Twig

by wildbow

  “As you did with Ferres?” Professor Gossamer asked.

  “Compared to where I am now, I was in a good mood when I addressed Ferres,” I said. “And I didnt have the benefit of the other Lambs to focus me. I can promise you, they’ll all have something to contribute, if it comes down to it.”

  Mrs. Darby yanked her arm from Ibbot’s grip. She dropped to her knee, head low.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Darby,” Duncan said.

  “I’m a pragmatist. I’m going to believe my being first to bend the knee counts for something. Please don’t dissuade me from that belief.”

  “It does count for something,” Duncan said. He glanced at me, and I nodded.

  Others started to kneel. Low-level aristocrats that had attended that trailed the group.

  They were most used to bending the knee, perhaps. They had the least to lose.

  “I’d like assurances of food, proper accommodations,” Gloria said.

  “This isn’t a negotiation, Gloria,” I said. “That boat sailed so long ago it’s already reached the other side of the King’s Ocean. When you bend the knee, it’s an acknowledgement that you are wholly and totally at our mercy. You are wholly and collectively fucked. You’ve wholly and collectively fucked the population, the landscape, the governing, the economy, the past, present, and future, and the time has come for it all to catch up with you. If servitude is all you face, then that is a ludicrous kindness.”

  “I’m not even ‘Lady Gloria’ anymore, then. Two of my three Professors are sick with dehydration and hunger. Their care of me has floundered,” she said. “Being atop that building over there for a day and night hasn’t helped matters.”

  “That was the intent,” Mary said. “We might not be able to defeat Nobles, but we can drive home just how dependent you are on them.”

  “One among many of a series of realities I’ve suspected but never had to face,” Gloria said. She paused, and then swept into a curtsy that became a kneeling position. I wondered if it was a motion practiced and reserved solely for the likes of the King or perhaps the Infante.

  With her submission, others followed suit. Professor Gossamer, Doctors, and some holdouts among aristocrats.

  Ibbot was a holdout.

  “I will not bow to a life I brought into this world.”

  Helen picked her way through the assembled group. She found her way to him.

  He held himself high, chin raised, refusing to even back away.

  She reached over to brush a hand down one side of his face. She was taller than him, helped mostly by the fact that he wasn’t tall for a man. It had been some time since I’d seen them together, and somehow I was left with the impression she hadn’t stood nearly so tall in past cases. Diminished by association with him.

  “Miserable, miserable man,” she said. “I’d pity you, but it’s not something I’m very good at doing. I’d hate you, but I can’t, as much as you deserve it.”

  “This is where you break me, then?” he asked.

  “If I took hold of you to break you, I’d kill you,” she said. “A bit of a snag in the way you put me together.”

  “You’re that far gone, then,” he said.

  “I’m that far gone,” she said. She stepped closer to him. Her hand ran along the top of his head, to the back of his neck. “I have to wonder. You made me, clearly with intentions that everyone suspected and nobody of note spoke aloud. You didn’t care that they laughed at you behind your back.”

  “They respect me,” Ibbot said. “And I won’t betray that respect by kneeling here. I’d sooner have my own experiment crush me. There’s something to be said for closing that circle.”

  “They respect your work,” she said. She moved closer to him. Her hand traced up his body. When she spoke, it was into his ear. “They have zero respect for you. Everybody weighs the odds, is he so maladept and socially incompetent that he doesn’t realize what it looks like? Or is he one of the disgusting sorts that seizes the reins of life itself, forging thinking, breathing existence from next to nothing, only so he can stick his cock in it?”

  She breathed those last words.

  “Have the Lambs warped you so much, that you’re this ruined?” he asked.

  “Have they indeed?” Helen asked. She giggled. “No, Professor. Without them, there wouldn’t be anything of worth in me.”

  She seized his ear, twisting it. His knees buckled, and he gripped the railing of the bridge to keep from falling to the ground, from kneeling even accidentally.

  But that wasn’t her intent. She twisted his head by twisting his ear, and she made him turn a quarter-circle.

  “Show them, Professor. Show them the sum total of what you are.”

  He scowled, struggling more. But he knew as well as anyone, very literally, just how futile that really was.

  “How did Jessie put it, Sylvester? We talked about it when discussing my brother.”

  I winced at the mention of Jessie. I felt a pang.

  Still, my eye dropped to the lower half of Ibbot.

  “The sleeping dragon,” I said. “Except we’re not talking sleeping dragons in this case.”

  Ibbot’s face was visibly red, even in the gloom. With the angle of his body in regard to the main building, all of the faces in the window could no doubt see, as they watched Noble, Doctor, Professor and aristocrat kneel, while Ibbot… stood up.

  “So easy,” Helen said. “So easy to show them how small a man you really are.”

  “Not that small,” Ashton said.

  “Shhh,” Duncan said. “Metaphor.”

  “Oh.”

  Ibbot picked up his struggle. In the midst of it, I couldn’t tell if it was because he was struggling so hard or if it was Helen’s strength, but he pulled away from his creation, and he left his ear behind, firmly in her grip. He snarled and gasped as he dropped to the ground.

  He was on all fours, but he was on his knees too.

  “Don’t kid yourself, Professor,” I said. “Nobody thought you were the last holdout, nobody believed you were the strongest here.”

  “They’d be embarrassed to think you were,” Mary said.

  “Go back. Talk to the others. Make the stakes clear. We’ll be approaching you with your assignments shortly. Trust me when I say that you really, really want to have everyone on the same page by the time we get to you, and I’m talking an hour or two at most, understand?”

  “There’ll be holdouts,” Gloria said.

  “Address them,” I said, my voice hard. “Consider that your first collective assignment. Go.”

  They rose to their feet. I could see the unhappy looks on many faces, at taking these orders, at this circumstance. They walked back over the bridge.

  They’d tell themselves that it was only a matter of time, that the Infante would find out or they’d have a chance to get a message out. That we were expiring. There would be heated debate, but they’d concede. They were too hungry and tired to do otherwise.

  As the group departed, they left Ibbot behind. Only a few disgusted looks were cast back his way. He still huddled on the ground, head buried in arms, back arched, knees tucked under him, like a turtle drawn into his shell. One of his hands struggled to stem the tide of blood from his ear.

  My hand hurt in much the same measure. The limited bandage wouldn’t be enough.

  I wished my hand wasn’t as hurt as it was. It would have been nice to have an excuse to postpone things.

  “Come along, Professor,” Duncan said. “You might as well come with us, as you’re not going back to them.”

  “Pheromones,” Ibbot said. “She was near the boy. She drew them into her lungs, she breathed them on me.”

  “You took drugs to ward off Ashton,” Duncan said. “But if that’s the story you want to tell us, you can do that. If you really believe it’s true, you can go back to them and tell them. They’ll take any excuse to believe it, I think.”

  Mary gestured at me. Her eye dropped to my hand.

  “Or you
can stay here and bleed,” I said. “Lambs, lieutenants, we’re going back.”

  We started walking. Behind us, without looking at anyone, and without even an armed escort, Ibbot picked himself up. He trudged behind, head hanging.

  “How bad was it?” I heard Duncan ask Mary. “When you went to check on Sy, Jessie, and Lillian?”

  “Far from good. As to how bad, we’re going to have to see.”

  A weight seemed to settle over the Lambs as we made our way back.

  Lillian sat on one arm of the chair. Jessie sat in the chair, bundled up in a blanket. Much of the blood had been cleaned up. Jessie was awake.

  She smiled when she saw me.

  I approached her, and I kissed her on the forehead.

  “I appreciate you not killing me,” she said.

  That doesn’t make this easier, I thought.

  “You’ll want to look at Sy’s hand, Lillian,” Mary said.

  “How are things?” Jessie asked. “Is it resolved?”

  “Something essential just broke in them. The underpinnings that let them hold onto their pride. The rest will crumble,” I said.

  “Then there’s a chance I’ll get to see the conclusion,” Jessie said. “Or the start of it.”

  “No,” I said.

  Lillian, already taking my hand to examine it and peel away bandage, stopped, tense.

  “Sy,” Jessie said. “This is not the time for you to get nutty on us.”

  “We should put you to sleep, Jessie.”

  She swallowed. I saw a look of fear sweep over her expression before she pushed it away. She reached up for my hand and took it. “No, Sy.”

  “We have a wealth of resources at our disposal,” I said. “We’ll soon make our play to have the Crown States under our thumb. But with the people we’ve brought here, we can start on the first leg of it. Ibbot will work on Helen again, but as an exclusive project, with a dozen keen eyes and minds looking over his every last piece of work, to look for traps. He will keep Helen from expiring, on pain of death.”

  Eyes moved to Ibbot, who hung back at the rear of the group. He scowled, but he didn’t have it in him to reply.

  A good thing too, or I might’ve hurt him.

  “We have Professors and Doctors to take over Mary’s project. Minds that would have otherwise been turned to prolonging life are going to turn to prolonging yours, improving your quality of life.”

  “Sy, we talked about this, but it wasn’t a primary focus—”

  “It’s absolutely my primary focus now,” I said, tense. “I will not, under any circumstance, see another Lamb die. I will not lose another one of you. The rule of longevity isn’t that you have to unlock a hundred extra years of life. You unlock five, or ten, or twenty, and that buys you time to find another five, ten, or twenty. They will find answers.”

  “They’ll find some, but they’ll have failures. There will be five or twenty year droughts,” Duncan said. “Droughts that are long enough.”

  “Then we put more on it,” I said. “But I’m not taking no for an answer here. Every single one of us, even the New Lambs, are getting focused, expert attention. Entire Academies worth of people, if need be. We’ll take control, we’ll have the power, and we’ll do all the things we said we would, we’ll—”

  No, the voice said.

  I changed the conclusion of my statement, “We’ll do this first. Everything else follows from it.”

  “This is the forward movement you were talking about?” Lillian asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “So long as we do this, you think you’ll be able to cooperate and stay on track?”

  You will not tell her about the compromise.

  “As long as this is the route? I’ll see things, I’ll have odd moments, but… I’ll manage.”

  “And what if I don’t agree?” Jessie asked.

  I met her eyes.

  I was pretty sure I’d never seen her angrier.

  “Tough.”

  “It’s my choice,” she said. “And I decided a long time ago that if we’re going to lose our minds, if we’re going to slip away, then it’d be on our terms. I’d do it with you, I’d enjoy the moments, I’d make the most of the time we had, and we’d accomplish what we could before passing the reins for others or the others to see it through to the conclusion. We agreed. That was the deal we had.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You asshole,” she said. “You don’t get to change the terms of the deal.”

  “Jessie does get a say,” Duncan said.

  “I get the say! It’s my brain!” Jessie said. “And it’s crumbling and I can tell I’m losing memories by the hour, and it’s picking up speed, but I have a few days, maybe a couple of weeks.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I got the sense of that from our last conversation.”

  “I’ve put up with so much shit from so many people. I’ve worked hard to get us here. Not just the plan, but you and me, with the people around us, with the Lambs here. I’ve made compromises and sacrifices. So I get this. Even if it’s hard!”

  “You should,” I said.

  “If you put me to sleep to slow the damage until you find some answer, you do know what happens, don’t you?” she asked.

  “I know. Believe me.”

  “I go to sleep, and it takes time to fix. Time the rest of you don’t have. Look at how far you’ve slipped in the last month, Sy. If it takes another year? If Mary and Helen continue down the roads they’re on?”

  “We’ll stall, we’ll put things in motion,” I said. “Just like I talked about.”

  “That’s no guarantee. You’re asking me to go to sleep, possibly for years, with no guarantee anybody but Duncan or Lillian is there when and if I wake up. If I wake up. If you don’t find an answer—”

  “We’ll find something,” I said.

  Jessie pushed the tea table I’d already damaged by tearing the leg off. She rose out of her seat. “I’m deciding I stay. I’d sooner live out my last days with you than go to sleep, miss out, and live a longer life. This was the damn deal!”

  I’d already told Mary and Lillian the reality.

  Jessie was so indignant. It was rare. She was usually so calm. The rock to my storm.

  She wanted this as badly as I did.

  “You can’t,” I said. “Because we don’t get that. You and I can’t spend our last few days alone together. I need a Lamb close by, or I’ll lose my mind.”

  “I’ll be beside you,” she said.

  “You’ll fall asleep. You’ll drift off, because you sleep sixteen to twenty hours a day to stay at your best, and you won’t be beside me anymore,” I said. “Because if you’re asleep, you’re not next to me. You’re as good as gone.”

  “That’s not—” she started. “No.”

  “Just a short step away from convincing myself you’re never waking up, the darkest parts of me saying it’s better to kill you than to see the look in your eyes when you’re completely gone. Anything else, any compromise we might try to make, it’s going to feel hollow, reminding us of the issue, and I don’t want our last days to be a compromise. Not like that.”

  She shook her head.

  “You’ll go to sleep, we’ll give you the drugs to keep you under. We’ll be there when you wake up.”

  She started to shake her head.

  Then I saw her expression change. Before anyone saw, I wrapped her in a hug. She buried her face in my shoulder, hugging me tight. I felt the borrowed shirt become damp, and I looked at each of the other Lambs, who would soon say their goodbyes.

  It was some time before she nodded her head against my shoulder.

  Previous Next

  Enemy (Arc 19)

  He’d wanted to run the Academy for so long, now. He’d ascended to the rank of second in command, and now he was to burn it all down.

  Men, women, and children gathered around the water’s edge. The canal served as a moat to separate Chedglow Academy from the supporting city. Boa
ts lined the canal, each with ramps extending down. Teams of vat-grown labored to load luggage, crates, and cases onto the individual ships.

  The people on the far shore were clearly restless. There was an excitement that would be fitting for people at the street’s edge during a parade or mass hanging, but there were less smiles than a parade would have, and less fervor than an execution might stir up. The sentiment was there, but they didn’t dare to reveal it to those around them. The little he could make out of expressions—of brow and the play of light and shadow on each face—indicated solemn and blank expressions.

  “Are the three widows still around?” Hector asked the room, without looking.

  His assistant replied, “They are. I believe they’re hosting guests and reassuring the, ah…”

  “The populace?”

  “No, Professor. The gentler sorts among the upper class.”

  The interim headmaster nodded. The soft. The idealists.

  The doctors and students alike were packing up. Some students had gone ahead or traveled to meet family that would give them more comfortable accommodations aboard nicer ships. Others had already been sequestered away with special projects, to keep them out of the way until they could be informed of what was underway.

  The people standing on that far shore were very much like the students who had been gathered together under the guise of learning manners and decorum. Of the five hundred students at Chedglow, eighty-five had been from poorer families, ones without backers, patrons, or standing sufficient to earn them a way over the King’s Ocean. Rather than catching up to their peers, as they hoped to do, they would be left behind. There was a dim possibility that they would be killed outright, to minimize complications once all people of good standing had fled for safer territories.

  The people realized something was wrong. The key would be to reassure them, to tell them that war was underway. There would need to be an illusion, somehow, that there was still a governing body above them, and that keen minds remained in Chedglow. The widows would have an idea of what to say.

  But things were moving neatly.

  He swept his black lab coat around him as he turned his back to the window and the people he could see from it. His assistants hurried to gather papers and notes, slotting each into folders, collecting folders into stacks, and follow behind him. Others stayed behind, closing the office.