Twig

by wildbow

  But she had said she felt closer to me, and my head was recognizing that I felt oddly distanced from her. I found myself disagreeing with the Sylvester of twenty minutes ago, who had argued with Lillian about the personality after Wyvern. She’d been right. This didn’t quite feel like the Lillian I knew.

  The mind and body warred with one another, and in the midst of that war, Gordon was the tiebreaker. I felt repulsed by my reaction to Lillian, and that let the mind take the helm.

  “I’m glad,” I said, noncommittally.

  Jamie spoke, “Be careful about the changes you make, Lillian. They’ll revert over time, but a small fraction of it will be permanent. It’s through the prolonged use that bigger changes are made.”

  You know more than you let on.

  “I thought you said you didn’t know enough about the wyvern formula to say anything?” Lillian asked.

  “I was being polite. Saying anything would have been getting between you and Sy, and if you both agree we need this to tackle the situation outside, I’m not going to slow things down by arguing.”

  “You’re too nice sometimes, Jamie,” Lillian said. She finished cleaning the syringe. She adjusted it, then dropped into position, straddling my lap. My back was to the front of an armchair. She locked her eyes to mine. “Ready?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She was more sure about it than I was, the insertion of the needle sure and straight. I felt the needle balk as it hit the scar, even though I didn’t feel the hit myself. It wasn’t scar tissue, exactly, but more a lesion, an accumulation of minerals and byproducts.

  Then the push through.

  A moment of fear.

  And the flood of wyvern, across the membrane at the exterior of the brain, then seeping into the brain itself, my senses screaming at me, my body rebelling. Vertigo, a paralyzing series of moments where time had no meaning, where my body didn’t listen, where I couldn’t think in words.

  All before the pain swept in, not gradually but as sudden as the drop of a guillotine blade, and just as capable of obliterating all function.

  Ten out of ten, on the scale. Ten out of ten, for how uncomfortable it was, if I separated all other parts of it from the pain. I wanted to throw up, to wrench muscles from sockets, claw into flesh, shit, piss, scream, anything that separated me from this.

  In the incoherent thoughts and observations I sensed, I noted the girl hugging me, Jamie looming over me, my vision unfocusing, seeing Jamie blurred, one figure and one shadow against the wall now two people side by side. Gordon lying dead, and a pattern of firelight against the wall I couldn’t even begin to convince myself wasn’t another, phantasmal Gordon, watching.

  I looked away from it all, and I endured, my fingers digging into my knees.

  I’d been here before, or somewhere very like it.

  My senses came back first, and I felt like I was going to go blind, crawl out of my skin, and throw up in the same moment.

  Time and place followed. Reality clarified around me. I pushed away the image of Gordon on the wall, recognizing it for what it was. Jamie was one person.

  Slowly, everything else sorted out. I was left with only a crippling headache and a nosebleed of blood diluted with clear fluid. Lillian dutifully plugged the nostril with a bit of cotton.

  The pain had a bitterness to it, and it colored my thoughts, mingled with the knowledge that it would come again and again, that pain. A small part of me felt like I was holding onto something ancient, dating back to the very first time I’d received the formula, but I didn’t know how to let go of it, as if I was trying to paint the ground I stood on.

  That bitterness redoubled with the memory of where we were, and the recollection of the fact that Gordon was dead. The walls weren’t up, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. The raw surprise of a feeling almost perfectly mirrored a memory of how I’d stumbled onto Jamie, lost to us, and I thought I might break in a permanent way.

  I was staring up at the ceiling, and tears started streaming down my face.

  I can’t. I can’t feel this.

  I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.

  A hand touched my face and I flinched. I stood up, pushing Lillian off me in the process, and backed away.

  Lillian who wasn’t Lillian and Jamie who wasn’t Jamie and Gordon who was just a body.

  My hands went to my hair, my arms vertical bars in my field of vision, walling me off from reality, from empty shells, lies, fakes.

  “Stay with us, Sy,” the fake Jamie said.

  “Deep breaths, like you said,” the fake Lillian told me. “Put everything in its place. You know how to handle this.”

  I know how to handle this, I thought. The thoughts themselves were so crystal clear that the edges of them were sharp and painful to experience. This is the world I live in, with primordials and shells both empty and filled with the wrong things, with war and violence and things I should be more scared of, but I buried those things a long, long time ago, with the worst of the pain.

  This isn’t the problem. This is something I can deal with, and I’ve been dealing with it for a long time. I couldn’t leave this world behind if I tried.

  But the memories of Gordon came to me, hitting me, and flowed like the tears did. If I so much as looked in the wrong direction or paid attention to the wrong memory in the torrent, then I thought of Jamie, and that was a flood of memories and gut-wrenching impacts that was worse.

  I felt like I was going to lose my mind, but I couldn’t fix the problem without risking burying those things and too many important things with them.

  No, the problem was that I was looking at my mental and emotional makeup with pure, perfect clarity, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to handle the loss of another Lamb, and I knew it would inevitably happen, and so what was there even to stop me from just accepting that loss and rolling with the consequence?

  All I had to do was let go, feel that grief for someone who hadn’t yet died, on top of everything else, and I could lose my mind.

  Or I could take the grief, bury it like I’d changed my mind in so many different ways already, and lose something precious in the transaction.

  “Stay with us,” Jamie said.

  I was a problem solver, and it was a problem without an answer.

  But there were problems to answer. My hand went up to touch the eyepatch. I felt anger, contempt, black bile roiling inside me.

  I always had to claw my way up from a dark place, post-dosage. This time, well, it wasn’t so deep a fall, with only eighty percent of the formula, sparing me the dip into things I’d cast off and tried to lose when I was half the age I was now. Not so deep a fall, but it felt like an especially steep climb, this time around.

  I kept a little of that darkness with me as I surfaced. I let the tears stop.

  I looked at Lillian, who was disheveled, her eyes intense and wide, and at Jamie, his face in shadow, the lenses catching a bit of the firelight.

  “Sorry,” I said. I embraced the emotions, and was glad that they listened to me. I was filled to the brim with rage and loss, and there were abundant enemies in this city who I wanted to direct them at. “I think I’m ready now.”

  “Burn the building on the way out, you said,” Jamie told me.

  “Okay,” I said.

  It didn’t take long to set up. There were oils in the kitchen, and the stove was already burning. We poured out the chemicals, letting them pool around the base of the stove, before we drew the connection to let the fire stretch along a stripe of oil and touch soaked floorboards.

  We backed away, leaving Gordon where he was.

  A warrior’s funeral, I thought. I pushed down all the parts of me that wanted to scream and cry.

  Lillian whistled, and Hubris finally left the body, hurrying to her side.

  The four of us ducked out of the building and into the streets of shadow and fire. Tonight we started with a game of cat and mouse where the mice had no choice but to fight.

  Previous Next


  Counting Sheep—9.7

  The city had a surreal edge, viewed through the lens of the wyvern formula. The haze of smoke, the glow of fires both near and distant, the echoing pop of distant gunshots and shells, and the screeches of warbeasts served to disconnect me from the immediate surroundings. I took it in, and I put pieces together.

  They’re setting the city on fire, but not everywhere. There’s a gap there, where the Crown forces are. The Crown’s camp was thereabouts, but we’ve been hearing shots from that direction, and the squads the Twins tore apart were running from there to there… they have to have moved further up.

  Where are the Twins? If we run into the Twins now—

  I couldn’t think of any good options. I could have shifted my focus, turned my thoughts to analyzing them, figuring out a set of tactics that might have worked, but I felt like it was a big investment of focus, and there was nothing to guarantee it would be the Twins we ran into.

  “Lillian,” I said.

  She turned to look at me, her eyes wide. I saw more of the elemental Lillian I’d seen at the Fishmonger’s, now.

  “Twins. We need a countermeasure. Think about it. Jamie, explain the twins.”

  “They smelled you,” she said.

  The words came across as abrupt. I was anticipating a certain pacing and pattern to her speech, I’d had years to get used to the measure of time she took to take things in, to wait to see if any of us spoke before adding her opinion. It didn’t surprise me that she spoke, but it did catch me off guard.

  “Enhanced hearing and smell was Sy’s take, yeah,” Jamie said. “Small, black, recessed eyes that they didn’t seem to rely on. They interlock with their older sisters to form one complete, adult body—”

  “What color are they?” Abrupt.

  “Black,” Jamie said.

  “Charcoal black,” I clarified. “Dull, not glossy.”

  “Except for the parts where you see the skin, from the interlock,” Jamie added.

  Lillian nodded, taking in the words, even while her thoughts were somewhere else.

  “Is that important?” Jamie asked.

  “Maybe. How much did their chests move when they stood still? Did they stand still?”

  “They breathed harder than seemed necessary,” Jamie said.

  Had they? I hadn’t noticed.

  Hubris’ ears perked up, his head turning, nose catching Lillian at the knee. She barely seemed to notice, but I did.

  I put my hands out, stopping them, then gestured.

  The group of us moved closer to a wall, huddling down. I drew one of the knives I’d collected from the kitchen in the now-burning house, and tucked it into the top of my boot as I heard the footsteps.

  Five people, at least, running. Disorganized.

  Definitely not the Twins. Probably residents of Lugh, not Crown soldiers.

  I gestured come behind my back.

  I’d expected Lillian, but Hubris was the one who came. Almost as good. He approached steadily as I kept the gesture up, until his shoulder was flush against my side. I hugged him.

  The next part was to act. It really didn’t take much digging to get to the emotion I wanted. Breathe harder, as if I was panicking, let emotions well up, my face contorting—

  All the while, my hand flew through gestures, letting the other two know what to expect.

  The group stepped out from around the corner. Five civilians, armed with improvised weapons. It was the one at the tail end of the group who turned his head, looking for trouble, and spotted us. He yelled out, “Oi!” The others stopped in their tracks, turning, weapons at the ready.

  They looked scared, but they let their guards down as they spotted us: three youths, with the one closest to their group fiercely hugging his dog, clearly upset.

  I didn’t turn to look, but I knew that if Lillian’s expression was even remotely the same as it had been the last time I’d looked, she might have looked shell shocked. Jamie—I didn’t actually know, but two data points would work well enough.

  “Shit,” the one at the tail said. “What are you doing here?”

  No response was as good as a non-response in a situation like this. Let them fill in the gaps.

  More footsteps were still approaching. It didn’t seem to be a threat or a chase, by the reaction of the group in front of us.

  No, they were looking to the individuals.

  I reached out to put my hand on the wall by Hubris’ head, as if to keep my balance, fingers in a specific position. The hand was only a foot from my boot with the knife.

  Alert, the sign was. Be ready, the intent was.

  I felt Hubris tense under my other arm.

  The pairing who followed up the rear of the initial group was composed of one more Lugh civilian, armed with a long-handled axe, and one of Mauer’s soldiers, with a rifle and bayonet.

  I watched as he tracked the group’s gaze, and I saw the flicker of recognition. The recognition was followed by alarm, but I was already pushing out with the arm I had around Hubris’ shoulders, rising to my feet and drawing the knife in the same motion.

  Before the soldier could bring his weapon around to point it at us or slash at Hubris, the mutt was on him, tearing at one wrist, making it impossible to handle the gun, pulling him toward the ground—

  I slammed the knife into the side of his neck, nearly lost my grip on it as I hauled it back and out, and then drove it into his neck again, closer to the front.

  He collapsed, Hubris dancing out to keep from being caught under him, teeth going for the gun.

  Four grown, armed men stood within two and a half metres of me. We’d just beheaded the leadership of their group, but the rest remained a threat.

  I opened my eyes wider, and I hissed at them. Showing absolute confidence here was essential.

  Behind and to the side of me, I heard Lillian echo the sound, followed by an amused noise.

  She’d said she wasn’t drunk on the wyvern formula’s effects, but she was doing a horrible job of selling the argument.

  Still, the group retreated rather than advance.

  “Don’t—” the soldier on the ground spoke, blood in mouth and throat muddling the word. He spat, coughed, and then tried to finish the sentence, “hold—”

  I plunged the knife into his throat for the third time.

  People were so hard to kill, even with stabs to an important area like the throat.

  The blood that had splashed up and the moisture from the rain made it hard to get the knife out. Rather than try and fail, I let my hand slip off as if I’d intended to do it, and straightened.

  The group turned, starting to run.

  We were back in that direction, we came this way, the Twins would have come this way before losing our trail, with Hubris running that way…

  Odds were better than not that the group was running in the direction the Twins had gone, off to our left. Sixty percent chance, if I had to put a number to it. Thirty percent they were down the street I and the other Lambs had been walking down, ten percent chance the Twins were back the way we’d come.

  I bent down, reaching for the rifle Hubris had secured. I aimed and fired.

  The group of men ducked their heads, stopped, and looked for cover. Not that there was much point—I’d fired well over their heads.

  “That way,” I called out, moving the rifle and bayonet to indicate the road we’d already been traveling down.

  “Those particular exorcist rifles have to be reloaded between shots,” Jamie said, quiet enough the people wouldn’t hear.

  “Got it,” I murmured. I bent down, not taking my eyes off of the people peeking around cover, and reached down to pat at the still-dying soldier. He grasped weakly at my wrist, and I shook him off.

  In the corner of my vision, I saw Gordon’s face being framed by a dark pool of blood, rather than the soldier’s mug. I ignored it, keeping my vision on the possible threats, while continuing to feel around for where the soldier had the ammo stored.<
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  Patiently, Hubris stopped sniffing loudly at the man’s side and used his nose to nudge my hand to the right location. I dug into the pocket and found ammo. I reloaded the Exorcist.

  “That way!” I said, with more force. “If you go that way, you’re going to die, and it won’t be because I shot you!”

  They were lost, rudderless, and by the small numbers and lack of guns among the group, I was guessing they were a smaller splinter of a larger faction. They turned, and then ran the way I’d indicated, toward the harbor and the bulk of Mauer’s forces. It wasn’t a hard sell, even coming from someone who had stabbed their group’s leader.

  My vision of how things stood in Lugh was an abstract painting, broad strokes with little detail and a lot of blurred lines and fuzziness where I wasn’t absolutely sure of details. Every gunshot, particularly the duller booms of exorcists and the bursts of fire from multiple stitched soldiers firing in unison, served as another stroke or dab on the greater picture.

  I mentally revised my mental picture of where things stood, moving the Academy forward. Mauer’s front line was getting torn to shreds, and it was probably somewhat worse than he’d anticipated. Four nobles came with more than the usual amount of firepower. Two of those nobles were on the periphery of the front lines, picking off stragglers, scouting groups, and flanking attacks.

  The group I’d redirected ran down the street, keeping to cover where cover was available. I watched them go, giving them a head start, so we wouldn’t be right on their heels if they ran into trouble and wound up cornered.

  I relieved the now-dead soldier of the bullets. My finger touched the ring at my thumb, rotating it around—a little bit of resistance, with the fit being tighter.

  “Sorry,” I told him. I wasn’t sure if I was, but I felt like I had to say something.

  Our trio moved at a brisk walk down the same road the group of militia had fled down.

  “…and bony pincers instead of arms. They were attached after the fact,” Jamie was saying. Right back onto the subject of the Twins.

  “That’s interesting. Were the legs okay? Flexible?”