helen called out. “We bring snacks, tea, good company, and agendas.”

  Bright and warm and very Helen. My hands released Lillian’s hand and arm.

  When she turned up, rounding the corner, she was smiling, very much Helen, intact.

  “My dears,” she said. She set a tray down on a nearby table.

  “You’re in a good mood,” I said.

  “I hunted, and it wasn’t perfect but it was good, and I’m sated for the now. I’ve got snacks made by our Possum-Helen, and I’ve got the Lambs,” she said, bright and warm. “What more could I want?”

  Her hands touched the sides of my head, her fingers running through my hair. She kissed my forehead.

  As Ashton approached with Lara and Nora, the two twins now asymmetrical, Helen pounced on Ashton, throwing her arms around him and lifting him bodily off the ground. The twins flinched away.

  One of the two had had a growth spurt, and was a foot taller than her sister. The shroud of clothing that covered her now covered her lower face, her overlong neck, and the two long forelimbs that now stretched from shoulder to toe. The dangling claws scuffed the ground and the edge of stairs as she walked down the path to where we were in the garden.

  “I brought them,” Ashton said, belaboring the obvious.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said.

  “Where do we sit?” the smaller of the twins asked.

  “Find a compost heap and sit in it,” the larger twin said. “Then you might grow some, and you’ll smell better.”

  The smaller twin gasped.

  “Be nice, Nora,” Lillian said.

  “I am being nice, I’m giving her advice that’s sorely needed.”

  “She’s just bitter because she’s a piteous miscreation of science,” Lara said. “It’s why we left the Academy, because they were going to put her down for being so grotesque and disappointing to look at.”

  “Says the runt who hasn’t grown yet.”

  “I will say so, thank you very much,” Lara said, before turning to me. “There’s really no justice in this world if the Academy goes unpunished for bringing her into existence.”

  “You think so, huh?” I asked.

  “It’s one of the great crimes against humanity, edging out the red plague and the genocide out east.”

  Nora lunged, falling to all four limbs, face thrust at Lara’s. Her voice was a growl. “I could eviscerate you. You’d be prettier.”

  Lara tittered with a laugh. It took me long seconds to read past the hostility in Nora’s body language and see that she was laughing too.

  Lara threw her arms around her big sister’s long neck, hugging her, and rocked left to right.

  Mary approached with Abby and Quinton, and broke away from Abby to go straight to Lillian, sitting at the edge of the bench, her focus on Lillian’s recently mended throat. They exchanged murmured words.

  “Did we interrupt?” Abby asked me.

  “Hm?”

  Her eyes moved between Lillian and me.

  “No,” I said. “All good.”

  “Good,” she said.

  So it was. Jessie, Emmett, and Duncan were the last to arrive.

  I stood from my seat with some difficulty, and wrapped Jessie in a hug with less difficulty.

  “Brought them,” she said. “I missed you.”

  I nodded. The moment, having everyone here, it made words catch in my throat.

  “I worried so much,” she said.

  I nodded again. Me too.

  It wasn’t just that I’d worried for my sake. I’d seen things. My head had turned against me and it had subjected me to things, doubts given life, mind games. In the midst of it, Jessie had died far too many times. She’d died more than any of the others. She had suffered implied fates that would have made death a kindness.

  She’d been the one they had repeatedly used to try to convince me that the Lambs were back, that I could let my guard down.

  The others were getting settled, Lara settling in Nora’s lap, Abby sitting on the short wall that bounded the soil of the garden to one side of us, Helen at the table, arranging tea and snacks. Jessie sat next to me.

  “A lot of them want to leave,” Duncan finally said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Shh,” Jessie said. She gave my hand a squeeze. “It’s okay.”

  “The question came up, there’s no place to go. The Crown has a stranglehold on the Crown States, there aren’t many options. Some of the Hackthorn students think they could backtrack on their betrayal of the Crown, but… it’s hard. They have fellow students who remember them defecting. There’s some thinking along the lines that the ones who remained loyal might stay silent on that if they’re allowed to go, but… that’s a lot of mouths that could talk
.”

  “Which brings us to our next point,” Jessie said. “They know. About the block, about the nobles. And we’ve made it clear to them, well, Sylvester made it clear but we made sure it was crystal, that if one mouth talks, the Crown might erase the problem. So like it or not, they’re cooperating. It’s reluctant assistance, but it’s assistance.”

  Others approached. Shirley, with Bo Peep. Davis. Bea, the Treasurer, Mabel, Junior, and Gordeux.

  “Just catching them up,” Duncan said. “People are mostly willing to go along with us?”

  “Looks like,” Davis said. He turned his attention to me. “You alright?”

  “Oddly so,” I said.

  Jessie spoke, “We gave you a half-dose of Wyvern, in the hopes it might help you get your mental house in order, while you were unconscious. Duncan’s idea.”

  I shivered at the notion. I liked being in control… but I wasn’t sure if I would’ve made the right decisions, being like I was, either.

  “I didn’t know that,” Lillian said. She glanced at me, wary. “I don’t know if I would have recommended it.”

  “It’s done,” Duncan said. “I don’t know if I would have recommended it in the light of day, either. But I didn’t like seeing you like you were. You just kept endlessly asking about what you’d done or hadn’t done, who was alive or dead, who had been tortured to death or not. You’d stop for a bit and then start. We drugged you to knock you out because you got so anxious, and it took three tries to get the dosage right, even with your native resistances. I thought… if sleep helps us reorganize our memories and feelings from the day prior… well, maybe Wyvern might help for a bigger endeavor on that front.”

  “It doesn’t quite work like that,” Lillian said. “But it’s not wholly wrong either.”

  “Okay,” I said, still uncomfortable with the idea. It overlapped too much with my thoughts of the double dose and the brainwashing, even if it had been a half-dose outside of the usual schedule, by people who meant well.

  “The Infante isn’t coming. Almost none of the people we really were invested in getting into Hackthorn are,” Jessie said. “But some are. Professors from smaller Academies. From what I was able to pick up and listen in on, we’re approaching the final days.”