Twig

by wildbow

  I winced.

  I’d been that reality, toward that end.

  I clenched my fists, resting them on the fence to either side of my rear end.

  “You’re different?” I asked, managing to sound different. “Harder-hearted?”

  “I don’t know,” Jamie said. “I read the texts, saw everything from an almost purely objective standpoint. I could see the naivety, even when I was only months into understanding the world. I didn’t want to be that.”

  I nodded.

  “It’s why I didn’t read the adventure books with the same zeal,” he said. “I avoided fiction. I wanted to focus on living in this world. I focused on being wary, so I wasn’t a tragic farce of repeated mistakes.”

  “That’s why you were so hard on me,” I said.

  “One reason. We’ve talked about some of the others. But I was hard on everyone, everything, in a way. I’m only now learning to relax,” he said. He smiled a little, “To stop, listen to music and have tea.”

  “You wanted,” Catcher cut into the dialogue between Jamie and me, “To avoid heartbreak?”

  “I am heartbreak,” Jamie said. “Every time Sylvester looks at me, I see a glimmer of it. Earlier today, he told me that he might never be able to put it behind him.”

  There was a hint of emotion in that last sentence that I hadn’t expected. Jamie was usually so good at keeping it under wraps.

  Dog gave me a look. It was a good look, if he was trying to make me feel guilty or get me to say something.

  “I don’t want to get your hopes up,” I said.

  “I know,” Jamie said. “I know. But for someone who was so fixated on the future, maybe you’d have better luck if you could let go of the past?”

  Back to the ‘new Jamie’ who had challenged me so bitterly in our first meetings.

  I was going to say something more, but Dog’s head rose from the ground.

  “They’re here?” I asked.

  Dog and Catcher both nodded.

  “Alright,” I said. I kicked Jamie lightly on the shoulder. “You and me. We’re going to finish this conversation.”

  “If you want to, Sy. I don’t really know what there is to say,” he said.

  He gave my foot a tug, and I dropped from the fence, landing with both feet squarely on the ground. I could see the group approaching now.

  Soldiers, not all that many, and the mercenaries working with Dog and Catcher.

  The blonde woman we’d seen earlier was wearing someone else’s coat, shivering. Something about her seemed eerily familiar. Her augmentations and alterations were crude. Back-alley. Candida’s had been mishmash, once, but these were bottom-of-the-barrel.

  I could make out the Bruno, as well as a second Bruno with a heavy gun that looked like it could take down elephants or elephantine warbeasts. There was a man with treated skin that looked permanently charred and a fuel tank at his back, and another woman that looked fairly ordinary.

  The soldiers drew their guns as they approached Dog, Catcher, Jamie and me. I felt my heart skip a beat. That ‘dead or alive’ request. I could so easily be a ‘dead’.

  “There’s no need for that,” Catcher said. “They’re being cooperative.”

  The guns didn’t waver. As the soldiers drew nearer, it became clear who the guns were aimed at.

  Dog huffed out a noise of annoyance and confusion. Soldiers tensed and shifted their grips on their guns.

  “What’s this?” Catcher asked, now that a full third of the guns present were aimed in his direction.

  The Bruno with the gun held up a paper. It was the same big piece that I’d given Jamie. The same paper Jamie had left behind in the bakery.

  On that paper, replicated with care, were Dog and Catcher’s faces, a ‘Wanted: Alive’ message in nice bold letters, and a description of the pair. The number for the order, the signature of the man in charge who’d given the order, even the terminology, it was on point.

  Catcher turned his head to look at me.

  “Your fellows have explained the situation as they understand it,” the head soldier spoke. “This goes easiest if you cooperate.”

  Dog huffed out a noise. Catcher swatted Dog on the nose with his mancatcher.

  “We’ll cooperate. It doesn’t change the outcome in the end. Hand the Lambs off to the other mercenaries and they’ll handle the remainder.”

  A very unimpressed looking Bruno, still the one with the gun, tapped the poster, middle paragraph. Catcher was too far away to read, but the implication was clear.

  The police officer simply recited from the paragraph, “A habit of choosing children as quarry, under the guise of—”

  “I get it,” Catcher said.

  “Good. We’re going to take you in. All of you. The moment we’re able, we’ll reach out to the Capitol and ask about the warrant numbers. We’ll see which of the warrants are real. We’ll devote the resources we can to handling this situation, keeping what their alleged poster is saying in mind.”

  Catcher seemed to get just a little bit angrier with every realization. “And I am assuming the phones we would need to use to reach the capitol are busy, given the quarantine? And that the resources you have are limited at best?”

  “It will only be a few hours at most,” the captain said. “The rest of your papers seemed to pass muster, this is just a formality.”

  Dog growled.

  “A formality they arranged from start to finish,” Catcher said.

  “I won’t deny the strong possibility. If I were more sure, I might shoot the black-haired one.”

  “I’d be tempted to encourage you to,” Catcher said.

  No hard feelings, you said, I thought to myself.

  “We’ll cooperate,” Catcher said, growling the words, while giving me and Jamie a dark look. “But I have a favor to ask, first. It costs you nothing.”

  ☙

  The cell door slammed.

  So far, things were going according to plan. They’d even put Jamie and me together in the same cell.

  With the quarantine in effect, the number of soldiers was thin. The bulk of the men in uniform were out there, guarding bridges and controlling the flow of traffic around the city. Here in the jailhouse, where only a dozen cells were arranged along a long hallway, there were only a few guards.

  Catcher, with his natural strength, could have bent the bars and walked out. But he was working alongside the Academy, and that would be a sensitive deal.

  No, even with his strength, there were good chances that there were measures in place, or it would draw undue attention.

  The simple fact of the matter, the crux of the plan I’d worked out with Jamie, was that if we got arrested alongside Dog and Catcher, I was fairly certain I could get out of the cell more easily than they could get out of whatever was devised for them. Dog would be in some special holding cell far, far away from us. The fact that they would need and want to reunite would buy us even more time.

  The contract with the Academy was just one more barrier keeping them inside their cells.

  But Catcher had managed one last laugh. He, given the nature of what he did, carried restraints.

  He’d had every single damned set of them placed on Jamie and me. Our arms were bound behind our backs, and restraints of various sizes and shapes. Even the fingers of my right hand were bound, with thimble-like caps over the ends. The weights likely totaled twenty-five pounds in all.

  I opened my mouth, and used my tongue to lift the lockpick free of the gap between gums and cheek. Shortly after, I had the second pick out. I spit them out onto the cot, and then sat down on the bed, to pick them up with my one hand.

  “This is going to be a chore,” Jamie murmured, as I worked the thinner pick into the lock that wrapped around my right hand. “Looks like a three-pin cylinder. Move closer to me, I’ll try to hold the cylinder so it doesn’t rotate as you pick it.”

  “How amusing,” Catcher said, in the least amused tone I’d heard from him today, his vo
ice echoing to us from the far end of the hallway. “I told myself the same thing, when I realized it was you two I was chasing down. This is going to be a chore.”

  “You don’t sound very surprised at this,” I said.

  “I knew something was up with that lunch,” Catcher said.

  “The lunch had nothing to do with it,” I said, my voice raised. “If you hadn’t eaten with us, it still would have turned out pretty much the same. I wouldn’t punish you for—”

  “Shut up!” someone screamed, interrupting.

  “You shut up!” Catcher bellowed, loud and with a monstrous voice.

  There was no retort.

  Our old friend was in a bad mood, it seemed.

  “I wouldn’t punish you for playing fair with us,” I said. “Sets a bad precedent if we’re—”

  I felt the lock click. I freed my hand.

  “If we’re going to cross paths a few more times.”

  “Ah, so you know,” Catcher said. “They will let me out of here. They will release Dog. We will find you, Sylvester. We don’t let our quarry go.”

  Jamie muttered, “I’ll be so happy if a day ever comes where someone doesn’t remind me of something I already know. Do my wrists next? These wire cuffs are digging in something fierce.”

  Getting my hands to the right place to work the lock was hard. I had to turn my back to Jamie and bend over. I leaned over with my forehead against the bars for balance.

  “That one,” Jamie confirmed.

  It had to be five pins. Such a chore. At least I could pry the lock as I worked the pins.

  One pin, two pins… three…

  The fourth took some doing.

  The fifth, too, ended up being difficult. Just when I thought I might get it, I heard footsteps.

  I aborted, and changed position. We waited patiently as the lone guard made his rounds, checking on every cell.

  He stopped at the end of the hallway, and I could hear Catcher talking.

  I was straining to listen, and trying to decide if I needed to put the hand-restraint back on, when Jamie nudged me. It felt weird, the elbow against my arm. Jamie wasn’t normally one for physical contact. When he did allow it, he was always very measured about it.

  I looked where he was indicating, and I saw.

  In the cell to the left of the one that sat opposite ours, a man lay on his cot. He was breathing very quickly, and he was spasming periodically.

  Between his sleeve and the glove he wore, I could see the marks. As though a hand had touched him and burned him, with blotches the size of a fingerprint or a random portion of a handprint. The mark was so red it looked like he was openly bleeding.

  Calling for quarantine or attention to the problem was risky. The guard was going to finish his route, passing down the other side of the hall, and he was going to see. Things were going to go downhill from there. It could so very easily see us sealed up inside here for good.

  Jamie and I didn’t even need to communicate. He turned his back to me so I had access to his wrists, and I started working on his locks.

  Previous Next

  Cut to the Quick—11.5

  “He modified the Smythe Bullard,” I said, under my breath, “He filed down the seam.”

  “Catcher likes to fiddle with his gadgets.”

  “It’s my go-to practice lock when I’m re-learning and I can’t get it.”

  “You can’t get it because it’s your go-to,” Jamie said. “Muscle memory. I run into snags like that, things that should feel natural that catch me every time.”

  “So I should forget? If I had a fresh dose of Wyvern, I might be able to, but—”

  “Keep at it,” Jamie said.

  Five locks down, six if I included the hand-lock Catcher had placed on my left hand. I was almost done freeing Jamie.

  On my sixth attempt, probably owing to the fact that my previous attempts had scratched a faint groove in the tin of the lock, I was able to get that hair of traction I needed to get the lock to start rotating.

  I turned around to check the next lock—the cuffs were like manacles, attached to his upper arms, with a bar running between them instead of a chain. I’d seen it as Catcher had pulled it out of his jacket. The lock was more about strength and having a configuration that could be neatly packaged together than it was about being fancy or hard to crack. I shut my eyes, and did it by feel. Three pins to lift. Nothing complicating my attempts.

  I could hear the guard making his way down the hall. He didn’t even have the courtesy to walk slowly.

  “Got you,” I said, gripping the bar so it didn’t fall apart and clatter to the ground.

  “Give me the picks,” he said. I took a second to put the lock down. Before I’d even set it on the bed, Jamie had snatched it from my hand. He grabbed for the picks. “Hurry.”

  “Hurry, you say, like I haven’t been,” I griped.

  “The fellow across the hall is getting worse, fast enough that I can tell,” Jamie said, under his breath. He removed the first lock at my wrists, then tugged the next lock down.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I can remember what those welts looked like when I last saw them, and I can look at them now—” Jamie said, pausing as he looked over my shoulder, picks still working at the locks. “They’ve spread. More spots, old spots are bigger, and there are dark centers to the biggest ones.”

  “Right,” I said.

  Jamie removed the second lock. The clatter momentarily drowned out the guard’s footsteps.

  “Damn,” I said, quiet. “Did he put all of the easy ones on me? Is this like the barber with the bad haircut?”

  “No complicated ones so far,” Jamie said, his voice a hush. “Same ideas apply to most. Moment I run into one with an unfamiliar concept, though, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  I heard a sudden shout, then a string of cuss-words.

  “It hurts,” the sick man mewled the words. I leaned forward to see better, only for Jamie to jerk me back in his direction and continue picking. The guard was a matter of six steps from our location.

  Jamie very quickly and quietly removed the cuffs he’d been picking.

  “Stand back and away from the bars! Move! Now stay there!”

  There was an edge of panic to the man’s voice.

  The guard strode past us, straight for the door, not even looking our way. I shut my eyes and shook my head.

  We hadn’t been fast enough. Now things got harder.

  “I’m stuck,” Jamie said. “There’s a lock I don’t know how to crack. I try to apply tension and it just rotates. I think I have to have it at a specific rotation with specific pin placement?”

  “I dealt with one of those. Do a full rotation, tap the first pin as you go around, see if you can find the space it’s supposed to go into. Once you get it, hold it as steady as—”

  “I already did the full rotation.”

  “Then do the second pin. The tallest pin will end up being the one that works,” I said.

  “The rotating cylinder is sitting inside another cylinder. It might be that both cylinders have to be at the right rotation?”

  “What?” I asked. I tried to twist my head around to see. “How the hell does that work?”

  “I don’t know!” Jamie said. “And hold still! I’m checking and I think there are a few false notches to catch the pin.”

  Catcher’s gravelly voice came from the other end of the hallway. “Having fun?”

  “He can hear us,” I said, speaking quieter.

  “I can, Sylvester,” Catcher said. He sounded smug.

  “You’re a butt, Catcher!”

  “I had those custom made, you know,” he said. “Call me names all you want, Sy. You’ll still have your hands bound behind your back until I hand over the keys.”

  Keys. Plural.

  I glanced at Jamie.

  “There’s only one slot for a key,” Jamie said. He double checked, moving my arms this way and that.
>
  “Cylinder nestled in one cylinder… one key nestled in another key? Mechanical key, changes form as the other key slides in. A wedge shape, or—”

  “Got it in one, Sylvester,” Catcher taunted me.

  I knew what the problem was, and I knew just how unlikely it was for Jamie to figure out a way to pick the lock. Alone, at least.

  “Do me a favor,’ I said. “Help me get a good look at the thing? I might be able to get my thumb around and hold something or jiggle something.”

  Jamie slid the cuffs as far down my wrists as they would go. They’d been around the thickest part of my forearm, and now sat around my wrists and a portion of my hands. Jamie held the cuffs still while I contorted my shoulders, striving to see around behind me to the cuffs.

  The guard who’d been walking the length of the hallway returned. He carried a stepladder and a sheet that could have been a flag if the dimensions were different. It bore a asclepius symbol in white, snake wound around rod, contained within the belly and head of a red bird that had its wings outstretched. The bird was crowned in red.

  “Quarantine,” Jamie said under his breath.

  “Guard,” Catcher said, his voice carrying. “You should know the boys in the cell behind you are escaping their restraints. They will be out of their cell shortly.”

  The guard turned, giving us a look. Jamie didn’t even bother to hide his lack of restraints. I could see the guard’s expression change. He was young, fresh faced, with eyebrows that had been plucked very neatly. He was handsome, but a very artfully and effortfully put-together sort of handsome. I suspected there were girls out there who very much liked that.

  “I’ll get to it in a minute,” the guard said. He stepped up onto the little ladder and hooked up one corner of the sheet on the wall.

  “Help me!” the man in the cell begged.

  The man ran his hand against the edge of the sheet as he stepped down off the ladder, fixing it to the wall. He then walked to the other side of the cell, then stepped back onto the ladder, hooking up another corner and sealing another side of the sheet.