Twig

by wildbow

  “Arright,” Craig said. “Just stay out of the way. There’s a hot stove upstairs to huddle around, if you need to warm up.”

  Ashton glanced at me, waiting for my nod before going upstairs.

  “Gordon teach him?” Craig asked me.

  The name caught me off guard. Something must have shown on my face.

  “No,” Craig said. “What happened?”

  “The dipstick went and died on us,” I said. “I came to tell you.”

  Among the twenty or so kids who were gathered across the room, the news hit approximately three-quarters of them like a ton of bricks. It was like the wind had been knocked out of them, and the rest were at least respectful enough or aware enough to stay silent and avoid asking questions.

  There was bad news, and there was news that you had to deliver that cracked the foundation of another person’s world. This was the latter. For so many of the people here, Gordon had been someone to look up to. To them, on a level, he’d been one of them, but he’d gotten out of the ditches and alleys and made something of himself.

  It wasn’t just the loss of Gordon that had people blinking tears out of their eyes, looking away, swallowing hard. To them, it was like the world had turned around and told them ‘no’. ‘No, it isn’t really possible. You don’t really have a chance.’

  “Who?” Craig asked, suddenly angry.

  The Academy, I thought. It was interesting to me that the ‘who’ was the first question out of his mouth. Not how. Not when, or anything else.

  “Nobody,” I said. “Bad ticker.”

  “No,” Craig said. “That’s not right. Not with someone his age. It doesn’t work like that. Something had to cause it. Was it poison?”

  He didn’t quite mean something. He meant someone. He wanted that ‘who’ so badly, someone to blame.

  That desire for someone to blame wasn’t fresh. It had been simmering for a while.

  “No poison,” I said. I could see how wet Craig’s eyes were, even as he tried to put on a strong front for all the children who were looking to him for support, and that made my eyes wet too. “Bad, dumb luck.”

  “Fuck,” Craig said. The word was out of his mouth the moment I finished saying ‘luck’. Angry, frustrated. “No. Fuck.”

  He was getting more agitated as I watched. That agitation would translate to all of the rest of the mice. Helen lay on the ground, still, her arms around Alice, but that gesture was now a comforting hug.

  “There’s stuff I need to talk to you about,” I said, working to keep my voice level, calm, confident, as if I could convey those things to him. “In private? About Gordon, in part.”

  He took a long moment to take that in, seemed to step back mentally to take in the situation and the status of the mice, as he likely did each and every time he made a decision in their vicinity, and he seemed to realize where things stood, in terms of his emotions and the commotion that was soon to follow.

  “Helen,” he said. “Look after ’em?”

  “I will,” she said.

  Craig and I made our way through the kitchen, which had been gutted a long time before the mice moved in, past one of the many bedrooms, and out the back door. The door shut heavily behind us.

  The moment he was out of sight of the younger ones, he bent over, elbows on the railing, fingers in his hair and heels of his hands against his eyebrows.

  I didn’t know if he was crying, but I didn’t think it was right to check one way or the other.

  “You told me the truth, right, Sy? Bad ticker?”

  “Bad ticker.”

  “Fuck, Sy. There wasn’t a doctor nearby? That girl you had with you? Not Mary, but the one with the bag?”

  “She tried. But I don’t think there’s a professor in Radham who could’ve saved him, the way things were going.”

  “Fuck!”

  The outburst was loud enough that children inside were liable to have heard it. He seemed to realize that, and visibly calmed himself down.

  “Okay,” Craig said, still hunched over. “Okay. I’m done. Shit.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I was, just last night, I was thinking I needed to talk to him. Get some advice, figure out the direction things were going.”

  “With the mice?” I asked.

  Craig nodded. He looked up at me, and his eyes were hollow.

  Please tell me they’re okay. That you’re going to cope if I leave.

  I sat on the stair, my back to the railing opposite to the railing he was sitting against.

  “Are they okay?” I asked. “Managing?”

  “No,” he said. “No, not managing at all.”

  I heaved out a heavy breath.

  “We usually save up for winter, but the thing with the ghosts last year, we lost some old faces. I’m—there’s new faces, and they weren’t on the ball with contributing to the penny jar. I should’ve been on top of it, cracked heads together. But I was preoccupied, and I—”

  He kept stopping short of the same sentence or confession.

  “You what, Craig? What’s going on in your corner?”

  “I’m getting older, Sy. I’m almost not one of the kids anymore.”

  “There’s no hard time limit,” I said. “They won’t string you up or mutiny on you when the clock hits midnight and it’s your eighteenth birthday.”

  “Seventeenth, and… fuck, it’s complicated, Sy. Complicated in a way I’ve talked about with Gordon. I way I really wanted to talk to him about.”

  “I can try,” I said, and I dreaded the answer, felt doubly the traitor, because the odds were good that if he confided in me, and if he started to rely on my listening ear, I was going to disappoint him, leave him lacking. “I’m not in a particular rush today. My whole morning is yours, if you need to figure things out with me.”

  He sighed, shifted position, and settled down to sit with his back to the railing that enclosed the steps. He looked up at me, “This was never my thing. I was never going to stick with it.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I sort of got that.”

  “It’s hard living, a lot of missing meals, when it was your mistake as leader that leaves the penny jar empty and there’s a kid who is maybe one or two missed meals from seeing next week. You know?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m old enough to fend for myself. Told myself I’d always be there for them, but come a certain time and circumstance, I’d bail. Every day now, every hour, I’ve been telling myself I’d join the Crown Military. Because god damn, it would be nice to put bullets in the people who did what they did to our kids. To the kids in other cities.”

  “And it’s good money,” I said. “Enough to get you on your feet, get a room somewhere, buy good clothes.”

  “Yeah,” he said. He hung his head. “Yeah. But there’s nobody to really hand things off to. There’s no money to keep these kids going through the winter. Food is more expensive. They have farms and monster cattle that are bred to grow to four times the size, there’s food enough for a population ten times our size, and somehow in the midst of the fighting, warbeasts and soldiers end up getting the food and we get jack shit.”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, fuck. I figure I might as well be one of the soldiers that’s getting fed. My conscience can live with that. I know how to shoot a gun, I know how to fight. Give me three meals and a cot in a warm room, I’ll put on some weight, some muscle, and I’ll be as good a soldier as any of them. I can climb the rungs of the ladder, get a good position, get a girl… It would be really nice to get a girl, Sy.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Can testify. Girls, recommend.”

  Lillian isn’t going to leave the Academy, a voice in the back of my mind told me. The thought put a chill in the core of my body and left me feeling nauseous.

  Oblivious, he continued, “I can give up the freedom and gun down enemies of the Crown, and I can live with knowing I’m supporting the same fucking bastards who are deciding the laws a
nd deciding these kids starve. But I can’t just up and abandon them, Sy. I do that, and it’s going to eat me alive. Drive me to drink.”

  “Stick it out,” I said. “You know what the answer is. It’s not a good answer, but sometimes we don’t get any.”

  He made a face. “There’ll be reasons not to go next year. And the year after.”

  “Yep,” I said. “Yeah. There will always be reasons.”

  I felt like such a hypocrite.

  But to give any other advice, it would be doing like Helen had commented, putting others first.

  I needed to know the mice were looked after. I couldn’t take this on and free Craig of his burden.

  But I’d anticipated this question.

  “I brought money,” I said, reaching into my jacket. I pulled out an envelope. “No arguments.”

  “Who’s going to argue?” he asked. He took the envelope without a moment’s hesitation, opened it, and riffed through the bills within. “This helps.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Shit, Sy,” he said, staring down at the envelope. “Gordon? Just like that?”

  “It was slower than that. Gradual. We expected it. It still sucks.”

  “Shit.”

  We sat in silence. The snow drifted around, and the wind that blew around the houses found a course that sent the snow into our faces. Both of us had to angle our faces toward the ground to avoid the sting of a cold snowflake in the eye.

  “Craig,” I said. “If you repeat this to anyone, I’ll probably get killed or worse.”

  He lifted his head, cupping one hand around the side of his face to look at me.

  “I’m done. I can’t do this anymore. Losing Gordon, it might have been the last straw.”

  “The eye?”

  “Drop in the bucket,” I said. “I’m going. I’m going to try to wrangle the others, see if they’ll come, but…”

  He drew in a deep breath, then huffed it out as a sigh, nodding.

  “Do you know anyone? In other cities. I’ll need to put a bit of distance between myself and Radham. It would help to have names and places. If I decide to go.”

  “I know people. Not many, and they’re scattered, but you can give them my name, and they’ll help you or point you in the right directions.”

  “Anyone near Richmond?” I asked. “Warrick?”

  “What the fuck are you doing around there, Sy? There are more monsters than humans in that neck of the woods.”

  “The less I say, the better,” I said. “Do you know anyone?”

  “I know of people, but you don’t stick your neck out, there, they might take badly to you even looking the wrong way at them.”

  “Okay,” I said, nodding. It was a better answer than I’d hoped for.

  “Sy,” he said.

  I looked up.

  “Go. Don’t worry about me. Don’t worry about the fact you’re a fucking hypocrite.”

  Oh, he’d drawn the connection.

  “Go,” he said. “Go get your friends. Walk out that door. If I see your face again, I’m going to hit you, and I’m going to keep hitting you until I can’t feel my hand anymore. Understand? You need to go. For your sake.”

  I climbed to my feet.

  “I’ll send one of the kids to Lambsbridge with some names and places,” he said. “I, uh, I’ll keep the details short and sweet. Use the scratchings to let you know who’s who and what’s what?”

  “That works,” I said. My voice was hoarse. I had a lump in my throat. “Thanks. I’d say we could meet up, if you wanted to leave Radham, but…”

  “But there are too many kids here who can’t pull up stakes, because they spend half the time here and half with their shitty families, or for other reasons. Because this is a place we know, and we’d get eaten alive in stranger territory. Yeah, Sy. Yeah.”

  I nodded.

  I opened the door and let myself back into the house, signaling Helen. I didn’t have the voice to reach out to Ashton, so I let Helen do it, calling upstairs.

  Craig remained sitting on the back step, probably for a long time after our trio had put the hideout behind us.

  Previous Next

  In Sheep’s Clothing—10.3

  Our ‘picnic’, as it turned out, was situated under a jutting roof, beside a storage bay that was intended to hold an assortment of wagons. Wagons and the stitched horses would be parked here outside the building in order to get cleaned or repaired, before being moved back to the bay. It was a nice building, all considered, one planted here in anticipation of the higher-end buildings appearing nearer the Academy, something that hadn’t yet happened. There were still lingering traces and some odds and ends from when the building had been used as a storehouse for military assets.

  For our purposes, it worked nicely. The overhanging roof with only two adjoining walls—one to block the wind and another from the adjacent building—gave us cover from the falling snow. The open nature of it gave us a view of the hills and fields beyond Radham. We had a place to sit, complete with benches and crates to use as tables, and we had some privacy.

  Jamie’s suggestion, of course. He’d noticed the place some time ago, made a mental note of it, and was able to point us over here when the subject of the picnic had come up.

  I worked with Jamie as we laid out a blanket and pinned it down, in case the wind changed direction. Ashton was starting a fire on the paved floor, and Jamie was on the same page as me when it came to worrying about that particular detail. Actually getting Ashton to coordinate with us was often stiff and awkward, in a ‘move left, no not that far left’ way, so we had given him something he could do standalone. Now we regretted the decision, as the flames started to rise. From how close he hovered to his work, it looked very possible that he would set himself on fire.

  Back at Craig’s, he hadn’t used his pheromones to win his exchange with the boy. His victory had been an earned one, and it had indicated that he was learning fast, even if it might take him a long time to get up to speed.

  He was going to be a monster. He had the tools and he had the ability and willingness to learn to cover the gaps those tools didn’t provide for.

  For now, though, I made a point of hurrying to set down the basket so it pinned down one corner of the blanket. That done, I rushed to Ashton’s side, putting one finger on his forehead to push his face away from smoke and fire.

  I walked over to the railing that bordered the edge of the property and this little parking spot, looking out over the hills and distant farms. Jamie joined me, standing a short distance away.

  “Mrs. Earles called the Academy. She’s more upset than I thought she’d be,” Jamie said. “But the Academy is sending someone down to pick up Rick.”

  “I didn’t ask,” I said.

  “But you were wondering,” Jamie said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I was.”

  “I can’t tell if you really just wanted him gone, and knew that that would do it, or if the feelings are that close to the surface,” Jamie said.

  “If you figure it out, let me know?”

  He nodded.

  I wished that I could talk to my best friend again, much like Craig had wanted to talk to Gordon.

  But, in this moment, I wasn’t sure if I actually minded his presence or the reminder. Not so much that I felt the need to say or do something to put distance between us.

  Helen had finished shaking out the other blankets. She brought the folded stack over to the blanket we had already laid out and distributed the blankets, where they could act as seats.

  Once she was done, she walked over to Ashton, grabbed him by the back of the collar, and hauled him about a foot away from the fire, pressing down on his shoulders as if to fix him to the location he was sitting.

  “I’m itching to really start talking about particulars, and I don’t want to do that before Mary arrives. Lillian too, if possible,” I confessed, my voice quiet.

  “Particulars? I was wondering why you wanted t
o do this,” Jamie said.

  “I’m antsy,” I said. My finger tapped against the railing. “I didn’t think it would be this bad.”

  “Ah,” Jamie said, and he gave that one-note utterance a lot of meaning, like he’d just realized what I was talking about. “Yeah.”

  He didn’t push me, and he didn’t pry, and in that, I could see how much he had changed since the outset of the whole situation in Lugh.

  The others arrived. My mood lifted considerably at the sight of Lillian and Mary, both girls dressed up just a bit. Lillian wore her academy-issue jacket and skirt, but her leggings had a raised pattern, and she wore a nice blouse under her jacket that I hadn’t seen her wear before. Mary wore a lacy dress and ribbons, with a fur-trimmed duffel coat.

  My mood then plummeted twice as far as it had climbed at the thought of the bigger picture, the conversations that would need to be had. I hadn’t even been letting myself think about it, and now the conversations seemed so imminent.

  Take it one step at a time, I told myself. I was able to wrangle the worst of the feelings, putting the nervousness and terror off until a discussion some other, later point in time… until I saw Duncan.

  I hadn’t intended for Duncan to be invited, but now I could see why he would be. Frustration tore at me, made me want to scream, shout, throw something at him, and act very uncivilized. There were things I wanted to talk about, and how the hell was I supposed to bring them up with him here, listening and watching?

  Helen joined the girls, giving each a tight, nonlethal hug and a kiss on each cheek, before giving Duncan a hug.

  I saw the look that crossed Lillian’s face as she found me, and I put a smile on my face, despite everything else that I was feeling. That, at least, was something I had practice in.

  I turned around, leaning back against the railing, while she strode toward me.

  Was she going to hit me or hug me?

  Lillian wrapped her arms around me, her cheek cold against my ear. The hug was soft, made softer by the layers of coat and clothing each of us wore, and the fierceness of the hug didn’t quite penetrate either.

  “That was a lovely touch,” she whispered in my ear. Referring to the sign-off of my note, no doubt.