Twig

by wildbow

  “Here!” Mary called out.

  “But—” Lillian started. “Dose is for her.”

  “Here!” Mary said, more insistent. Her first shouted statement had drawn a glance from the creature. Not having success against Gordon, seeing Mary with nary a chair to protect herself, it started to reorient, moving its arms in preparation to stab.

  I saw Lillian look, pausing, not sure what to do, eyes on the space over the experiment’s shoulder that she needed to lob the needle through, knowing an errant throw could hit a wall or the ceiling, or that a moving arm could swat the thing aside.

  I snatched the needle from her hand, then moved forward, ducking low to cast it along the hardwood floor.

  Gordon, in a last-ditch effort to save Mary from being impaled on a half-dozen points, twisted the chair. One or two arms were still caught in it, or caught between rungs and the seat of the chair, and the creature reacted, turning its attention back toward him.

  Mary had the needle, and brought it up into the creature’s abdomen, pressing the syringe. One free hand, then the other, went up to catch at three of the thing’s ‘elbows’, holding them at bay, to reduce it’s range of movement.

  It took only a few seconds for the dose to work. It collapsed, landing across its creator’s body, helping to pin her down.

  The girl on the floor coughed, as if the cough could bring air into her lungs.

  She couldn’t quite look at Gordon, who practically straddled her, or at Mary, who was behind, so she looked at us, alarmed and confused.

  I looked away, my attention on the bag, pulling a free syringe from the spot where Lillian had taken the first, then grabbing the tranquilizer. I pushed both into Lillian’s hands, distracting her from the young lady we’d just assaulted.

  “It’s okay,” Helen said. With Lillian now measuring a dose, me busy with the bag and Lillian, urging our medic forward, Helen was the only one left with our captive’s attention. “You’re in no danger. We just need you to sleep for the rest of the night. You’ll wake up on the floor, safe and sound.”

  The young woman opened her mouth to talk, and only wound up coughing again.

  “Do you have friends that would come looking for you?” Gordon asked. “If you’re missing at dinner? Or after?”

  The girl frowned, then after a pause, she nodded.

  “Don’t lie,” I said.

  She looked up at me, concerned, heaving in wheezy breaths. I’d only been guessing, but her reaction to me calling her on it was telling.

  “That’s a no,” I told Gordon.

  He nodded. “We have an escape route if we need it. Place to hide out.”

  Mary partially opened the door. “One-sixteen.”

  “Remember that,” Gordon said, to the rest of us.

  Lillian approached our captive with a needle in hand. I saw the girl tense up.

  “Typhomine,” Lillian said. “Thirty three point four milligrams, for a person that weighs eleven stone.”

  Our captive took that in, then relaxed.

  “On your side,” Lillian said, bending down, pushing at the girl’s shoulder.

  The girl obeyed, twisting her upper body until she was lying on her side.

  When Lillian reached out with the needle, a hand went up. Gordon grabbed it, holding it down, and Lillian stuck the young woman in the stomach.

  In moments, she was asleep.

  Lillian grabbed a pillow from the bed and put it under the woman’s head, then another, propped behind her back.

  Gordon looked impatient by the time she was done. Lillian gave him a nod, as if to confirm that she was done.

  Think what you want, Gordon, that would have been far harder without Lillian, I thought. I handed her her bag.

  Mary peeked out into the hall, then gave us the go-ahead.

  The hall was largely empty.

  We moved as a group. Helen, Gordon, Mary, and I were quick to slip into our roles. We walked comfortably, casually. Stealth was good, staying out of sight and being quiet, but the next best thing was to look like we belonged. Moving with purpose, briskly enough that it looked like we knew what we were doing. If we looked lost, then others would want to give us direction, or question what we were doing.

  “Turn right,” Jamie said.

  “How the heck do you know where we’re going?” Gordon asked.

  “Photos in the yearbook, outline of the school, what we saw from outside. It feels like common sense,” Jamie said, quiet.

  “That’s kind of scary,” Lillian said. “I know you could pull out anything you’d seen, but connecting the pieces, now?”

  “You have your thing, you practice it. I have my thing,” Jamie said. “Not that I’m positive, mind you.”

  “Better than nothing,” Gordon said. Then, not for the first time, he said, “Wish I had that brain of yours.”

  “Yeah,” Jamie said, quiet. “Maybe.”

  Mary couldn’t have made the connection. Even Lillian probably wouldn’t have remembered, it was so long ago I wasn’t even sure Lillian had been with us.

  No, the very first time they’d had the exchange had been one of our earliest meetings. When the Lambs had just made the move from being three to being four, Jamie joining our ranks, we had been learning what each of us were capable of.

  I wish I had your brain.

  I wish I had your body.

  If I remembered the interplay of dialogue between Jamie and Gordon, then Jamie had to, right?

  Odd, that he hadn’t brought it up or used the line. He was acting odd in a few ways, as a matter of fact. Jamie looked tense, and a side effect of that tension was that he was too stiff, not quite the casual air we needed.

  I knew that this particular situation made him the fish out of water. Improvising wasn’t his strong suit, because improvising required fast reactions and adaptation. But shouldn’t that have made him more willing to lean on us, stick to the tried and true, the interplay, the jokes, the reminder that we were a team?

  I poked him in the side. He flinched, doubling over a little, then shot me a look.

  I rolled my shoulders, then stretched, fingers together, arms over my head with palms up.

  “Uh huh,” Jamie said. He seemed to force himself to relax.

  It solved the immediate problem, but it didn’t solve the rest of it. I wasn’t sure what was up with him.

  Double doors at the opposite end of the hallway banged open, a small herd of young ladies in fashionable clothing coming through. Their hair was nicely done up, and the clothes were nice, high quality, though not loud or attention-getting. They were fitting the atmosphere of the school, unconsciously adapting.

  “More girls visiting their rooms before dinner,” Lillian said. “Before long we’re going to be surrounded.”

  “Being surrounded is bad. It’s less chance for us to see Fray before she sees us,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Gordon agreed. “Let’s get out of sight.”

  “Through the doors, hard right, then stairs, down,” Jamie said.

  There was a heavy set of double doors just like the one the collection of Dame Cicely’s students had come through. Gordon and I each pushed one of the doors open. We rounded the corner. There were more rooms to either side, but the hallway was short, and at the end of it were two sets of stairs, one leading down, the other leading up.

  “What’s downstairs?” I asked.

  “Labs. They’re almost always downstairs,” Jamie said. “I don’t know what the layout is, but I doubt they’re going to be too busy if people are going from class to their rooms for dinner.”

  “No guarantees,” I said.

  If Fray saw us and bolted—

  Footsteps on the stairs marked someone or multiple someones coming down the stairs. We were too far away to make a run for downstairs, too far forward to try and slip through the doors.

  Immediately, as we’d done with the young woman in her dorm room, we looked for our exits.

  Six of us, and four of us had the whe
rewithal to check nearby dorm rooms, hoping some were unlocked.

  No luck on all four counts. Stupid school with its scheming, paranoid students.

  The girls came down the stairs, and I found myself saying a mantra in my head, as if I could will it to be true. Don’t be Fray. Don’t be Fray. Don’t be Fray. Especially don’t be Fray’s killer monster man.

  The young women were in the company of their pet monsters and stitched, chattering with one another. None were Fray. Nor the monster.

  But there was one more experiment than there were human girls.

  The stitched girl from Fray’s entourage carried a tray of kettle, plates of tidbits and cups. She saw us and stopped so suddenly that it startled the girls in her company, porcelain rattling on the tray, tea slopping over the side, threatening to spill.

  It was a still tableau.

  “It’s you!” she said, staring at us.

  Previous Next

  Stitch in Time—4.8

  This was, like the rattle of the doorknob, the kind of situation that demanded a coordinated response. When the doorknob had rattled, it had been Mary and Gordon who’d stepped forward.

  This was a different sort of rattle.

  Helen, Gordon and I were on point. Well, Gordon was always on point, there weren’t many active, immediate situations where he was bad. Much like how there weren’t many situations where Jamie and Lillian were really supposed to step up and take charge.

  “Hi!” Helen said, cheery.

  Fray’s stitched alone wasn’t the biggest problem. Her stitched being in the company of other women and monsters made for something more complicated.

  “What are you doing here?” Fray’s stitched asked, looking confused and mildly alarmed.

  Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, I thought. A cleverer person could be invited to dance, words playing off of words and the bystanders forever kept in the dark. The stitched wasn’t so nuanced, and she’d chosen the single hardest question to answer directly.

  “We’re taking a look at the school!” Helen said, matching the stitched girl in tone. “It’s so pretty!”

  She wasn’t lying, but even ignoring that part, it sounded so genuine I almost believed her. The problem was that it left things open, it gave the stitched girl a moment to think.

  “Careful,” I said, abruptly. “The tray, don’t drop it.”

  She startled a little, looking down at the tray.

  “I don’t ever drop trays. I’m careful,” she said, voice firm. She hadn’t been close to dropping it, but she’d had to check.

  Gordon seemed to sense what I was doing. “How is Genevieve doing?”

  “Oh. Um,” the stitched said. A furrow appeared between her eyebrows. “She’s happy, and she’s working. She’s with Claire right now.”

  “We were going to go see Lady Claire,” one of the girls said.

  “Yes,” I said, then I took a risk. “We were too.”

  “You know Miss Fray?” one of the girls in the group cut in.

  Hadn’t expected that. It was rude, sudden, and it didn’t fit into the flow of the conversation.

  “We do,” Helen said.

  Again, she was leaving things open-ended, letting the other person decide the next part of the conversation. I had to have a talk with her about it. A casualty of Helen being largely reactive in nature.

  “How?” another girl asked. Was her tone accusatory?

  I wanted to defer to the other Lambs and let them control the flow of the conversation while I took a second to think, but I worried we were one mistake away from trouble. Something about the collective tone and body language.

  “She recommended the school to us,” I said, off the top of my head. It tied things back to the backstory we’d already discussed.

  “To you?” was the arch reply. To a boy?

  “We weren’t supposed to say, Sid,” Gordon admonished me.

  I flinched, but I did catch a glimpse of the confusion on the girl’s faces. This was a cutthroat school, one where it was every student for themselves. Why then, did they look at each other for confirmation or feedback?

  A tight-knit group, centered around Fray?

  Or were they a tight-knit group, rallying against Fray?

  Either way, I had a plan of attack now. “Do you think she’s going to be angry at us?”

  Gordon paused, not sure how to respond. My mistake.

  “I’m miffed at you,” the stitched girl called out. Giving her an opening to say something was another mistake.

  “You know her best,” Helen said, covering, and diverting focus. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  I nodded. “I guess. She’ll be mad, but she won’t show it. She’s better than that.”

  “What are you talking about?” one of the girls asked.

  “I can’t say,” I said. I was sure to say it too quickly, pausing awkwardly, feigning discomfort in the moment of silence that followed.

  “Miss Genevieve is nice,” Wendy said. “You’re not making sense.”

  If these girls liked Fray, we needed to counteract that impression. If they disliked her, then I needed to play that up.

  “That’s not a word I’ve heard people use to describe her,” I said.

  With that, two of the girls broke away from the group, their monsters following.

  “Um,” the stitched girl said, looking at them, bewildered.

  “It’s okay, Wendy,” one of the girls that had stayed behind said, interrupting her.

  Shift the bias of the conversation. Recognizing that stitched tended to be slower to react or adjust in the same way Jamie was, I could override her, build up a story, and turn these girls into a weapon we could use against Fray.

  “It’s very much not okay! That one threw a knife at my head!” Wendy said, pointing at Mary. “Be safe. They’re dangerous!”

  That brought everything to a screeching halt.

  She was a little faster on the uptake than most, then. Had to stop making assumptions when Fray was involved, even tangentially.

  “Wendy,” I said. “We’re not dangerous. You’re mistaken.”

  “We’ve talked about this,” Lillian said, piping up. “You have residual memories. What you’re remembering isn’t Martha, but someone very similar to Martha, from before.”

  Clever Lillian. Every stitched spent some time being trained and checked for residual memories and tics before they were cleared for their duties. Lillian was helping to build something of a narrative, and she was helping to direct the conversation. In the right direction, no less.

  “No,” she said, stubborn. “We haven’t talked about it and that isn’t one of my memories. Miss Genevieve had me running all over to try and watch you and she said to be careful and then she threw a knife at my head and he pushed some bricks over so they almost fell on me, and—”

  I wanted to slap a hand to my face.

  “That sort of thing doesn’t happen in reality, Wendy,” Helen said, with the best gentle tone.

  “It does and it did!”

  I mused, We need to move the conversation to the right destination, even if we have this anchor holding us back and threatening to sink us.

  Attack her stance, erode the other’s faith in her words, using the fact that she was a stitched? Evade and distract, maybe? Or approach things from an oblique angle?

  I decided to play along. I hated doing it, but I played the kid.

  “We didn’t do that!” I said. “We came here because she asked us to and she says we’re going to be able to go to school here later if everything works out, and—”

  “What?” one of the girls cut me off.

  “She’s… I wasn’t supposed to say that,” I said, for the second time. By this time, their curiosity had to be killing them.

  The girls who’d started to approach finished crossing the floor to reach us. One of them dropped down to sit on her heels, reaching out to place a hand on my shoulder. She smiled, “It’s okay. You can tell us.”
r />   I turned to look at Gordon, as if for reassurance. He shrugged, which was perfect.

  “She made friends with Lady Claire because Lady Claire knows someone who runs the Academy,” I said. “She says, if everything works out, then this won’t be a girl’s school next year. There’ll be men coming here, which means I can come.”

  You want your precious seats? How would you like more competition?

  “That doesn’t make sense,” the girl in front of me said. She was a pretty blonde with features that I was pretty sure had been adjusted with some Academy science.

  “It’s true,” I said. I could have used money to drive the point home, but money held more weight with people who weren’t used to wealth. “She said that Lady Claire’s dad—”

  “Uncle,” Jamie said, under his breath.

  “Uncle, he’s noble, and he’s been offered a position, but the man offering the position has a daughter he doesn’t want to be studying any of this and she’s supposed to get a scholarship and—”

  “Okay,” the girl cut off my ramble, which was very intentionally rambly. Hit them with too many things they would want to ask questions about, all at once, leave them reeling. Even if they pick apart the argument, the message underlying it all still penetrates.

  Politics. I was willing to bet they’d appreciate politics more than money.

  It was a lie they could believe.

  “I don’t know about any of that,” Wendy said.

  I could have thrown out something in response to that, but I decided to let it sit.

  Helen decided to pick it up, “It’s okay, honey.”

  Damn it.

  “No it’s not! You tried to strangle Warren!”

  “She keeps saying that stuff,” one of the girls said. “Is she burning out?”

  “I’m quite fine, thank you,” Wendy said, stamping a little in frustration. The cups and saucers on the tray rattled.

  “Maybe we should ask Miss Fray?”

  Ugh. That would be a disaster.

  “Maybe,” said the girl, who was crouched in front of me. “I always wondered where she came from. It would be nice to know who I’m talking to, when I go down to see her.”

  There were a hundred things I could have said, webs I could have spun, but with this proximity to the girl, I knew it would be too much, too fast. We needed a subtler line, something to set the hook without giving our fish reason to struggle. Besides, I was playing the kid, matching Wendy in the innocence angle. I couldn’t deliver anything too cutting without drawing too much attention to me.