Twig

by wildbow

  Among them was an unspoken agreement.

  Had I let slip that he was trying to figure out Latin, after our little trip down to the Dungeons with Sub Rosa, Jamie would have gotten in serious trouble.

  This was something else entirely.

  “Never done this before,” he murmured.

  “You said—” the man of the house started.

  “My dad is a doctor,” Jamie lied. Then he told the truth, saying, “I’ve watched and learned.”

  “If you’re not sure—”

  “I’m sure,” Jamie lied, again. He lied for a third time as he said, “I was talked through procedures worse than this.”

  You’ve seen, you remember, you piece it together, I thought.

  “The powder smells different,” Jamie said.

  “Could be old,” the man said.

  Jamie made a face, then tossed the powder. He rifled through the kit until he found a liquid, instead. He set a match on my chest.

  “Uh,” I said.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Going to have to do it like it’s done on the battlefield.”

  “You’ve never seen a battlefield, you butt!”

  “I’ve heard,” he said. He didn’t respond to the insult. I realized how scared he was.

  The problem with this piecemeal knowledge. He knew the moves he needed to make, but he didn’t have a foundation. One day, all going according to plan, he could have that foundation. He couldn’t trust a medicine that smelled different. But that he could even figure out the right tools, that he was this far along, and he’d kept it a secret?

  The Academy couldn’t know. We were forbidden.

  The man moved his hands. Jamie took the scalpel to my injury, opening it up enough for the pliers to go in.

  He looked so terrified I couldn’t bear to look at him. My head dropped to the floor, and I reached out to pat his knee, grunting and gasping now and then as the pliers moved. A small sound escaped my throat as I held my breath.

  “Isn’t there something you can give him?” the man asked.

  “No,” I said, a moment before Jamie said, “No.”

  “But—”

  “There!” I jumped in, and the volume and suddenness with which I’d spoken made the pain explode through my abdomen. I groaned, long and loud, clenching my fist and squeezing Jamie’s knee hard, making little sounds with every pant.

  “Easy,” Helen said. She gave my forehead a pat, and pushed hair out of my eyes. It was sweaty, and stayed out of the way.

  “Talk to me,” Jamie said. “I’m not good enough to find it on my own.”

  The man spoke up, “You can’t possibly—”

  “Close,” I said. “No, other direction.”

  “I feel it.”

  He found it, he got a grip on it, locked the pliers’ grip, and he pulled the modified pliers free, a bullet the size of a grape held in the prongs.

  I wasn’t privy to the particulars of the clean up job, but he dumped the contents of the bottle in, daubed it around with a swab to get the parts the match couldn’t reach, then seared the bleedy bits with the match.

  “Now I’m hungry,” I murmured, as I smelled the seared flesh.

  “But we just ate,” Helen said. “We had treats!”

  “I was joking.”

  She gave me a disapproving look. The tears had dried up, and she was smiling a little. All an act, of course.

  He glued me together and closed me up, using the clamps to hold things in place until the glue could set.

  “I’m not sure how much blood you’ve already lost,” Jamie said. “There’s no aqua nucifera, and I wouldn’t trust it if there was.”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t move too quickly,” he said. “You’re going to be weak.”

  “Like that’s anything new,’ I said.

  He put the tools aside, leaving a bit of a mess. The man looked a little concerned, as if things didn’t add up, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

  Helen gave me a hand in getting to my feet. The man and Jamie moved to the kitchen sink to wash their hands.

  I still had blood in my butt crack. I probably looked like a wreck.

  “There haven’t been more gunshots,” the man observed.

  “There was one with a knife,” I said. “One with claws, and one with some weapon on a chain.”

  “A censer,” Jamie said, looking over at me.

  I gestured for him to ease up a bit. I saw him nod.

  Riding a high. He did what he wasn’t supposed to do, he even succeeded and saved me, hopefully. Whatever special kind of person Jamie might’ve been, he was still a person. He got a rush of adrenaline from a success like that.

  It didn’t show that much, though. Jamie was quiet and reserved at the best of times. He cleaned himself up, leaving his sleeves still rolled up, and grabbed his bag.

  “I should go,” the man said. He turned to his wife. “If we’re under attack, I need to do something.”

  “But—”

  “They attacked a child,” he said. “If we’d been out instead of here with Edmund—”

  She nodded, spooked.

  I let the drama play out while I gently prodded my stomach. I pulled clothing back into place, wincing at the pain, took a cloth from beside the sink and began to wipe at my shirt where it was all bloody. Jamie handed me my jacket, then helped me pull it on.

  I was well and truly ready to take something for the pain now, now that Jamie didn’t need help to find his way to the bullet.

  The man went to a cabinet, and came back with a gun. He took a moment to put it together, checking for various components, most definitely not a person with more than a few hours of practice, and then gave his wife a kiss.

  “Be healthy,” he told me, “Thank you for the warning about the attacks. Will you look after my wife?”

  “Of course,” Jamie said.

  “Good man,” the soldier said.

  “Sir!” I cut in, before he could head out, gun in hand. He paused, and I told him, “Warn others.”

  He nodded, then headed out the door.

  I pointed, and the others nodded. As the wife stepped over to the door to lock it, peering out the window to watch her husband, we headed out the front door.

  There was nowhere to go but forward and out. The residential road had people gathered in clusters, talking, and we used them for cover, watching.

  “Stop,” Helen said, but it was less the order and more than fact that she grabbed us and hauled us back that stopped us. Breaking our forward momentum. I jerked, and my stomach clenched inadvertently. I bit back a gasp of pain.

  The crack marked a bullet striking something hard. I didn’t see where.

  “Go!” I called out, “Go, go!”

  We hurried as much as we were able, with me hurting and sucking at everything. An alley offered cover from the gunshots.

  They had a gunman that could see well enough through the rain to target us. He was sharp enough to notice us just moments after we’d emerged from the house.

  “Jamie,” I said. “Where is he?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “You know where he was? First shot? The one that hit me?”

  “Some idea.”

  “And the shot just now?”

  “Less that I know where he was, more… I can eliminate possibilities.”

  “Eliminate,” I said. We hurried down the alleyway. There were people there, more clusters. I studied each group, watching for potential trouble.

  The others had to have heard about the gunshot. They’d look after Lillian, if Lillian was even in danger. She was well camouflaged. Short of them killing every child in the town of Whitney… which wasn’t impossible…

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “Are you okay?” Jamie asked.

  “Not that,” I said. I knew my voice sounded more tense than it usually did. “We’re stuck.”

  “We’ve been stuck before.”

  “We need to get out, rendezvous with the
others. We can’t do that without stepping into an open area. If we stay put, the other two might track us down.”

  The rain was coming down harder now. I wasn’t quite able to hope that it was making life harder on our enemies.

  “If we think about the things that make them stand out,” I murmured. “Nose, eyes, the guy with the scarf might just be fingers, touch, and the guy Jamie shot is probably ears.”

  “Was,” Helen said. “Past tense.”

  “I’m not willing to bet anything,” I said. “There might be a fifth, taste, and I’m going to assume the one Jamie shot is alive until we see him dismantled on some Academy autopsy table.”

  “Five,” Jamie said.

  “There are more than five senses,” Helen said. “Balance, sense of one’s own physical state…”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “But these buttheads aren’t even supposed to have three pieces of work this good, let alone four or five. Experienced soldiers, each with custom modifications?”

  “Academy work,” Jamie said.

  “Traitors,’ Helen said.

  I nodded slowly. “That changes things. I don’t feel so good about Helen going after one.”

  “I can do it,” Helen said.

  “Probably. And you’re going to have to,” I said. “But I don’t feel good about it.”

  She nodded. She was holding herself in a way that I was pretty sure was Helen for ‘anticipation’. Her expression was still normal, smiling, but her body was ready for the attack.

  “Let’s head in Lillian’s general direction,” I said. “In case the others can’t cover her. And because it’s the direction they’re liable to be going in. We assess the situation, then we go in. If we spot one, we bait.”

  The two nodded.

  We moved.

  Through winding alleys, awareness of our surroundings pitched to a painful degree. I wasn’t at my best, and I was focusing my thoughts and my own un-altered senses on every gap, readying myself for an attack at any moment, knowing it was futile even if I was fast enough to react.

  We paused at a pile of debris, while Jamie turned his attention to figuring out a plan that worked, then went down a side-alley. The street was packed with soldiers. Another side alley was mostly empty, wagons that were usually there now cleared away. No cover to hide behind.

  As we returned to the four-way intersection, the woman appeared.

  Helen indicated, and the three of us crawled into a space beneath a house, belly deep in mud. I used one hand to hold Jamie’s raincoat down over the injury so it wouldn’t get too dirty.

  We were as good as caught. She had the ability to smell.

  I signaled. We collectively abandoned our attempt at staying silent, and crawled for the other side of the space. The floor above us scraped our shoulderblades as the ground rose to meet it. Jamie squirmed out of his backpack.

  “Children,” the woman spoke, from just in front of us.

  She’d circled around. She could do it again, as fast as we could crawl.

  “You killed Phlegm,” she called out to us. “My brother.”

  Jamie reacted to the name. He’d connected two dots.

  He didn’t seem to have a ready answer.

  “I have his belt,” the woman said.

  The cans of gas.

  Previous Next

  Esprit de Corpse—5.6

  The only sound was the rain coming down, and the periodic sucking noise of mud as Helen, Jamie or I shifted position.

  “You have the canisters Mr. Phlegm had on his belt,” Jamie said.

  “Not my preferred weapon,” the woman said. “But it’s somehow poetic that Phlegm might get a last laugh. Not that he is the laughing type. Was.”

  She made a noise like she was spitting.

  Also poetic, all things considered.

  I swallowed, then spoke. My side was still hurting like nothing else, even after being patched up, and my voice faltered at the start, the strength to get the air past my lips not there when I reached for it. “What’s your name?”

  “Not telling,” she said. “Goodbye.”

  “Wait!” I said, raising my voice. My stomach rewarded me by cramping up in new sorts of pain, clutching like a fist around all the hurt.

  She didn’t use the canister.

  To my left, Helen crawled forward, not with her arms and legs, but fingers and feet, pushing and pulling herself by painstaking half-inches, periodically reaching up to grab onto the roof and use that to slide herself forward. The lack of speed was balanced by the fact that she was nearly silent. I was right next to her and even I couldn’t hear her raincoat scrape against small stones and mud.

  She’d been wearing a nice dress for the event. Now it was ruined. What a shame.

  “We used to be on the same side, didn’t we?” I asked.

  “I’m not the laughing type either, little boy, especially not with Phlegm dead,” the woman said. “You’re wasting my time if you’re making jokes.”

  “You were Academy,” I said, not because I knew, but because I had no choice but to follow the same track. I couldn’t change the subject without her deciding I was stalling and deciding to off us. Or whatever that canister did.

  “Yes. But that’s different from what you said before,” she said.

  I noticed how she was walking. She was lingering more at the places where posts held the house up off the ground, which kept her out of sight and protected her ankles from any further gunshots.

  Not stupid.

  “We’re related,” I said. “We’re family. We’re experiments, we’re conn—”

  She cut me off. “We’re alone, little boy. Everyone is. The act of being born is a separation, so is dying. For experiments more than anything else. At least they get to have doctors use sterile scissors to snip their connection to their mother, after they’re squeezed out into the world, covered in blood and landing in shit. Us, we’re made, or we’re born like they are and then we’re reborn on a table or in a vat.”

  “That’s an experience we share, it’s—”

  “It creates a gulf between us. You can pretend to have some greater connection to the world, but that’s a child’s fantasy. We’re as different from them as a cat is from a dog, at least. Compare a cat to a dog and a dog to a lizard and you’re not going to find a connection between the cat and the lizard. They’re a social species, but we’re all species of one, or of two, or of four.”

  Helen, our lizard, crawled forward. She was crawling across from me, now, her body in front of my face.

  “A year and nine days ago, our species of four added one more to our ranks. In the next couple of years, we’re going to have a sixth.”

  “Twelve days,” Jamie murmured. “A year and twelve days.”

  “Shut up,” I whispered. Louder, I said, “Listen, I think we’re similar in how we approach the world. The differences, the focus on the team, even if my idea of what the ‘team’ is happens to be different—”

  “One of my colleagues, you’ve crossed paths with him, he keeps a tiny black notebook filled with tickmarks, you know. He counts the number of times people try the ‘we’re the same’ line on him. A different line or phrase or word for every page.”

  Drat.

  “I’m betting he has whole pages dedicated to ‘please!’ or ‘god, no!’,” I remarked.

  She was silent.

  “Was I on target?” I tried. Her being silent and taking time before she offed us was fantastic, but talking and hurrying things along was better than three seconds of silence followed by her deciding to kill us.

  “No,” she said. “Not quite. You made me think of Phlegm.”

  Double damn and dang-blast it. The thought crossed my mind, but I held the emotion at bay. My focus was on her and on our conversation.

  “Alone,” she said.

  “If you’re alone, it’s by your own choice, your own way of looking at things.”

  “I’m more alone than I was since you killed my partner,” she
said. There was a pause. “I’m done entertaining you.”

  Helen was a few feet away. She wasn’t picking up speed, even with that announcement. Still the slithering crawl through the mud. She had to be getting it in her mouth, her nose, even with her lips closed, but she was calm, glacially slow, and eerily focused.

  We had one option. It was one I hated to use.

  “You can’t afford to take the time to do that,” I said.

  I heard something snap or crack from the woman’s direction. My hopes that she’d been attacked were dashed when she shifted her footing. She was getting something from the belt.

  “In less than an hour, you’re going to need all of the cans you can get,” I told her. “All of the bullets too.”

  I’m sorry, Gordon, Mary, I thought.

  “That so?”

  “The reason we went to go pick up our girl here was because we’re done. The traps are placed, boxes under half the houses in Whitney. Soon, really soon, the things occupying the box are going to wake up. The city falls, and if you’re here, if your buddies are here, then you get to watch them die, maybe, and then you die alone.”

  “Assuming you’re telling the truth, what’s in the boxes?” she asked.

  “I think they started with spiders,” I said.

  Jamie added, “But, like you said, they’re as comparable to spiders as cats are to dogs.”

  There was a pause.

  “Look under the house on the other side of the alley,” I said. “Chances are pretty good.”

  Between the rain, the distance, and the lack of lighting, I couldn’t see under the house across the little alley.

  The chances weren’t good at all. My heart pounded.

  Helen crept further. She was about a foot from being able to lunge for the woman’s ankles. A crocodile in the mud, with styled hair, at least to a point. It was thick with muck after a certain length.

  The angle of the woman’s legs changed. She was looking.

  “Hm,” she said. Noncommittal. Leaving me in the dark.

  “Those cans, whatever they are, they’re bound to be helpful. If you don’t want to grab your buddies and get out of dodge.”

  “No, not at all,” she said. “I’ve decided I can spare one of these.”

  She shifted her stance, and I tensed.

  Helen reached, lunging.