Twig

by wildbow

  The man nodded. He invited us in.

  It smelled like a barn inside, which probably wasn’t a bad way of putting it. The lab was one of the larger ones, but iron bars blocked off one side from the other. On our side, there were tables and notebooks, slates with equations and notes written out in chalk, and a full set of Ratios by Species.

  On the other side, the experiment lurched. It was five-legged, unbalanced, it had no less than ten heads. The body was patchwork, some areas feathered, some furred, some scaled. With every movement, it made a hoarse whine, or a high pitched growl. It was hard to say.

  “Doesn’t look very viable,” I said.

  “Not… viable,” Jamie echoed me, penning it down.

  “Hold on,” Patches said. “Do you even grasp the very basics of what we’re doing here?”

  “Um, yeah,” I said. Then I added a lie for good measure, “Our project, like all the other groups going around, is to summarize your projects, take notes, and do reports on them for class.”

  When what we’re really doing is scouring the university for Mauer’s moles and spies. Investigating and interviewing every single damn person who might know something Mauer might be able to use or pass on.

  Checking ten to twenty a day, out of thousands of relevant doctors, teachers, students, and staff members. Six days a week, for three months.

  We’d only caught one.

  This is my personal hell.

  “I’m talking about method,” he said. “It starts with a goal.”

  “Making a weapon,” Mary said.

  The doctor gave her a very condescending look. I prickled a little at that.

  “No,” Patches said. “That’s one option. It’s an easy way to get bonus funding and extensions. But if someone can contribute to the greater scientific knowledge in a demonstrable way, we can use that. Right here, we have my study on ratios. Common lines of thinking are that all sustainable lifeforms naturally fit into certain configurations on the macro or micro scales. So long as the scale is maintained, or not deviated from too much, the lifeform should survive, even as other life is grafted into it on the micro and macro levels.”

  “Doesn’t look very sustainable,” I said.

  “Seeing when, where, and why it fails is my goal. It’s very possible that thousands of doctors and professors around the world are operating under a flawed assumption,” he said. “In the process, I’ve cataloged whole texts with numbers on the ratios pre—and post—graft. I have support from four different professors in Radham, and two more in other institutions.”

  “File has details on your past,” Jamie said. “We’re getting a sense of where things stand at present—”

  “Four papers and one text published in the last three months,” Patches said, with pride.

  “What’s in the future?” Jamie asked.

  The creature made a noise, louder than before, a guttural whine.

  “Next step in determining sustainability. I’ll have my creature impregnate itself,” Patches said. “It’s a chimera, actually two sets of compatible DNA in one creature. It won’t bear a clone, but a genetically distinct member of its own species, I’m hoping. If it can carry offspring to term, that’s the last major benchmark in sustainability.”

  Jamie nodded, but I noticed his hands as the giveaway, clutching pen and book.

  “Any other questions?” I asked Mary and Jamie.

  They shook their heads.

  We stepped out of the room, and the door was shut firmly behind us.

  “Nope,” I said.

  “Didn’t get any impressions he was hiding anything,” Mary said. “He even knew we were investigating on a more official level, didn’t flinch.”

  “I was thinking it was more to do with his personality. That’s a long-term project, ties him in pretty deeply to the academic community. He had some idea who we were, even. That’s not someone who gets caught or used by the Shepherd.”

  “No,” Mary said.

  “What do you think, Jamie?”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” he said, absently.

  “Okay, I’ll rephrase. What are you thinking?”

  “The animal in there. What he was talking about. Doesn’t sit well.”

  “Our sensitive soul,” Mary said. She stepped over and gave Jamie a kiss on the side of the head. He smiled at her, still clutching his book tight to his body.

  “Wuss,” I said.

  He hit me with the book.

  I amended my statement. “Nah, I’ll back what Mary said. I think I get it. You’re a good person like that.”

  He nodded.

  We reached the staircase, and started our way back up to Gordon, Helen, and Lillian.

  We were only partway up when we saw the woman coming down.

  Half-again as tall as a woman should be, she wore clothes that were a part of her, waves of raw-edged, scar-tissue flesh flowing back to cover her hair, wrap around her arms, encircle her legs like a dress, and cover her feet. Only her face was normal, and it was a very pretty face, though the eyelids were fixed open with staples, and her mouth sealed shut by the same. Tubes ran out of her cheeks, down from her tear ducts, and out of her ears, while more extended from belly button, each tube feeding out a constant supply of black or bile-yellow fluid. The tubes themselves disappeared into the folds of the cloth covering.

  Her arms were bloody, up to the elbows. That same blood was splattered all over her front and legs, with droplets on her face.

  She made her way down the stairs at a brisk pace, crimson hands clasped in front of her. We hurried to get out of her way.

  We were silent as we watched her continue her herky-jerky descent deeper into the Bowels, perfectly upright throughout, though her head bobbed with each step down she took on the stairwell.

  We exchanged glances.

  We bolted. Up the stairs, down the hall.

  Jamie knew the room number, though I’d forgotten. It didn’t matter in the end. The door was open.

  Broken glass was everywhere. Helen was sitting against the wall, Gordon and Lillian were kneeling over a mangled body, Lillian doing what she could to help the man, though it didn’t look like it was enough.

  “Mole?” I asked.

  Gordon shook his head. “But he was hiding something here. Moment we started asking questions, he panicked.”

  “His panic agitated the experiment,” Helen said. “The experiment agitated his insides with her hands.”

  “Please,” Lillian was whispering. “Please, please, please…”

  “I don’t think you can save him,” I said.

  “He’s… I wish I could, but that’s not what I’m worried about,” she said. She looked at me and whispered, “Lockdown.”

  A silence followed her word.

  “Let’s go,” Gordon said. “Get out of here before—”

  The siren went off. All through the complex, throughout the Bowels, the lighting shifted.

  “Oh,” I said. I slapped my face with my hand. “Oh. Well, you just had to go and jinx it, didn’t you?”

  Heavy thuds marked the barricades dropping down. With the experiment loose as far down as she was, chances were good that they’d only sealed off the exit.

  “I’m sorry,” Lillian said, in a small voice. “I’m really sorry.”

  Like we haven’t spent enough time down here already, I thought, as I heard the loudest thud yet, a final, terrible impact, burying us inside.

  Previous Next

  Lips Sealed 3.2

  In the wake of the biggest seal coming down, breakers, locks, and defense systems could be heard, one after the other, throughout the complex, each one a distinct ‘boom’ with a long series of echoes following it. The room vibrated with the motion of water through the floor and ceiling, before something filled up or the flow became consistent.

  “Just to make it absolutely clear,” I said. “I wasn’t here when this happened.”

  “What?” Lillian asked. The look she gave me was a bewildered one.r />
  “First thing Hayle or Briggs are going to think is, ‘Sy did it.’ Guarantee you. I’d like to point out, for everyone in the room, except maybe the dead guy there, who isn’t listening, that I’m innocent this time.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” Helen said. “You weren’t here.”

  “How is that a priority?” Lillian asked, her voice tremulous, like she might break at any second. “Why does it matter?”

  “It matters to me,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked. She was gesturing far more than usual, and her hands were bloody. She shoved them in my direction, “This is one of the very worst things that could happen, and it happened in the worst way, and you’re assigning blame?”

  “Deflecting blame.”

  Lillian wheeled around and lunged for me. Gordon swept her up and caught her in a tight hug, holding her back, and holding her at the same time. It served as emotional support just as much as it was keeping her from trying to strangle me with her gore-smeared hands.

  “I can beat you in a fight, Sy!” Lillian shouted, still struggling. “Just give me an excuse!”

  I spread my arms helplessly, unsure of what to say.

  Outside the door, a long train of people in lab coats ran down the length of the hallway, shouted instructions flying between them.

  Lillian had seen her share of crises. Yes, she was young, and being very good and spending a lot of time around us did influence her behavior to sometimes mask how young she really was, but I’d honestly expected a response similar to the other doctors, rather than this.

  I looked at Jamie, one eyebrow raised.

  “She’s claustrophobic,” Jamie informed me. “Right now she’s—”

  “I’m not claustrophobic,” Lillian cut him off. “I’m phobic of this, whatever the phobia is for being trapped in a dungeon with dangerous experiments and sterilization procedures!”

  “Understandable,” Jamie said, gently.

  “When I think of worst case scenarios and I think of those a lot because I work with you guys, when I think about the stuff most of it starts like this and I’m in the Bowels of the Academy,” Lillian said, and she put an awful lot of emotion into her voice at the end.

  Mary approached, and Gordon handed off Lillian to her. Lillian buried her face into Mary’s shoulder.

  The emotion in Lillian’s voice carried over as she continued speaking. “I like to be prepared just in case so I can be strong, but in the worst thoughts I’m here and there’s almost no point to being strong because I’m here, and if I feel like imagining something especially bad to test myself, then sometimes something’s loose and we have no idea what it is, and if I feel like being really, really mean to myself, then I imagine Sy being there and he’s making fun of me all the while. And it’s happening!”

  “Why?” Gordon asked. “Why do that to yourself?”

  “Because it sucks being the only one that’s freaking out! Just like this, right now! I don’t want to stand out when you all are saying, ‘that’s one big spider, do you think it eats horses?’ But no, I get freaked out and Sy acts like a penis, and Helen acts like she’s seen worse because she has and that doesn’t make me feel better at all! The rest of you are okay and nice about it. I want to mentally fortify myself, so I don’t get scared anymore.”

  “We can work on it together,” Mary offered. “We’ll get through this, and we’ll work on it together.”

  “I don’t want to be scared anymore,” Lillian mumbled. “I’ve heard too many stories from my classmates and stuff.”

  “Dumbass,” I said.

  Jamie punched me, giving me a glare. Everyone else stared at me in shock.

  I pressed on anyway. “You’re valuable to us because you’re normal. Mary should know as well as any of us, how we need people to remind us how normal people act. The day you stop being scared and become one of us, we won’t need you like we do.”

  The counterpoint is that by being around us, she’s absorbing our qualities, trying to emulate us.

  “That almost sounds comforting,” Mary said.

  “It isn’t,” Lillian said. “Sy doesn’t do comforting. He does manipulation.”

  “No, Sy does comfort people,” Jamie said. “He just does it in his own special way.”

  Lillian scowled.

  Everyone has a weak point, I thought. Everyone has good days and bad ones. It’s only when we’ve seen someone on their best and worst days that we can truly know them.

  This was Lillian’s bad day, it seemed.

  “You want to be a professor someday, right?” I asked. Her good day. The day she gets her coat and degree.

  Lillian nodded.

  “If you’re going to be the best Lillian you can be, it’s not going to be by trying to fit in with us. Take another step closer to being the woman that wears a black coat. That doesn’t mean being fearless, it means doing what needs to be done.”

  Lillian nodded again. She seemed a little less distraught than before. Mary gave her a reassuring squeeze of the shoulders.

  “…So tell us what’s going on,” I told her.

  Her face fell.

  I expected Jamie to hit me for that one, but he didn’t. Perhaps he wanted to know as much as I did.

  Lillian started explaining in a way that made me think of a stitched, very deliberately, without a whole lot of emotion, “I said this happened in the worst way. These first few floors are supposed to be for stuff that isn’t so dangerous. The lockdown protocols here have to be manually activated by the people in the labs. Something that dangerous shouldn’t be here, and it shouldn’t have gotten loose.”

  “Further down you go, the more there is to keep things contained,” Helen added. “With some exceptions. It gets wobbly with people trading for lab space.”

  “What was this experiment, exactly?” Mary asked.

  “Project codename Sub Rosa. Another attempt at reviving the dead,” Gordon said. He had the file. Jamie reached for the papers, and Gordon handed them over before continuing, “They pitched it for weapon funding, saying that it had uses in feigning death. Spy dies in an obvious and undeniable manner, pulse stopped, heartbeat stopped, gets placed in the cocoon, revived. Or the Academy removes one of its enemies, steals them away from the morgue, and then revives them for questioning.”

  “Does it work?” Mary asked.

  Lillian shook her head. “Destroyed brain structures are still gone. We were asking the doctor about this inhibitor that was reported to vastly speed up brain and muscle cell regeneration, but even if it rebuilds, it won’t rebuild the exact same things that were there before. Some, but not all.”

  “Blank slate,” Jamie said. “Heal the body, restore the brain’s capacity, but the person doesn’t just magically grow back.”

  I gave him a curious look.

  “Yes,” Lillian said. Though she was oblivious to my exchange of glances with Jamie, she was more focused on the task at hand than she had been. I wondered if it was my advice or the fact that she was talking about something she was passionate about.

  “She doesn’t have any offensive weapons?” Mary asked.

  Gordon shook his head.

  “She’s strong,” Helen said. “There wasn’t anything about that in the file.”

  Lillian said, “Doctor Shipman—”

  “Him?” I asked, pointing at the body.

  “Him, yes. He had to know that Sub Rosa was exceeding expectations,” Lillian said. “But he chose to keep it secret. Why? Telling the Academy would have meant extra funding.”

  “Excellent, Lillian,” I said. “That’s a question we need to answer. Secrets within secrets, with that experiment at the center of it.”

  Gordon nodded, “We should probably check in with Gorger, then figure out how we can help.”

  We nodded, though Lillian seemed reluctant.

  “The experiment is probably killing everyone she comes across,” Gordon said. “If we’re going to contribute, it can’t be in a fac
e to face confrontation. We gather information, disseminate that information, and see if we can’t work with Gorger to keep the problem contained.”

  A bunch of us started to speak all at once. It was Lillian who came through the clearest. Or Lillian that Gordon chose to listen to, anyway.

  “Without us in the containment?” Lillian asked.

  “Exactly,” Gordon said.

  Mary, Jamie and I spoke up at exactly the same time. He deferred to us.

  I let Mary win. The nebulous benefit garnered by being the one to bring it up wasn’t worth getting on the wrong side of Mary’s competitive spirit.

  “She isn’t killing everything she comes across,” Mary said. “She walked right by us as we were coming up. We weren’t even really hiding, we were on the stairs.”

  “Yep,” I said. “That’s what I was gonna say.”

  “She went down?” Gordon asked.

  “Down.”

  “It’s reassuring that she didn’t go after you, but why go down? Why is she being selective about who she kills?” Gordon asked. “Something happened to make someone call for an emergency state. They must have found a body. She would have moved on, or they’d have locked down one specific area.”

  Helen nodded. “Code blue. Or a code indigo is possible. Or a code white. Code brown, even? That doesn’t narrow things down. There are any number of reasons they could have locked everything down.”

  “I know what those codes mean,” Lillian said, quiet. “This is moving closer to me getting all panicky again.”

  “All I meant was that something happened, and it wasn’t just a strange creature wandering around that made people react,” Gordon said.

  We headed out the door. After a moment’s pause, glancing at each other to make sure we were all together, we started down the stairs. Gordon and Mary took the lead, Helen and Lillian second, with Jamie and I at the rear.

  “We need to find Gorger, first of all,” Gordon said. “He hangs out more at the lower levels. Eight or nine.”

  “Stop at floor six first,” Jamie said. He handed the file back to Gordon. “Our scientist here has relatives. You guys interviewed one a month ago.”

  “We did?” Gordon asked.

  “Bug swarms, tranquilizing and anaesthetic venom. Helen, Lillian, and Sy.”