Twig

by wildbow

  “I’d rather be with you, Sy. I’d rather have the freedom to choose than to have a black coat.”

  I can’t let you, I thought.

  “Would you?” I asked. I lifted myself up. My hands found places on either side of her head, as I loomed over her, staring down into her eyes. “Would you leave the Academy? Your parents? Your friends?

  “What? Sy, leave? I don’t understand.”

  I tried to find the words, and I couldn’t. I just continued to stare down at her.

  “You can’t make me make that choice,” she said. “Especially not if you won’t explain.”

  She was crying, now. The light from one of the windows gleamed as it caught the track one tear had left on the side of her face. It wasn’t the sort of reaction I liked provoking from her.

  “The Baron wants revenge on me, and Hayle is trying to sell him this. Us. So long as I’m here, there will be no happiness for the Lambs. I’m going to go kill that noble, but with the tools and weapons they have, they will have my scent. I can draw the Crown’s focus and ire. I can cover my tracks and I think I can protect any Lambs who don’t come, protect you. But I would much rather if everyone would come with me.”

  “Sy, you can’t. My parents—”

  “Your parents care. But they want to stifle you. They asked Hayle to postpone your black coat. Your dad would rather you never got one, I think. Hayle agreed. If you stay, that is what you’re staying for. You might still get a black coat, and you could even get a black coat early, if the stars align right and the Baron dies. But you cannot have the black coat and have me.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, but only a squeak came out. She was crying, and it was a messy, beautiful sort of crying, with tears streaming out. Her hands went to her face, trying to wipe at her eyes, but the tears came at a rate that blinded her.

  I spoke around the lump in my throat. “I can’t stay anyway, Lil. Jamie, the old Jamie, broke when the memories and burdens got to be too much. Only an empty shell left. I’m just about at that point. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t be their puppet. I can’t see another Lamb die.”

  “No,” she said, her voice too high. The heels of each palm pressed into her eyes.

  “If I stay, and if we stay together, I will see you fade away the same way Jamie did. The body will still be there, the eyes, the hair, the voice… but you and I both know it’ll be an empty shell. You without the passion or ambition is… not you.”

  “No,” she said, in that same, high, awful voice.

  But she nodded as she said it.

  “Yes,” she said, her words now in accord with her actions.

  I pulled my weight off the bed without jarring it, climbed off of her without too much movement, stepped back and away. She remained where she was, hands at her eyes.

  I wanted to hug her, and to make this alright, to console and kiss the tears away.

  “I broke up with you. Or you broke up with me, when I asked you to leave. That’s better than the first one,” I said, finding myself unable to look at her. “I was acting irrational. I scared you. You tried to get me to stay. I didn’t. You have no idea where I went, or why. But a lot of things I said in the last few days suddenly make sense.”

  I found my coat and pulled it on. I opened the window, without a sound.

  Lillian spoke, her volume such that it seemed like she thought I was still there, just in front of her. As it was, I barely heard her.

  “Now?” she asked.

  I climbed through the window and closed it behind me.

  Now, I thought. I couldn’t stay, not like this. Too much would be given away.

  I didn’t stumble as I walked through the snow. My path was clear, and my mind turned to the prescient. The next few steps were too important.

  When I passed through the gate and saw Mary there, getting her bag of belongings, it felt as though I’d expected to see her. I hadn’t, but I’d been wondering where she was, considering her as a factor, and it was a fine line between seeming fitting as a thing and seeming to fit in the bigger picture.

  “Sy,” she said. She smiled as she saw me, and the smile dropped away as I got closer and she saw my face.

  I was angry.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  Follow, I gestured.

  She gave the man at the gate a second glance as I walked past her. I was halfway to Lambsbridge before she caught up with me.

  “We’re going,” I said. “The train should arrive within thirty minutes. Not sure where it goes, but it gets us out of here. That’s the most important thing.”

  “Now?”

  The one-word question stung.

  Contingencies needed covering. “We need to get a message to Jamie. I’ll handle that, I promised, and he needs to help Lil. You buy a ticket, separate from me. I’ll find my own way on. We make our way to Warrick.”

  “What happened to Lillian? I’m going to need an explanation.”

  “You’ll get it. I promise. But for now, can we please,—please—just focus on getting to where we need to be, so the Baron can die like the maggot he is?”

  It was like a switch had flicked in Mary’s voice, her tone of voice and degree of conviction changing. No more questions or confusion. Only a hungry, “Yes.”

  Previous Next

  In Sheep’s Clothing—10.7

  “This is going to take all of us,” I murmured.

  The train car was dark, without any interior lights. It wasn’t meant for passengers, though it clearly had been, once upon a time. The windows were layered with dust, cracked, and the light that came through was scant, though it grew stronger as we approached dawn. The floor had been removed and retrofitted, the benches and seats pulled out. Now it was only for luggage, a hundred passengers worth of baggage stacked within and kept in place with straps.

  Mary was sitting across from me. I was unwilling to look her in the face, but I knew her glare was hard as she fixated on me. I was poised to roll backward and hide behind a stack of bags if anyone came in, but Mary seemed eminently at ease.

  “The more of us there are in play, the bigger the chance for mistakes,” she said. “You have to pay attention to whether you’re involving us because you value what we bring to the table or if you’re doing it because you want our company.”

  “Right,” I said, staring down at the floor. “We’re killing a noble on his home turf. If that isn’t cause for ordering all hands on deck, then I don’t know what is.”

  “We’re all with you, Sy. This is too important to be anything but,” Helen said. She was off to one side, excited in that very still way that Helen so often was. It was reminiscent of a cat, fixated on prey, a reptile poised to strike, and it went with an easy smile that would linger for days in the memory of any male who was of an age to like girls. In the gloom I could only see the smile.

  I smiled back at her, but it was a sad smile. “You’re with me, but only for now.”

  “I think…” Mary said, “The less you talk about that, the easier this will be.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I ached in an emotional way. I was hungry in a way that had nothing to do with food, but it remained that nagging, persistent feeling that consumed me from the inside and reached toward the out.

  “When this is done,” she said. “I’m going back to the Academy.”

  I winced at the words.

  “Lillian can’t leave,” Mary said. “But even if she went… I don’t know that I would.”

  “You would,” I said, with conviction.

  “I like being useful,” she said. “Having a mission, a destination. The idea of cutting myself free, running, not knowing what happens tomorrow, besides trying to survive? I don’t know. I think of being the mission and I think back to when I was with Percy and the Bad Seeds. When you interrogated me, when I talked to Percy and he didn’t say the things I needed to hear, of the headmistress and the other students, and feeling like I couldn’t catch my balance?”

  “What if we went t
o Fray?” I suggested. I sounded desperate, which was perhaps fitting, because I was desperate. “She could give you a purpose.”

  “Probably,” Mary said. I saw her touch her hair, moving it out of the way before she shifted position. “But is that any better than working for the Academy? Do you think we can work for her like we worked for them, and that you won’t have to watch the rest of us die?”

  It was a rhetorical question.

  No, I told myself.

  “Sy, you can’t keep fooling yourself. You know what you’re doing by walking away. You know what happened last time, when you ran.”

  Last time.

  Saying I had repressed the memory wasn’t exactly right. I simply hadn’t preserved it. I had to work to decide what was important enough to keep stored in my head, as other things crowded it out and took up property. I’d only retained a glimmer of those miserable days, and now that I was running again, I had to dredge it up, the details eroded by time and by Wyvern injections, and I had to mine those memories for details.

  “You weren’t even there,” I said.

  “I was,” Helen said. “Jamie was.”

  Jamie, off to the side, nodded. All of the Lambs were present, and of them, Jamie was perched nearest to me, but it was an uncomfortable sort of nearness. Lillian was just a little further away. Silent, unwilling to talk, unwilling to even face my general direction.

  I could smell her, taste her sweat, even now, separated by well over an hour.

  I couldn’t look at anyone. Things were so twisted up and messy, it was largely my fault, and that was only half of why.

  “Do you remember?” Jamie asked. “I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t.”

  “The Lambs hunted me,” I said. “Nothing came of it, beyond the first one or two times we crossed paths. I got away.”

  “We got close. You used your knowledge of the Lambs to anticipate us, then turned yourself in before we got close, toward the end.”

  I nodded to myself.

  “The Lambs are going to have to hunt you again. We’ll have to, to prove our loyalty,” Mary said. “I don’t want to put too fine a point on things—”

  You love your fine points, I thought.

  “—But this time the Lambs have me. We have Ashton, and I don’t think Ashton is coming with you.”

  I looked at Ashton, who was still, staring out the window.

  “Helen?” I asked.

  Helen was silent. The smile remained.

  No, I hadn’t expected an answer.

  “Let’s change the subject,” I said. My voice was tense. “Please.”

  The train car was silent, but for the wheels bumping as they passed over less even bits of track or areas where snow had dropped off branches and onto the rail. The entire car thrummed, the bags jostling.

  “The mission,” I said, into the dark space. “Strategy.”

  The seventh member of our group spoke up. Her doll clacked as she moved it. “Without knowing exactly what we’re facing, it’s hard to come up with answers, Sylvester.”

  “We know we’re facing one lesser noble, one who might have taken on some of the Duke’s staff for the time being,” I said. “We’re facing his sister, who we have to figure out how to deal with. The staff of their home, the security countermeasures…”

  “Sy,” Gordon said, interrupting her, because she never stopped talking on her own, “I think what Evette is getting at is that you don’t know anything specific. The resources of the staff, the nature of those countermeasures, the nature of any weapons the Baron might have at his disposal. Without that, you can’t devise counter-strategies.”

  “Exactly,” Evette said. She held up her posable doll, so it and her hands covered the lower half of her face, and stuck one of its fists in my direction. Looking at her face was easier, even if the features were less consistent than anyone else’s. I could even tell myself that those inconsistencies were part of her. A vat-baby, large eyes, snub nose, wide mouth, everything spaced out slightly wrong, so that she made people uncomfortable if they looked at her. The features changed, the spacing, but she was never attractive. Her skin was smooth, her bone structure fine, but no, too alien to be a beauty. She spoke, moving the doll as if it were the one speaking. “This is Gordon’s domain, not mine.”

  “Plan of attack,” Gordon said. I made the mistake of trying to recognize his face. It stung to know I was already losing the particular details and placement. “Don’t respond to them. Set up a situation, determine the nature of the engagement.”

  “Which requires information,” I said. Jamie nodded.

  “Lay in wait,” Helen said. “Carefully. Even if we’re playing the spider, this is his web. His city.”

  “The note you sent back to Lambsbridge for me to read. You set a time limit for yourself. Four days,” Jamie said. He was the new Jamie now. He’d replaced the old Jamie, who had swapped places, now occupying the faint reflection in the dusty glass window.

  “Three,” I said, to myself. “Three days. One more day to travel.”

  The train slowed down. Approaching a stop.

  Yet no whistle, no horn.

  I knew what that meant, there was a reason.

  “They don’t blow the whistles when they arrive in an area where the nobles live,” Jamie said.

  “We’re here,” Mary said.

  I nodded.

  It was like waking up from a vivid dream, but it was a dream where I hadn’t slept, and it was one where things had almost been okay.

  I put them away one by one, in a very deliberate way.

  “You don’t have the luxury of fighting them in their home. Watch their routine, and decide when and how to fight,” Gordon said.

  “Yeah.”

  He didn’t quite leave at that. “You did alright, you know, looking after Lillian.”

  “Doesn’t feel like it.”

  “It’s what I was asking you to do, when I made that request one of my last words.”

  “I know,” I said, staring at the ground. “I knew.”

  The movement over less even rails and between segments of track felt more pronounced now that the train was slowing.

  Gordon was neatly put away.

  “Trust me,” Mary said. “But don’t you dare tell me the truth. If you tip me off, I’m going to start thinking about what to do, and you won’t like how that ends. I’m your only real ally for the next three days. But on the fourth—”

  I didn’t want to sound it out. Mary, put aside. I would be interacting with the real Mary soon enough.

  Then Lillian, without any interaction, without any words or anything else. My heart might have broken if I’d tried it. The emotions were still too raw to stir up for amusement or for some abstract way of organizing my thoughts.

  “Four days,” New Jamie said. Not the deadline for this mission. The deadline for what came immediately after.

  Ashton gave the suitcase he’d been sitting on a pat, and then he was gone, that rudimentary mental image of him boxed up and set on a very rickety shelf in the mind of Sy. I lurched to my feet, feeling surprisingly stiff, and I blinked. My eye was as dry as a bone, as if I hadn’t blinked in a very long time. It stung, and with that stinging, it started to tear up.

  “You’ve got a role to play, Sy,” Helen said. I could imagine her hands at my shoulders, the kiss at my forehead. “You know Mary. You know that a failure or a mistake here will cost the other Lambs, and it might put Mary at risk. You decided to move now, so pay attention, put your face on. Play that role.”

  Then she licked my hair.

  I brought my hand up to touch the moist spot at my hairline. There was no Helen there for my arms to bump into as I raised them. Sweat, nothing more.

  I looked at Evette. The doll, much like her face, like all of their faces, seemed to change in ways I couldn’t put my finger on. The details were too hard to remember, for the others, wyvern left me without that, but with Evette, well, she had never been real. An aborted project.

&n
bsp; “We would have gotten along, Sylvester,” she said.

  “We would have despised each other,” I countered. I stumbled a little as the train came to a stop. “Too much overlap in the same role.”

  “You would have adapted your role, like you did with the others,” she said, hugging the doll. In that moment, she seemed very young, no older than Ashton was now. With that lack of age came an odd lack of inflection and exaggeration, as if a lack of age meant more maturity. But it was just the way Ashton was, even the way Helen was. The unrestrained, childlike manner wasn’t there because the personalities wouldn’t be.

  “I would have resented you, because you got the big moments, the flourishes, the problem solving, like I resent Helen when she can get someone wrapped around her finger, or Gordon for kicking ass. We would have been oil and water, rivals of the bitterest sort.”

  “But it would have been fun,” she said, extending her arms to thrust the doll out, gesticulating with it. “You would have loved me like you love them.”

  “A ton of fun, and I would have.”

  She was more stubborn than the others, in a way. My musings of what she would have been like were vivid enough to be a hallucination, but I wasn’t sure how to compartmentalize it, how to process her and what she meant, or the message I was supposed to take away.

  “…I brought you along because I worried I might get lost,” I said. The explanation was for myself, a thought spoken aloud so it might help me answer my own questions and shake the image of her.

  “Is that the only reason you brought me along, Sylvester?” she asked.

  The side of the train car made horrific snapping sounds as clasps came undone. The lower half of the outside wall folded out and down, and light streamed in, clearer than the light that came through the windows. The men on the outside began to pull out the luggage down and out for the passengers.

  I was alone in the car. I made sure to grab hold of my suitcase. Well, not my suitcase.

  I double checked the location of Mary’s suitcase. I’d removed a tag from another case and attached it to hers, with a short note attached. I left it where it was.

  Pressing my ear to the door that connected this luggage car to the adjoining passenger car, I could hear the babble of conversation. I reached up to the handle and opened it.