Twig

by wildbow

  “If he’s nauseous, we can’t ignore that,” Lillian said.

  “You can get Sy naked and check him out as soon as we get someplace warm, and we can do that as soon as the others catch up. They’re coming right now. Until then, take his word for it when he says he’s feeling okay,” Gordon said, his finger pointed at Lillian.

  “I never said naked,” she said.

  The finger wagged in her direction. She pressed her lips together.

  Gordon was right, though; Jamie and Helen were halfway down the long, straight alley, opposite the end the others had come down. Jamie looked like he’d been running a moment ago.

  Gordon moved his finger to point to Mary. “Sy can tell us what happened on the way, and while Lillian’s looking over him. I’ve held back my curiosity this long, you can do the same.”

  Mary made a ‘hmph’ sound, sticking her hands in her pockets.

  He pointed at me. “Be quiet. I know you’re riling them up.”

  “Then I shouldn’t mention the blood dripping out my pee hole, or the fact that Fray is—”

  He smacked me, way harder than was necessary. One of my eyes teared up.

  “He was joking about the blood, right?” Lillian asked, cutting Mary off before Mary could say anything.

  Gordon gave me a ‘see?’ look.

  “Yes,” I said. “Joking, joking.”

  Helen and Jamie joined us.

  “What’s this about getting Sylvester naked, warm and checking him out?” Jamie asked. “I heard you from a distance, but I’m pretty sure that’s what you said. Is there anything you need to tell us, Gordon?”

  “Ha ha,” Gordon said, unamused.

  “And Fray?” Jamie asked. “You said her name?”

  “Sy’s health takes priority,” Gordon said. “We need to get indoors.”

  I turned around, reached, and knocked on the window.

  It took some time, but the woman who’d been cleaning tables inside appeared at the window, and she gave us a look. I made a pleading gesture, hands pressed together, and she gave me a very unimpressed look.

  She looked at Gordon, who was holding up a wallet, and relented. The door that opened to the patio opened, and she let us inside.

  “Are you open?” I asked her.

  “No. But you can order something.”

  “We want to check my friend out for frostbite, can we get six of whatever you have that’s warm to drink? And a bite to eat? Cake or pie?”

  “I have slices of cake and I have slices of pie, prices are on the board over the counter,” she said. “Carrot, vanilla, and chocolate cake, meat pie, wildberry pie, apple pie, stone nut pie…”

  “Cake,” I said. “Chocolate, please?”

  “I thought you were feeling sick?” Lillian asked, hands going to her hips.

  “It’s chocolate cake,” I said.

  She nodded, accepting that as fact.

  “I’ll have a stone nut pie,” Gordon said. “Thank you.”

  “Wildberry pie, please,” Mary said.

  “I would like a Vanilla cake, please,” Helen said.

  “Carrot cake, please” Lillian said, hands dropping from her hips.

  The woman’s arms folded as she looked at Jamie.

  “Chocolate cake?” he asked, cringing a little.

  “I just cleaned up, it’s late, and I’m not going to serve each of you something different,” the woman said. “Decide on one thing. Two at most.”

  It took us ten seconds of quick haggling to hash it out. Gordon spoke up, “Four slices of chocolate cake, and two slices of apple pie?”

  The woman nodded, leaving to get our order.

  Lillian wasted no time in beginning to pull my clothes off.

  I would have made a joke, but I wanted to maintain my one-bellybutton status.

  “Fray was waiting for me. Or for any one of us. I was the one who stumbled on her. The rest of it was a distraction, to keep the rest of the group away so we wouldn’t mob her or whatever. She invited me over for a chat. I obliged. We talked, she tranquilized me, Gordon found me a little while after I woke up.”

  “What did you talk about?” Mary asked. She was sitting on a chair, perched like she was going to leap over and create my new bellybutton if I wasn’t quick to answer. Too much killer instinct, suppressed for too many weeks.

  “My memory isn’t that good,” I started. I was forced to pause, raising my arms to help Lillian pull off my sweater and shirt.

  Mary didn’t leap on me, but a knife had appeared in one hand in the moment the sweater obscured my vision, the rest of her not having moved a hair, like a magician producing a card. She toyed with it. It wasn’t like she would really stab me, but her point was clear. She was dead serious when it came to this.

  “But we talked about the fact that she knew who we were. She’s studied us, the Academy made her, and she has a sense of what we are and how we function. We talked about the Wyvern formula, about the effects, the side effects, and how we each developed while using it. She says she didn’t develop skills as a manipulator or a people reader, but I’m not sure that’s true. She did develop skills as a strategist, to make her way in the upper echelons of the Academy, but I think we already knew that.”

  The others were hanging on every word. Lillian prodded my neck and chin. I resumed speaking the moment I was free to. “Fray mentioned Ashton, to give you a sense of how well she knows us. She likes us, she’s interested in us, and I think… I’m revising my opinion of where we stand on the pill situation.”

  “You don’t think she swapped out the pills. It was a ruse,” Jamie said.

  “I don’t think she swapped out the pills,” I said.

  “How sure are you?” Gordon asked.

  Eighty percent, I thought. But if we fail here, if we go back to the Academy while it’s under new leadership, return to doing the interviews in the Bowels and other dreary activities, a black mark of failure on our records…

  I’d already come to the conclusion while lying on the patio, waiting for the tranquilizer’s effects to subside. We couldn’t afford to go back. We couldn’t leave it at this and run. It would destroy us as surely as our bodies breaking down on us. It was just be more drawn out, less noble.

  “Ninety five percent,” I said.

  Gordon hissed in a breath through his teeth, long and slow, then exhaled.

  “You’re not sure,” Jamie said. “You think there’s a five percent chance you’re wrong.”

  “I’m not. If any of you have instincts telling you we should go home…” I trailed off, almost hoping someone else would make the call and take the responsibility out of my hands. Not entirely hoping, but almost; the thought of getting this wrong on either front made the sick feeling come back.

  Nobody spoke up. The burden was on my shoulders.

  There was a variety of looks in their eyes, but there remained a moment where I could look at each of them and interpret their expressions as knowing, acknowledging exactly what I’d done and why I’d done it.

  Eighty percent wasn’t enough of a certainty to make us stay. We would’ve had to go, and we would have all known it was the wrong choice.

  The lie was better, and maybe there was a mutual agreement that the lie existed.

  Maybe I was imagining it, deceiving myself in believing the unspoken agreement existed.

  “She made an offer. To take us in, use her knowledge and skill to keep us in working order, as long as possible. Give me my Wyvern formula, let Jamie stop his appointments, and so on down the line. She would provide the pills we needed to survive away from the Academy. There were other promises.”

  “You said no?” Gordon asked.

  “I said no, yeah,” I told him.

  He nodded.

  “She made it out to be about freedom from the shackles of the Academy, but that’s not how it works, is it?”

  “No,” Mary said. She paused as the woman from the little restaurant arrived with a tray of tea, cake, and plates. Mary kept
talking, though the woman was in earshot. “I realized it early on. There isn’t really any escape. I went from Mr. Percy to you guys, and it’s better, but I’m not free.”

  “I’ll pour the tea, miss,” Helen said. “Thank you so much.”

  Lillian handed me back my shirt. I pulled it on in a second flat, then began untangling my sleeves from my sweater as Lillian found her seat.

  “Don’t make a mess, I don’t want to spend any time cleaning up after you,” the woman warned.

  Gordon handed her a fold of bills. She stood there, counting, before walking to the counter, apparently satisfied.

  The cake, pie, and tea was doled out. I had little doubt everyone was weighing the heavy issues at hand even as we prepared for our little feast.

  The conversation resumed in low voices.

  “I love Professor Ibbott,” Helen said, with less inflection than I’d heard from her in a long while, “I don’t like him. I wouldn’t be happy if I never saw him again, but I wouldn’t be sad either. I do what he says and I’m good. I’m a work of art and I do what he tells me to so I act like one too. If we walked away from the Academy and I had someone else telling me what to be, it wouldn’t be any different.”

  “Except we’d be in more danger,” Jamie said. “The Academy would come after us.”

  “Was that what you said?” Lillian asked. “That you wouldn’t go because it would be the same?”

  “That would have offended her, I think,” I replied.

  “That doesn’t usually stop you,” Gordon said. “You offend us. Why not her?”

  “In the time between when I woke up and when you found me, I did a lot of thinking,” I said. “Couldn’t do much else. I realized that I hadn’t been cutthroat enough. That she played me. She read me, she figured out what I wanted, and she came at me soft. Gentle, friendly, vague, without threatening me at all. She went out of her way to avoid challenging me, because she probably knew that I’d rise to the challenge, and I’d take that a step further to come after her. I spent the entire time floundering and not realizing why,” I said.

  The table was quiet. The Lambs sipped tea, stared, or ate their pie and cake.

  “I’ll admit it right here,” I said. “I lost, back there. I learned things about her, but she went out of her way to tell me only what she was willing to let me know.”

  Mary’s gaze was the hardest to meet. She took failure so personally, and I knew she’d been pinning hopes on me getting something out of our collective encounter with Fray and her people, so her loss against the Headsman would mean something.

  “You said you found something out,” Gordon said. “Was it only what Fray wanted you to know? Or did you figure out something else?”

  “I think I figured out something else,” I said. “I asked her why she was here, challenging us. Why didn’t she leave? She never gave me a straight answer. She presented only one side of herself, and she kept the violent, confrontational part of herself hidden. She controlled how we encountered her, but there was no guarantee we wouldn’t be a little bit faster, that she wouldn’t be up against all of us at once. That means she had an out. Something she could have said or done that would have let her escape, if we came after her hard.”

  I saw Helen steal a bit of Jamie’s cake, while Jamie’s attention was focused on me. As thievery went, it was blatant, cutting the cake with the fork, then spearing a chunk the size of her fist.

  “What are you thinking, Sy?” Gordon asked.

  “I’m thinking we should contact the Academy. If the pattern holds, they’re sending reinforcements here, to investigate and give chase, for when we go back for our appointments. Maybe the Hangman, again, maybe Dog and Catcher. Except all of this, it’s a massive distraction from what she’s really doing.”

  “What?” Jamie asked. “What is she supposed to be doing?”

  “I don’t know exactly what. But she has a plan in the works. She’s not averse to killing, but she left us alive. Let’s assume it’s not idle curiosity. That she’s not some dime novel villain. There’s a master plot at work, and we play a part. Think, what logically follows from this? What does she do by showing herself to me, then disappearing, maybe even staying here?”

  “I don’t know,” Gordon said. “I can’t guess how your mind works, or how hers does, for that matter.”

  “She’s giving us hope. Hope that she can be found and caught. The Academy sends resources to assist, all the focus is on this place, this town.”

  “And?” Mary asked.

  “And we’re not looking where she’s been. Fray isn’t running, or she is, but the running is a distraction, bait to lure us forward. What we do is we tell them to send the people back, investigate all the past locations.”

  “What are they looking for?”

  “A weapon. A catalyst. Something catastrophic. She’s hiding her fangs, but those fangs are there. What we need to do is find her, find her fast, and we need to find out what it is she’s doing. She’s brimming with fury against the Academy, and everyone is going to pay for it.”

  “I can draw up a quick sketch of her monster and the stitched girl,” Jamie said. “It’s a starting point.”

  “Good,” I said. “We also hit up any shops that sell coats or jackets. She left hers with me,” I said. “But I doubt someone who travels as much as she does has more than one. She’ll be buying one, I think. Most importantly, she’s going to be baiting us, dropping hints to keep the Academy focused on her.”

  “You’re sure?” Gordon asked.

  I nodded.

  “Let’s not waste any time then,” Gordon said.

  Helen made a small whining sound, mouth full of cake.

  “We finish our tea and cake first,” he said, with authority.

  Helen emphatically nodded the affirmative.

  “After cake, we move. Our best bet is being aggressive when she expects us to be struggling or on the retreat. We catch her off guard.”

  There were nods all around.

  We helped Helen finish her cake, to her protest, cleaned up, and were out the door in two minutes, some of us still chewing. Gordon handed Jamie the coat to look over while we walked.

  Gordon and I walked faster than the others. Normally I might have waited up for the others, but he had a look on his face, stern, focused.

  He saw me studying him, and he relented.

  “I would have taken the offer,” he said.

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Sorry.”

  He shook his head, then threw an arm around my shoulders. “Let’s go get ‘er.”

  Previous Next

  Stitch in Time—4.6

  The train whistle howled, echoing across snowy Kensford, and with it went our escape. We’d made our call, and now we’d live with it. It bothered me, more than I cared to admit. If I was wrong, then we were going to get catastrophically ill, and we could very well die.

  We were a squad, here. Each of us had a discrete role. Gordon and Mary were handling the front end of things, leading the group by a margin, scouting, peeking through windows of stores. My role was to watch Jamie. He had his book open in his arms, pen in hand, and was sketching. Every time a bystander, obstacle, or someone’s monstrous pet got in our way, I led him out of the way, while his eyes stayed on the page.

  “Lillian,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “By all accounts, the stitched girl was falling to pieces when Fray got her and left the jail. She wasn’t falling to pieces when she went to go distract you guys.”

  “Yes?”

  “She fixed it, or improved it. How hard is that to do?”

  “It’s easier to make one from scratched. In terms of cost, unless there’s a shortage of bodies, most people make a new stitched instead of fixing up an old one, I think.”

  I pulled Jamie out of the way of a gaunt stitched that looked like it incorporated some grafted features. Sections of its chest and arms had been stretched over containers of bi
le yellow liquid, with tubes running out of the containers and into flesh. Poison, probably. It hissed.

  Jamie continued drawing, oblivious.

  “But how hard is it to do, Lil?” I asked.

  “Don’t call me Lil!”

  “Answer the question, then, dummy.”

  “Butthead. It’s hard.”

  “Well, gee, thanks,” I told her. “That clarifies things a bunch.”

  “I don’t know what you want or why you’re asking!” she said. “Making a stitched is easy, I’ve made a stitched, last year, for an exam. But if you want to repair it, you have to diagnose and fix whatever’s broken, probably have to replace or undo any damage to major chunks and pieces, rip out the wires and chemical tanks, put in new ones, um—”

  “Does that require tools?”

  “Obviously.”

  “Obviously,” I said, giving her an eye roll. “Would she need access to a lab to do it? Or could she do it using just the tools she’s packing in her bags? Keep in mind that she’s very good.”

  “She’d need a lab,” Lillian said.

  “She would. What about maintaining the thing?”

  Lillian gave me a so-so gesture.

  “Can’t say?” I asked. I pulled Jamie out of the way of a lamp post.

  “You can cover your basic hygeine needs with a sponge and a sink, but it’s not fun, it gets old, and it takes time,” Lillian said. “Doing it on a bad week? You’d have to be pretty disciplined or have no other choice to take it in stride and not want to change it.”

  “I like that analogy,” Jamie said, eyes still on his sketch.

  “Thank you, Jamie,” she said.

  “Part two of that same question, then,” I said. “You saw her guy? The head?”

  “Yes. From a distance, and I was mostly running, but yes.”

  “How doable is that without a proper lab?”

  “Not at all,” Lillian said. “I’d be surprised, impressed and scared if she was able to do that while running from us. She only ever stays in one place for a few days, if that long, and she’d need a lot of days to do that stuff.”

  “Stolen work?” Jamie said, still sketching. I steered him with my hand on his left elbow.

  “It would be reported stolen,” I said. “That, or there’s a missing or dead scholar out there.”