Twig

by wildbow

  I saw an opportunity, and I lunged at the one in front of me.

  I’d hoped to shove him off the building’s edge. I didn’t.

  Looming above me, while my shoulder rested against his steaming, injured midsection, he drove his elbow down into my back, knocking me down onto the roof.

  It raised a foot, ready to stomp on me, and I raised myself up, meeting the foot with my back. In the doing, I put it off balance. It stomped the foot down to one side, and I repeated my attempt from earlier, shoving myself into the thing’s stomach, pushing it back.

  It fell back at an angle, and it landed on the ladder the stitched to the right of it had used. I could hear the wood splinter at the collision.

  “Kill it and move on, Hel!” I called out. “We need you!”

  We really need you.

  Duncan was rousing, but it was slow, and he was forced to scramble back as the stitched approached him. The stitched had lost its gun at one point, and now it was using a backup weapon. Duncan couldn’t rise to his feet without putting himself in harm’s way, but the more he backed up, the more ground we ceded.

  A knife appeared in the stitched’s eye. Mary’s throw.

  Duncan and I together engaged it, me signaling with one hand while holding a spare rifle in the other. I used the blade to fend off the sword, and Duncan went on the offense.

  Helen moved on to another target. Mary waged her war on the far end of the roof.

  A gunshot drew my attention. Not one close to us, but—

  Lillian and Jessie.

  I looked just in time to see Avis taking to the sky.

  She’d found them. She was drawing attention to them, and the enemy was obliging. A share of the soldiers we weren’t fighting were splintering off, giving chase.

  There was nothing I could do but surrender to circumstance and have faith that they would fend for themselves.

  ❧

  The rain poured down around us. As a group, we hunkered down near the chimneys, our backs to the brick, stone, and wooden branches. We sat so we could each keep an eye on one side of the roof.

  Duncan’s wound that ran from above his temple to his cheek had been glued shut, but it was a haphazard gluing, and it had dried clear. The effect was as though he’d frozen the wound in time, raw, red as though it was about to start bleeding, but never quite crossing that threshold.

  Mary was hurt, but she was pretending she wasn’t. Helen was quiet.

  Rather than talk to me, Duncan lifted up and moved my hand to where he needed pressure or a hold. He pressed my fingers down, as if to tell me to press down harder. I obliged.

  The surgery on Ashton continued. Duncan’s hands made wet, sucking sounds as he dug for the next bullet.

  The gas had dissipated enough that we didn’t have the gas to mask our location anymore. We’d piled bodies six high on one side, and Mary was propping up the pile with her back. Soldiers had climbed onto a rooftop further down the street, where they had a good angle to shoot at us from. The bodies were our pile of sandbags. The chimneys protected us from the people on the walltop.

  We repaired our Ashton. They repaired the stitched who weren’t composing our sandbag wall.

  Sub Rosa stood on the roof’s edge, in plain view of anyone who might shoot her.

  It was the nature of the stitched that, given opportunity, they would win the war of attrition.

  “Okay,” Duncan murmured. “Thank you, Sy.”

  I pulled my hands back. Duncan began wrapping it up.

  “What are you thinking?” Mary asked.

  “I’m thinking of cigarettes,” I said. “And how Avis and Fray might steal this plan from us like we stole Beattle.”

  “We won’t let that happen,” Mary said.

  I grabbed the little case of cigarettes. I weighed it in my hand.

  “And you can’t smoke,” she added.

  “Creature comforts,” Helen said. Her voice was soft.

  “Gas,” Mary said. “Sy is resistant to a lot of things, but we agreed a while back that when it comes to Hayle, we should assume our usual strengths may not apply.”

  “We could,” I said.

  I found the flask. I opened the tin cigarette case, and I emptied the flask’s contents into it, careful of the angle. I didn’t want to soak the entire cigarette. Just eighty percent or so. I began soaking some of Duncan’s spare bandage, and wrapping it around.

  “Yes, go ahead, you can use that,” Duncan muttered.

  He wasn’t one to let things get to him to the degree he was so morose. I was less likely to blame the situation, more likely to blame the fact that Ashton had been hurt.

  “Good to hear. I need thread. Not surgical thread either,” I said.

  “Thread or wire?” Mary responded, as if it was the natural assumption that she’d be the one to supply it.

  “Thread. Thread-thread.”

  “Give me a minute.”

  As Mary began to supply the thread pulled from her own clothing, I began to wind it around the bases of the rifle cartridges. Gunpowder primers, then propellant, then the bullet itself, in that order. The primers were arranged to sit against the cigarette.

  I pulled off my gloves to work more accurately, trusting that the gas wouldn’t affect my exposed skin too badly. Once I got going, I was fairly quick with it. Mary joined me, but she kept her gloves on.

  The resulting ornaments looked like pinecones.

  Mary handed me matches, taken from one of the bodies.

  “You’re going to set yourself on fire or blow yourself up,” Duncan said.

  “Let’s hope not,” I said.

  I set them aside, taking up my rifle.

  “Not using them?” Duncan asked.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Alright then,” he said. He gave Ashton a light slap on the face. “Ashton, wake up. I need room to work.”

  Ashton remained still.

  Duncan stared down at Ashton for a long moment, then gave the boy a hard strike on the sternum.

  “Nnf,” Ashton made a sound.

  “How are you doing?” Duncan asked.

  “Less good, after getting thumped.”

  “Percussive maintenance. I need you to move aside. And stay out of the way of bullets. Stick close,” Duncan said.

  Ashton crawled over to the space between Duncan and Helen. I expected Helen to wrap her arms around him, and she didn’t. He sat with his arm pressing against hers, and he rested his head on her shoulder. She smiled.

  Duncan spoke, “Mary, can you pull that one stitched down? I’ll help.”

  “Up here?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  The two of them hauled one stitched down from the makeshift wall of bodies.

  As the gas cleared, we could see where certain areas of the city were still shrouded, other gas-production buildings spilling forth, protecting them. We could see where the denizens of Radham were doing their work. Webbing cocooned areas and formed bridges between higher tiers of the city and lower ones.

  The swarms of things were doing their own work. The Harvesters. What they collected in organic matter, they spun out into constructions, reinforcing and connecting, following a biological program that had been set for them.

  This was only one small part of it. The longer we took to pick this fight, the more time Radham had to adapt. To transform itself.

  Distant gunfire was as much of the background noise as the downpour, the groaning of the city. That distant gunfire changed in tenor.

  We’d waited. It sucked to wait, but we’d waited. We couldn’t operate wholly alone in this.

  Now our army was invading the southern end of the city, confident that the gas was dissipating and the rest of our forces could follow behind. They moved through the streets, and the soldiers who had us surrounded were the ones caught by circumstance.

  Avis had cost us precious time. She’d put us in a corner, and we had no idea what had become of Lillian and Jessie, but she’d primarily cost us time.<
br />
  Two choices, I thought. Two things the enemy could do. They weren’t ready to storm the rooftop again. They would need to keep soldiers back to guard us. It would need to be enough to keep an eye on all sides of the building. The greater war and advance of an army demanded their full attention.

  I’d tuned my ears to pay attention to surroundings, and aside from a brief distraction with the cartridge-and-cigarette pinecones, I hadn’t stopped tuning.

  I could hear the orders, and I could hear orders with a vague note of condescension and strained patience.

  I picked up my pinecone, and I lit the end of the cigarette that didn’t have alcohol soaking it. It began to burn down.

  Mary grabbed one, igniting it, while I whirled mine. Sparks and droplets of ignited accelerant wicked off of it, landing in puddles across the roof, while I built up speed.

  I launched it in the direction of the voice. I immediately picked up the second of the three pinecones. Mary threw hers while I lit it. I could hear the shouts as it ignited mid-air.

  I stood to throw my last one, my ears trained on the shouts and voices. A hail of bullets fired from the wall behind us, and many chipped at the chimneys or flew between them to take chunks out of the roof. I let the third and last pinecone loose, aiming more for distance and the general area of the target. A collection of rifle bullets arranged with the ends against the fuel source.

  The third one went off right when it would’ve been hitting the ground. A series of bullets popping all in quick succession.

  I waited, listening for the reaction. Alarm, more shouts.

  “What?” Duncan asked, interrupting my listen. He was still wrist deep in the dead stitched.

  “Hm?” I asked, not quite sure if I didn’t want to prompt more of a reaction from him, lest I miss the critical detail.

  “That shouldn’t have worked at all,” he said. “I was digging into this guy to see if we couldn’t use a voltaic node for the same effect.”

  “Sorry you didn’t get your moment of cool,” I said. Then, before he could respond, I held up a finger.

  The shouts were taking on a different tenor now.

  Frustration. A moment of argument.

  There hadn’t been many voices ordering the stitched about. I’d aimed for where they were congregating. The bullets wouldn’t fly as fast and sure as if they’d been fired from a rifle, but there had been a fair number of bullets in the one pinecone that did go off.

  Enough to debilitate? To disable the leadership of the squad of stitched soldiers?

  The orders were called out, too far away to be distinct. I could hear the tromp of boots.

  The call had been made. They were retreating. I peeked and I saw the ones on the wall running along the walltop. Soldiers made a break away from the end of the city where our side was finally invading.

  The stitched soldiers were staying. They were all gathered near the front of the building. Too much effort to wrangle, without the wranglers?

  Bloodied, several of us injured, we checked the coast was clear and scaled down the chimneys, our feet touching road.

  Fray was in the mix. She was here, and she was throwing her wrenches into the works of a plan so vast it threatened to collapse under its own weight.

  Fray—well, we had no idea what she wanted. But she was dangerous, she was devastating in her own right, and the moves she made were such that there was almost always collateral damage. To things, to people, and especially to plans.

  The plans she had set into motion, that we hadn’t seen the end of. They would continue to grow and reach out and by petty measures and by vast scales, they would throw us into disarray, much like Avis had so casually done. It was what qualified her as architect of the second of my three gods to slay. Conspiracy.

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  Enemy (Arc 20)

  Lawrence was jolted just as he finished penning one of the final lines of his letter. The chandelier in the room swung, the curtains swayed, and books on shelves slid across the shelves or slammed forward against the doors of branches and glass that kept them from scattering across the room.

  Whoever designed this thing should be poisoned and left to die a gasping death, he mused.

  He leaned back in his chair, running his fingers through his hair without putting the pen down, holding the instrument with the point away from his head. His eye traveled to the bed that was just a short distance away.

  The sheets were black, only fragments and pieces of a pale form visible amid the waves of spun silk fabric. Jeanette. She had slept through the most recent crash—the alcohol that he could still smell was likely a part of that. He didn’t begrudge her the alcohol, nor the sleep. That wasn’t how he wanted to operate.

  He turned his eye to the letter. A line stretched across it. Frustrating.

  He mused for a moment, then used the head of the fountain pen to stab a beetle at one corner of his desk. He shook it loose over the trash bin, tracking it with one eye to make sure it fell within, then opened a tin case, collecting a nearly identical beetle.

  He was careful not just the words he chose for the letter, but in how he penned it out. There was a care that needed to be taken in the formation of strokes, in the intensity, rhythm and speed with which he put words on the page. It was closer to the enunciation and rhetoric of a speech than to the crafting of the written word.

  Silent, scratching, black ink on white, but a speech all the same.

  He finished,then picked up the letter. Striking a match, he burned it. He held it until it was almost entirely gone, then carefully deposited the remaining corner in the bin. He placed a lid over the top of it.

  Gathering his things, he set the pen and paper away, careful to secure each. The paper went in a box that was fixed to the shelf, and the pen went in a case. The beetle he gathered in his hand.

  He stood from his chair with care not to let the feet scrape on the floorboards of the cabin, and he walked over to the window, stretching as he did so. He opened it, and he released the beetle.

  He remained at the window, watching the speck that was the beetle fly off. It would travel to its destination and, with the right coded chemical to unlock its instincts, pen a replica of his letter. By similar secure means, the letter’s contents would find their way to the Crown Capitol.

  He shut the window and turned. Jeanette was awake. She held the sheet around her breasts, for modesty’s sake.

  “Did I sleep too late?” she asked.

  “Not possible,” he said.

  “I have to make you breakfast, or tea,” she said.

  “You don’t,” he said, firm. “All you have to do is… enjoy existing. Within the week, all other business going well, we’ll be on our way to the crown jewel of the Crown States. Circumstances allowing, I’ll defer my primary duties and we’ll travel over the winter and spring while I show you some of our most beautiful cities.”

  “All of this feels dreamlike,” she said.

  “It does,” Lawrence admitted.

  They both harbored thoughts that they didn’t say.

  He broke the momentary silence, “I’ll be busy. Have you given any thought to what you want to do with your day?”

  “Read,” she said, without hesitation.

  “Alright,” he said. He smiled. “Let me know if you run out of books.”

  “Ha,” she said, in mild disbelief. Her eyes roved over the room. Countless bookshelves stored texts with leather covers.

  He walked over to the washroom, which was partitioned off by a partial wall, with a section that could slide to afford more privacy. An esophageal hose lay coiled white and alive in the commode, like a severed umbilical cord or a section of intestine with a toothless mouth.

  Jeanette was not a fan of the ‘tube’.

  He washed his hands of stray bits of ink, then started washing his hands thoroughly, in the way he’d been taught to do in the Academy, from fingertip to elbow. It wasn’t necessary, with the various measures they had against infection, but h
e liked the ritual of it, and he liked the symbolism. Preparing for every day as if he was preparing for surgery. In a way, he was.

  He faced the mirror. The face on the other side was pale, with sculpted cheekbones, a high forehead, and a defined jaw. The nose was narrow, the lips thin, and the eyes intense and blue. He lathered a brush and applied the foam to face and head before shaving cheek, chin, and neck. That done, he turned his attention to the hair at each side and the back.

  Jeanette appeared behind him, pressing her front against him. Her hands rubbed at his shoulders as she looked past him to the face in the mirror. Her own face was visible, made faintly foggy by the steam from the sink. The effect was dreamlike, as she’d said. Freckles dotted her cheekbones and nose, her hair was straight and brown, her lips full, and her eyes were large and green.

  They were solemn, too. The eyes.

  He stared into her eyes as he finished wiping at the foam and fixing hair, and he didn’t break the eye contact while rinsing the brush and razor. He didn’t flinch as she reached over to touch one cheek.

  Not his cheek, really. One cheek.

  He firmly took her hand, moving it away. She lowered her eyes, and gave him one kiss on the shoulder before walking to the bookshelf, no doubt to consider what she might read while lounging about in his cabin.

  Even words that were implied were dangerous, much like the speech to the beetle wasn’t actually spoken. Through silences and gestures like what she’d just done, she could say so much, and that ran contrary to the deal they’d struck. He’d said it was because it would disrupt things if people knew, if they found out, but that wasn’t true.

  He preferred things if he didn’t have to think too deeply on the subject of faces.

  He’d fallen for her beauty, initially. He was willing to admit as much. She had worked in a coffee house, in a city he was only in temporarily. He had struck conversations with her, and he’d remembered her bewilderment when a man like him had spoken to her, expressed interest in her day, and made a daily habit of going there.

  He remembered the fear when he’d given her a gift. She loved reading but rarely had an opportunity, so he’d given her some favorites. She’d been afraid, because of the black coat he wore and the power he wielded, and because of the disparity she saw between them.