by wildbow
“And the…”
“Ridgewell group. They’re not local. Harding’s group, he pulled that together from a bunch of others who talked work with him over drinks at the pub, probably. Alfred’s group? Same idea, random kids who found each other and decided they’d be stronger as a team than they were alone. But the Ridgewell group? They showed up in town, their group twice as large as Alfred’s, and they all already knew each other. Each of them with a defined role. When they came to buy—”
“They already knew what you had in stock,” I said.
“Yeah,” Ratface said. “Exactly.”
“All they needed was a place to work unmolested, probably,” I said. “Everything else was set. I’m willing to bet their lab is nice, too.”
“It should be,” Ratface said. “They wanted some containers, ones with special seals. Had to go through colleagues of colleagues to track it down. Then they had it sent back twice, once because it had a scratch in the side. Not even a structural issue. Thing would’ve withstood a hit from a cannon without leaking, but no. No, they wanted it sent back on my dime. Would’ve told them to go fuck goats if they weren’t such good customers otherwise.”
“Where are they?” I asked.
“Am I going to lose them as customers the same way I might lose Giles?”
Giles’ organization is already crumbling to the point even Ratface is aware?
I turned to Lillian, “Let’s go.”
Ratface cut in, “I didn’t say I wasn’t going to tell you. I was asking, you little prick.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“If you want an apology for the insult, you can keep waiting. I’ll reserve my right to insult you until the day I die.”
“I don’t care about that. I just want the answer.”
“Ridgewell is up that way. I never delivered directly to them, but if you go there, you’ll see them eventually. They go out in pairs. Always with the long coats. One more a militia type, armed, and one academic. The militia protect the eggheads.”
“And Old whatshisname?”
“If you’re not even going to remember the particulars of what I tell you, why are you even interrogating me?” Ratface asked.
“We’ll do the remembering,” Jamie said. “He twists the knife.”
I smiled at the imagery.
“Old Harding is set up in his house. No street names over that way. Find the two churches, or ask for directions to them, even the meanest Bruno around Lugh won’t begrudge you finding your way to church. From there, head due west, you’ll find sprawling houses. Harding’s has a bunch of hand-wagons parked in the front. If you see more than one, his is the biggest. Bought out his neighbor to make room for the rest of the lab space, back when he was garden-growing meat.”
I signaled Lillian. She underhand-tossed the antidote at Ratface.
“Just so you know,” I told Ratface, “The project that uses the jellyfish? Bad news.”
He sneered at me. Apparently he didn’t need to pay me much mind, now that he had the antidote.
“There’s nothing I could tell you that would convince you. The Academy’s done that stuff before. They backed off. What those people are making, the people who’re giving them the money and recipe for making it don’t expect anything except disaster. The creations will get loose eventually. The Academy will have to mobilize with army and everything else, which is what the project’s sponsors want. If the creations don’t kill you right off, and if you survive the Academy coming to town, well, Lugh will be gone either way, and you’ll be unable to conduct business.”
“If I didn’t provide the material, someone else would,” Ratface said.
“Probably, but you trade in innocent lives, like you tried to trade with hers.” I indicated Lillian. “I don’t like you, and I wanted you to know that when the sky starts falling, so to speak, you have nobody to blame but yourself.”
“Yeah?” he asked. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
I nodded.
This time, as I signaled the other Lambs and walked away, he didn’t call out or try to stop me.
The rain continued to patter down as we put distance between ourselves and Ratface.
“Doesn’t solve the problem,” Gordon remarked. “What you said to him, what you did.”
“I know,” I said.
“We can clean things up here and go back home to the Academy, but others are going to crop up. Sooner or later, short of Lugh being wiped off the map, someone’s going to start up the project again, they’re going to get far enough in, and they’re going to succeed.”
“Probably,” I said. “Ratface is right.”
“Ratface?” Lillian asked.
“The guy. Who we were just talking to. He’s right. If we take him out, another supplier will fill the void. The floodgate is opened. There’s no closing it now.”
“We can tell the Academy,” Lillian said. “They’ll do something.”
So much faith.
I looked at Gordon. We’d exchanged words about needing to keep Lillian in the dark so this all could run smoothly.
But…
“What?” Lillian asked, looking at me. Her eyes were large beneath a fringe of brown hair and her hood.
She was getting better at reading me.
Touch her. Hug her. You know how to distract her.
I didn’t touch, hug, or distract her.
I glanced again at Gordon.
“What!? Sy, you’re looking concerned. You don’t think the Academy can handle this? Or do you not want them to? Because if you don’t think the primordial experiments are a danger, then—”
“No,” I said. “No, it’s not that.”
She punched my arm, then grabbed it. “Then what!? Seriously, Sy.”
“The Academy will handle it,” I said. “I believe you.”
“Then—”
“They’ll bring an army. They’ll surround Lugh, and they’ll hit the city with plague or something equivalent. Soldiers with masks on will march through, scour areas for clues, evidence, and the ‘cats and cockroaches’ survivors. A place this large, they could spend days or weeks doing it, picking through the bodies. All the while, they’ll place gunpowder charges or oil or whatever else. When all is done, they’ll torch Lugh, burning it down. Then they’ll wrap it up by sending in war-hounds and warbeasts to find the survivors of that particular purge, and to knock down the buildings that are still standing.”
“No,” Lillian said. I wasn’t sure if she was disagreeing with me.
“The bigger a problem gets, the simpler we tend to make the solutions. It’s why people gravitate so heavily toward extreme beliefs, or hating whole groups of people. Sometimes we get our heads askew and we stop seeing things straight, so a problem seems too big, and we want to treat it as something very simple. Sometimes, though, the problem just is that big, too complicated to deal with in a smart way, when we’re already under a tremendous strain. So we turn to violence. That very thing happened with us and the Fishmonger last night.”
“They’d evacuate,” Lillian said.
“And risk that someone sneak out with pages of the material tucked in their underpants?” I asked. “Or in a metal tube they’ve jammed up their rear?”
“It’s not—It can’t work that way.”
“It does,” I said. I turned to Gordon. “Right?”
“It’s not enough you’ve got to go and be the bad guy, hurt Lillian by telling her all this, you’ve got to bring me into it?”
“Yeah,” I said.
He shook his head, closing his eyes before taking a deep breath. “I want people’s last memories of me to be of me being nice. A good guy.”
“You’re as big a prick as I am, Gordon. You just hide it far better. I’ll make it my life’s work to make sure you’re remembered as such. If you insist on playing the ‘I’m gonna die’ card as often as you are, I’m going to be trying even harder to discredit you post-death.”
“What Sy was saying about Lugh,” Lil
lian said, cutting in. “It’s true?”
“There’s precedent,” Gordon said. “For things less serious than what you described with these primordials.”
“Why can’t it be easy?” Lillian asked. “I… this was supposed to be a nice little reference on my record. A favor owed from people with money and connections to higher society. I gave up on that, and in my head I know it was the right thing to do, and Emily and Drake can have a good future together, but in my heart, I feel… nasty.”
“It was the kindest thing to do,” Jamie said. “You’re allowed to feel disappointed.”
“It’s not disappointment, it’s worse. I hate myself. I’m—Jamie—”
She was on edge, emotionally, lost, her sentences getting shorter until she couldn’t string together full ones. In the midst of it, she was turning to Jamie, not me.
“Jamie,” she said. “Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around? Can’t I logically know that this was a bad move, but at least feel good, in my heart?”
“I don’t know,” Jamie said.
“But now you’re saying that we’re going to walk away, and all the people here, they’re going to get killed, the city is going to burn?”
“It’s very possible,” Jamie said, gently.
It didn’t feel like enough of a response. Lillian was hurting, and I didn’t like that.
I spoke, “Fray probably talked to Mauer about this, planning it to some extent. I imagine she rationalized it, saying that people getting reckless with the primordial stuff was going to happen sooner or later, she’s just speeding it up, accelerating the process. She told Mauer what the Academy would do, what it would have to do, and now he’s waiting. His people are facilitating it all, and he’s waiting in the wings, ready to take advantage of a situation that would usually be neatly tidied up, point to it as something that started with the Academy and ended with the Academy. Rile up the people. Start something bigger. In the meantime, Fray has the way clear to engineer something else. Something more constructive.”
“Okay, Sylvester,” Lillian said, sounding somehow absent. Like she didn’t care about the particulars, or the motivation.
Lillian wasn’t me. In my darkest, most painful moments, I wanted the world to make sense. I wanted to have answers. When I lacked them, I would, well, reread the same diary entries for hours on end.
She wanted something else.
“Sorry,” I said.
“I wanted this to be constructive,” she told me. “Talking to Drake and Emily, I thought it would be. You gave them hope and a future and I could barely contain myself because I wanted to kiss you right there as the words left your mouth, and I was happy, and then that happiness faded, and I started to think about me again, and my future, and now a whole city, just burned away? Isn’t there a way to stop it?”
“Yeah,” I said.
I saw her stop.
The hope in her eyes stung.
“Maybe,” I said. “No guarantees.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Sy,” Gordon warned me.
“No promises,” I said. “Okay, Lil? Don’t take this as a promise. Don’t get your hopes up. We have a job to do, and you know, in both that head of yours—”
I touched her forehead.
“—and in that heart of yours—”
I touched her chest.
“That’s my boob,” she said, quiet.
I raised my voice, to be heard over her small protest, “You know that the number one priority is cleaning up this mess. We lay the groundwork we can, and we make sure the primordials in progress are cleaned up, then we take a shot in the dark, to see if we can’t engineer a happier ending for this gloomy shitstain of a city.”
She opened her mouth to respond.
I poked her in the chest again. “No. Bad. I can see it in your eyes. No getting your hopes up. No being disappointed if this doesn’t work. No being disappointed in me, and definitely no being disappointed in yourself. Understand?”
She reached up and took my hand in both of hers. She held it there, against her chest, where her heartbeat thumped against the back of my hand.
“I understand,” she said, lying through her damned teeth. Then she lied again, “I’m happy if we just try.”
I looked at Gordon, and the look he was giving me. Speak of disappointment.
He wasn’t one to think things through to the same extent I was, but he’d probably seen this exact situation arising when he’d encouraged me to keep my mouth shut.
“We should go after the Ridgewells first. They sound better armed, and they sound better organized,” Gordon said. “Better to hit them while we know what resources we have and the condition we’re in, than to wait and find ourselves ill-prepared.”
“Agreed,” I said. “Then we move on to… dang it, Ratface called him an old crusty asshole and now I can’t commit his name to memory. I just think of crusty assholes every time I try.”
“Old Harding,” Jamie volunteered. “I’ve heard of him. There’s a picture of a student club at Radham mounted in a stairwell, with names on a brass plate underneath it. A quote about him appeared as an inscription in a class yearbook, too. Not much to go on, but I’ll recognize his face when I see it.”
“Neat,” I said.
“Based on what he said, this won’t be easy,” Gordon said.
“No,” I agreed. “Jamie, got a job for you.”
“Sure?”
“You have the best handwriting. If any of the rest of us write, we’re liable to get sentimental. Pen a letter to Mary? Let her know if she finishes her job early, she should come give us a hand. You can tell her we’ll do the same if she wants, but I don’t think this job is going to wrap up neat and tidy anytime soon.”
“Alright,” he said. “Should I break off and head back to our rooms, or see if a post office has the materials?”
“No. We’re all going back,” I said. “You can pen the letter while Gordon, Lillian and I explain the basics to the rest of the would-be-slaves I rescued. Extra hands on deck, much as I hate to do it.”
“Even the kids?” Gordon asked. “For something this dangerous? That’s not like you.”
I pulled my hand away from Lillian, and I jammed it into a pocket. It was colder there, I noticed.
The city was so dark, considering it was midday. The frost seemed to stubbornly cling to the edges and the shadows. I could see beyond the low, sloping buildings and make out structures that could be the targets we were going after. In another light, they were all homes of stubborn, stupid people who’d decided to live in a barren, ugly little city like this. People who would probably die to plague and fire, or to the monsters Lillian had described.
“Wanting Mary, if she’s available, wanting the kids and adults, it’s my roundabout way of saying we need help,” I admitted.
Previous Next
Bleeding Edge—8.13
“And there we go,” Gordon said. “Third patrol coming home.”
I raised my head up to watch as two men in black coats made their way down the street. One had a bag slung over one shoulder, the other had a gun on either side of his hip, and a knife in his tall boots. Both seemed to be roughly the same age, both were of similar builds, and both had their hair cut short beneath brimmed hats. If it weren’t for the one having a gun and the other having the bag, I would have considered them interchangeable.
Everything about their demeanor suggested a military background, or ex-military. Mauer’s sort, if not his brothers in arms.
Gordon and I ducked our heads back behind cover as the pair looked around, searching for trouble. We’d chosen to hunker down behind a short fence surrounding a pen. It had once served as a home for an animal, very possibly a stitched creature, considering the lack of mess. Our choice had essentially been ‘warm, dry, out of the rain, choose one.’ We had a little roof, but the water was doing its best to puddle beneath us, and it wasn’t very warm either.
It was just us three boys, four if we co
unted the mutt. Lillian was with the hired help.
Jamie looked up from his watch. “Twenty minutes from the last patrol, fifteen minutes from the time they left.”
“It’s not a regular pattern,” Gordon said.
Jamie shook his head. “Semi-regular. They alternate when they leave and the route they cover, but if three data points are enough to go by, the next group steps outside in five minutes, and they’ll be out and about for thirty minutes. We’ve seen three different pairs, nobody else has entered or left the building, so we know there are at least four people inside right now.”
“Likely to be more,” Gordon said. “It’s hard to focus on your work if you’re having to stop and go on patrol or get updated on other people’s patrols on the regular.”
The building was one of the sturdier ones in Lugh. The city was mostly populated with ramshackle constructions, many of which weren’t even set into the rocky ground but poised atop it, leaning as the weight settled. Here and there, however, there were buildings made of proper stone. This was one of them. Two stories high, solidly built, with doors that looked like they were more metal bracing than they were solid wood.
I had the impression Lugh tried to revitalize an area and failed, only to forget the idea and wait a few years to a decade before trying again. Ridgewell was a neighborhood that had seen more recent attention. The building constructions weren’t great, but they hadn’t decayed or fallen to pieces in the same way that other houses throughout the city had. Details and embellishments remained, from trim to decorative wood panels, untouched by rough handling from the weather. Here and there, though, even in the nicest part of the city we’d seen yet, some pieces of wood trim had come undone at one end, and in the strong wind, they knocked a steady rapport against the stones or the other pieces of wood. Windows rattled, and a change in the direction of wind made shutters slam open or closed, where they hadn’t been fastened into place.