Twig

by wildbow

  “Okay,” Gordon said. “Disappointing, but okay.”

  “Who are you?” one of the adults we’d recruited asked. “You haven’t really explained what’s going on?”

  Ugh. I wished we hadn’t had to bring them to get the kids. The kids were at least willing to shut up and listen and see if they couldn’t figure things out for themselves, instead of looking a gift horse in the mouth. When and if they did ask questions, I was betting they’d accept the answers they got. Not so for the parents.

  “We’re looking for someone. If we find them, we get paid,” Gordon said. “That same pay that let us buy you free of your debt.”

  “There’s a hint in there, if you listen for it,” I said.

  “What are we here for then?” the man asked.

  “Sylvester had a plan for you, but he mostly wanted to be a nice guy and free you,” Lillian said.

  “Lies, balderdash and fuckin’ bullshit, that last part,” I said.

  “We’ll probably use you to gather information, Sylvester will walk you through it,” Lillian said, sticking her elbow into my ribs. “Where you need to go and what you need to listen for, or things you need to say. We’ll pay for your food and lodging, and when we’re done we’ll pay you enough that you can get where you need to be, or at least until you can get by.”

  “Hmph,” the man said. He didn’t sound happy, but that was an out-and-out lie. I hadn’t missed the change in his body language the moment Lillian had said ‘pay you enough’.

  “No violence, then,” Gordon said. “What else?”

  “Um,” Lillian said.

  “You’ve been with us long enough to know how we do things,” I said. “We need to find the target. Girl with horns, not that that’s going to help—”

  I could see two different girls with horns nearby, and I’d seen a handful since we’d left the harbor behind.

  “—the parents didn’t give us a name.”

  “They did,” Jamie said. “You weren’t listening. Candida Gage.”

  “Oh that poor girl,” I said.

  Lillian, Jamie and Gordon nodded.

  “Okay, we need to find… Candy?”

  “I have some ideas about the information gathering, but I don’t know which one is best,” Lillian said.

  “What do we want, what are we giving?”

  “Giving?” Lillian asked.

  “Let’s say we put the word out, start asking questions. Someone mentions to another someone that some kids and strangers were asking about whatshername.”

  “Candida,” Jamie supplied.

  “What happens next?” I asked.

  “She runs,” Lillian said. “Leaves the city, maybe, or makes herself harder to find, if she can’t.”

  I nodded with approval. “Question is, can we bait her in, or can we offer something that would make people want to come to us instead of Candida?”

  “Saying her parents were hurt?” Lillian asked. Then before I could shut her down, she shook her head. “No.”

  “No,” I agreed. “The bond isn’t strong, and they’ve manipulated her enough she’s watching for it.”

  “Family doesn’t work,” I said.

  “Don’t go and give her the answer,” Gordon said.

  “I’m not.”

  “You are. You have an answer in mind, and you’re picking and choosing and subtly pointing the way to that answer.”

  I clapped a hand over my mouth.

  “I bet you can’t keep that up for two minutes,” Gordon said.

  I pointed at him and winked.

  “Can’t be family. Do we push or do we pull?” Lillian asked. “Rhetorical question. Thinking out loud.”

  “You’ve been spending far too much time around Sylvester,” Gordon said.

  “She’s going to run if we push, unless it’s the right kind of push, but I’m not clever enough to figure out how to do that.”

  I poked her in the arm, hard, my other hand still in place over my mouth. When she looked at me, I wagged my finger at her.

  “You’re cleverer than you think, Lillian,” Gordon said.

  I nodded, in a very exaggerated way.

  “I’m a year or two older than most of you and I’m still behind you in terms of my ability to pick things up and put them together,” Lillian said. “And I’m years behind a real, practiced doctor. I know I have my strengths, but let me be self-depreciating when it’s accurate, okay?”

  I poked her shoulder again. She swatted at my hand.

  “We disagree on how accurate it is,” Jamie said.

  “Then let me be self depreciating when I think it’s accurate, then,” Lillian said.

  I poked her again. She swatted at me, and I grabbed her hand, my other hand still clasped to my mouth. I held her hand and pressed it to her chest, over her heart.

  “Sy’s trying to tell you something. Because he just can’t resist,” Gordon said.

  “I don’t get it,” Lillian said. She tried to pull her hand free and I held on. In a quieter voice, she said, “And you’re touching my chest, Sy.”

  That was maybe the fourth most important thing going on here.

  Maybe the fifth.

  I let her move my hand away, and extended a finger, pointing at her. I had to work against her to extend a single finger and tap it against her chest.

  “Me,” Lillian said. She shook her head.

  I could see her expression changing. The disappointment in herself.

  I tapped that finger against her heart again.

  “Sy’s going to have an aneurysm,” Gordon said.

  Lillian’s smile and half-chuckle was more sympathetic for Gordon than anything.

  I kicked at his leg.

  Clod! Jerk! Look at her, read her! Understand what she’s doing. She’s frustrated and you’re rubbing it in her face.

  “Me,” Lillian mused. “What can I do that nobody else can?”

  I was too busy avoiding Gordon’s retaliatory kick to give her further guidance.

  Lillian continued to voice her thoughts out loud, “We know they’re working on something using the books. What if… we tell them the truth? That I know Academy science, I am—was a student of the Academy?”

  Gordon and I turned our full attention to her.

  “They might want help or details, if they’re working with those books. Or we could tap into that, if we make it clear I’m looking for one of the books too. Through that, we could find them. It’s a slim chance, but it’s—”

  “Brilliant,” I said.

  “Ah, ah, ah!” Gordon said. He smiled triumphantly.

  “Eat your dog’s shit, Gordon,” I said.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “I hope you puke it up and you get that thing where it goes out the nose, too.”

  “You amaze me sometimes, Sy.”

  I ignored him, because he was in a prickly, surly mood, and pointed at Lillian. “Good.”

  She smiled, but it was a faltering smile. “You ended up leading me to the answer you wanted in the end.”

  “I actually was thinking along the lines that you could trade your services for information, at first,” I said. “And I did jump to the idea you gave, but I was too busy with Gordon kicking me to actively lead you to it.”

  “That’s sweet, Sy,” Lillian said. “I don’t believe you.”

  I sighed.

  I turned and looked back at the two families and the one stray child that were all following us, in earshot, but far enough away to almost count as a distinct group.

  They looked so confused and lost.

  “Where are we staying?” I asked.

  Jamie pointed at a building that loomed above the rest. Where there were many buildings here that ranged from the dilapidated to outright shacks, the building Jamie indicated was one of the sturdier ones.

  I spoke to the families, “Pass on word, ex-Academy student is looking for the book. If they ask what book it is the student is looking for, they aren’t who we’re looking for. If yo
u find them, then you get a role in what follows, with a corresponding increase in pay. We meet at that building at dusk if unsuccessful. If successful, you can lead them to us at that building, or just take note of who they are and where they are, we’ll handle the rest.”

  I saw a number of uncertain nods.

  I had my work cut out for me.

  “Start out by saying you’re looking for work. Might be you find something for yourselves, which is great. But mention that you have a friend who has Academy training, young and not sure what to do. You can say she’s heard about a book or say she’s looking for a mentor.”

  More uncertain nods.

  I suspected I could give them a day’s worth of lessons about how to handle this, and they would still have doubts.

  “You’ll figure it out,” I said.

  “Go in groups,” Gordon cut in.

  “Oh yeah. Dangerous town, you’ll want to be safe,” I said.

  “Pairs, trios, or as a family,” Gordon said. “Keep an eye out for trouble. We got you out of a bad situation, if you do decide to head off to greener pastures, maybe do us the favor of letting us know what you’re doing, so we don’t waste time looking for you?”

  Less than committal nods.

  People were so annoying sometimes.

  “Go,” Gordon said.

  The families scattered, staying to their individual family units. One family was black, the other white, and the youngest criminal, independent of either family, immediately went off and ignored Gordon’s instructions to stay in groups and left on his own.

  “We’ll stay in groups too,” Gordon said.

  “Great,” I said.

  “Lillian’s with me,” he said.

  I opened my mouth to protest, then closed it.

  “If I put you with her, you’re going to be distracted.”

  “Scurrilous lies,” I said.

  “Or you’re going to distract her.”

  “Damn straight,” I said.

  Lillian swatted my arm. She was so physical like that. I pitied the man who ended up with her, after I was dead and gone.

  “If I take you with me, I’m not sure that pair will have any forward momentum,” he said.

  Which was a fine way to say that a pairing of Jamie and Lillian were liable to get their asses kicked.

  But, I thought.

  I could see the look on his face. There would be no negotiating, no pleas.

  I looked at Jamie, my new partner.

  “Right-o,” I said, after managing to muster up something resembling enthusiasm.

  “Stay out of trouble,” he said. Then to Jamie, he said, “Watch him.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Best I can ask for,” Gordon said. He whistled for Hubris.

  I watched as he and Lillian walked away. Lillian glanced back at me.

  I looked at Jamie.

  It made sense, doing things this way. On a technical level, I knew it was for the best.

  I was doing a lot of those failed, miserable attempts at convincing myself that things were ‘technically for the best’ too, these days.

  Previous Next

  Bleeding Edge—8.4

  Though it was chilly, without even the sun for light, the man had his shirt off, the straps of his overalls tied around his waist. He had virtually no body fat on his frame, and more muscle in his forearm alone than I had in my entire body. Tattoos covered him, his arms and back an artist’s doodle pad of fish tailed goats, mermaids, and other scantily-clad women.

  I watched as he lifted a crate onto the bed of a cart. The crate was filled with metal, and rattled, the cart’s end bobbing as it adjusted to the weight.

  He was a ‘Bruno’. While Bruno was slang for a brute, a guy that was more strong than smart, it also was the term used most often to describe the men and the exceedingly rare women who went to back alley clinics and walked out with more muscle than they’d had when they started. Sometimes it was drugs, sometimes it was a rewriting of their physical makeup, and sometimes it was grafts, from vat-grown sources or from animals.

  Most did it because the cost of the procedure was low, compared to the added dollars they could make being manual laborers. It meant a year or two to pay off the medical expenses, then a few decades of living like a king. Relatively speaking, anyway, in a place like Lugh.

  But the drugs meant dependency and tolerance. The rewriting of one’s makeup always had other consequences in the long run. Grafts from animals meant possible rejection or having to take drugs, and grafts from vat-grown life didn’t always last that long, meaning more surgeries and replacements.

  It amounted to the same thing. A shortened lifespan. Maybe a halved one.

  Curiosity satisfied, I turned my attention briefly to Jamie. He was studying the man too.

  When old Jamie had been erased, had that been erased too?

  “Alright,” the man said. He turned and faced us. “First off…”

  “Sparing you the time you’d need to go buy yourself something,” I said. I extended a hand into the bag Jamie had. I held out a massive hunk of fresh baked bread with stuff crammed between the two halves. Not quite a roll, but too crude to be a sandwich. We’d bought it and a few more like it at a stall further down the street, for maybe half the amount that I would have had to hand the Bruno to get him talking comfortably. Jamie handed me a bottle, and the man took that too.

  He didn’t eat it, but put it on one corner of the cart for later.

  “We’re looking for work,” I said.

  The Bruno belted out a laugh.

  Altered lungs, to go with an altered heart. Adding seventeen stone of raw muscle to your frame means needing more oxygen to that muscle, and a heart to push that blood around.

  “I’ll give you the rest of my pay for today if you can even lift one corner of the crate over there,” he told me. “Either of you.”

  “We’re friends with this girl, she was an Academy student. Smart as a whip,” I said. “We’ve been helping her out, she owes us one. She’s going to find work here, she’s going to get us work, helping. We’re helping look, to speed up the process.”

  “Ah, my boy,” the man said. He took a seat on the back of the wagon. “Let me tell you, I think you’re in for a bit of heartbreak.”

  “I think I’m more the heartbreaker type than the heartbroken type,” I said.

  He laughed again, as if the idea of me being a heartbreaker was as ludicrous as me hauling a crate full of machine parts.

  Jamie moved, beside me, and I glanced at him. But he was just shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He wasn’t making a point, reacting to anything, nor was he trying to signal me.

  The Bruno’s laugh quickly became a chuckle.

  Jamie had reminded me of something pretty dang close to actual heartbreak. I wondered if losing my best friend counted, or if it had to be romance.

  If heartbreak by way of romance was worse, I wasn’t sure how the species had survived this far. Just thinking about Jamie in passing was enough to knock the air out of me.

  It wasn’t hard to put an annoyed expression on my face. The trick was making sure the expression wasn’t too severe, or that it didn’t slip from annoyance to something else altogether.

  “Girls are trouble,” the man said, as he finished chuckling. “You’re in for disappointment. It sounds like you gave your time and attention to the girl for a while, but nice and sweet as she seems right now, she’ll drop you in a heartbeat when someone says they’ll pay a fair wage, but they’ll take only her.”

  It wasn’t so far off from the reality.

  Lillian would leave. She would work towards her black coat and hopefully being an exemplary professor, one that bettered the world instead of butchering it, but she had that dream she was following, and the Lambs would be a distant memory. There was a slim chance she’d leave before the Lambs all expired, and with me being last to die, she would inevitably be leaving me.

  She would be upset to do it, she would
consider staying for us, whether us meant Lillian and me or Lillian and the Lambs, but she would go one way or the other. Even if I had to make her.

  “It seems like I struck home,” the Bruno said.

  “She’s nicer than you’re making her out to be,” I said. He seemed to want to see me as the naive child, so I would play that role.

  “They all are,” the Bruno said. “Very few people throw themselves into bad situations thinking that person is an utter bastard, or that group is a rotten bunch of you-know-whats. They always make it seem like a good deal at first.”

  I nodded slowly, as if I was taking it all in, then looked up, asking, “Have you heard about anything that might do? A place where she might have an in?”

  He didn’t sigh or try to shake any sense into me. He did offer me a sympathetic smile. I could see that some of his teeth had been worked on. The color between them was slightly different, some very white, on contrast to his dark brown skin, tanned a darker brown somehow, despite the meager sun in Lugh. “A hundred places where she might have an in.”

  The only thing worse than not getting an answer to a question was getting too many.

  “She’s good, a lot of the critical stuff is fresh in her memory,” I said. “Do you know anyone good? The whole… thing there looks well done. Maybe the doctor who did it?”

  The man smiled, looking down at his chiseled body. I was pretty sure the compliment had struck home, but he didn’t show it. “Uh huh, no, this isn’t top dollar work.”

  I injected just a bit more of a childlike tone into my voice as I spoke, “It isn’t? But I’ve seen some people and it looks wrong, the way they fit together. They look ugly.”

  “It’s not,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. Playing at being younger than I was meant I could be more persistent. “Could we maybe talk to that doctor anyways, then?”

  “I don’t know if I want to send trouble to his doorstep.”

  “Okay,” I said. If I pushed, he might get annoyed. “Drat.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Can you point us in the right direction, at least?” Jamie jumped in. “Not your doctor, but any one of those hundred places you mentioned?”

  “I can. You come in by boat?”

  We nodded.

  “You would have passed the market. Open space between the four towers, the ones that—”