by wildbow
Going from being unable to see through the smoke ten feet ahead of me to having the building there was a shock, as if it was lunging forward at us, rather than the other way around.
We passed through the window, Gordon perching in it to help me and Lillian up. I let Lillian go first, looking up at the fighting on the roof. Discrete groups, shouts, ongoing fighting, and a ape-like Warbeast standing between two groups, threatening both.
We really weren’t on their radar.
I took Gordon’s hand, and he hauled me inside.
Fray’s group, Mauer, and Percy made their way inside. The soldiers gathered with their backs to the wall. There wasn’t enough room immediately inside.
“I’ll take that,” Fray said, to Helen.
“Aw.”
Fray took the octopus. It crawled up to her shoulder and wrapped itself loosely around her neck like a scarf.
“The books,” I said.
Fray looked at the stitched girl. “I suppose it’s time. Give the books back, Wendy.”
Wendy approached. She handed me the backpack.
“As to the other part of our deal,” Fray said.
“What’s this?” Mauer asked.
Fray set her eyes on Percy.
Boots tramped on the floor above us. Everyone looked, worrying we were about to face soldiers. A gun fired, a body fell.
More boots stomped on floorboards. Nobody came downstairs.
Mary was staring at Percy, her jaw set.
The other part of the deal.
It would be an advantage, a win for the Academy, for us, a hit to the enemy, a benefit to Mary in a way, even.
All I had to do was let the lie to Mary continue.
Less than an hour ago, Lillian had suggested I was like an abusive husband. Manipulating, coddling, baiting people closer and then pushing them away.
I wasn’t sure if this was bait or a push.
My finger touched the ring at my thumb. There was a faint ‘x’ on the knuckle. I’d written it to remind myself of something. Damn it.
“It’s awkward to admit, and I know this will cause friction,” Fray said. “But—”
Right, had to focus on the matter at hand.
“Wait,” I said.
Fray stopped short.
The Lambs looked at me.
My breath was frozen in my throat. I couldn’t bring myself to breathe, let alone speak.
But…
When I swallowed, it was a difficult swallow.
“I lied to you, Mary,” I said, my voice soft. I stared down Percy. “About Percy. There was no command phrase, he didn’t abandon you, he did intend you to lead. When he confessed his sins to you earlier, he was lying too.”
Mary stared at me, then looked at Percy.
“He cares, Mary. I know we might lose you by me admitting it, but—he cares enough to let you hate him, if it means you’re happier in the end, with us. Assuming I understood that right.”
Percy straightened a little, as if he’d withered in the time since he’d been rejected by ‘his girl’. He lowered his head in a short nod. “You did.”
“Okay,” Mary said.
I glanced at her.
Her expression was flat.
“You were going to sell out my acquaintance?” Mauer asked Fray.
“We never formally agreed on that. It came up, and I planned to discuss it here, before we parted ways. Keeping in mind they don’t have much leverage anymore, beyond Helen’s promise of mutually assured destruction.”
Helen held up the canister.
The Brechwell Beast roared outside. It was closer than it had been.
The two were talking, but all of my focus was on Mary.
I’d confessed a grave lie that I’d kept for a year and a half, and she wasn’t giving me anything at all.
No anger, no tears, no outrage.
Was she stepping away? Figuring out how to leave? Or, worse, was she staying, while attacking me in the worst way possible, by shutting me out and denying any and all connection between us?
“Gordon’s right, Sy,” Mary said. “You’re really terrible at being honest.”
I don’t know what that means! I screamed, internally.
Externally, I didn’t move an inch or make a sound.
Mauer drew his gun. Percy reached for one as well.
“This doesn’t need to go this far,” Fray said. “Sylvester confessed the lie, there’s no reason to hold to that part of the deal, am I right?”
“Kill him,” Mary said. “Percy.”
“What?” Percy asked. “You heard what he said, he—”
“I heard,” Mary said, voice cold. “What he just said makes more sense than what you both were saying, back in the meeting room back there, the story I heard in the past.”
“Then—this is about the children? The work I do? It bothers you so much?”
Mary shook her head. “No. You shaped me, honed me into a tool, a weapon. You could kill a thousand children a year and it wouldn’t bother me.”
“Then why?” he asked. There was a note of anguish in his voice. “You want me to die?”
“It bothers her,” Mary said, pointing at Lillian. “And she’s important to me.”
“I’m assuming you can’t be convinced otherwise?” Mauer asked.
“No,” Mary said.
Mauer nodded. His sonorous voice carried, even as he spoke to himself, “That’s problematic.”
“Mary,” Percy said. “You’re important to me.”
Mauer turned, and with the crack of a pistol shot, he put a bullet through an anguished Percy’s head.
Percy’s body crumpled to the floor.
“We could have found another option,” Fray said, looking down.
“I’d like to go,” Mauer said. “It’s a loss, but one I’m willing to live with if it means leaving the city before a small army closes in on us. You’ll owe me something in compensation for expediting matters.”
“As you wish,” Fray said. She turned to the rest of us. “Another day.”
“Another day,” I said.
She turned her back to us, taking Warren’s hand as help to make it through the broken window.
Letting them go…
Helen held the grenade, making motions as if she was gauging her ability to accurately throw it through the window at the small army massed outside.
Gordon reached out, putting a hand on her wrist.
“No?” she asked, sounding mournful.
“Cats and cockroaches,” he said. “Some would survive, and it would be the most exceptional ones. Not worth it. Besides, they could have done the same to us.”
He held her wrist firm while he took the pin from his pocket and put it through the slot. He took the weapon from Helen.
“Doesn’t stop us from sending everything we can after them,” I said. “For all the good it’ll do.”
“We can try,” Gordon said, nodding. He drew in a deep breath, then exhaled. “We’ll have to see how—”
Mary, standing beside Gordon, tilted her head to one side, until it rested against Gordon’s shoulder. Her arm reached around his waist. Her eyes were fixed on Percy.
“…How bad it is up there. Are you wanting to stay?”
“No,” Mary said. “I like being like this, but the mission comes first.”
“Mary,” Lillian said. “You doing that for me, you didn’t—”
“You’re my friend,” Mary said. She smiled a little. “It’s okay. I feel better than I have in a long time.”
“If you’re sure—”
“Mm-hmm,” Mary said, nodding, her head rubbing against Gordon’s shoulder. Just being like this, she was closer than she’d been getting to him for a while. Gordon seemed to be taking it in stride. She spoke, “Thank you, everyone. Sy especially. I appreciate this.”
“If you’re absolutely sure you’re okay—” Gordon said.
“I will stab the next person to ask if I’m okay,” Mary said.
“A
re you okay?” I asked, without missing a beat.
She moved her head off of Gordon’s shoulder, turning my way.
“Wait,” I said, “hold on.”
She approached me, drawing a knife.
She was a few feet away when she stopped.
Looking up at the stairs.
My first thought was that the enemy had circled back or come down and found us.
Worse.
Two young individuals stood on the staircase, twelve and thirteen, going by appearance alone. I knew better.
One had red hair, parted to one side, wearing a white collared shirt only, despite the cold weather, with dark brown slacks. He had a folded umbrella in one hand. He had freckles on his face, and his eyes—the eyes were intense, amber colored, more like that of a wolf than a person.
Those eyes were the most alive part of him. Helen, even in the earliest days, was better at looking like a proper human than he was.
Beside Ashton was a familiar face, dressed wrong. The hair was still long, but it was combed straight back. The glasses had changed, and were oval, slender, more like reading glasses than anything else. His shirt had a high collar, not folded, with a ribbon around it, and he wore a coat with a hood, but carried no bag and held no book. He held himself differently.
His eyes, as he looked at us, showed no glimmer of familiarity. Recognition, yes, but not in the way it counted.
“You let them go?” he asked.
Previous Next
Tooth and Nail—7.16
It’s him. Not him.
Worst timing possible.
Greet him with a smile. Figure out what to say.
My expression remained blank, eyes turned up to the pair on the stairwell. No words left my lips.
Something screamed atop the rooftops. The gunfire was incessant.
He came down the stairs, with Ashton following just a step behind him. He stopped at the base of the stairs, looking us over.
Hubris growled. Gordon touched the dog’s head, and Hubris went quiet, though his posture was still aggressive. He moved closer, until he was between Gordon and the pair, on guard.
He reached into a pocket, withdrawing a flat leather case, thinner than most wallets, and no longer than his hand was. His fingers curled around the end as he held it up.
“I’m supposed to give you this,” he said. “But seeing what we saw—”
“It’s complicated, Jamie,” Gordon said.
“I’m sure,” was the reply.
That’s not Jamie.
He took a moment, considering, feeling the weight of the little package, before tossing it ten feet over to Gordon.
Gordon unzipped it. He handed out vials small enough that a finger couldn’t slide into them. One to Mary, one to Lillian.
“Sy doesn’t need one,” the boy with Jamie’s face said. “Helen either. That’s three days of doses for the rest of you, Hubris included.”
Gordon nodded. He removed the stopper from the vial and downed it. He grimaced. Lillian and Mary did much the same.
“I know,” the boy said. “It’s just for a little while.”
His eye moved over to Percy’s body.
“What did you hear?” Gordon asked.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened, first?” the boy asked, calm. “I’ll see if it matches up to what we saw and heard.”
He was confident, wary. Jamie had always hung in the background, quiet, nose in his books. Jamie’s confidence was a different sort.
“Sy?” Gordon asked. “Feel up to taking a stab at explaining?”
The words caught in my throat as I stared at the boy.
Anything else, I could have managed. I could have found the words, braved my way through, been clever, whatever needed to happen.
But he was here, staring at me with Jamie’s eyes, no familiarity, loaded to bear with accusation.
That, I couldn’t deal with. It penetrated every defense I had to hit me right where it hurt most. A part of my mind and feelings I hadn’t figured out how to patch up the missing pieces, fix the pieces that weren’t working with, or even muster the feelings I needed to cope with it at all.
“Guess not,” Gordon said. “Sorry.”
I shook my head a little.
“Might be for the best,” the boy said. “I’ve been reading the books, trying to get caught up. I’m not sure I’d believe what Sy said.”
“Not being sure about Sy? Eighty percent of what you need to learn, when it comes to Sy,” Gordon said, a light smile on his face. “Realizing you have to take that leap anyway? That’s another ten percent. The rest is crammed into the remaining ten percent.”
The boy smiled a little. Too similar. I looked away.
“Um,” Lillian said. “Hi, Jamie.”
“Hi.”
“I’ll try explaining? Because I’m probably the worst liar here, I think?”
“That would be great.”
“It’s good,” Gordon said.
“A while back, Fray reached out to us, too, back—”
“Dame Cicely’s,” the boy said. “It’s in the books.”
Lillian nodded. She fidgeted nervously with the strap of her satchel. “We didn’t take that offer. But she reached out to Dog and Catcher and some others. They switched sides.”
The boy’s eyes narrowed. He looked up at the ceiling. “Dog and Catcher told us to wait here for you.”
“Did they say anything else?” Gordon asked.
“Yes,” the boy said. “They said, ‘it’s a shame we have to say goodbye so soon after saying hello for the first time’.”
“They’re leaving,” Mary said. “We found them out, they can’t stay, so they’re going to do what they have to do and then disappear.”
“It makes sense,” the boy said. “The tone, the wording.”
He said it like it was a prompt to keep going.
Lillian fidgeted more. She glanced at me, then looked away, the eye contact equivalent of touching a hot pan handle. “We realized we were in a bad situation, that what’s happening up there was about to happen. No way to avoid it, unless we left the area and abandoned the mission. We debated whether or not to take her offer to join, and we decided not to. But the fact that she’d asked, it meant we could get close.”
The boy nodded.
Lillian continued, “Being there was better than being here, especially when we weren’t sure how she would get bullets to start flying and bombs exploding. Being there in the other building meant we could talk. Mary could talk to Percy, we could talk to Fray, try to guide things…”
“We got them to kill Percy, at Mary’s request, and we got information, coming from there to here with each side holding the other at gunpoint, in a manner of speaking. We let them go because there was nothing we could do against their numbers and the kind of force they could bring to bear,” Gordon finished. “They left us behind because Fray wants to keep an open dialogue.”
The boy looked between each of us, then looked back at Ashton. Ashton was giving Hubris a a pat on the head. He looked at his companion, and very softly said, “It makes sense?”
The boy in Jamie’s skin nodded in response. He was agreeing, but still didn’t look sure.
“I know it looks bad,” Gordon said. “But there weren’t any options that were great, once we realized what was happening.”
“I know,” the boy said. “I believe her, and I know what you mean, about the options. I’ve read the books. The ones I had, that is.”
“Ah,” I said.
One syllable, that was better than nothing at all.
I took the backpack, and I held it out.
He crossed the distance, and he took the bag from me. He checked the weight, then handed it back.
“Keep it for now?” he asked. When my expression was one of confusion, he said, “I’m tender. Too many days in the chair.”
I nodded. I took the bag, and slung it over my shoulders, stepping back. Lillian touched my upper arm.
; “Like I said, I read the books,” he said. “I’ve got this mental picture of each of you, all from words on the page. Months and years of writing and notes. Mentally, I can sort it, the dates, I can pull all the details together into something that should be…”
He gestured, unable to find the word.
That was odd.
“Three-dimensional?” I asked.
He smiled, a soft, easy expression. “Thank you. I haven’t met any of you, and it feels flat in my head, even if I try to pull it all into a shape. I know the particulars, how the Lambs operate, how each of you operate, the hand-signs, the details of past missions, but it’s all still images, broken up. I know exactly what you mean, about the issues you run into during a mission, except in a very page-turning, pen-on-paper way. I understand there aren’t many great options, sometimes. That we scrape by when things get bad.”
“You’ll pick things up,” Gordon said. “It’s good to have you both with us.”
Gordon extended a hand. The boy shook it, then pulled Gordon into an awkward sort of half-hug.
Then he hugged Mary, Helen, and Lillian in that order.
I was the last one he approached.
In the background, Helen was greeting Ashton. “It’s so sad! They gave you red hair!”
“Helen!” Mary rebuked her, while keeping one eye on my imminent exchange with the new boy.
“Everyone says that a man can’t be truly handsome if he has red hair! And freckles too!”
“You don’t say that to his face, Helen.”
Oblivious to the ongoing conversation behind him, he stood a short distance from me.
“Ashton doesn’t mind,” Helen said.
“I don’t mind,” Ashton said.
My view was partially blocked by the boy who stood in front of me, but I saw Helen throw her arms around Ashton, hugging him. He stayed there, arms limp at his side, as she rocked him back and forth. She said something I guessed to be ‘little brother’.
I returned my focus to the boy. Everyone that wasn’t Helen or Ashton seemed to be watching us. More pressure.
There were a hundred things that were going through my head, things I could say and every single one of them had bad implications.
Whatever. I would try one. Starting simple.
“Is there something I can call you?” I asked.