Twig

by wildbow

  She’d broken once, and she’d pieced herself back together again. Sylvester had helped inform and instruct that person she’d been then. She knew it was possible she’d hit a wall and break again. She found an eerie confidence in the knowledge that if it happened, she would piece herself back together.

  Endlessly, if need be. But she wouldn’t be cowed.

  She would take the things she wanted.

  She touched the small of Pierre’s back, moving fingers along it while she mused aloud. “I’m thinking we might start by having you involve me in things more, sir. Then we can have you fall ill.”

  “Ill,” the Mayor said.

  “I’ll take care of you. I’ll see to some of your duties. I’ll take over more as you suffer more.”

  “The Academy would want to address my health,” the Mayor said. “As a point of pride.”

  “Mental health?” she suggested. “Harder to pin down.”

  The Mayor considered, then nodded.

  “We should be able to nail that one down,” Pierre said.

  “There’ll be pushback,” the Mayor said. “You’re not an aristocrat.”

  “We’ll do fine, I think,” Shirley said, thinking hard. It felt so strange to be moving forward in the face of adversity like this. “It’ll need to start with me proving myself in regard to the food crisis.”

  “We’ll pit them against each other, I imagine,” Pierre said.

  “Perfect,” she said.

  “We’ll want to involve the others,” Shirley said. “Samuel is in town, he doesn’t like the complex machinations, but he has an eye for some kinds of trickery and forgery.”

  “We can reach out to other areas,” Pierre said. “To the others. There might be resources.”

  The discussion continued until they needed to bring out the lamps and candles, and for some time thereafter. The snow began to fall more heavily.

  Previous Next

  Forest for the Trees—e.3

  Just beyond the periphery of the city, the landscape rippled and bulged from the mass graves. All was now buried under a carpet of wolf clover. The plague had hit New Amsterdam, and war had hit it some time after. Word was that the putrescence made walking out among those mounds and that clover dangerous.

  It was still so nice to see green again. It had been a bleak time of it.

  Drake puffed on his cigarette, then moved his hand, putting the cigarette just in front of Emily’s mouth. She drew on it. Then, smoke still suppressed, she kissed the back of Drake’s hand before he pulled away. Her exhalation of smoke chased after his hand.

  He moved the cigarette to his right hand, before reaching beneath her hair to rest his hand on the back of her neck. She half closed her eyes and let her head rock left and right as he used the one hand to massage her. The scales that decorated his hands were smooth on the surface, rough at the edges. His fingertips were clawed, and she shivered every time the points grazed her.

  “I always planned to come here. I was so young, the last time I came,” Drake said.

  “New Amsterdam?”

  “Yeah. It’s our city, isn’t it?”

  “It’s everyone’s. Or it was,” she said. “It’s supposed to be big and messy enough that anyone can find their place here.”

  His hands were strong. She loved his hands. They were long-fingered and capable of massaging her neck, from hairline to shoulder. It would be so easy to pinch or squeeze in the wrong way, and he avoided it. She loved that they were studded with scales and marked with tattoo and as a consequence there were probably no hands like his in the world.

  She loved that just about every last part of him was like that.

  A distant train whistle screamed, and people that had been in the station or sitting on benches under the eaves began to migrate out toward the platform.

  That same group of people represented a cross section of the city’s residents. The rich, the poor, the young, the old. The free, the slaves, the living, and the dead that were animated with voltaic riggings. There were families there, Emily noted. She felt a twinge at seeing that.

  Drake’s thumb ran down the side of her neck, tracing beneath the collar of her shirt, the nail touching skin of her shoulder that clothing covered.

  “You’re bored, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Never, when I’m with you.”

  “Clearly,” she said, with exaggerated amusement. “You turn your full attention my way when you have to wait around for even a few minutes.”

  “It’s been an hour.”

  “Not even half of one.”

  The relatively chaste contact of his hand on the back of her neck was drawing some stares from some of the people who’d gathered closer to them on the platform. Well-to-do families. Not as well-to-do, perhaps, as the family Emily had been born into, Emily figured, but well-to-do enough to have clothes of the latest fashion and stitched to carry their bags. They would be paying the fares for those stitched servants, too. Those same servants would have a separate car. The smell of death and ozone tended to come up when they gathered in an enclosed space.

  She was aware of the pressure. There was an unspoken expectation that Emily and Drake would get out of the way. They were supposed to move to a place on the train platform that would be out of sight. They were altered. Tattooed, physically changed. She was horned and her teeth were fangs. Her clothes were a men’s work shirt, because ordinary woman’s clothing didn’t fit well with her altered musculature, and she wore overalls with the straps and front piece of the upper half tied around her waist, knotted in front. Drake wore a sleeveless shirt and canvas pants with suspenders. The suspenders were a necessity, with him having next to nothing in body fat. Lean muscle, more lean muscle, the requisite pieces and organs to keep him alive, the skeleton to keep him upright, and everything else was decoration.

  She wouldn’t have it any other way.

  There was a girl, Emily noticed. Thirteen or fourteen, in nice clothes with nice hair, a pretty stitched servant carrying her bag. Where the girl’s family and greater group were turning up their noses or stopping just shy of outright sneering at Emily and Drake, the girl kept sneaking glances, and her expression was unreadable.

  Please, little lady, Emily thought. Please see this for what it is.

  She reached up for Drake’s hand, and she pulled it down, so his arm was against her neck and shoulder, his arm against her front, his front against her back.

  She held that arm with both hands, holding it against herself, holding herself against it.

  Look, she willed.

  “What’s our agenda for later?” Drake asked.

  “Our agenda? We have guests to entertain.”

  “Mmm,” he made the sound, and she felt that sound through where his chest and stomach. pressed against her back.

  “We’re fairly flexible, though.”

  “That we are,” he murmured in her ear.

  She laughed, loud. That got her more annoyed glances than the affectionate touching had. The little lady looked away, rather than at her, as if ashamed, embarrassed on her behalf.

  Look, Emily willed, prayed.

  “Good thing too,” Drake continued. “The very next moment we’re alone together, I’m going to pounce on you, beautiful creature, and I won’t be letting you go.”

  Where his hand draped down in front of her, his fingertip tapped twice against the knot of the overall’s straps, that knot just a bit lower than a belt buckle ought to be.

  She hugged his arm to her, tighter, and she smiled to herself.

  In many things, she worried. In many other things, she was far from alright. In most things, even, there was anger or pain. Old, present, and looming.

  In this, however, she was content. She had fought for this. She had claimed her scale-decorated man and left him behind, and she had fought her way back to him again. She wanted to embody her contentment in a way that could be seen.

  That little lady with the fine well-to-do family and the stitched carryi
ng her bag looked her way, curious despite herself.

  Drake placed the cigarette in her mouth again. Emily drew back, then exhaled the smoke through her nostrils, twin plumes.

  The train screamed again. It was coming out of the trees now. One scream after another, as it drew close to the platform. The sound of the whistles and horns were joined by the sounds of the brakes.

  Soon the passengers would flood out and flood in.

  I’m everything you’re not, little lady. I don’t have the fine clothes, I don’t have the money or the future waiting for me. Not properly. I could hang tomorrow, if things unfolded wrong, if the wrong words found the wrong ear or if the wrong people happened to arrive in this city.

  But I’m free.

  The train came to a stop.

  Stairs stretched down from the side of the train, part machinery, part musculature. The passengers followed a moment later.

  The car closest to Emily and Drake was filled with people like the little lady.

  “Shall we go find them?”

  Emily nodded.

  They took their time traveling around the back of the crowd. They got several more dirty looks.

  Chance and Lainie were getting off the rear car. They had a crowd around them. Lainie wore a sleeveless dress in a dusty rose shade that wouldn’t have looked out of place on someone in the well-to-do crowd, but she wore it to show off her arms. Plague scars marked one arm, and tattoos marked the other. Thorny branches reached up from her hands, and Kraken tentacles reached down from her shoulder, making only the slightest contact, just past the elbow. It was part of a broader tattoo that claimed her back.

  Her eyes were modified, in what was supposed to be a minor change, but there had been a complication. A red ring marked the division between pupil and iris, stark and bright, but her actual eyelids were reddened, the spaces beneath each eye darkened, as if she’d just finished a marathon session of crying and gone a night without sleep.

  Emily always noticed the eyes. Eyes held meaning to her. She’d offered to find someone good who could fix it, and Lainie had declined.

  Chance was relatively unchanged, for his part. He was fit, with the work he did in the downtime, he had one or two tattoos, he had some plague scars that were worse than Lainie’s, mostly beneath his clothes, and he had a mod-girl at his side, but he was still recognizable as Chance.

  The rest of their small crowd was of similar caliber. They were dockworkers, youth of questionable reputation, thieves, charlatans, with tattoos, modifications, and delightfully poor fashion choices.

  Emily’s hand moved. Together.

  Of the group, Chance’s hand, Lainie’s hand, and three others all moved in the answering sign. Agreement.

  She broke away from Drake to reach out. Her hand caught Lainie at the side of the head, fingers in Lainie’s red hair.

  “How are you?” she asked Lainie.

  “Tired from the trip. Hungry. We made friends on the train.”

  “Good,” Emily said.

  Chance said, “Job finished early, but trains took forever. They were pulling trains off of one line to put them on this one. Five more trains are going to pass through this station before the afternoon and evening are over.”

  “Why?” Emily asked.

  “We should find out and report back to our Lords and Ladies,” Chance said. “After.”

  “After food and sleep, please,” Lainie said.

  Chance put an arm around the girl he’d been close to since stepping off the train. The girl had lace growing out of her, to the point it wasn’t clear where clothing ended and skin began. “After.”

  Emily laughed. “I know just the place.”

  “You know a place?” Drake asked.

  Emily nodded. “Come on. All of you.”

  She gave them a hand with one of the heavier bags, slinging it over one shoulder. She led them toward the city, the rest of the group chattering and smiling.

  She cast a look over her shoulder, searching the crowd for the little lady. She found her target in the window, meeting the girl’s eyes.

  Emily smiled, revealing her fangs. The girl turned away from the window, a flicker of annoyance on her face.

  That was fine.

  It had been the theaters of Tynewear, not a train station, she’d been two or three years younger, but years ago she had been that girl. She had cast the same inquisitive glances, her expression flat because she’d been unable to come to a judgment. Rather than a couple, it had been a heavily tattooed man and his friends, drunk off their asses, singing.

  She hoped and she prayed that the girl, should she need it, would find it the same opportunity that she had. The first seed of a realization, if not the catalyst itself.

  “Where are we going?” Drake asked her. She knew what he really wanted to ask. With this crowd in their company, would there be any pouncing?

  “Home,” she said. “In a fashion.”

  ❧

  The music played throughout the apartment home. She moved her hand and it caught in torn sheets with beads of blood on them.

  The room was nice. The walls were painted evenly, decorated with portraits and landscapes in fine frames. One wall had a bookshelf sitting against it, and the books were all leather, including some exotic kinds that had been Academy created. The bed had four posts and a canopy, the floor had a fine rug from halfway around the planet.

  Everything in the apartment home would be of similar caliber.

  She wanted to destroy the rest of it, as friction, scales, claws, and other decorations had destroyed the sheets. She wanted to tell the others to help her destroy it, but she didn’t want to spoil their rest.

  Before they left, perhaps.

  She sat up.

  “Cigarette?” Drake asked.

  She reached to the bedside table, retrieved the sole remaining cigarette from the little metal case, and handed it to Drake. She found a matchbook and pressed it against his bare chest, before standing from the bed.

  “Not partaking?”

  “Getting water and checking on our guests,” she said. “I’ll be back.”

  “Get dressed first,” he told her. “I’ll save it until you’re back.”

  She threw a small pillow at him, then stretched.

  She found the clothes she’d had on, and put them back, the overall’s straps going over her shoulders this time. She walked barefoot into the next room.

  Lainie was curled up in a young man’s lap, head on his shoulder. The lad had a guitar resting across the armsrest of the chair and her lap, laid with strings up. As the music box played, he plucked the strings.

  One of the young men stood and approached her as she found a wine glass and filled it with water from the tap.

  “Keep your distance,” she warned. “I imagine I smell atrocious.”

  “Can’t smell a thing,” he said. “Too many years of exposure to noxious chemicals, even before the Lambs found me and snatched me up.”

  “Chemicals, hm?”

  “And after they found me, it was more poisons, gases, and other things that singe the nose hairs, even if you’re being careful,” he said.

  She drank her water, making a bit of a nodding motion to make it clear she’d heard.

  “Junior,” he introduced himself. “Posie is over there, with one of our guests from the train. The other two, are boys I’m training up in hopes they’ll be able to follow in my footsteps. Marv and Vic.”

  “Emily,” she said. She offered a hand to shake. He shook it. “I’m the princess in the tower that Lillian and Sylvester rescued, and now they don’t know what to do with me.”

  “I think—” Junior started.

  There was a hard knock at the door.

  “—He knew exactly what to do with everyone.”

  Past tense?

  She went to the door.

  No peephole. In a building like this, there wasn’t really a need. Each resident had an apartment that spanned one or two floors.

  She ope
ned the door. The people on the other side forced it the rest of the way open. Soldiers. They flooded into the apartment. Anyone who could have gone for a gun wasn’t given a chance.

  Candy stared down the officer who pointed a pistol at her.

  If they shot Drake—

  “On your knees!” the officer shouted into her face.

  “No,” Emily said.

  The others were kneeling. Junior had dropped to his knees of his own volition, even without a gun pointed his way. It freed officers to turn their attention to her.

  Two approached her from behind, grabbing her arm and shoulder. A boot kicked the back of her knee, sharp.

  Her leg didn’t bend or even move in reaction.

  “I will not ask you again! Down on the ground or I will put a bullet in you!”

  “My answer will remain the same. If you shoot me—”

  “Candida.”

  Emily closed her eyes for a moment.

  “Officers, it’s alright.”

  “Are you sure?”

  The pair stepped through the door. More officers followed behind them. He was an older man, his features chiseled to the point they looked artificial. She looked thirty years younger than she was, her figure ridiculous.

  “Everard. Adelaide,” Emily greeted them.

  “Candida. Don’t use our first names like that. It’s petulant. We’re your father and your mother,” Everard said.

  “I’d hoped never to see you again.”

  “Then our family apartment in New Amsterdam was a bad place to visit. You’ve brought squatters?”

  “Friends and acquaintances.”

  Drake had emerged from the other room, dressed.

  “They’ve broken into our liquor cabinet, it seems,” Everard observed.

  “My lords! You’ve destroyed yourself,” Adelaide said.

  “I feel better than ever, Adelaide.”

  “Your eyes,” Adelaide said. “Whatever possessed you?”

  Emily raised her hand to her face, touching near her eye. The orbs were there, but they had been made utterly clear and translucent, visible only if the light caught them at the right angles. Otherwise, it left her eye sockets looking empty, raw.