by wildbow
A sense that something was wrong.
She’d pretended to throw two at once, but had held back the other. Before I’d fully processed the fact that I’d almost swung right into the knife’s path, she was throwing it in a simple clean, crisp motion. No choreographing, no putting her entire body into the throw. The sort of thing I could very nearly miss if I wasn’t paying enough attention.
She’s aiming for—
The half formed thought was enough to make me let go of the window frame, falling and sliding until both of my feet landed in the gutter, the back of my head banging against the windowsill.
The knife buried itself into the spot where my hand had been. While I’d been moving from side to side, my hand had been staying in place, keeping me from falling.
This time I was paying attention to what her hands were doing. They traced the bottom of her uniform top and the fingers curled inward, holding what was presumably another throwing knife.
I grinned at her. “I saw that. Not quite subtle enough.”
“Don’t waste them,” the puppeteer said, raising one hand to the side of his face, then removing it, revealing a mess of blood on the fingers. “He’s baiting you.”
“He’s a bastard,” she said.
“I never pretended to be anything but,” I said. I reached up for a grip on the windowsill, and found a large piece of glass. I whipped it at her.
She blocked it much as she had the bottle, flinching as it broke. One of the eyes she’d closed remained closed after she lowered her arm.
“Go, we gain nothing by staying. I can walk,” I heard the puppeteer say. He rose, and Mary was quick to put her entire body under one of his arms, helping him to stand and put a few more steps worth of distance between us.
“What about the lab?” Mary said, looking up at me.
“It’s as good as gone,” the puppeteer said, mumbling some of the sounds. The hit to his face seemed to have caught his cheekbone and nose, but that was somehow impacting his speech, too. The skin was badly split, and it looked ragged enough that a shingle’s edge might have caught it. An impact and a sawtooth edge.
I’d got him good, it seemed.
That wasn’t the sort of thing that made me want to shout my glee to the heavens. The satisfaction was colder, quieter.
“You don’t have all your work,” Mary said.
“I have enough to start over. If he wants to destroy it, he can destroy it. Survival is paramount, and that includes yours, Mary.”
Hearing him, I almost believed it, and I would have if I hadn’t heard his special word and noted the aftermath.
I pulled another piece of glass free of the window itself, where it was only hanging on because of the paint. I wasn’t strong enough to give it proper distance without putting so much into the throw that I’d lose all accuracy. They were too far back, standing on the street now. Mary and her hobbling puppeteer.
She was glaring at me through one eye, the other staying shut.
They turned, Mary watching me out of the corner of her eye, supporting the puppeteer as they retreated in the general direction of the school.
I counted the seconds between each over-the-shoulder glance she gave me.
One, two, three… glance.
One, two, three… glance.
One, two, three, fo—glance.
One two three, glance.
One, two, three, four, pausing for breath, a long stare back in my direction.
One, two, three, four, glance.
The moment she turned away, I moved. To one side, to break line of sight, putting the corner of a building between us, then down the face of the building. It was a reckless, haphazard descent, one where I fell more than I descended, stopping myself now and again with a grab at a window shutter or a bit of branch.
Providing the moths a flame to follow was one thing. Creating a desire and filling it, destroying the prey at the conclusion.
It was another to leave your enemy only one path, and follow them along it.
I wasn’t strong. I might never be. Gordon could have brained the man with the shingle box. Hell, even Helen could’ve. Jamie could have done more damage, but probably would never have hit. I’d hurt the puppeteer, at the very least. Mankind had a long and involved history of being hunters, following a wounded beast for miles.
He’d already been intent on getting to Mothmont and gathering the boys, his three other killers. Now it was the only place nearby that he had access to where he could tend to his injured face.
Nine in ten chance he would do that. One in ten chance that the blow to his head would leave him relying on Mary.
It meant I didn’t need to follow, exactly. That carried its own risks, when little Mary was so very good at throwing things at people. Better to lag behind, to watch my flanks and move with appropriate care and caution.
If I happened to catch up with them, there was nothing I could do to capitalize on the situation. If I stayed back, out of sight, then she had to wonder, and that wondering was a very useful tool. It made every decision she made more difficult, with more variables to consider. Every step of the way, she had to watch her back.
Approaching the school, I found my way to the same alcove where the coach had stopped to drop me off, and peered around the corner.
The puppeteer was alone, his keys rattling as he stood at the locked gate.
I immediately whirled around, looking, searching.
No Mary in sight.
You want to play that game, Mary? I thought.
I’d really hoped that her bond to her creator would mean she stayed close to him, even as he got to the school. But she was sticking to the plan. I couldn’t go for the man without risking that Mary would step out and kill me, much as she’d promised back at Percy’s home.
I’d angered her enough that she was going to kill me very, very thoroughly, if she got the chance.
I could go straight for the puppeteer, but that was a gamble. Was Mary close? Hiding? Would she intercept me? She had a couple of inches on me in height, she had been trained, honed, and I wasn’t positive I could outrun her if it came down to it.
I didn’t like that gamble.
The man was still working to find the right key when the gate opened.
It was the headmistress.
“Mister Percy!” she exclaimed. I looked through the window and thought it was a vagrant. What happened!?”
“I was feeling better,” he said, mumbling. He coughed and spat, “Thought I’d check how things were. A thug on the street waylaid me.”
“Good mercy. Get yourself inside. We’ll get you patched up.”
I heard the gate shut and click. That was my mark to go, double checking for a murderous Mary, then heading to the same window I’d used to exit the building, slipping inside.
My shoes had hard soles. I slipped them off. Comfort was secondary to moving quietly.
If I could get past Mary to reach Percy, I won. If Mary could get to any of us, possibly excepting Gordon or very possibly Helen, it was over. We’d never get the advantage over them with one of ours down and out. If she could reach her group, they’d have an overwhelming advantage. If I could reach mine… well, we’d be a group, and I could share what I knew. In a situation as tenuous as this, their combined strength beat out ours.
Lopsided, as games went. Her with her arsenal of knives and whatever else, me with my letter opener and the knowledge that she was scared, though she was only willing to show it to her maker.
Who, as he’d endeavored to communicate to her, wasn’t to be discounted as a player of our dark little game.
I smiled to myself as I darted off into the recesses of the building.
Previous Next
Taking Root 1.10
This was what I lived for. Literally speaking.
I knew my enemy now. I knew where she was weak, where she was strong. I knew how dangerous she was, and through all of that I could make assumptions about the others in the school. I might have pr
eferred to know where she was and interact with her from a safe vantage point, but this was the next best thing.
I knew that the best way to handle this would be to get to the puppeteer, Mr. Percy, and deal with him before anything else. He was hurt, my odds weren’t that bad. Once he fell, the others would fall. I knew that Mary knew the same thing, and would react accordingly. She knew I knew, and I knew that.
Ad infinitum.
I liked these games, when the system broke down. It was no longer about how good we were at predicting and planning. We were both just good enough that we wouldn’t get ahead of the other by that alone. It was about understanding the other, and I had the edge there.
The yard was dangerous. Too wide a space with no cover. Mary’s space.
That left me the school itself, hallways and classrooms for places I could navigate without exposing myself. If I made it far enough, then I’d be in the back of the school, with the dorm rooms, showers, kitchen, and the boiler rooms in the basement.
The Lambsbridge gang would be back there, I was fairly certain.
I stopped where I was, beside a classroom door that was already open, something to keep me out of sight while not getting in my way. The only light that filtered through was from outside, passing through windows on the outside that fit older styles, square and proper and framed, illuminating bits of the classroom, then touching the windows inside the hallways, where it was all broken glass secured in place with custom-grown branches. The light that reached me was faint and mottled, like the light that might filter through a heavy forest canopy.
I couldn’t move forward until I knew how Mary would react. Who was she? How would the others read her, assuming I’d filled them in on the particulars?
She’s dangerous, she prefers to stay at arm’s length. Throwing weapons, pistol, poison. It’s not just a fear of you, it’s how she is, I imagined Gordon telling me.
Helen might say something like: The puppeteer raised her with care and a great deal of control. A special trigger phrase to keep her compliant if she started to slip the leash. He waited to use it, so it wouldn’t have been a common thing. Remember everything we said about why he raised them at Mothmont. Control and a firm hand. Somewhere he could be close to them and steer them.
Except not in so many words.
Jamie was a hard one for me to guess. I couldn’t slip myself into Jamie’s shoes and imagine what he’d say because Jamie would be the type to call up some obscure set of details. He had a good memory, while mine was below average. But Jamie would also have a sense of the building layout. He could sketch out a quick map in that book of his, I could stare down at it, put all the pieces together, and start to imagine where Mary might have entered the building, where she might have positioned herself.
I tried to imagine the building as well as I knew it, but it wasn’t a complete map, and parts of it were nebulous, the scale not quite right. I couldn’t draw a sharp picture, not a crisp image that stayed still in my mind’s eye.
Then there was Lillian. Not an Academy project, except she was, in a way. She’d grown up with the Academy in mind, had spent some time at Mothmont, and went on to be one of the Academy’s younger students. Her family wasn’t so wealthy that she would thrive regardless of what happened. She’d had to throw herself into her studies, into our activities, just to secure her future. The Academy had its claws in her.
Lillian would share something about the science of the clones. Maybe explain how the trigger phrase worked.
…Or, now that I thought about it, she might surprise us and say something very human. Something like, she was so cold around you, but she let her guard down around him. She even cried.
I imagined that as the moment I could pull the pieces together and get an idea of where Mary might be lurking. I could formulate a plan and enact it. But imagination was only imagination, and as much as it helped to put myself into others’ heads and look at things from set angles, I was missing pieces of it. Jamie’s map, the extra tidbits that I could never come up with on my own.
But I still had an impression of where Mary was, even if I couldn’t pinpoint the exact location. Given how much she cared about the puppeteer, how afraid she was of me, there had to be a comfort zone. A certain range she might wander, where she could potentially keep an eye out for me while still watching him.
My head slowly turned. End of the hallway. Either one of the classrooms on either side, the last classrooms at that end of the hall. Everything beyond that was offices. More likely to be locked tight, too close to him, not close enough to observe me.
What else?
The yard? I’d called it her territory. She could look in the windows just as well as I could look out, and it gave her a lot of range of movement.
I started to imagine a Mary at each of those points. A phantom image lurking in shadow, just out of sight.
The puppeteer was her weak point. When he was strong, he could give her strength, centering her. When he was weak or in danger, she cracked. The brick I’d thrown at him had been aimed at her, in an abstract way. That in mind, I was willing to bet that she was devoting more thought to how to protect him than how to catch me if I tried to break away and run.
Strings extended from him to the phantom Marys. An abstraction of the fundamental hold he had on her. They were strings that could snap, if given cause, but there was a resistance. Tension. Anything she did would always, always be prefaced by a concern for him. A momentary worry.
That was the tool I had to use.
I could make out a heavy, low sound further down the hallway. A large object being set down, a book being dropped.
What are you doing, Mary? I wondered.
The phantom images were suddenly busy. Enacting various scenes and scenarios. Mary, anxious, making a mistake. Mary intentionally making a sound to distract, then slipping closer toward me. Mary setting a trap, a deadfall or a heavy object that held down a tripwire, impossible to see in the dark.
It was very possible that she didn’t just have weapons. Poison, wire, any number of things could be stowed away in and around her uniform. I liked traps, but they were hardly exclusive to me alone.
It was an approach that let her actively protect the puppeteer while keeping the right position respective to me and the man.
If that was what she was doing.
I was visualizing her at the end of the hallway, or in one of the adjacent classrooms. I wasn’t thinking about the yard.
I raised myself up, head snapping over to look into the window of the classroom beside me, past desks and chairs to the window that looked out into the yard.
Between the rain and the branches, there was no way to tell if she was there, moving around to circle behind me, or if it was just weather and gloom playing tricks with my eyes.
Think twice, Sy, I told myself, going back to thinking about Mary being at any one of the positions in a quarter-circle around me. Right classroom, hall, left classroom, yard.
This is why Gordon gets on my case, I thought. Spend too much time thinking, miss my chances.
She was watching, apparently secure in the idea that she’d spot me or confirm my location if I made a break for it. I needed to disrupt that security.
Need to make a noise someplace I’m not.
I looked, peering into the windows, searching the classrooms around me.
Books could be slid across the floor. A small object could be thrown to break something, but both were crude, obvious. I wasn’t strong enough to throw or slide either all that far, the sliding book would make too much noise and the broken glass would be too cliche.
My eye settled on a shape at the back of one room, barely visible as a silhouette against the vague light that made it in from outside, even against the paler background of the wall.
I darted across the hall, low enough to the ground that I had to put my hand down to touch the floor for balance and to keep my nose from smashing into the tile.
My heartbeat picked up as I made it
into the classroom, moving amid desks and chairs. There were windows, yes, but the only exit that didn’t threaten to cut me to shreds on the way through was the door I’d just passed through. If Mary appeared in the doorway, I might well be done for. Even if I did make it through a window, I wasn’t sure she couldn’t catch up to me.
The only defense was to do it fast and do it quiet.
I headed to the corner of the room furthest from the door.
Teacher’s desk. Nothing of importance.
But beside the teacher’s desk, next to the window, there was a globe, resting on a stand, fixed in place at the poles so it could spin. The colors were rich, even in the gloom. A third of the globe was dominated by a rich crimson, each etching of place name topped by a crown. The independent countries were marked out in their own colors, paler, less saturated, scattered and patchwork.
I took it down and pried it free of the stand with the letter opener, then made my way back to the door.
I was paranoid enough of emerging to find Mary standing just outside the door that I raised the globe a bit to shield myself from an impending stab or pistol shot.
But she wasn’t there.
I glanced down the length of the hallway, then set the globe rolling in the direction of a door that sat slightly ajar, leading to a more distant classroom.
I watched it roll, glancing back periodically to make sure she wasn’t sneaking up on me.
It touched the door. The door moved, creaking slightly, clicking.
I ducked back to cover, hiding just inside a classroom, between the door and the shelf.
Closing my eyes, straining my ears, I counted to twenty.
When the time was up, I took a peek around the corner.
The globe had moved.
I moved in that same heartbeat, toward the globe, low enough to the ground that I couldn’t be glimpsed through the windows, glad for once that I hadn’t grown since I was nine.
As much as I was trying to find her and identify her location, she’d been doing much the same as I had. I had little doubt she’d watched me break into the school from a window, tracked my general location, maybe even spotted me as I made my way through the school itself.