Twig

by wildbow

A matter of seconds later, the real Mary made her way down the stairs with her injured subject, a medicine bag in one hand. Like Lillian’s bag, it was one of the newer ones, expensive, the contents very up to date.

  “I’ll need to take her to the lab to give her proper treatment,” spectacles said. The woman was managing gasping breaths, but it was as if she was trying to breathe with a hundred-pound stone on her chest. Each intake of breath was an uphill battle, a strain.

  “Then drag her,” Mary said. The man wasted no time. I had to pull my puppet back to keep the way clear, as we let the man drag his patient, hobbling as he used one heel instead of his whole injured foot to move. Mary spoke to his back as she followed, “I hope you know, each time your friend doesn’t cooperate, I’m going to put a knife through one of your hands. That’s going to have a big impact on your ability to practice medicine and on this woman’s future.”

  “We understand,” the man said, his voice strained and trembling.

  In a procession of sorts, we made our way to the lab, which was on the lowest floor of the house. Except for the fact that it was better-lit than any room in the house, it very much had a dungeon aesthetic. Stone walls, stone floor, metal counters and tables, and countless tools. Papers and books were set up everywhere, filled with more sketches than proper medical terminology. Along one side of the room, incomplete bodies floated in tanks. Skin without the flesh, fetuses the size of grown men, and homonculi, vat babies of a far cruder sort than Helen, Ashton, or Evette.

  The man laid the woman on one counter, and Mary wasted no time in tying the woman to the rails at the edge of the table, using lengths of razor wire. The man with the spectacles and mustache watched but didn’t protest as she tied a length of wire around one of his ankles, binding it to the same table, restricting his movement.

  “I don’t see any of the babies,” Mary spoke.

  Spectacles’ expression was an interesting one. His hands busy, he still looked to his friends, as if for confirmation. Neither was in any shape to tell him what to say or do.

  “No babies,” I said. “Not here, not like that.”

  Another look at the mustache man confirmed my statement. The children weren’t being made into firstborn. A test of the firstborn’s blood would likely reveal that there was no relation between the monster and the family they had been assigned to. At best, the similarities had been designed, added for the psychological impact.

  Mary’s expression was an interesting one, as she realized the same, staring at the cases where the monsters were obviously being designed from scratch. Disappointment?

  “You’re thinking of Mary Cobourn, aren’t you?” I asked. “The real one. That’s where the extra viciousness is coming from. At least in part. You were the same way with Percy, when you shot him.”

  “Was I?”

  “Ruthless,” I said. “More so than usual.”

  “They always go straight after the children,” she said. “Not even using them as resources, but discarding them. Percy, he went after children and he used them to make the Ghosts, but the Crown…”

  “Discards children. Treats them as something expendable,” I said. For a moment, I felt a flare of hope, that maybe Mary could be convinced. Then I remembered Lillian. My breath caught in my throat as I started to speak, forcing me to swallow and try again. “That bothers you?”

  “No. Not really. But I feel like it should, so I act like it should,” Mary said. She hopped up to sit on a counter, knife in her hands. “I feel like I should want it to stop, and at the same time, I owe my existence to it.”

  Me too, probably, I thought. I had no idea where I came from. We kept hearing about children disappearing or being cast away. I’d seen the slaves in Lugh, the non-clone counterparts of the Bad Seeds, and disappeared mice. Each and every one could have pointed to my origins.

  I would likely never have the answer.

  I think you’re a terribly dishonest person, Mary, I thought. Maybe that’s why we get along so well, when left to our own devices. But you’re not dishonest to the rest of us, or to our enemies. Only yourself. How many times have you said that now, that you aren’t acting because you feel or believe a certain way, you say you’re doing it because you think you should. Killing Percy, wanting to track down the ghosts…

  You just wanted Percy to die. Lillian didn’t factor into it.

  This… this bothers you. And you won’t ask, leaving me to.

  “Where do you send the firstborn babies?” I asked.

  “To the nobles,” the man with the mustache said.

  “For?”

  “We don’t ask,” he said. He was busy using a set of modified hand-bellows to get the woman to breathe. Her eyes were open and staring.

  I nodded. I allowed some slack in the wire that wrapped around the face of my puppet.

  “Do you really think you deserve any mercy at all from us?” I asked, of all three of our victims. “After what you’ve done to those families? To those children?”

  From the looks in their eyes and on their faces, I imagined it was the first time they had really considered the question, or if they had faced the morality of what they were doing before, it had been long ago, a question that was easily glossed over as they studied texts and focused on advancing, finishing projects, and succeeding in their careers.

  I looked at Mary, who was so close and yet so far away, sitting on the other end of the room. I knew I could convince her to come with me, that I just had to ask in the right ways, raise the right ideas. I knew also that I couldn’t.

  It was a very lonely experience.

  In the midst of that, I turned to another Lamb for consolation. Evette lurked, agitated, far too eager to get to work.

  My puppet leaned over a metal counter, gripping the railing that bounded the edge. He didn’t seem willing to move, except to gingerly dab at his wounded, twitching eyelid, and blood dripped down his face from the myriad cuts and lacerations, pooling on the counter.

  Tying their fates to those of their friends had been part of my goal. To break them, challenge them, to satisfy some internal craving I had to validate how stupid it was to stay in a bad situation out of loyalty.

  “I have a laundry list of projects I’m wanting you to complete,” I said. “You three can take turns getting them done, I don’t care. But you are going to have to make an ugly decision. My friend and I were going to force whoever we conscripted to modify themselves to look like a proper Firstborn, so we can move freely through the city. That’s a hard thing to do to yourself, so someone’s going to have to volunteer, or they’re going to have to choose one of their friends as their patient.”

  I could see the looks of horror on their faces. It was my turn to be cold.

  Mary and I hadn’t actually discussed this. I’d only thought about it in terms of getting someone else’s Firstborn fresh from the shop and using that.

  This was more poetic justice.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. My voice was dark. “They’ll be able to return you most of the way to your original appearance. That’s one project. Project two, are you all familiar with the studying drug? Wyvern?”

  Mary’s eyebrows went up.

  “I’ll explain the reasoning later,” I told Mary, lying through my teeth, before I turned back to my puppet, “I’m going to need a batch of that to start. Then, let’s see, while I’m thinking about it—”

  “Poison gas,” Evette said, grinning.

  “Poison gas,” I said. “Three things, as a starting point. I’ll come up with more as the night wears on. And I want to see you do every step. Let’s see what sticks.”

  Previous Next

  In Sheep’s Clothing—10.11

  “How many labs have we been in?” Evette asked. “I’m not asking for any reason. I’m curious about the number.”

  We? I arched an eyebrow.

  “You know what I mean. We’re not going to pretend I’m real. You’re very detached from reality. You’re putting yourself in a very d
etached, suggestible state where the only suggestions you’re listening to are your own. That the Lambs are here and helping. That you’re not alone.”

  “Careful,” I warned, I kept my voice low, so as not to wake Mary, who had fallen asleep with her head on my shoulder.

  Two of the three conscripted doctors turned their heads to look at me.

  I reasserted my grip on the pistol I held.

  “I might not be much of a lab geek, and my memory might be garbage, but I know enough to know that that stuff you’re working with is volatile. I know I’ve seen it used in explosives. I’ve used it to blow up labs very similar to this one.”

  Clifton, the man with the mustache, pulled his hands away from what he was working on. “You might know more than I do when it comes to this, then. If you want a weaponized gas, you need to disperse it. The phosphor is the best way I know for doing that.”

  I watched his expression for a moment, then nodded.

  “Nice recovery. It’s almost like you were talking to them in the first place,” Evette said. The look on her face was intense, but it wasn’t the smouldering intensity I had recently seen on Lillian. It was the wide-eyed, hair-flung-back look of someone who stuck their head out of the window of a fast-moving train.

  Her pale face still resembled Mcormick’s daughter, as if my subconscious had latched onto that, but the eyes were larger, the mouth smaller, the teeth exposed by her unending smile different every time I looked at her. They would be overrun by an overgrowth of gum tissue one moment, then the next time she looked my way her mouth would be filed with something very similar to the braces used to align teeth, except these braces were used to hold the gums at bay. Then she would part her lips in a smile and her teeth would be the sort that was badly in need of braces.

  I knew that my mind had, at some distant point in time, latched on to the fact that vat babies tended to have problems with teeth, with hair, with the proportions of faces and body, that I’d collected the fact and held onto it where I let so many minor facts slip by. Because it related to Evette, Helen, and Ashton.

  Even when human tissue was used as a starting point, it was hard to hit every mark consistently, especially those parts of the body that appeared late in the various stages of growth. That Helen was as attractive as she was said a great deal about Ibott’s talents as a professor. The creation of beauty wasn’t even his specialty, and he’d managed it. She was a work of art, and whatever else I thought of Ibott, I had to to admit he was a true genius, based on Helen alone.

  Ashton, meanwhile, was vaguely offputting but still hit the mark, the work of a committed team who could refine and implant the refined pheromones package once they had a vessel to hold and transmit it.

  Helen was the actress, Ashton the social manipulator, and both needed to look good, considering the roles meant for them.

  But Evette… to make sure they had something workable, they would have had to get her to a later stage in development, grow her to the point that she was able to respond and communicate, then test her. Getting a workable brain and an acceptable appearance, for someone who would primarily lurk in the background as a problem solver, it was unnecessary.

  She was the safest one to have out and keeping me company, because of all of the Lambs, she was the only one I was moving closer to. To bring out the others would only remind me of those I had lost or those I was likely to lose soon.

  Carmen, the young lady in the trio of scientists we’d recruited, knocked a tool into a pan, startling herself. Mary woke at the sound. She’d fallen asleep holding a knife, and raised it to fend off any attackers, but I already had the pistol pointed at Carmen. Mary relaxed.

  Carmen saw the pistol and startled even worse. She was shaking like a leaf, clearly agitated.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said. “Please.”

  “You woke up my friend,” I said.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so tired. We’ve been working all night. I can’t even see straight. I lost blood earlier, I’m hungry, I’m sore—”

  “Shut up,” I said. “It looks like you’re pretty close to done. Just keep working. You’ll be done soon.”

  “What—what happens to us when we’re done?”

  “One of you gets to be our firstborn companion,” I said. I doubted Carmen was up to it, which left Clifton and Simon as our options. Clifton had ditched his tinted glasses to see his work better, while Simon’s face was stitched up and bandaged. Neither seemed particularly keen on the idea of staying with Mary and I. They shrunk away from looking at me and focused more on their work, like errant students who hadn’t done their homework, hoping to avoid their teacher’s attention.

  I left them to their work, dropping the pistol until my hand rested on my knee.

  “I fell asleep?” Mary asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t do that. That’s not me. I’m alert when it counts.”

  “You’re human,” I said. “Helen can manage without sleep, but she’s different.”

  “Did you sleep?” she asked. “Were we asleep at the same time?”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t sleep.”

  Mary looked genuinely distressed. I gave her shoulder a rub, not sure what to say or add. I could have speculated as to why she drifted off, but none of it would have really addressed why she was so bothered, and a lot of my speculation would have added to how bothered she was.

  Whether it was because she was comfortable with me or the emotional cost of recent events had cracked the facade and let the human frailties show, I could keep quiet on the subject.

  “You should have slept,” Mary said.

  “I tried, but as comfortable a pillow as your lap might be, a metal counter does not make for a comfortable bed, and I was twisted into a weird position. By the time I got comfortable, you’d drifted off.”

  Concern was clearly etched on her face. Her fingers drummed her knee, where her leg hung over the countertop.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, keeping my voice low so the others wouldn’t hear.

  “I am worried,” she replied.

  “You got some sleep, I’m fine. I’ve done more with less in the past. All you need to do is focus on being as excellent as we both know you can be. What we’re doing is going to require it.”

  “I feel like you’re subtly manipulating me,” Mary said.

  I rolled my eyes and hopped down from the table. Mary wasn’t wrong. I’d downplayed my own fatigue, jamming it in between reinforcing statements that turned her focus back to herself. Ignoring the subject would have left her feeling like it needed to be addressed.

  “I’ll be with you in a moment,” she said. “My leg fell asleep.”

  Evette was hanging around Simon, which was my cue to pay more attention to what he was doing. For much the same reason I could sometimes get a bad feeling by way of ‘prey instinct’, Evette represented parts of my subconscious that were potentially picking up clues that my conscious mind wasn’t. She stood on his right, and I moved around to his left, gun in hand.

  “The formula you wanted,” he said. He mumbled a bit, with the way the stitches and glue pulled at his wounded face. One of his eyes was badly swollen. He was tense, for reasons beyond the gun I had pressed against his lower back. “I wrote down the mix and the steps. We’ve used this often enough when the Baron Richmond has been leaning on us. It helps with inspiration, but going too far down that road… bad nightmares.”

  I glanced past him at Evette, who had her elbows on the counter.

  “Okay,” I said. I glanced up at Simon “I want you to give either Carmen or Clifton that dose.”

  I watched his expression, the momentary fear, the arrest of his already warped facial expression and body language.

  “I’m patient,” I said. “And, barring bad circumstance, we’ll be coming back to drop off our new firstborn, right? So… test that, I’ll double-check the formula with someone knowledgeable while we’re out, and we’ll either do some more tests or I
’ll take the next batch as I return. It’ll give you something to do while we’re gone.”

  I watched his expression change, his less-swollen eye moving to his friends.

  “Which one?” I asked.

  “You keep doing that,” he said. “Making us choose.”

  Because I want to ruin the bond you have, I thought. I want to drive in a wedge.

  “Which one?” I asked, again.

  He turned, looking at his companions. “This would be easier if one of you volunteered. Please? Carm—”

  “Nevermind,” I jumped in. I reached out with my free hand, taking the syringe and the paper with notes it was resting on. “I believe you, that this is legitimate.”

  If the stakes were higher, then I doubted he would be able to ask his friends to volunteer in good conscience. I wasn’t sure if this formula was as good as I’d get from my personal team, but it was one I could believe to be relatively safe.

  Behind me, Mary hopped down from the table.

  “I gave you four projects,” I addressed Clifton. “Where are we at?”

  “Not done,” he said. “Give me an hour.”

  “Not done with…?”

  “Any of it. I’m juggling the gas, the drug, the poison, and I’m trying to prepare for an improvised surgery with parts that are swelling as we speak. I’ve got it on ice, in hopes that it’s ready.”

  I nodded, looking over the table.

  “And Carmen?” I asked. Mary joined me, limping a little where her leg was a little wobbly. She’d taken a moment to fix her hair and re-tie her ribbons.

  “This is too big a job. I can’t even keep my hands steady.”

  She was breaking down, and even my slow approach seemed to ratchet up her nervousness. I stopped where I was and leaned against the nearest counter. I stared at the flesh that was laid out in ribbons across the counter in front of her.

  Clifton spoke up, “It’s a simple job, Carmen. It’s why we gave it to you. You’ve done it twenty times.”

  Twenty times.

  How many families had been altered by this trio of people?

  “It would be nice,” Evette said. “If there was a way to make one a firstborn, and force them to take the role for life. Mute, unable to express themselves, wearing the flesh of a monster.”