Twig

by wildbow

  The city was waking up, the early bird students stepping outside, business owners turning on the lights, and a two-to-one ratio of wagons to cars taking to the streets. Traffic was being held up as a pair of shepherds guided a flock of sheep down the street, up the back road that would lead around to the side of the Academy.

  Helen talked, “I think if you put Mary in charge of some very disciplined, committed people, then she would do well. Test their limits, organize them, orchestrate. But I get tired too fast, Ashton doesn’t really get tired now at all, I’m not good at being fast, and neither is Ashton.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “We’re different, and she couldn’t figure out how to push us or test our limits.”

  “She likes Lillian because, even if it’s not physical, Lillian works at what she does,” I said. “It reassures her, in a way, knowing that Lillian is trying. It’s synonymous with being focused. Faced with you two, well, she’s wondering in the back of her mind, are you listening, watching, are you ready to move when something happens? Or are you dealing with a shift of hormones, adjustments Ibott made, or staring off into space, dreaming of how you’re going to break whoever your target is?”

  “Yes,” Helen said. “I think she missed all of you. Gordon, Lillian, you.”

  “I get last place?” I asked.

  “You get last place,” Helen said.

  I pressed a hand to my heart. “Ow.”

  “Just because you aren’t the first or the second person she thinks of when she’s lonely doesn’t mean you’re the least important person to her.”

  I raised my eyebrow. “That sounds positively brilliant. Or like utter bullshit.”

  She smiled at me.

  The sheep were out of the way, traffic moved. We had to wait for the more impatient carts and cars to move out of the way before someone stopped and let us go.

  She said, “I think if you want to sound smart, you have to straddle the line. If you only sound smart, then you—”

  “Sound like Ibott,” I said.

  That gave her pause. I watched as she considered the idea.

  “Yes,” she said, very definitively. “Like Professor Ibott.”

  I wanted to ask, to poke, to pry. What did she think about Ibott? If things changed, what would she think about leaving Ibott? But the way she’d said that last bit made me feel as though she’d terminated that branch of the conversation there, and pushing the subject further wouldn’t be smooth or natural.

  Mary was attached to Lillian and to me. Lillian was attached to Mary, me, and the school. Helen was… always just Helen. She was fond of Ashton, but the relationship didn’t alter her focus or her course. She was attached to the rest of us, and we were reflected in her in varying ways, but Ibott was a part of that.

  Was she more attached to us than to Ibott? I was willing to say so, but I couldn’t say it with confidence. Was Ibott the first priority and first thought when it came to her continuing to exist for the immediate future, even if he wasn’t the most important person? Probably.

  Helen was ever the person that was hardest to grasp and to pin down, on so many levels.

  “Your hair is too tidy,” she told Ashton.

  “I like my hair like this.”

  “Why?” she asked. “It’s not right. You’re wearing the wrong face, except it’s your hair, and your hair is so much easier to fix than your face.”

  “Because I like it,” Ashton said, looking straight ahead as we walked. “If it’s something I had to fix then I’d fix it, but I don’t have to fix it.”

  Helen gave me a look. Her hand went up above Ashton’s head, gesturing. The first gesture was the sign for vile, toxic, evil, bad. The second was the number two.

  Bad two? Polluted two?

  Terrible two. I smirked.

  Ashton saw the shadow of her raised hand passing over his head and turned to look at her. Helen, with her hands now clasped behind her back, gave him her best innocent smile.

  “There are degrees of give and take,” I said. “Baby steps on the path to playing a part, and we’re always playing a part.”

  “Okay,” he said. He made no effort to mess up his hair.

  My hair had a way of going wild if I didn’t wash it or at least run my head under the tap, and I hadn’t stopped to shower before leaving with Helen and Ashton, instead pulling a flat cap on over my head, to keep at least the top of my head down and out of the way. With luck, the pressure of the hat would pin my hair against my head and keep it it back and away from my face, even after the hat was removed.

  “If I give you my hat,” I said. “Would you at least cover your hair?”

  “I don’t like hats,” he said. “I don’t like shirts or pants or shoes, either, but with those I don’t get a choice.”

  “And you’re not going to change your hair.”

  “Why?” he asked, conveying a glimmer of bewilderment at the fact that I’d even ask.

  “And Helen was saying that Mary had a hard time wrangling you two,” I said, under my breath. “I can’t see it at all.”

  “Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit,” Helen said.

  “Puns are the lowest form of wit. Sarcasm is a survival mechanism,” I said.

  She reached out around Ashton’s head to give my cheek a pat.

  Ashton must have seen someone or something in his environment and decided to model himself after them, which extended to keeping his hair parted and his appearance more neat than was necessary. Helen was very much a creature of nurture, she had emerged from the vat that birthed her with one nature, one instinct, and every other urge and desire was sublimated into that instinct, the lines blurring and bleeding through one another. The personality she had constructed and even the mask she wore from day to day was one that relied on external cues and feedback.

  The newest, youngest Lamb was almost the inverse. He didn’t seem to have any desires but the ones he was handed. His personality, conversely, was wooden, stiff, wrought by instinct and a careful background process of observation and growth from that observation. Teaching him was a slow, careful process, recognizing what he was doing and why, and guiding his growth with the right kinds of exposure. At times it was like wrestling a headstrong goat. At other times, though, when the baseline wasn’t even there, it seemed to go in one ear and out the other. Worse, he didn’t have to change to get what he needed and wanted. People catered to him.

  In my little excursion with this pair, I had secondary goals. Figuring out Ashton was one. Figuring out where they stood in terms of my ability to get them on board and leave the Academy was another.

  On this cold morning, as we walked down the main street, among student and scholar, business owners and homeowners who had stepped outside to take brooms and shovels to the light covering of wet snow, I was as spooked as I had been with the Baron’s sword impaling my eye.

  I was spooked as I quietly observed and studied Ashton and realized that there was probably no way that he would pick up roots and leave the Academy. He was a Lamb. Not one I knew or loved in the same way I loved the others, but he was a Lamb.

  I was more than spooked at the fact that I could look at Helen and imagine asking her the question, and I had no idea at all what her answer might be.

  “Does it hurt?” Helen asked.

  “Hm?” I asked.

  “Your eye. You were being quiet.”

  My eye wasn’t why I was being quiet, but I don’t blame you for jumping to the obvious conclusion.

  “Some. The fact that it isn’t here, that I move my eye to look one way or the other, and there are parts that aren’t moving, parts that don’t have any feeling at all, it…”

  I spread my hands.

  “I’m interested,” Helen said. “In how you feel. And I want you to feel better.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And I want to know how the pain you and other people feels, compared to the pain I feel. I asked Ibott if there was a way to attach my nerves to other people’s nerves to fee
l what they felt while I hurt them, so I could figure out the best kinds of hurt and the best ways to understand others when they hurt, but he said no, that was a whole different project.”

  “I have feedback mechanisms that would make that easier,” Ashton said. “So I can understand the things people are feeling. They could probably give me the ability to feel others’ pain. But you need a secondary brain to process it, detached from the primary brain. I think he’s right. It would be complicated.”

  “I’m envious,” Helen pouted.

  “What I’m talking about,” I said. “It’s not real pain. It’s… more like it feels wrong, and if I sat down and focused on that wrongness for too long, I could get really depressed, and maybe even get a little bit mentally off? As if I was looking too hard into the light and I scarred my retinas, but it’s not light, it’s wrongness and nothingness where there ought to be something.”

  “I know exactly what you mean when you say that last part, about being mentally off,” Helen said, sagely. “I feel a little bit like that all over after I get adjustments made. That’s a good explanation. Thank you, sir.”

  “You’re welcome, madam.”

  “It’s nice being with you,” she said. “And it’s nice being with Lillian, and with Jamie.”

  And Gordon? Do you miss him? How do you process that?

  If I left and you stayed, how would you process that?

  “It wasn’t all bad, being with Mary. She likes being girly. We went shopping. And we infiltrated, all dressed up, and I think, thinking about what you said before, she liked that I tried and I could teach back, while she taught me things. We were so coordinated, like we were dancing all night, every step in time. It was a lovely evening.”

  She looked up and away, as if struck by something.

  “I don’t think Duncan will stay very long,” she said.

  “Where did that come from?”

  “There was a lot of blood, when we were done, that night. For someone practicing to be a doctor, he doesn’t seem to like blood very much.”

  I put out a hand to steer Ashton in the right direction as we took a side street. The trip to the Shims was far faster without the checkpoints every step along the way.

  I pointed out the carvings in the wood of buildings, doors, frames, and fences, for Ashton’s benefit, explaining each. To his credit, as stubborn as he was in other things, he listened carefully. He was quick to pick it up and to ask questions.

  “And the triangles, three in a row?”

  “Fangs. Bad animal. I think that one there was a cat? Greeted anyone that approached or spoke to it by leaping onto their head and sinking four claws into scalp and neck.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I think I understand. Then there’s one for bad people, one for good people, one for food, and for water.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Good observation.”

  “It makes sense,” he said, while Helen nodded behind him.

  He wasn’t hopeless after all.

  “But—” he said, “Why not make them bigger?”

  “Bigger, as in…”

  “In the middle of the street, the street is so wide, and you can see it from a distance. A picture of a wolf so big you could see it from two blocks away.”

  “Um,” I said.

  “It makes sense,” he said. “Because it’s about communication, and big communication is better. Something people won’t miss, that more people see, and it marks out territory, so people know, and they might change their behavior.”

  “It kind of does make sense,” Helen said.

  “No,” I said, gravely and fundamentally offended at the assertion. “No, it really, really doesn’t.”

  From there, I launched into particulars about how the mice wouldn’t want to broadcast their presence, that they were fundamentally prey for others, or parasites. I went onto a tangent about subtlety, how, no, people wouldn’t always see the positive signs of ‘helpful person’ as positive reinforcement to continue being helpful.

  There was nuance and tangent enough in the explanation for me to talk all damn day. Instead, I was cut short by our arrival at the hideout. I felt a lingering, bittersweet feeling, combining with an entirely renewed experience of fear, about Ashton, about Helen, and now about the mice.

  I banged my hand on the door, once, then waited.

  It took almost a minute, but one of the few sets of windows that had glass in the pane swung open—all of the other windows had broken glass, the shutters closed. A head peeked out, so fast I almost missed it, and then the window shut.

  I could hear the calls within the house. The door latch came open, and the door swung open.

  “In, fast,” Craig said, from the top of the stairs. “Don’t let the cold air in.”

  We hurried to get in, stomping off the trace amounts of snow. The door shut behind us.

  The number of mice had increased. Colder weather meant more children were scrambling for shelter. Everyone was bundled up as if they expected to go outside, but it was because the interior wasn’t particularly warm. ‘Bundled up’ in many cases meant wearing multiple shirts or two pairs of pants.

  Helen roared, rushing at Alice, sweeping the girl up in her arms. Alice, for her part, hugged Helen back. Alice, at ten or so, looked closer to eight. Stunted growth, which I could sympathize with, but for her it was a lack of nutrition.

  Little details, parallels, and bits of common ground were why I so frequently enjoyed the company of the mice.

  “What happened?” Craig asked, touching one eye. Talking about my eye.

  “Sword,” I said.

  “You should have the money for a new eye, you dingleberry.”

  “Yeah, I know. I do. I thought the eyepatch looked cool, thought I’d keep it for a while,” I said, my voice dry.

  He seemed to take that as the signal it was, and he didn’t pry further. He seemed so much thinner and more tired than I remembered him. Of an age with Gordon or Rick, but he was a scarecrow of a person, his hair dark, his eyebrows thick, a dark look in his eye. That look only softened when he looked at one of his mice, or at me.

  “Hi Helen,” Craig said. The poor bastard seemed to withhold the softest look for the prettiest girl in the room.

  “Hi,” Helen said, beaming at him.

  It physically hurt to see how he reacted to that. He turned away, almost bashful.

  The softer look didn’t extend to Ashton, though.

  “New kid?” Craig asked.

  “Ashton,” I said. I gave Ashton a shove, putting him in the center of the front hallway, exposed.

  “The hell is with that hair?” Craig asked. “You look like a sissy Mothmont brat.”

  Ashton turned, looking over his shoulder at me. I gave him nothing, my expression still, my hands in my pockets.

  Better to let him learn his lesson and adjust.

  “You vouching for him, Sy?” Craig asked.

  “He can vouch for himself if he needs to,” I said.

  “He might need to. Only so much space, you know,” Craig said. All posturing. He made his way down the stairs. “Maybe he should wait outside.”

  “I’d like to stay,” Ashton said.

  Craig finished making his way down the stairs. He stood a short distance from Ashton. There was a one-foot height difference between the two.

  “My house, my rules.”

  “Our house,” another kid said.

  “Same thing,” Craig said, without turning around.

  There was no disagreement.

  He and Ashton stared each other down for a moment.

  Ashton could have decided this with the pheromones he could naturally shed. He wasn’t, which was a point in my book. I had about ten or twenty different questions about Ashton and what he was doing and why. The list started with the parted hair and extended all the way to finer details of how he was developing himself, how he saw the world, all the way down to the subject of what his motivations were in the here and now.

  “Why isn’
t Sylvester vouching for you, red?”

  “Because he didn’t like me parting my hair, and I wouldn’t change it. He’s trying to teach me a lesson.”

  Craig looked up and over at me. I gave him a nod.

  “He was right. You should have changed your hair.”

  Ashton didn’t respond.

  “If you’re not going to listen to him, there’s a good chance you won’t listen to me, which is disrespectful. I don’t want that kind of disrespect in my house. Maybe you should sit this one out and go wait outside, keep yourself warm until Sylvester and I decide you can come in? What do you say to that?”

  “I’ll fight you for the right to stay,” Ashton said.

  I cocked my head at that. Helen ceased abusing Daisy to raise her head and turn to look, as well.

  Fight? Where the shit did that come from?

  I wished I could see more than the back of Ashton’s head from my perspective. His expression would have been interesting to read.

  “You want to fight me?” Craig asked. He looked at me, “Sy, is there anything I need to watch out for? Hidden weapons or something? He’s not going to sprout claws or extend some bladed tongue out of his mouth or anything?”

  “No weapons, not in the way you’re thinking,” I said. “I don’t think he’s ever actually been in a fight.”

  Craig looked down at Ashton. “You think you’re going to win?”

  “I’m going to lose, but I’ll hit you a few times before I end up standing outside in the cold,” Ashton said. “If I end up in the cold either way, at least I get to punch you a few times first, this way.”

  Craig smirked. He approached Ashton, then did the false-start-lunge thing, moving as if he was going to swing a punch, trying to get Ashton to flinch.

  Ashton moved in that same moment, stepping to one side and coiling up as his foot reached the ground, like he was going to throw himself forward, fists flying—

  And when Ashton stopped short, freezing in place, Craig was left taking a short step back, hands raised to strike back.

  Craig relaxed, extending an arm to Ashton’s head, gently shoving Ashton and simultaneously messing up his hair. Ashton had to take a step to catch his balance, and fell out of the fighting posture.