by wildbow
“But if you want to try us,” Gordon said, folding his arms, “Arrest us. Let’s wait this out.”
We stood there, waiting.
The man didn’t flinch, he didn’t show a sign of doubt.
I started to wonder if he’d physically altered his face or nerves to have better control over it all, to hide his tells and more precisely manage the face he presented to the world.
A full minute passed, and he didn’t give the order to arrest us.
I’d brought up his subordinates for a reason. I knew he was aware of their gaze, their worries. He had control over them, but he didn’t necessarily have their trust. They would help him commit an atrocity, and cover up the fact that he’d worked with a terrorist to do it, but when push came to shove, they couldn’t trust him to genuinely care about them.
Or so I hoped. More to the point, I hoped that he was insecure about whether they trusted him.
“Arresting you would be a hassle, honestly,” the man said. “But I don’t want you here any longer. I was kind enough to provide accommodations, with the idea that you would be passing through. Please… pass through.”
He gestured, and the stitched at the door moved away.
Gordon hauled the doors open. I remained where I was.
“My badge,” I said.
“Sy,” Gordon said. “I swear, if you don’t get moving, I’m going to run you up a flagpole and leave you hanging.”
“The badge, headmaster,” I said. When he didn’t make a sign of moving, I added, “We’ve established that spite isn’t any small thing. Don’t make unnecessary enemies. You’re a very short distance from being on everyone’s bad side. Fray’s scapegoat, the person who let down your Academy, the person who sold out his niece, and Radham’s whipping boy.”
“You have what you want, free reign to leave. Are you throwing it away to offend my pride?”
“The badge,” I said, not budging.
He tossed the badge at me, so it would fall just short. I stepped forward and caught it, all the same. I liked the weight of it in my hand, and took a second to flip it closed and slip it into a pocket.
We turned and left, striding through the school. Mary leaned heavily on my shoulder, which wasn’t welcome, though it was understandable.
“You have an idea of what Fray is doing?” Jamie asked.
“Some,” I said.
“Do share,” Gordon said. He sounded a little miffed.
“Like I said, it’s something Kensford can bounce back from, because Kensford has money. It’s something that’s going to enrage people, and it’s going to hit places that aren’t Kensford hard. It’s going to hurt, given Fray’s feelings toward the Academy, and at the end of the day, it was something the Academy was planning to do anyway.”
“What is it?” Gordon asked.
“Control,” I said, simply. “It’s what any power wants, in the end. Control of everything.”
There was no need to elaborate. We all knew about the Academy’s methods of control.
“Where?” Gordon asked. “Where does she go to spread the word?”
“The dining hall,” Lillian said. “Everyone’s eating dinner. Everyone’s talking as a group.”
It hadn’t been my first instinct, with so many people around, but Fray was a bird of a feather here, a needle in a haystack.
If it was the dining hall, then it might well be too late.
Our brisk walk became a run. Jamie gave directions. When our battered Mary proved too slow, then he took over, willingly lagging behind, while Gordon, Lillian and I headed to the room.
The hubub of conversation had a tone. Quiet, subdued, and concerned. Even horrified.
The girls were gathered in groups, one or two to a table, huddled, talking, their focus on pieces of paper, one or two papers to a group.
This was the heart of the city. All things flowed to and from it. The substance that had been put into the water, the people, and now information.
That information was as damning as anything else.
Gordon approached a group, and he took one of the pieces of paper. He read some of it as he approached us, handing it over to share. It had been printed in large numbers by way of a printing press. Something Fray had seen to in a previous city, no doubt.
Control. An attack on two fronts, both things the Academy had planned over the long term, no doubt things that had been intended to be slipped past the public’s notice when the time was right, when distractions were imminent, or an excuse available.
The papers described the process by which men and women who imbibed the chemical would be rendered sterile.
Control over reproduction and population.
The process would be reversible, but those were keys that the Academy held, to be provided on a case-by-case basis.
The other form of attack was one we were too familiar with. We’d been subjected to it, once upon a time. For most of the population, the effect would be minor—Fray hadn’t had the time to give them too heavy a dose, but some of the fat chains that made up the cell walls would be composed of the modified kind, found in the water. Left alone, they would collapse, and cells would die. Sensitive tissues of the brain, lungs, stomach and mucous membranes would the first to go. Symptoms would progress through pain, full-body bruising, system failure, internal bleeding, fatigue and weakness, and eventually lead to an unpleasant, undignified death.
The symptoms would be staved off by continuing to drink the water, but continuing to drink the water would perpetuate the problem.
“I don’t understand,” Mary said. “The Academy can’t fix it?”
“They can,” I said. “They won’t.”
“It’s too much. People aren’t going to take it lying down,” Mary said. “The Academy has a way to stop it, to cure the effects, don’t they? They just say Fray did it, and they put out a fix, and—”
“They won’t,” I said, again.
“You can’t say that for sure,” Mary said.
My eyes roved over the crowd. The horror, the anger. I could already see distinctions forming. Different groups with different reactions. Some were shocked, as anyone might be, but they weren’t scared. People with money, raised to believe that any problem could be fixed. Especially those of the human body.
But there were others. People who didn’t have as much money, those who weren’t sure they were in a position to buy a solution to the problem, buy the ability to have children and a way to move freely. A way to move freely that likely involved bottles of purple pills. These members of Dame Cicely’s student body were closer to the population on the ground, the farmers and craftsmen, the wagon-drivers and grocers. They were angrier, more frightened, louder.
She told us, I thought. Fray teased us with the pills. All along, it was her plan.
There was an undercurrent of disbelief, as if this were a joke in particularly bad taste.
That would change. This was a school of students. Those students would do tests, and they would verify this for themselves. The reaction after that would be terrible to behold.
Things would be bad here, but Radham…
Subjecting the regular population to the chemical leash, not just the experiments? Denying a small city’s residents the ability to have children without the permission of the Academy and the Crown?
“Did she do this in Radham?” I asked.
“Probably,” Jamie said. “She would have done it everywhere.”
“That means we have to go back,” Gordon said. “Soon. This is too big, and there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to get back if we wait.”
The train drivers drank the water too.
The ramifications were too broad. I clenched my fist. It was true. At any point in time, Fray could have simply told us, and we would have had no choice but to go back.
When none of us spoke, Gordon added, gently, “There’s nothing more we can do here.”
“You’re right,” Jamie said. “Let’s go.”
We left the di
ning hall much as we’d entered, at a brisk pace.
There were things to take care of. We needed Helen, of course, and then there was Wendy.
We stepped outdoors. A whole crowd of students was heading toward the school.
They’d heard. They were coming to read those same papers.
We headed in a different direction, before they could trample us. One out of every four faces was haunted, they’d heard, they knew how the Academy operated, and they grasped the ramifications.
It would sink in with the rest soon. They would contact their parents, and the rich and powerful who had sent their daughters to Dame Cicely’s would take issue. The headmaster would pacify and massage his way back into good graces with promises of fixes or temporary solutions.
It wouldn’t be pretty, but he’d come out looking good.
“What was the guy’s name?” I asked. “The headmaster?”
We crossed a road, and our heads collectively turned to look further down the street, where a number of people who most definitely weren’t students were gathered outside a church. The shouts were audible, the anger apparent.
“He told you his name,” Jamie said. “Headmaster Edmund Foss.”
“Don’t remember that,” I admitted.
The shouts rose in volume.
I looked, studying the crowd, but I didn’t see Reverend Mauer. Churches were bastions of community, and in the midst of this growing crisis, they were becoming rallying points. Not an idea exclusive to Mauer.
“Christ,” Gordon said. “This is only just starting?”
“There’s going to be war,” Mary said.
War.
She was right. Mauer had tapped into the public’s fears and resentment, but this was something else altogether. The man would be having a field day, wherever he was.
War, the people against the Academy, with everything that entailed. The weapons, the monsters, the crude attempts at handling the finer, more delicate matters.
How odd, now that I thought about it. With the chemicals in the water, adjusted to affect everyone, we would have free reign. The leash had been given a considerable amount of slack, and it was thanks to Fray.
Gordon slowed. I spotted the reason why.
Further down the street, the giant of a man with incredible blue eyes. Warren.
He didn’t charge, and he didn’t attack.
He was so close. Did he know where Helen and Wendy were?
How odd, that he looked so calm, standing in the snow, as the rest of the city grew so heated and noisome.
“You want your stitched friend,” Gordon said.
Warren nodded, the blue eyes bobbing in the dark.
“We can negotiate,” Gordon said, and his smile was a grim one.
Again, Warren nodded.
Previous Next
Stitch in Time—4.12
Just an hour or so ago, Fray had been giving the order for Warren to attack us, to kill or maim. Now we were following Warren to where Fray was waiting. A little upriver from where we’d had our first discussion, near the edge of Kensford, where it bordered the woods.
There was a crowd further down the street. They were moving toward the Academy with purpose, and we could hear the shouts, though I couldn’t make out the words.
Fray looked genuinely surprised when we turned up. More surprised than she’d been when we’d turned up near her lab. She raised one hand to move her hair away from her face, as the wind blew it forcefully in the most inconvenient direction.
It took her a second. Something fell into place, and she nodded a little. “You found them, Warren, and you brought them here, because of Wendy.”
Warren nodded.
“If you don’t catch a train soon, you’re going to be stuck here,” Fray informed us.
“Now you’re being manipulative,” I said, walking up with my hands in my coat pockets. I separated from the group and found a tree with a short stone wall built around it to contain the dirt, taking a seat on the corner of the wall, one foot propped up, the other on the ground. “Setting a time limit? That’s number one in the manipulation textbook.”
She shook her head. “What is it they say about a thief being wariest of theft?”
“I never liked that saying. Thieves deal with thieves as a matter of course. If I’m going to steal, I’m going to steal from a thief who can’t go to authorities to complain. It stands to reason that a thief is well justified in being wary.”
“You’re missing the point.”
“I get the point. I’m a manipulator dealing with manipulators. And a manipulator is particularly vulnerable to the predations of their cannier counterparts. But okay, if you want to pretend you’re not setting an artificial time limit to put pressure on us and position yourself better for getting Wendy back, I can play along.”
The other Lambs were taking my lead, spreading out, very casually. This encounter with Fray was very different from the last one, and very different from my first encounter with her. We’d lost. She’d dropped her bombshell, and now, oddly enough, we could relax.
The shouts and screams further down the street rose in volume. People had torches, which was almost laughable. It was so iconic for the angry mob, but now that I saw it, I wondered if they intended to set fires, or if they simply needed the light. How did that even happen? Did someone have a supply of torches on hand, or did one guy just pipe up and say ‘I know how to make torches! Just give me a few minutes!’
“You’re smiling,” Fray spoke to me.
I raised my eyebrows, the smile disappearing.
“Do you have a plan, Sylvester? A way to snare me? One of you is missing.”
It was Gordon who replied. “No plan to capture, no snare. Whatever we did, you have Warren, and he could hurt or kill several of us in retaliation for whatever we did to you. Not worth it.”
Fray nodded. It was common sense, really—Warren wouldn’t have brought us if he thought it would hurt Fray. It said something, though, that she’d asked, bringing things up to sound it out and gauge our reactions. A hint of insecurity.
If I had to reason it out, I suspected we’d shocked her a little by appearing in the school and forcing her hand. Forcing her to use Warren, and forcing her to put her plan into action.
“Are you satisfied?” Lillian asked.
“We’ll see,” Fray said, leaning back against the railing that overlooked the river. “I’m more interested in the long-term.”
“You’ve been at this since you left the detainment center with Warren and Wendy,” I said.
She smiled. “Have I?”
Gordon spoke, saying, “It’s done. You won, you don’t have to be coy.”
“I can’t just outright tell you the particulars. I could lie, but I don’t like doing that. We’ll both see how far the ripples extend in the coming weeks and months.”
“War,” Mary said, quiet. “There has to be.”
“I think so,” Fray agreed. “The Academy crossed lines. I wanted to change it from within, that didn’t work, so I’m going to force a change from the outside. War is one way. Changing minds is another. There are weak points in the economic backbone, there are weaknesses in the foundations of the Academy’s work… that last one might be a weakness I’m not clever enough to exploit, I have to admit.”
“And you tell us all this with the idea that we’re going to go back and tell Radham Academy what you said, down to the word,” Jamie said.
“I expect you will, Jamie,” Fray said.
“But you’re leaving out the next part. You’re only getting started,” I said. “Your real method of attack isn’t one of the ones you just described. You want us to go and we tell Hayle or Briggs what you said—”
“You mean the duke, not Briggs,” Fray said.
I raised my eyebrows. “Funny that you know that.”
“It’s not exactly a secret,” she said.
“Sure,” I said, smiling. “You want us to go to Hayle or the duke, listing off all those differ
ent ways you could hurt the Academy, and when they’ve busied themselves frantically working to cover all the bases, you attack us from another angle.”
She shook her head, “Or I expect you’ll say that and I use one of the methods I just named. The Academy is too big. Something has to give. You know full well that you each have expiration dates—Sy wasn’t surprised when I brought it up. The Academies are an experiment of sorts too. Just as they’ve done with you, they’re going to keep pushing until something breaks, and then they’ll change things, approach anew with learned lessons fresh in their minds. I’m not saying this is a dragon that can be slain. I am saying that it can be trained. Even if we’re on opposite sides, you can’t disagree with me on that score.”
“Want to try us?” Mary asked.
Man, Mary was in a bad mood.
Odd, considering the fact that I felt fantastic. I wasn’t happy, exactly, but I’d become caught up in Fray’s flow. Stagnation was the worst thing, and change was something thrilling.
“You’re smiling again, Sylvester,” Genevieve Fray told me. “My mental picture of you told me you’d be more upset.”
“Can’t cry over spilled milk,” I said. “There are better things to occupy my thoughts with.”
“The forced sterilization and enslavement of tens or hundreds of thousands is spilled milk?” Lillian asked, quiet.
“Close enough,” I said. “We went into this a step behind. You had the files on us, Fray, you knew who you were dealing with. You have moles on the inside who are feeding you information and telling you we’re coming.”
“Someone could read that as you being a sore loser, Sylvester,” Fray said. “We eluded you, so there must be a mole?”
“I’m thinking you know entirely too much, and you know far too much that’s up to date, like about the Duke and the fact that Mary is a Lamb.”
“She was a Lamb in the spring, when I was introduced to your file.”