Twig

by wildbow

  The commotion broke up. The children who’d been sitting there waiting for their turns in the infirmary had mostly fled. Two were apparently too sick to move while bullets were flying, and the third lay there with a bullet hole in him. The one who’d clutched me. Younger than I’d expected, going only by the strength of his grip.

  I exhaled slowly. Gordon was across the hall, in a classroom, ass on the ground, back to the wall, the littlest clone propped up beside him, still unconscious. The others were behind me.

  Unconscious and whatever else. Being knocked out didn’t mean waking up okay after a set amount of time. It could mean serious brain injuries.

  “I have to ask, for context,” I started.

  The pistol fired yet again. I saw the puff where it had hit the corner.

  It was a ball pistol. One shot, firing balls of lead or whatever else. It wasn’t efficient, in terms of the number of bullets it spat out, range, velocity, or whatever else. Where a bullet from a high-end gun passed through your enemy, these guns were meant to fire a small metal sphere into the other guy’s body, where it could bounce around and tear up their insides. A good killer would make the bullet count, and the damage done by these particular weapons meant that Academy trained doctors would have a far harder time patching them up.

  “Context,” I started again. “Does the Puppeteer read you bedtime stories at night?”

  I heard Mary speak, and she sounded very tired. “Don’t answer. He’s trying to get to us, or trying to buy time.”

  “Oh, Mary! How are you doing?” I called out. “They really like using you as bait, don’t they?”

  “I volunteered,” Mary said. “My plan.”

  “Funny how that works,” I said. “You’d think the puppeteer would work harder to convince you that you should stay alive, if you’re that special to him.”

  “Puppeteer?” the older clone asked.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Mary said.

  “You responded,” he pointed out.

  “Mm,” Mary said.

  I could imagine her expression. Not very happy.

  “I’m curious, Mary, why did you change your mind? You sounded so insistent about not wanting the puppeteer to put himself in danger by coming here. Then he said his magic words and, well, can you clarify? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Magic words,” she said, her voice soft.

  “You’re special, Mary, he was going to make something of you, right? Big sister to all the new clones of the next generation. Why would he do that, trying to control you? Maybe if he came out, I could hear his explanation.”

  “He’s—” the older clone started. He stopped short.

  I frowned, staring down at the ground, trying to picture why.

  “We’re not going to put him in harm’s way,” Mary said. “You’ll have to get through us to get to him.”

  “Basically what I was going to say,” the older clone said.

  “He puts you in harm’s way,” I said. “What part of this is fair?”

  “It’s none of your business,” Mary said.

  “It’s exactly our business! It’s what we do. We do it to make money. The definition of business.”

  I couldn’t see either of them. I was talking to thin air, which was worse than it had been trying to talk to Mary in the furnace room.

  “You’re the cleanup crew for a corrupt and distorted organization. Child soldiers and killers.”

  “I think any argument you could make against our group would apply double for your puppeteer,” I said.

  “Think so? You don’t know us,” Mary said.

  Something was off.

  For someone recommending avoiding talking to me, she was doing an awful lot of it.

  I raised a finger, pointing at the corner of the wall. Very slowly, I moved my fingertip. I glanced back at Jamie and Helen, then over to Gordon.

  I got nods in response. They got it. Gordon leaned back, out of sight.

  Mary was distracting us while the other clone approached down the length of the hall.

  We didn’t have guns. Much less guns intended to rip someone up inside.

  “I know you, Mary,” I said. “I get you. We’re the same.”

  She faked a laugh.

  I held the blackjack and letter opener, poised to throw the first and stab with the second. The other clone had to be close. He could well have his back to the same corner I was crouched beside. Close enough to smell, if the smell of blood and puke hadn’t made the use of my nose impossible.

  “Laughing, you don’t see it? Tell me, did you have breakfast with him, Mary?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Often enough? In the way you really wanted?”

  A pause.

  Glass shattered.

  That was my cue. I threw myself forward, out into the hallway.

  Gordon was still mid-air, having leaped through one of the tree-branch and broken-glass windows that separated classrooms from the hall. Glass and bits of wood danced around him, his knees pulled up to his chest to clear the wall beneath the window.

  Not anything I’d expected, but it was something.

  My shoulder hit the ground. I’d planned to stab if he was close enough. He wasn’t, so I threw the blackjack. A little weight in a long, semi-rigid bag for smacking someone over the head. It served as something to distract, to buy Gordon a fifth of a second as our teenaged assailant reacted.

  Gordon collided with him. In the midst of the collision I saw the two pistols the eldest clone was armed with, saw Gordon reach for just the one, twisting it around in the clone’s hand so the barrel pointed at the boy, the trigger finger slipping away from the trigger.

  Our Gordon. A hero on paper, skilled, strong, fit. But if anyone took him for noble, they’d be wrong. A noble person didn’t take advantage of inches of height difference to slam their forehead into someone’s mouth.

  The older clone shoved Gordon away. He raised his pistol in the same instant Gordon did. One aimed at the other.

  Slowly, I found my feet, rising beside Gordon.

  The glass had cut him on the way through. That didn’t happen in the books.

  “You had two guns,” Gordon said.

  “Was going to shoot both ways,” the clone replied.

  “We’re not here for you,” Gordon said. “We’re here for the puppeteer.”

  “That’s not his name,” Mary said.

  “It’s a good enough name,” I joined in. “You can’t deny he has control over you. He pulls your strings, he decides what you do. Uses you as bait.”

  “And they don’t use you?” Mary asked. “You’re not tied to them, these other orphans? Would you give them up to save your skin? Oh, wait, you don’t care about your skin. Expiration dates, huh?”

  I saw Gordon’s gun waver a fraction.

  “Yeah, you forgot to tell them, huh?”

  “Was going to at the conclusion of this,” I said.

  “You described yourself as a villain. You’re a liar, a cheat, a thief, a grubby killer.”

  “Yet,” Gordon chimed in, “I believe him.”

  Mary didn’t have a quick response for that.

  “When I was asking about breakfast, about the little things that count,” I said. “I was really asking if you felt loved, if you truly loved your… father, or whatever you see him as, or if it’s just something ingrained in you.”

  “I think that’s my cue?” a voice said. Not a confident one.

  A female voice.

  The headmistress emerged behind Mary.

  Her hands clutched a piece of paper.

  My thoughts moved so fast that they were a jumble.

  “La, re, tu, la, sun—”

  I found my conclusion.

  Left alone with the headmistress, the quarantine, our puppeteer had figured out what I’d done.

  “They are not on your side!” I called out. “They are not with the Academy, Headmistress!”

  He’d turned it around.

  �
��—ro, ta.”

  The eldest clone reacted, pulling the trigger. Gordon’s reaction was a fraction of a second later, off-balance as he reeled from getting hit. The clone was hit in the shoulder.

  The look in his eyes went beyond cold, and had become something else entirely. Dead, empty, hollowed out.

  That was how he had them kill the parents. A kill phrase, a letter they were to read at a set time or something sent to the home.

  Gordon fell, and the clone barely staggered, heedless of pain and injury.

  Helen wasn’t a fighter, and the rest of us didn’t stand a chance.

  The puppeteer was a manipulative bastard, one that could well be on his way out, and he might well have beat us with one fell stroke.

  Previous Next

  Taking Root 1.11

  Letter opener, get close, stab, doing any damage at all can make the difference, get low, make better use of shorter stature—

  The eldest boy stepped closer. I ducked, drawing my arm back to stab, and he kicked me. He caught and twisted my wrist while I was trying to catch my balance and before I grasped what he was doing, he’d grabbed the letter opener.

  He pushed, and with the way my arm was twisted around, my head pointing forward rather than up, I was put in the position of having to let him destroy the arm or letting myself fall.

  I toppled, landing next to Gordon. He was hunched over, his hand to his chest. I didn’t like the amount of blood I saw.

  Mary was standing back, between me and the Headmistress, who was kneeling on the ground, trying to help the little boy who had been shot, her eyes wide, paper in one hand. Mary’s expression was unreadable, but her body was tense enough I could visualize every muscle being tight, ready to spring. The headmistress was the opposite, as if she would have fallen to pieces with a touch.

  The others were still around the corner, half-crouching, caught between running and trying to do something.

  Helen was the one who stepped up.

  We’re better as a group. Just need to put him off balance, give Helen the best opportunity possible.

  I found my feet, half-walking, half-stumbling over to Gordon, where I grabbed one of the knives he’d stowed in his belt. I paused, behind the clone, watching, waiting for the best chance.

  He reached forward, to his belt.

  Helen took a step, and I lunged in the same instant.

  “Behind you!” Mary called out.

  My instincts told me that Helen saw me, that she was capitalizing on the eldest clone’s distraction and my position. Together, the pair of us might be able to accomplish something, whether he was drawing a knife or loading his pistol.

  But Helen stepped back, instead.

  I found myself on a collision course with someone almost twice my size, who was better armed than I was, far better trained. He followed Mary’s warning by turning and spotting me.

  Situations like this were where I felt like the Academy had screwed me over. The thoughts were in place, I knew what I had to do, and I could see everything play out. Knife in hand, my enemy’s soft gut in plain view, almost in reach, nothing to stop the knife from punching deep. Let the pain and the damage done slow him down.

  But thoughts ran away, I started naturally thinking about cause and effect, follow-up, what to do to maximize the damage done and turn the situation around. What if he made that one in a million movement to knock my knife aside with the letter opener or the barrel of the one-shot pistol?

  While talking it wasn’t a problem, I could say one thing while thinking about the next step. A fight moved too fast. It slowed me down, made it feel like my hands and body were a step behind my thoughts. Enough to make the difference in a fight against someone ordinary.

  This guy wasn’t ordinary. He swept his arm out, holding the pistol high—more thoughts about complications, predicting what he was doing, countering it—and letting his cloak fan out. The fabric of the raincloak caught the knife. His arm moved and helped the cloak naturally fold around the knife and my knife hand. He bent his arm and used his elbow to force both hand and weapon to one side.

  Before I could try to pull away, he was twisting, bringing his knee into my hand, driving it into the wall.

  I grimaced in pain and followed through on backing up, aware that I’d lost my knife in the tangle of his cloak.

  The letter opener clinked to the ground as he straightened his arm, fixing the flow of his cloak so his own limb wasn’t trapped in the folds.

  Before I could catch my balance and pull my thoughts together, he was leaning forward, chasing me faster than I was retreating. My knife was in one of his hands, freed from the cloak, filling the hand the letter opener had just been dropped from. The pistol was in his other hand.

  Good job, Sy. Pick a fight, achieve nothing except arming the other guy with successively larger weapons. Shall we go find a sword to give him?

  He kicked me, hard, and sent me stumbling backward. Keeping me off balance.

  I was in the middle of thinking about how to regain it and turn things around when I stumbled over Gordon. I hit the ground, the back of my head cracking hard against the floor.

  One of the best minds the Academy can produce, still no better in a fight than a typical underweight, underdeveloped eleven year old.

  I felt a little better knowing that Gordon was now between me and the clone, even if he was crawling on the floor, one hand held tight against a bullet wound, my feet on his back while I lay on the floor.

  Then I felt guilty for feeling better.

  I shot a quick glance at Mary and the headmistress, and saw that Mary was on the approach.

  “Mary,” I said, backing away.

  “Don’t even try,” she said.

  “Do you want this? Do you want to be—”

  I was cut off by the slam of a door. The eldest clone had kicked a door that Jamie was trying to use as a shield. The door closed, and Jamie, Lil and Helen backed up.

  “Do you want to be that?”

  Her expression was still blank, unreadable.

  I knew she had emotions. I’d seen them, or I’d seen hints of them. The problem was that she only let herself be vulnerable with her creator. The same man that had turned his back on her.

  She lifted up her skirt at one side and slipped a knife free from a garter.

  Gordon moved, straightening, and my feet slid off his back to drop onto the back of his legs. I pulled them out of the way as he got one foot under him and started to rise up to a standing position.

  Mary, for her part, backed off. Her hand moved at the side of her skirt, and she held another knife. Smaller, less fancy, and probably weighted for throwing.

  “Gordon,” I warned.

  He didn’t seem to notice, and he didn’t seem to notice Mary either. He headed for the older clone.

  Mary threw, and in that moment, Gordon stopped in his tracks. The knife carried onward, striking the wall. Gordon barely spared Mary a glance before grabbing the knife from the wall and throwing it at the other clone’s back.

  The teenaged clone stumbled. Helen started to move toward him, but he held up his knives, warning her off.

  Gordon, for his part, made it another two steps before something refused to support him. His upper body went askew, seemingly twisted more by pain than anything else, and he stumbled into the wall. I saw him look at the others, then Mary, then me, a measured study, taking it all in. His eyes lingered on mine.

  One of the first lessons students learn in the Academy, is that life wants to survive. We’ve been at the survival game for a terribly, terribly long time. Against hostile environments, against predators. So long as a student doesn’t work against that impulse, either on the fundamental level or while dealing with the individual, they can trust that life will find a way.

  Meeting Gordon’s gaze, I was shocked to see just how hard walking that way was. His eyes had dark shadows under them as if he hadn’t slept in a week, and his skin was pale, his pupils narrowed. Each breath he took was labo
rious, the sort of ragged hauls for breath I’d expect someone to take after being underwater for minutes, but they each came right on the back of the last, with a phlegmatic cast to it, prompting his entire body to jerk a little, as if something kept getting stuck and coming unstuck as he strained himself.

  Best of the best, I thought. I want to take your place, so you don’t have to do this.

  Gordon didn’t seem to be up to talking. He looked at Mary, who was reaching for another throwing weapon, and spread his arms to either side, stepping away from the wall.

  “I wouldn’t,” I told Mary, which was the truth. Then I lied, “When he’s like this he’ll just catch them out of the air.”

  Though her expression was blank, I saw the pause in her follow-through. A moment of doubt.

  Gordon pushed himself away from the wall, taking advantage of the bend in the hallway to escape Mary’s throwing range and advance on the clone he’d thrown a knife at.

  I saw Mary grab the knife and hurried to duck into the classroom where the youngest clone had been propped up against a wall.

  She didn’t throw the knife.

  Gordon drew closer to the clone he’d knifed. Both were injured, Gordon suffering from a gunshot that had very possibly danced around the inside of his torso, the clone shot in one shoulder and knifed in the back.

  The clone, however, seemed largely immune to pain, the killing phrase driving him past such mundane things, putting him in the mind for efficient aggression and murder and nothing else. He was using his wounded shoulder to a reasonable extent, a stark contrast to Gordon, who wasn’t using one arm while he held a hand against his injury, though both arms were in good working order.

  Our clone had about three inches and twenty-five pounds on Gordon, who was already of a good size.

  To top it off, it seemed he had a pistol and the wherewithal to use it. While Gordon limped his way, he drew a pellet out of his pocket and slipped it into the gun’s chamber, pulling at the lever along the barrel.

  Helen appeared behind the clone, doing exactly what I’d intended when I’d come up behind him, earlier. She caught the clone’s arm as Gordon drew closer, hauling it back and forcing the pistol off course. I ducked lower in the wake of it going off, though I knew that by the time I heard the thing it was already too late.