Twig

by wildbow

  Then he was gone, running, back to his comrades and fellow soldiers and guards.

  “No such place,” I murmured.

  We made our way. I pointed the way, as best as I was able, but the same-ness of so many of the houses and the scarcity of landmarks made it easy to get lost.

  “You can act,” Lainie said. “You can lie and make it sound real. You know how to fight, or she does. My throat hurts from when you used that gas and none of the stuff actually reached me, but you walked into it. Where did you come from? What’s really going on?”

  “You said it earlier,” I said. “We’re monsters, aren’t we?”

  “That doesn’t explain anything!”

  “Have you changed your mind?” I asked. “Do you see us as something else?”

  “I think you’re scary, and—”

  I raised a hand, interrupting her, and then let it drop. “We’re monsters. It’s not my job to convince you of anything different. I, we, have another job. Your job is to come with us.”

  Further away from the plaza, the fighting was nonexistent. People, forbidden from going indoors, had taken to hiding. It wasn’t a lame hide-and-seek sort of hiding, but it was a sustained effort to stay out of sight without looking like they were staying out of sight. They clustered in groups of three to ten, gathered in nooks and crannies with their firstborn looming over them like guillotines. They kept their heads down, hunching over with backs to us, or averting their gaze.

  A broken community.

  Finally sufficiently lost, I looked at Simon. “Your lab. Where is it?”

  Still unwilling to talk, he pointed.

  My gut instinct had been right. The house wasn’t far.

  “Chance,” I said.

  “What is it?”

  “You helped back there with the soldier. And with the Twin.”

  “The Twin? The Lady Baronet of Richmond?”

  “Why?” I asked him.

  “Because I saw how things were unfolding, and I remembered hearing the stories, those memories were so vivid that it was like someone was speaking in my ear. Things the Twins did. Not so different from what you told the soldier back there.”

  Simon pointed, indicating a street. We changed direction.

  “I… couldn’t foresee any future where the Lady Baronet won and then let us go. She would be suspicious, and she would punish us without asking questions.”

  “She would,” I said.

  “It wasn’t courage, if you’re thinking that,” Chance. “It wasn’t. It was a horrible sort of fear.”

  “And the soldier?”

  “I don’t even remember what I said to him.”

  I nodded.

  We were approaching the front door of Simon’s house. I drew the house key from my pocket and opened the door.

  The stray items and blood from our earlier fight was still scattered and spattered, respectively, across the first floor. Blood marked a trail upstairs and down.

  Simon was now in the lead of the group, eager. He walked with purpose to the basement door. The rest of us followed.

  “You saved him from the soldier back there,” I murmured to Mary. She limped a bit as we approached the stairwell, walking just beside me, the two of us behind Lainie and Chance.

  “I wasn’t sure if you had any more plans for him,” Mary said. She winced and opened her mouth to touch a tooth. Fingers still in her mouth, she glanced at me.

  There were so very few people in the world who could I could communicate so much with, with only a second or two of unwavering, sustained eye contact.

  I loved Mary so much. Not as a girlfriend, she never would be one. But the way we worked in concert, the communication, and the feeling that she and I were a pair, when it counted.

  I wanted to say it out loud, regardless of the circumstance, much as I’d told Lillian. I wanted to speak from the heart, even while knowing that any and every time I did, it somehow became poison.

  We approached the bottom of the staircase. Simon had stopped in his tracks.

  Reaching the bottom of the staircase, I could see why. We’d bound Clifton and Carmen to the polished steel countertops, the crown of Clifton’s head touching Carmen’s. They both now lay in pools of congealing blood. Carmen lay contorted, the position far from the pose we’d left her in, dried froth and possibly a small amount of vomit collected around her nostrils and mouth. The act of taking her extreme pose had been violent, clearly, with razor wire hauled through flesh until it reached inflexible, unyielding bone. Here and there, the wire was so taut that it held her hands and legs in the strange positions.

  Lainie stumbled into one corner, heaving in breath while making gulping sounds. Chance hurried to her side, looking for something to vomit into.

  “Fits,” Simon said. His voice was hollow. “Withdrawal from the drug.”

  Carmen had been the one to have fits. To keep one from struggling or chancing a cut to their arm or leg, we’d bound Clifton to Carmen and vice versa. The wires went from one individual, under the table and around to the other. The idea had been to keep each one from struggling by making their struggles dangerous to the other. It had worked, she’d struggled, and her fits had effectively killed Clifton.

  Simon wheeled on us. I could see the pain in his eyes.

  “You! You did this!”

  I remained silent. There wasn’t anything to be said. He wouldn’t hear.

  He raised his hands to his face, fingers digging in, and in the doing, he provoked the living flesh that he’d been wreathed in. It contorted and pulsed, flexing under his fingers, making his monstrous, melted expression into something bloated and even more monstrous than before. The eyes behind it all were so very human, with a terrible sort of emotion in them.

  He spoke again, but the words became a cry, and the cry became a ragged, agonized scream that tore its way out of his mouth. He started to move toward us like he might throw punches and try to savagely beat us, then almost concurrently remembered the fate of the twin. He dropped to his knees.

  I waited, listening at the keening cry of the man. In sound alone, it almost perfectly represented what I’d been feeling since I’d left Lillian’s. I let it go on for far too long before I raised my hand, two fingers extended. I let my hand drop.

  Cold, quiet, and so fast I barely saw, Mary threw a knife underhand.

  Lainie shrieked as the knife struck home and Simon toppled to the ground. Chance wrapped his arms around her.

  “I want my wire,” Mary said, her eyes on the bodies on the counter.

  “Get it,” I said. “I can sew up my most minor wounds and see about looking after Lainie’s arm. When we’re done, I’ll patch you up, and you patch me up?”

  Mary gave me one curt nod. She stepped over Simon on her way to the bodies.

  I looked for and began collecting the necessary supplies for wound treatment. I ran water in the little cast-steel sink and waited until it was sufficiently hot.

  “Are you going to deal with us in the same way?” Chance asked. His arms were still around his sobbing cousin. “Tie up loose ends?”

  Not a dumb guy.

  “I don’t know yet,” I said.

  “What decides it?” he asked. His voice was tight.

  “Things like whether I can trust you to keep your word and be afraid enough of us,” I said. “And…”

  I looked down at Simon. His scream lingered in my ears.

  “And?”

  “And I asked him a question earlier. About what he thought about his handiwork. He made the monsters. He couldn’t give me an answer.”

  “That doesn’t mean he didn’t feel bad!” Lainie said. She sounded as if she was panicking. Chance squeezed her, as if to compel her to stay quiet and calm.

  “I act, like you said. I lie. I read people like she makes them bleed. If he’d given me one sign, one indication of remorse or pity for the people he hurt over the last few years, I would have let him live. I even asked him outright. I gave him a last chance.”
/>   “You asked me if I thought you were a monster, just a little while ago,” Lainie said.

  “I did,” I said. I set out the materials for first aid.

  “Is that the same sort of question?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t care what you think about me.”

  Chance was glaring at me now, his jaw set.

  “But if I was in your shoes, Lainie, I would be thinking hard about what kind of answer you can give me. And I won’t necessarily ask a question before I expect that answer.”

  “You said Lainie, you referred to her specifically, instead of say it to us both,” Chance said, his voice quiet. “Is that because you think I gave you an answer?”

  On the far end of the room, in front of me, Mary glanced at me. She knew.

  “If you want to kill her, you’ll have to kill me first,” Chance said.

  I turned around so I could look at them straight. Then, instead of answering Chance, I gestured at Lainie. “Get up on the counter here, I’ll take a look at that arm.”

  ☙

  “Sy,” Mary said.

  I stirred, realized my head was on Mary’s shoulder, her hair pulled back out of the way. I sat up straight. We were still in the basement. Chance and Lainie were sitting on a countertop. Sheets covered the corpses in the room, but neither of the young aristocrats looked at ease.

  “I slept?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Mary said. “A minute, maybe five at most. It was fitful.”

  I wasn’t surprised. I felt more tired than I had. Phantom images of other Lambs were disappearing.

  After we’d handled the first aid and Mary had been given painkillers, I’d gathered up supplies I assumed I could use. Packets of paper and cloth that held powders I knew to be hard on the eyes and nose. Then, when Mary and I had run out of details to talk about, I’d filled the quiet with their voices, the dim with their faces. Somewhere in the midst of it, I’d tapped myself out.

  “It hasn’t been an hour,” I said.

  “No,” she agreed. “It’s not time for the rendezvous. But…”

  She gestured. Ear. Sound.

  I listened.

  A dull noise, reverberating through the town, heavy. Like weather, but not weather.

  “A train?”

  “I didn’t even hear it stop,” Mary said. “But I heard the steam vent as it started to move again. It just arrived.”

  I nodded, taking it in. “Okay.”

  “You like to stay ahead of things,” she said. “I thought you might want to scout it out.”

  I hopped down off of the countertop. I looked around the room. I gave her a nod.

  The phantom images of the Lambs were long gone, having only been halfway between dream and daydream. Still, I remembered the feelings I’d had while they were here. In the twilight of near-sleep, I’d almost let myself believe.

  Chance and Lainie approached without complaint as I indicated for them to move. Chance seemed a lot more stern than before, his jaw set.

  He’d drawn blood in an indirect way. He looked like a hunter, but the death he had indirectly contributed to was a far weightier one. Helping to kill a noble, of all things. He had matured by leaps and bounds. Now he was looking at me and wondering what other hard decisions he might have to make.

  Lainie… I couldn’t say. She’d been forced to grow up a great deal, and I had challenged her to grow up the rest of the way and to do it fast, by demanding an answer out of her. I couldn’t make myself believe she had it in her.

  “A lot of people have seen us, now,” Mary commented, as we left the house.

  I gave her a singular nod in response.

  “What happens if you let Chance and Lainie go? You scare them?”

  “That would be the idea.”

  “And the soldier who is giving us access to the Baron’s mansion?”

  “Won’t talk. Others won’t ask him, and he won’t venture to say.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Sure enough that I’m willing to stake your life on it,” I said. “And the life of the other Lambs.”

  Mary didn’t have a response to that.

  “I’m not willing to stake your life on many things,” I said, my voice dropping.

  “I know,” she said. “I believe you when you say he won’t talk.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair. My breath fogged in the cool air.

  “The soldiers in the house where the Twin died?”

  “Didn’t see through the gas, and they won’t talk for similar reasons the other soldier won’t. Only they’ll be less motivated by good nature and more by fear. They were close to the Twin when she died. That failing will reflect on them.”

  Not wholly the truth, that. Some had glanced through and seen me. I was sure enough that they hadn’t gotten a good look at Mary. I was alright with that end result.

  The group at the train was still there. It had seemed to be a particularly slow-moving group of aristocrats, but as we made our way across the city, periodically glancing in that direction, it didn’t look like they were leaving the train station.

  We headed straight for the plaza, and I could almost remember the way back without Mary prompting me.

  The soldier wasn’t there. Forty or fifty minutes had passed, and the fighting had concluded. Bodies had been dragged away, and whole groups of people were bringing water, sloshing them on the cobblestones to wash the blood. Not all of the groups had firstborn with them.

  I’d planned to be here as the people on the train arrived, get the lay of the land, and see if there was anything I could use. They still weren’t advancing into the city.

  Fray? I wondered. Were her people here in disguise, dressed like the upper class?

  No. That would be too hard to sell.

  “What are you doing?” Chance asked me, “Don’t just stand around. Get water, clean.”

  I could see the look in his eye. He was playing along, and I couldn’t see any guile.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. Mary and I went to get buckets. I kept a close eye on the young aristocrat, collected the bucket, and used the fact that I was moving around to try and get a better sense of what was going on down at the train station.

  Something about this didn’t make sense. I was surprised at how much the sense of it nagged at me.

  I was so fixated on that odd scene that I needed Mary to nudge me before I saw our escort making his approach. The guard we’d pled to earlier was coming, and he had others with him. Nothing seemed duplicitous about what he was doing. Not unless he’d lost all ability to feel bad about the violence and wrongs committed against Warrick’s people.

  He’d brought his superior officer and a friend, it looked like. We would have our ride.

  I glanced again at the train, then back at Chance and Lainie.

  There. The aristocrats were now coming. There were no less than four nobles in their company now, departing the train. I could only see them from afar, but three looked younger than the Baron and the Twins, older than fifteen, going solely by proportion and their style of dress. The fourth was older, exceptionally fat to a degree that had to have been created by academy doctors, with crimson hair, and I couldn’t even tell if they were male or female.

  “Nobles,” I said. “They weren’t expected to arrive on this train, right?”

  “They weren’t. What are you thinking?” Mary asked me.

  “I’m thinking about the next train. All of this, it’s a play, right? A strategy. The Baron… he’s not a stupid man. The violence, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but he planned it to an extent. He anticipated Mauer or Fray coming for him, or coming for a cluster of nobles. The firstborn would or will be a distraction… and what does he do?”

  “You’ve said it before. He retreats to Richmond House.”

  I turned, looking past the houses at the forest, and at the expansive manor that peeked through the trees.

  “And remains disconnected? What does he do when and if the soldiers can’t ge
t things back in control? He’d want to hop in a wagon and make his way down to greet the other nobles, and he wouldn’t be able to, not gracefully. That far away, he’d be too slow to move and react. Does he really want to look that weak? That out of control?”

  Power and control. The nobles have the power and can never have enough control.

  “He’s here,” Mary said. “He made it look like he was going to Richmond House, which anyone would expect, and then he doubled back.”

  “Not here, but close,” I said. “I think I know where.”

  I looked past the tops of houses and buildings, to the spire of the godless church.

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  In Sheep’s Clothing—10.17

  My grip on Lainie’s wrist was so tight that when she crashed to the ground, I could see the imprint of my hand, distinct and white, the skin around the finger-marks crimson. I’d been pulling her along so we could get to the church as quickly as possible, and she’d hit her limit, stumbling, then being pulled down to the road, skinning her knees through her stockings.

  Ahead of us, Mary and Chance remained where they were, looking back.

  “Lainie?” Chance asked.

  I looked from Lainie to the end of the street. The largest church hadn’t been far from the train station. That little detail mattered.

  I was tense, and all of the emotions I’d been bundling up until now were binding together in that tension. I had to hold back to keep from lashing out at Lainie. I’d studied her as an individual, I’d known that she couldn’t run this far or this fast, that she didn’t have it in her to face the situations we were dragging her through. I knew it wasn’t fair, and I wanted to tear into her and shout her down all the same. I wanted to backhand her and drive some sense into her, or draw the gun and use it to provide incentive.

  There were too many important things hinging on this. We were close and a matter of seconds could make things very, very difficult.

  “Please stand up, Lainie,” I said, and the soft, gentle, almost pleading tone I gave my words was as great a job of acting as I’d ever done.

  “I can’t,” she said, between gasps for breath. The words were almost a mewl. If I hadn’t been expecting words, I might have interpreted it as a whimpering sound. She wouldn’t look up at me.