Twig

by wildbow

  “No, Mary,” I told her. I sighed a little. “What do you want to do? What are you thinking would be best, for the Lambs’ plan of action?”

  “We go after them. Lay a trap, take them out.”

  “Lay a trap how?” I asked. I was on the attack now, in a manner of speaking. “They could come after us or any of the superior officers. It’s pretty clear they have enhanced awareness on a lot of fronts. That’s a hard trap to lay.”

  “You’re good at thinking outside the box,” she said. “This is doable.”

  “Maybe doable. Probably. But ‘doable’ doesn’t mean ‘we should do it’.”

  “But—”

  “And thinking outside the box is only doable if there is a box and if I know what the box is and how it works,” I said. “They’re a box I don’t know.”

  “You’re making less sense as you go along, Sy,” Gordon said.

  “I’m injured,” I pointed out.

  “Which would be a great excuse if you got shot in the brain,” Mary told me, with a very unimpressed tone. Even as we talked, she was scanning the surroundings, watching the darker parts of the street.

  She was itching to go up against this new enemy.

  “Sy’s right. It doesn’t make sense,” Gordon said.

  Mary shifted position, impatient, annoyed.

  “If we let this slide,” Mary said, halting as the noise in the background reached a crescendo, “if—I just don’t want this mission to be stillborn like this. I want a win, Sy.”

  “That,” I seized on the opportunity, “Is exactly what we hoped to talk about.”

  Gordon nodded.

  Mary was paying attention now, even if her eyes didn’t show it. She was still looking out for trouble. But her hands weren’t clenched and scrunchy the little lines that tended to appear between her eyebrows and on the bridge of her nose when she was upset weren’t as pronounced.

  Even as we stepped out of the way of the streetlight and into darkness, her silhouette had changed in how poised it was. She’d been coiled like a spring, ready to pounce or react, and now she wasn’t. Not as much, anyway.

  “You’re being sly, Sy,” she said, wary but interested. “Gordon too.”

  “This is more Gordon than me,” I said. I said it because it was true. It was Gordon’s plan. But also because Mary was more likely to listen to Gordon than to me.

  She was closer to me, I felt, but she was more likely to listen to Gordon.

  Gordon cleared his throat. Mary fixed her attention on him. The pair slowed to a stop, and I realized Gordon had a hand on Mary’s shoulder. He wanted her full attention.

  I walked a bit forward, the two of them behind me. Taking over Mary’s watch, so to speak. Looking out for trouble.

  Behind me, Gordon asked, “Do you agree with the Brigadier?”

  “No,” Mary said.

  “Sy told me you didn’t have high expectations about how this would turn out, even before we talked to the man.”

  “I don’t feel the killer instinct,” she said. “We talked about this after leaving the meeting, but I was thinking about it. They hate us. Their side is angry, they have a cause. This side, I don’t know how much they really want to fight.”

  “I’m asking,” Gordon said. “Because if it came down to it, and the Brigadier exited the picture, but we found ourselves in a position to win this battle…”

  Mary made a sudden movement, and I turned to get a better look. A hand to her mouth. Connecting the dots.

  The sound of explosions drowned out the start of Gordon’s statement. Men came running down the street, a crew of stitched following them. I glanced over them as they passed under the light, looking for the unique facial features of the assassins.

  “—would you be?” Gordon asked.

  “Not very,” Mary said.

  There were two ways that could be taken, without context. I wished I’d heard how Gordon had framed it.

  But I saw Gordon’s shoulders relax. His hand dropped from where he’d been resting it on her shoulder, and the two of them walked to catch up with me a bit. Gordon looked pleased.

  “It depends, though,” Mary said. “On execution.”

  “Doesn’t it always?” Gordon asked. “Let’s sound out the others before we start discussing particulars.”

  “Sure,” Mary said.

  “For the record,” I said. “I’m not entirely on board with this. I see where Gordon’s coming from, I get it, but I have concerns.”

  Gordon nodded.

  “Gordon’s the reckless one for once?” Mary observed.

  “You should have seen him when he was younger,” I said. “He was as bad as I was.”

  Gordon chuckled. “I wanted to learn the good stuff so very badly, and they wouldn’t teach it to me. Sy cottoned on and the two of us would take off. Every day. They’d find new ways to lock us in or station new guards, Sy and I would compete to see who could get out and free the other one.”

  I was very aware that our conversation and banter had taken on a lighter tone. It was a contrast to the ongoing fight that we could do so little about. The seriousness of what it was that Gordon wanted to do here.

  “What Gordon’s thinking, if he’s thinking what I’m thinking he’s thinking,” I said. “Is—”

  “If you say thinking one more time I’m slapping you across the back of the head,” Gordon warned me.

  “Is going to put us in a risky position. We do this right, the Academy will let it slide. But if we pull the ‘traitor’ move and we fail, we’ll have to off the Brigadier and blame the assassins.”

  Mary nodded somberly.

  I couldn’t see in the dark, but I was suspicious that if I could, she’d be showing me a mischievous grin while maintaining a poker face on the other side, for Gordon’s benefit.

  “Okay,” Gordon said. “I know Sy is joking—”

  The sentence was cut off as a building detonated. Flame and flying bits of whatever erupted from a rooftop, halfway between us and the wall where the fighting had been happening.

  Bells were rung, people mobilized. Civilians this time, some in nightclothes.

  Putting out the fire.

  “Wow,” Mary said. “If they keep that up…”

  “They won’t,” Gordon said. “So far, the Academy’s been seeing how well they can hold back the enemy with the minimum possible resources. But they won’t let that go unanswered.”

  There were calls and orders. Permissions given.

  Unleashing the monsters.

  I thought, as Specialists stepped to the fore, joined by the scientists who were looking after the individual projects. Men pulled on chains, hauling experiments out of the enclosures where they had been contained.

  Three were large, with the massive horns, thick hide, and shaggy fur. Nothing fancy, probably no special qualities. It kind of amazed me when I dwelt on it. Someone had played god, they had made an entirely new life, and they had done it for a grade, halfway through their Academy education. Exercising the fundamentals.

  Give Lillian two more years and she might just put something like that together. Except she’d do it different. I would be deeply disappointed in her if she didn’t learn something meaningful from all of our adventures.

  The gates swung open, and the creatures charged through. Each one was probably pretty darn close to being bulletproof.

  We picked up our pace as we moved further away from the site of the explosion.

  Can’t think straight, this close to it all, I told myself.

  “If this goes badly, it’s going to cost us,” I said. “They’ve got Ashton Le Deux or Evette the Second in the works. I don’t want them getting second thoughts about moving forward with that.”

  “They’re not going to cancel a project they’ve already invested into,” Gordon said.

  “In wartime?” I asked. “War is the best excuse ever. Not just for scrapping projects or changing things up.”

  “Right,” he said.

  “Don
’t get me wrong. That guy pisses me off more than any enemy we’ve gone up against. I’d love to pull this one off, play it off like we haven’t in a while, but… I have questions, Gordon.”

  “For me, specifically?”

  “Yeah. Mary, look, since we’re almost there, you maybe want to handle rounding up the others? With some officers and people in the building, it’s a bad place to hold this conversation. I need to ask Gordon something.”

  I hated to ask. I knew that Mary didn’t like being left out. Her isolation had been the tool I’d used to get her away from Percy.

  We continued walking, and I felt a little nervous, between Mary’s silence and Gordon’s reaction to my earlier concerns.

  “How long do you need, for your chat?” Mary asked.

  “Not long,” I said. “You don’t have to dawdle. But don’t rush to get everyone out the door either?”

  “Alright,” she said.

  I reached out and took her hand, giving it a squeeze. She smiled at me.

  We reached the house where we were staying, and Mary stepped inside. I gestured, and Gordon and I stepped away from the door, to the corner of the house. We stood under the eaves, streams of water coming down in front of us, like the vertical iron bars of a cell. Our backs were to the wall, and we watched the surroundings. Men were marching in the opposite direction from the gate that was under siege.

  The city of Westmore was laid out between mountains. It zig-zagged more than it sprawled, and the various exits from the city were all mountain roads and paths, blocked off by sturdy gates much like the one at the front.

  It somehow made me think of Westmore as being weaker than it was strong. That the Academy had taken it by force only weeks ago suggested that it wasn’t impregnable.

  Weakness…

  “Gordon,” I said. “First thing I gotta ask. It’s bugging me, and Mary probably knows the answer, but I gotta hear it from you.”

  “Ah,” he said. He heaved out a sigh.

  “I know it’s a touchy subject, but… this morning. You were sitting on the wagon instead of helping out. You can tell me, straight up, if you were hurt in a very normal, conventional way, or lie to me and tell me you were, and I’ll leave it be. But—”

  “I’m not going to lie to you, Sy,” he said.

  I felt my heart plummet. “What happened, exactly?”

  “Phantom pains,” he told me. “Couldn’t coordinate my fingers right.”

  He lifted his hand. He touched his thumb to forefinger, middle finger, ring finger, then pinky, then did it back and forth, faster and faster.

  I swallowed.

  “It’s better now,” he said. “It was minor, when it happened. But it was a wake-up call. That things can go wrong. That maybe this is the very first step. I start breaking down, things start going wrong. Little things, and only for a short while each time, but the times get longer and the issues get bigger, and eventually, I dunno. I’m lying in a bed and nothing works or works together, and it all hurts, and the Academy decides it’s too much trouble to keep the Griffon project alive?”

  He was speaking in an artificially low voice. One that he tried on now and again as his voice steadily and smoothly changed. Burying emotion, doing what he could to control the words and keep them steady. Except at the very end, he was having to try more.

  He’d made it a question. I had the answers. He knew that.

  “I could tell you what I know,” I said. “The projected outcomes. Timelines. But I think you’d resent me for telling you, after, when the sun was up and things were a little brighter. Because it would cast a shadow over every good day from here on out. You’d take what I told you and convince yourself it was worse than it was, or something.”

  “Damn it, Sy,” he said. His voice was rough, a little choked. He wasn’t looking at me.

  “Does Mary know?”

  “Yeah. I had to explain. Gladys, too.”

  I nodded. “The others?”

  “Lillian. Not Jamie. Not Helen.”

  He wouldn’t have had an opportunity with Jamie and Helen.

  I didn’t say anything, just thinking. The sound of battle was dying. It wasn’t just that we were far away. The bomb blast on the one rooftop and the subsequent release of the warbeasts had ended things.

  They’d forced the Academy to play their hand. The rebellion had spooked the Academy forces of Westmore, and they’d proved they’d spooked us. Psychologically, it was what I’d want to do, if I was leading the enemy. Not that I’d mount a frontal attack.

  “They put me together with the best pieces they could get. Augmented, altered, fixed, matched to what I needed. I’m a chimera. A hodgepodge puzzle of about twenty-six people and some things that weren’t ever people,” Gordon said. “Everything wired perfectly, with treatments to keep it all in alignment.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve had trouble with coordination before. Early on. But the phantom pain… I had my hand, but my brain was trying to tell me I had a second, and it was caught in this—this ice cold vise, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. It wasn’t the pain that got me, or that I couldn’t get my hand to do what I wanted it to. It was… I was worried about what it meant.”

  “The second hand?”

  “Yeah,” he said. His voice had that rough edge to it still. He was having a hard time keeping it steady, but he was managing it. “Sy. They didn’t just work with muscle and bone and the frame of my body. They took a few brains, took them apart, with a few choice pieces in mind, and they jigsawed it all together.”

  “You’re wondering what happens if your brain starts doing what your hand was.”

  “I know phantom pain and the connections don’t work that way. But phantom pains like I felt, they’re a disconnect between the brain and the body in the first place. I just—”

  He stopped mid-sentence.

  I gave him time to find the words to speak, or the ability to create the words without letting something emotional slip through.

  The gunfire had stopped altogether. There was distant shouting, but that probably had more to do with the fallout from the one shell that had hit the roof.

  I heaved out a sigh.

  “You don’t have anything to worry about just yet,” I said.

  He raised his voice, “I told you not—”

  “I know I know I know,” I said, cutting him off. “I know. But you gotta hear it. And I have to say it. I can’t have that tearing at you like that.”

  He nodded.

  “Okay,” I said. “Right. That took longer than I thought it would. You know you can talk to me about it, right?”

  “But you won’t tell me, if I ask?”

  “If you really ask, I’ll tell. If you need to know, or if it looks like there won’t be any good days, I’ll tell.”

  He nodded.

  I could hear the others inside the house, coming down the stairs.

  “Shit,” I said. “Okay, look. Gotta ask. This plan of yours, being entirely honest, how on board with it would you be if we were doing this six months ago?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Fray. You were going to go with her.”

  The tension in the air was awful. I honestly felt like he was going to reach out and grab me.

  He didn’t say a word.

  “Are you wanting to do this because a part of you thinks that if it goes horribly wrong, maybe we’ll all have to pick up and go to Fray?”

  Silence.

  “Or because of the phantom pain? The feeling that you might be breaking down?”

  “Sy,” he said.

  “I gotta ask. We gotta go into this with our eyes open. No fooling. Knowing that you might cut corners or shift priorities because you feel like you have an ‘out’ in Fray…”

  “You want to know what the box looks like,” Gordon said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Not going to lie because I know you’ll see right through it. Yes. There’s a bit of a feeling of having an
out. We don’t need the pills anymore. The chemical is everywhere.”

  “Alright,” I said.

  “Does—” he started to say. The front door opened, and Gordon pursed his lips. He gave me a look, as if I’d timed things specifically to end the conversation there and leave him hanging.

  Jamie, Helen, Lillian, and Mary all stepped out, wearing raincoats, Jamie with his bookbag. Jamie’s coat was a bit too big, swallowing him up.

  “Where’s Gladys?” Gordon asked.

  “Sound asleep,” Mary said. “Thought about it, but…”

  “—she’s not a Lamb,” I said.

  Mary nodded.

  Gordon bristled at that, but he didn’t argue. I suspected it had something to do with the fact that he had no idea where I stood, since his confession. Lillian gave me a look, almost inquiring. But she was enough of a Lamb to be included here.

  We moved as a group, in the opposite direction from the gate.

  “What’s this about?” Lillian asked. “You’re making me nervous.”

  “Mutiny,” I said.

  Gordon gave me a sharp look.

  I was too busy watching the others to figure out where things stood. Fear in Lillian’s eyes, as she looked at each of us, trying to figure out what was going on, or what we were thinking. Jamie looked concerned, and rightly so. Helen gave no sign, of course.

  “The first foray didn’t go well?” Jamie asked.

  “Nope,” I said. “The people of the small township of Whitney are angry on a number of levels. They’re devastated, scared, and armed. The spider thing backfired, without the follow-up attack. They found their courage, they’re attacking, trying desperately to hurt us before we can do something like that again.”

  “If they knew how much work it took,” Mary muttered.

  Gordon was watching me carefully. I’d never told him which direction I was leaning with this plan.

  “They’re not going to let up,” I said. “It’s our feeling, given where things stand, that this isn’t going to end well for the Academy. We’re the only people who’ve seen both sides of things. We don’t have enough anger to drive us to go for the jugular. Brigadier Tylor is a good indication of that. He wants a safe win.”