Twig

by wildbow

  “Okay,” Lillian said. “Reason enough.”

  Mary opened the aperture enough for us to carefully work our way through.

  “And,” I said, as Mary climbed through, then gave Lillian a hand, so Lillian wouldn’t slip and impale herself on the glass that remained. “And… this next part might require a little luck.”

  We made our way through, except for Helen, who lingered, and for Jessie and me. I passed Jessie through, then turned to Helen. I touched her arm, and she flinched away.

  She was lost, as I so recently had been. As I had been in my own way for a long time.

  “Hold onto the good things,” I said. “From the past, and the things that await in the future. There’s so many good things ahead of you. The you that you are now isn’t the you that you’re doomed to be.”

  “Do you think so?” Helen asked.

  “I’m staking my everything on it,” I whispered to her. “I know what I’m doing, and if you don’t believe me when I say that, I’ll point out that Lillian just said I’m smart, even without a recent Wyvern dose. You should believe her, because nobody here’s going to deny she’s brilliant.”

  “She is,” Helen said. She smiled.

  “Now, speaking of good memories… I need you to dredge one up.”

  “No dredging needed,” Helen said. “My memories aren’t as bad as yours. It’s not my brain that’s being uncooperative and refusing to do things when it used to perform so precisely.”

  “Yeah, that’d be mine,” I said.

  “What am I remembering, Sy?”

  “Remember your first friend. You grew up in a place not so different and not so far from here. I need you to call out to him.”

  Helen smiled more. “He might not be friendly.”

  “Let’s ask,” I said.

  Helen nodded.

  “Come on, let’s get clear, just in case.”

  She followed me out through the gap in the glass. I felt like I could breathe better, in the hallway, surrounded by human dead. I could see, now that I was on this side, how the light on the glass and the dust made the glass reflective, not quite reaching through to fully penetrate the shadows on the other side.

  Then she called, making a sound of a pitch that went far and beyond that which humans could make. In the hallway and the tunnel, it echoed without end, returning to us, a haunting sound.

  She called again, then again.

  He came, crawling down the tunnel. He was bloodied, injured, and veins marked one side of his face. Great and beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with human standards, a magnificent creature.

  He slowed, approaching the aperture. He watched us with bugged-out eyes, the pupils barely visible, the edges bloodshot. His lips were thick, his mouth wide. He was naked and he was bloody from whatever he’d been doing before we’d called.

  “Gorger,” I said. “Sorry to call you away from your duties.”

  He was silent, staring.

  “We need help, getting where we’re going.”

  “Please,” Helen said.

  Those bugged-out eyes roved over our group. Then they moved to Mary again, and then the floor.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “I don’t want to leverage it, because I don’t want to manipulate you.”

  “I don’t know what he’s thinking,” Ashton said.

  “Shh,” Duncan said.

  Mary offered the answer for Ashton. “Gordon and Gorger got along awfully well.”

  There was a pause. Gorger stared down at the ground.

  “We need to get to any major building where the gas isn’t too thick,” I said.

  He raised those eyes and met mine. Then he nodded.

  Gorger pressed against glass, twisting around. He showed us far too much of himself in the process, as he reoriented himself within a tunnel where he scraped both sides, floor, and ceiling with his mass simply by being there.

  He pointed.

  We took his instruction. I had to adjust Jessie, I felt her grip me tighter, and the others followed as Gorger crawled through the neighboring tunnel. An escort and guide.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Gorger shook his head, still crawling.

  No?

  ‘Don’t thank me’?

  I swallowed, drawing my weapon. I heard the noises of other Lambs taking my cue.

  The paths branched. Gorger pointed us in one direction, away from him. We took it.

  Moments later, we reached another crossroad. The floor of the tunnel was a series of metal grilles, and Gorger slithered beneath them, making them buck and rattle. He pointed again.

  We took the path he’d indicated.

  Thank you, Gordon, I thought. For helping to convince Gorger.

  We reached another crossroad, Y-shaped, and we stopped. There was a ladder stretching up, and there weren’t any good venues for Gorger to appear.

  I adjusted my grip on Jessie, then drew my knife. I tapped it against the ladder.

  The grunt was distant, but affirmative.

  Mary approached the ladder. Lillian stopped her, gesturing.

  There was a brief interaction between the two. Mary eventually conceded to take Lillian’s mask and bladder, before ascending the ladder. She eased the hatch open, peering through the gap.

  After a moment, she eased it closed.

  She remained there, still and silent, for a moment. Then she pulled off the mask and bladder, tossing it down to Lillian.

  No gas, she gestured. Gas factory.

  Another of the gas-production facilities.

  Destroy, she gestured. Soldiers. Tall monsters. Superweapon. Crown gold. Crown tall.

  The gas production facility had already been destroyed. The army had reached this point without our help. Soldiers were here, and so were monsters of the highest quality.

  They had a superweapon at hand, and that wasn’t even the worst of it.

  Crown gold was our shorthand for the Duke. He was present.

  Crown tall was our shorthand for the Infante.

  Previous Next

  Crown of Thorns—20.7

  Our efforts to find a way up was hampered by the chaos above. The hatch Gorger had pointed us to was too close to the center of the enemy. Further down the tunnel, another hatch opened into the corner of the same building, but there was a fight unfolding right on top of it, bullets flying from guns, violence, shouting and death all included in the chaos.

  Further down the same tunnel, in an area where the tunnel served to channel rainwater, a wooden grate was sunken into the street, positioned to lead up to the exterior of the building. Unusable, because so many bodies or one very large body had been left to die atop it. Bodily fluids poured down like molasses from a spoon, collecting on the wood of a grate on the floor of the tunnel we occupied, congealing just enough that it didn’t fully filter through. Blood and clear fluids formed different proportions of the thick stream from moment to moment.

  Dim light struggled to move past the holes in the wooden grate, different parts of it blocked at different moments by the soup of flesh.

  We had to navigate carefully to avoid wading in the acidic runoff.

  I narrowed my eyes, adjusting to the fact there was light to see by. I turned my head to hear better. The noise of the ongoing fight above us was incessant, pure chaos.

  I tuned into that chaos, listening to it, parsing it.

  Kill them, the voice said.

  “So naggy,” I muttered.

  “What?” Lillian asked.

  “Murder, murder, kill kill, telling me to do things I’m not in a position to do.”

  “Do we need to shackle you?” she asked.

  “I’m mostly here,” I said. I turned my head around, trying to listen to the sound of the battle and piece it together.

  “That’s a non-sequitur,” she said.

  “It’s an answer. Mary can stab me if something happens.”

  “Unless something happens to Mary,” Helen said.

 
“Shh,” Mary said. “Bad omen to say it out loud.”

  “If something happens to Mary then you can do something, Helen,” I said. “Or Lillian can do something. If not her, then Duncan and Ashton.”

  “I’m noting that Ashton and I are last,” Duncan said.

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “And if you two kick the bucket or go out of commission, and none of the others are left, then, well, what does it matter?”

  “I think it matters a lot,” Lillian said. “There’s an awful lot of others you can hurt.”

  “The rebels might be able to fend for themselves. Who knows?” I said.

  “Let’s not let it come to that,” Lillian said.

  I was starting to get a sense for the sounds I was hearing through the grate and tunnel. Bullets going one way had a slightly different sound than the ones which weren’t. The tromp of boots had a dull sound to them when they were numerous enough to be heard together, people moving in formation.

  Exact location wasn’t possible to discern in many cases, so I didn’t try. I held them all in my head as separate entities, and I pieced it together. The fact that one regiment of a certain size existed, that another regiment was either nearer or larger by their volume. I could know that a group was firing one way by the sound of the shots, and I could gauge their general number by the volume.

  I could gauge affiliation by the fact that some had their backs to the Infante.

  Kill them or the Lambs die.

  I set my jaw.

  “The Duke is on our side,” Lillian said. “That’s something we could use, if we can separate him from the Infante.”

  “We presume he’s on our side,” I said.

  Mary spoke, “He was in communication with us for a long time. Coded messages that put him at grave risk. The Infante coming after us suggests that he found out. He had no reason otherwise.”

  “He could have a lot of reasons,” I said.

  “He could, but let’s be honest, Sy,” Mary said. “Sometimes the answer is the simple one.”

  Nothing about this seemed simple. We traveled down the tunnel, avoiding the areas where the rainwater ran thickest.

  Something cracked nearby. Dust and debris plunged down from the roof of the tunnel further down, pouring into the space, with a few scattered body parts.

  Shadows flickered. I checked my mental map, trying to think of who it might be.

  “The Infante’s people,” I whispered. I thought about the layout we’d observed, where the enemy was, and gestured.

  We moved into the side tunnels and the shadows, close to the grate where there was light. The light would be deceptive, giving the illusion that if there was anything close by, they’d be able to see it.

  I peered around the corner. They were a squadron of soldiers. Crown soldiers, dressed in black, with quarantine masks, the hoses worked into the masks, armored and protected from gunfire as the hose parted and disappeared over their shoulders, behind their backs. Glass glinted in the light at their shoulders, tinted fluids within the tubes in question. Shoulder-mounted drug injections.

  I gestured for the others, filling them in. I found a dry spot and eased Jessie down, placing her at one side of the tunnel, then returned to my vantage point.

  Their boots tromped, sloshing through the acid water.

  They ran past us, within a foot of me. They were dark enough and the tunnel was dark enough that I was only aware of them by the movement of air on my face. I saw the glint of what might have been a bayonet.

  One man passed me, and in the next instant, Helen was there, on top of him. She crashed into him, banging into the wall, then went down with him into the water. Into the acid. Harvesters rose up from the liquid, crawling over the both of them.

  My eyes went wide. I jumped forward, stepping on the back of the soldier’s head, driving it into the acid while using it as a stepping stone to keep my foot from plunging into the liquid.

  I windmilled my arm, no wall in reach to lean against, and the walls were moist with rainwater that flowed down from the cracks in the street above, anyhow.

  Mary caught my hand, giving me something to brace against.

  The dance.

  The weight of two people on him, his hands scraping against the slick floor of the drainage tunnel, served to keep him put. Water that already churned as it ran down the tunnel was bubbling as—yes, partially exhalations from his mask, but also that Helen’s toe was keeping the air bladder beneath the water.

  She was poised, perched on the man’s back, only barely keeping her limbs and face out of the drainage. It wasn’t a hold, not a grab, but something else, her toe keeping him from breathing, her other toe on his buttocks, her hands either propping him up or darting out to slap at his elbows, if it looked like he was getting them at the angle necessary to haul himself out of the water.

  Mary, still holding my hand, kicked the soldier a few times in the side.

  Her foot came away, held in the air, and I could see the blade that protruded from the toe, now caked in blood.

  We pulled away, retreating to the sides of the tunnel. Lillian, Duncan, and Ashton were all holding rifles, aiming them at the group that seemed oblivious to us. The group was moving slowly, navigating a zig-zagging path of detritus that was making the water level higher. We’d decided not to go that way.

  The harvesters were starting to crawl out of the water, trying to find ways in through the suit. Some were at the side, where Mary had kicked the man.

  I stared down at the scene.

  I touched Mary’s shoulder, then indicated Ashton. I gestured.

  Change.

  She took over for Ashton, taking his rifle.

  Ashton, for his part, took up Mary’s position.

  I gestured. Gas.

  I indicated the harvesters.

  Then I gestured at the group that had left. I used the… well, Jessie would’ve known the history of it.

  But it was the second or third sign we’d settled on, when we’d started using the gestures.

  Meager light and ample shadow were dancing further down the tunnel. It wasn’t impossible that we’d have company. It would put us in a bad position.

  Ashton reached down and cupped one of the harvesters in his hands. He flinched and dropped it.

  “Be careful,” I whispered.

  I dropped to my hands and knees. I tried to keep my hands away, bringing my knife to the soldier’s side. The harvesters moved toward me. Ashton waved his hands at them, and they moved away.

  I cut the holes wider. The harvesters slithered in.

  “Why?” Ashton asked.

  “As a distraction,” I said. “Assuming you can keep it from coming after us?”

  “I think so.”

  I nodded.

  I stared at it for a long time.

  I thought of where the enemy was, all the noises I was learning to make sense of, as if chaos was a language, and I was teaching it to myself, step by step, word by word.

  The focus and the shift in my thoughts came at a price. The voice was speaking. It said dangerous things and it made demands, for impossible things and ugly things.

  This time I was equipped to listen.

  ❧

  Five soldiers sloshed through the water of the tunnel. Some still had guns in hand. Others were empty-handed. Most were wounded.

  We shrank back into the shadows, listening to the noise of boots in water. Where the lesser and standard-issue quarantine gear seemed to dissolve and break down in the face of the acid rain, this gear seemed to be top quality. They waded in dangerous waters that churned with acid and parasites as if it was of no concern.

  The Crown’s elite soldiers. I wondered how they got there. Was it an alternate promotion path? Be leader of a squad, or remain a foot soldier in a squad of higher esteem? Were they picked from the cream of the crop of the aristocracy?

  They were men and women. They had families. They had hopes and dreams and they probably hated this war as much as any of us. They served
the Crown and they were loyal and patriotic. It was a virtue, even if the side they served wasn’t mine.

  I felt nothing. I could have called it coldness, a contrast to the warmth of Jessie, who clung to my back and breathed into the back of my neck, to Lillian, whose arm pressed against mine. Lillian held her breath, because she didn’t want to make a sound.

  Coldness was the wrong idea. Cold made me think of hate, a contrast to the feeling that welled in me when the Lambs were close. Cold made me think of staring the enemy down and feeling a change sweep over me as I internally came to new, more unpleasant terms with them.

  They were room temperature. They were more noises in chaos.

  They reached a point further down the tunnel, and they spotted the enemy. They picked up the pace, insofar as their injuries allowed them to.

  The enemy was Crown. Elite soldiers. They wore uniforms of the topmost quality, in the same black material. The enemy had the gas masks that protected the hoses and tubes with armor.

  The defending side was slow to act. It made me think of a group of men staring into a mirror, realizing too late that they weren’t staring at their own reflection.

  The reality wasn’t so neat and tidy. There was no mirror. There was only the assumption that men and women who were alive and well who wore the same uniforms were friendly.

  That, if they weren’t friendly, that they wouldn’t be suicidal enough to throw themselves at a larger, better-armed group.

  A squad of five collided with a squad of ten. The front ranks were dragged to the ground, and here, the tunnel was dry enough that they wouldn’t be soaked in the drainage water.

  The ones who still stood started to pull the attackers off, sticking them with bayonets, when there was no armor or defending soldier getting in the way. One gun fired from the attacking five, an accidental trigger pull, not something intentional. It made them balk.

  Mary gestured. The Lambs stepped out of shadow, moving quickly and soundlessly.

  Where the defending ten had held the upper hand, they were now outnumbered. Helen pounced on one. Mary attacked another two. I seized a third, burdened as I was with Jessie, and Lillian helped me. Duncan and Ashton went after the last one who wasn’t preoccupied.

  For an instant, it seemed we had the upper hand. We’d caught them unawares, they were preoccupied, and we’d seized them, knocked them down, or we’d disarmed them.