Twig

by wildbow

  The ‘Galatea’ path wasn’t any better. To be wed to her creator. If even this limited degree of freedom wasn’t enough for him to keep her calibrated and well, would she be limited to only the briefest excursions from him and his lab? Forever at his side?

  There were the little ones too. Nora, Lara, Abby, Emmett, and Bo Peep. Their endings were a ways away now, but there was a time they’d come due. There would be tears and frustration, the broken relationships and painful loss—

  “I’m ready,” Helen said. Her voice bounced around the tunnel, eerie. She rolled her shoulders.

  “Okay,” I said. I shifted Jessie’s position on my back. “Let’s go.”

  “These tunnels are bad for my style of fighting,” Mary said. “I’d recommend using the guns, but gunshots will be heard.”

  She led the way, the acoustics of the tunnel making even the smaller scuffs of feet on the ground that much louder. The sounds of the fighting, of distant explosions and crumbling fixtures, it was equally distorted, made into something hollow that had echoed too many times, like a thing that wasn’t really happening.

  The footing was even, if sometimes lacking in traction, but the real hazards were the hatches and doorways. Basket weaves of iron and thick strands of something wet that might have been muscle framed doorways or hatches that had been closed and now were open. It was too easy to lose track of where I was in the tunnel, to move too fast or too far on one side and kick one or run headlong into it. Some of the hatches and doors had been drawn deeper into the ground, and they formed tripping hazards.

  I didn’t want to hurt Jessie by falling or allowing her hand or arm to get caught between my body and a doorframe.

  Here and there, there were puddles. We avoided those with even more care than we avoided the partial barriers.

  It was disorienting, with no clear illumination. I tried to keep an eye out for each of the Lambs, calming my mind by trying to read them, reassure myself that they were there, and I saw others instead.

  Pale forms flashing by me and teasing, all in various shapes and forms. It was as if I wasn’t joined by just the Lambs and the enemies we’d pursued and destroyed, but by the hunts. The enemies as they’d been conceptualized when I hadn’t had a face, form or name to put to the deeds we were hunting them for. These glimpses resembled the foes we’d had nipping at our heels when a target grew savvy enough to hire help or send others after us, when they had attacked, chased, and hurt us but were only blurs.

  There was no measuring the distance with counted seconds, because it was hard to think. No measuring it by the number of footsteps, when footsteps echoed and kept no time as we alternately slowed, stopped, and started again, navigating the hazards. We couldn’t even keep track with the noises of the city beyond and the shape of the oncoming war, because all of it was muffled and diffuse.

  Mary held up a hand, and the hand was pale in the gloom. It moved, gesturing, and we slowed. As a group, we ceased making noise, but for the faintest rustle of clothing on clothing, or the wheeze of the air bladders that Duncan and Lillian still used.

  The phantom noises grew both louder and more distorted, massive sounds that reached us through multiple walls and floors, then bounced off of the curved sides of the tunnel. A rumbling, a roar, then a battery of gunshots.

  Shouting.

  I saw why Mary had signaled for quiet and caution. The bioluminescence only reached a certain distance along the wall. It stopped where a great pane of glass started, bottle green and crude, mottled in a way that suggested it was poor quality, and that it had relaxed from its original form in the many years since it had been installed. It was caked in dust.

  I ran my fingers through the dust, clearing a section so it was easier to peer through.

  A seemingly endless stream of soldiers were charging through the space on the other side, illuminated by old voltaic lights that were dark more than they were on, more of an orange ember glow than the usual jaundiced yellow. The soldiers ran past tables, sealed containers of supplies or emergency provisions, and past medical equipment with cobwebs on it.

  Their shouts were muffled by the barrier between us. The sounds reached a pitch, urgent, imminent, and then soldiers I couldn’t see opened fire. The gunfire was answered by more of the same.

  They charged further down the hallway on the other side, and soldiers at the rear of the group began to slow. Tables were cleared with sweeps of arms, and wounded were hauled into place. Men and women with melting flesh. Uniforms were cut away to reveal the harvesters that were crawling beneath clothing, both shelled and leechlike.

  The scene was like a play without words or musical accompaniment. Mouths moved in shouts and cries of alarm, but any sounds were so muffled that I couldn’t tell them apart from phantom sounds my mind was conjuring up. One soldier with a lieutenant’s uniform had harvesters jutting from now-empty eye sockets like tongues from an open mouth, and his face was reduced to burns and blood, features melting in together. He was fighting those who would help him every step of the way, and yet it looked like the people on the other side really wanted to save him.

  Closer to Mary, there was a thump. A bang against thick glass. She backed away from the spot, and I ventured closer to see.

  A man wiped at the glass, clearing away the film of dust on his side. He peered through, face and presumably eyes pointed in Mary’s direction.

  No cry of alarm, no reaction. The interior of our half of things was too dark.

  Dual tunnels, for dual purposes. Their side was the side for the Academy, for the humans who maintained and ran things. Through that underground hallway, food or the means to acquire food would be delivered to homes and houses throughout Radham, so the citizens could endure while the enemy was rained on and made into monsters.

  On the far side of Mary, I saw the phantom sights, the pale blotches that were the hunts and the hunted, the unknown enemies of no particular time or place. These ones looked like children. On the other side of the glass, as clear as anything, Sub Rosa was pacing among the soldiers, like a valkyrie ready to claim the dead.

  The man who was peering into the glass startled, and as a collective, our hands reached for pistols and knives.

  The man on the other side was reacting to something else. It surged forward from further down the hallway, and in the doing, it drove a tide of bodies ahead of it, like a plow-wagon with a snow removal scoop mounted ahead of the oxen or stitched-beasts. Lights on the ceiling of the hallway shattered as it charged into them, casting us into a deeper darkness.

  It stopped and shied away from contact with the glass. Lights from ahead of it in the hallway illuminated its pale form.

  Pale because of the pallid flesh, drained in the same way my face might drain if the worst had come to pass. Pale because the people who made up the bulk of the mass were soldiers, in white Academy uniforms and soldier’s uniforms that had been bleached to varying degrees by the rain. Where they weren’t pale, they were crimson, because they were bleeding and flesh was breaking down with the rain that had fallen no them. People, gathered together by the protein chains and strands and pulled into a crude machine of harvester and human-made-puppet. Bodies, arms, and legs strove to work together by jerky, mechanical movements, to allow the greater mass to function as a completed whole.

  It moved as if its ‘head’ was a blunt fist that sensed things by bludgeoning them, and it smashed tables, and it found the wounded from earlier—the lieutenant that medics had been trying to help. It raised a leg, revealing a foot made up of two or three mangled individuals that had been crushed and broken by the weight of those above and the repeated impacts with the ground, and it pawed at the wounded, bringing them nearer.

  The lieutenant, seeing by way of the harvesters that stuck from his eye sockets, moved with more purpose, crawling in jerky motions that resembled a baby’s initial attempts to across a floor. He climbed and embraced the smaller of the greater tangle’s forelegs, before he was swarmed, being integrated into the whole.<
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  The others weren’t so lucky, if there was such a thing. They were paralyzed with pain, blinded by acid or harvesters, and they were helpless as the foot came down on them, harvesters working to make them part of a new ‘foot’, one that would no doubt flex and push against the ground before the muscles tore and bodies were smashed to constituent pieces by the impacts. It looked as if it would take several minutes for the process to finish, if not considerably longer. Whatever connections would allow the greater tangle to function as a whole would need to be forged between it and the new additions.

  I turned away from the scene, and hesitated as I saw the blotches that were the hunted children.

  Go, the voice said.

  I steeled myself and marched past the vague shapes. The others followed.

  A pair of bullets hit the glass just behind us. Each took out large chunks of the thick pane. Cracks spiderwebbed across it, bright with the light from the distant old voltaic lights that the tangle hadn’t yet destroyed.

  We moved faster.

  The fighting was spreading over the top of Radham, and it was spreading through the guts of the city. Deaths by the hundreds and thousands, which would only grow more numerous as everything escalated, and the kinds of horrors that could be perpetrated by an Academy with decades of prior preparation and nothing left to lose.

  “I feel the need to say this,” Duncan said.

  “No need,” I said.

  Behind us, more bullets struck the glass. A beam of light shone through a hole that resulted. The sounds that came through and echoed toward us were the clearest non-Lamb noises we’d heard for ten or more minutes. The tangle of bodies on the other side of the glass was groaning and making keening noises.

  “It’s a need, not a want. I don’t want to say this.”

  “We’re all smart people, Duncan,” I said. “We know it. It doesn’t need to be said and made real.”

  “I’m not smart,” Ashton said. “I’m good at what I do, and I’m useful, and I’m good at thinking about things from unusual angles, because I don’t have a brain, but I’m not smart enough to know what you’re talking about.”

  “We’re in a tunnel reserved for experiments, things that are freed to access the city as the city raises itself up,” Duncan said. “All the while, the city is being transformed into a hive for those… abominations.”

  “Tangles,” I said.

  “Tangles, sure. Which raises a question.”

  “That question is, what’s supposed to come out of this tunnel?” Lillian asked.

  “We’ll find out,” Helen said, her voice light. “We’re running toward it.”

  “Oh,” Ashton said.

  The keening increased in intensity. I wondered if the sound was louder because the opening was larger.

  We reached another section with a glass pane at one side. The pane was newer, less green, less mottled, and cleaner. Blood smeared across a fair portion of it, having sprayed from wounds and then run down the surface. Further down, someone bleeding had slumped against it before falling to the ground, depositing a large volume of blood on the surface. Bodies littered the ground, furniture had been propped up to serve as limited cover, and it didn’t appear to have done the slightest bit of good.

  We stopped there for a moment. I crouched, easing against the side of the tunnel, so I wasn’t bearing Jessie’s whole weight.

  The Devil was on the other side of the glass, standing among the bodies and smoking a cigarette. I was really disliking how often he was turning up, now. Sub Rosa too, but she was at least… not unrepentant in her evil.

  Mary touched a break in the glass.

  “We could go through,” she said. “Not that it’s much better.”

  I looked back in the direction of the tangle, then at the bodies. I looked at the devil, and then the void that lay ahead of us.

  Detour into the thick of things with any number of guns and limited cover, or go ahead to a near-certain threat?

  “Okay,” I said. I met the Devil’s eyes.

  “What does it accomplish?” Duncan asked.

  “Whatever we face out there, we at least have a chance of killing it,” I said. “And we have a chance of surviving it. And at least the hallways branch over there. For what it’s worth, there’s occasionally directions that go beyond ‘forward’ and ‘backward’.

  “Sy,” Lillian said. “I hate to say it…”

  I tensed.

  “…and here I thought you’d urge me not to say it,” she said. “You’d say you know what I’m going to say and you’d say it, to spare me from being the villain here.”

  “You’re far from being a villain, Lil,” I said. “And I know what you’re going to say, and I’ll say it. Jessie would be useful. It would make a lot of sense, especially if she could help us figure out where we are in the city, and where there might be places we can go up.”

  Lillian nodded, and at the same time, Jessie squeezed my shoulders.

  “Under,” she whispered. “Under the orphanage.”

  Under the orphanage. Was there a way to come up through Lambsbridge?

  “You’re farther away, Sy. I’m trying to play along, but…”

  Jessie’s voice devolved into mumbles.

  “Did you guys catch that?” I asked. “Because I didn’t.”

  “Catch what?” Ashton asked.

  “Jessie spoke. Unless my head is playing tricks on me,” I said. “Under the orphanage? Helen?”

  Helen stirred, looking at me. She’d been staring down at the bodies.

  “Please?” I asked. “Did you hear?”

  “I wasn’t listening,” she said.

  I opened my mouth, then shut it.

  I felt so alone, like this. It was the situation, and the war, and Jessie being so close but so hard to communicate with. It was Helen being lost and nearly gone, and Lillian wasn’t communicating like she should. It was that I couldn’t see them, so much of the time, in the gloom.

  My heart hurt, being like this.

  It would be so easy to just say yes, that Lillian was right, and we needed direction and sense.

  It would kill or ruin Jessie, but it would be a gasp of air, when we were in this claustrophobic space. Light in so much darkness.

  I hung my head.

  Stand, the voice said.

  I remained sitting. I felt Jessie’s breathing against my neck.

  Under the orphanage. It wasn’t advice, and it wasn’t a deep, relevant memory for the situation at hand. Talk of tunnels had stirred her recollection of West Corinth, of me kidnapping Lillian and taking her to the tower.

  I didn’t want to give her bad dreams.

  Forward and backward, retreats into darkness, death and horror was in arm’s reach but not in a way I could do anything about. We’d created this situation, Jessie and I, the others, and it was my responsibility to see it through.

  Even if that course was even darker and grislier than the obvious and maybe unavoidable ones ahead of us. The path the voice was urging me to pursue. I’d made a compromise to give it what it wanted. In return, it wasn’t making me destroy the others.

  Stand.

  “This is doable, Sy,” Mary said.

  “I’m just gathering my strength and taking a second to think. Please. Both of you. Please,” I said. My voice was a hush.

  She didn’t say ‘okay’, or anything like it. Lillian walked over to Mary, and I could hear the murmurs as they conversed. Helen was stock still, looking into the glass and using fingers to comb at her hair, her head tilting to odd angles.

  I felt a hand on my head.

  Ashton.

  “You don’t work on me,” I murmured.

  “I know,” he said. He gave me a pat. “Not in the usual way. But I can give you a pat on the head. I can tell you that we’re strong, and it’s only because everything in Radham is hurting right now that things seem bad.”

  I nodded.

  “If that’s how it is, all of Radham hurting, then we should trea
t it like a surgery,” Lillian said. “We cut and we use harsh drugs, but we do it with the aim of making things better in the end.”

  Our plan of action isn’t so selfless, the voice reminded me.

  “Sy,” Lillian said, responding to something in my posture or expression. “When’s the last time you had Wyvern?”

  “While back,” I said. “Back when you gave it to me while I was asleep, to help me put all the evils of mankind in the box again.”

  “You remain exceptional, Sy, I don’t think you realize just how keen your brain is, even off of Wyvern. But you feel limited and you make it a self fulfilling prophecy. Right now, you’re simply more locked in a direction than you’re used to.”

  “That’s the problem,” I said. “Forward and back, back isn’t even an option, and forward seems like inevitable disaster.”

  “You can’t get too down on yourself,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “Not down on myself. Just thinking, like I said. A lot of what we’ve been trying to do is to forge a new path.”

  “A new path?”

  “Yeah. I’m just trying to figure it out with a brain that’s wrestling through an awful lot of burdens right now. I want to break from the inevitable.”

  “Humanity’s been trying to do that at least since the ancient alchemists sought out immortality, if you believe the myths,” Duncan said.

  “Death will have to wait,” I said. “That’s a god for another time, if we make it through this and kill the gods ahead of us.”

  Ashton’s hand was still patting my head. I gave the hand a pat of my own, then worked my way to a standing position, bringing Jessie with me.

  A new path. That was the objective.

  “Let’s get over to the hallway, at least for the short term,” I said, feeling more sure of myself.

  “Alright,” Mary said. She began working on the glass, seizing the largest shards around the opening and prying them free and away.

  “What’s the line of thinking?” Duncan asked.

  “Right now? I don’t want to be on this side of the glass. It’s messing with my head.”