Twig

by wildbow

  “I know,” Jamie said.

  “Because of the stitched?”

  “There was something behind her eyes, Sy.”

  “Yeah,” I said. My voice soft. “Yeah. Some of the newer models are more capable, less of the brain cut and burned away.”

  “I won’t ever forget that look—”

  “I know,” I said, quick, cutting him off. “I know. It’s part of the reason I didn’t invite you to come by. Even with that in mind, I didn’t think you’d react that intensely.”

  “She’s a shell, Sy. They tampered with her head, they took her old identity. They emptied her out. But she still has something there, buried there. Maybe it’s trying to surface. Maybe it never will, and that idea’s horrifying. Maybe it will, and that idea is worse.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I have—not nightmares, I sleep too deeply for real nightmares, but it comes to mind, I worry, I think about worst case scenarios. What might happen further down the line. Some of those scenarios look an awful lot like that woman did.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I drew in a deep breath, and stood straighter. “Yeah.”

  Jamie glanced back, in the direction of the shop.

  There wasn’t anything new to see there. It was a little mannerism that I didn’t put my finger on until I actually saw him deviate from it, that Jamie wasn’t one to look back. He didn’t need to validate or double check things.

  “It doesn’t bother you?” he asked.

  “I bent my brain until it didn’t. We needed to pay our way, and it wasn’t smooth sailing, at first. And once I bent my head in the right direction… I guess I really didn’t think too much about it.”

  “Except you knew it would bother me.”

  “Yeah. I think I knew it bothered me,” I said. I thumbed at the ring at my finger.

  Jamie nodded.

  “You’re not going to be able to put this behind you,” I said. “Let it go? No, that’s the wrong wording, I’m not saying you shou—”

  “I know what you mean,” Jamie said. “No, I can’t put things behind me. I carry them. I don’t let anything go. I can forgive, I can change my mind, when presented with new information, but there’s nothing there I ever want to be able to forgive or change my mind about.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I know what you’re about to do,” he said. “It’s decided, just like that?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I turned around, and walked back to the shop. I pushed the door open, slowly, up until the bell above the door dinged.

  “Hm?” Jer made an inquisitive sound. He was kneeling behind the display, rearranging some pieces. “Simon! Did you forget something?”

  I reached into the messenger bag, grabbed a grenade, and pulled a pin.

  He moved without a moment’s hesitation, dashing for the house.

  He reversed course as I threw the grenade past the open doorway, into the room he’d been heading into, scrambling back so fast that he fell over.

  The explosion was eminently satisfying, to all of the senses, from the smell of smoke to the noise, to the tactile feeling as it cracked and then woofed through the bones of the house and shop. Jewelry and crystal throughout Jer’s shop tinkled.

  That deals with any stitched servants in the kitchen.

  I’d neglected to mention to Jamie that there was more than one. He didn’t need or want to know.

  Jer went for his gun. I went for the next grenade, pulling the pin and lobbing it so it went high. It bounced off of the glass top of the display case, over the counter. I’d expected it to fall into the display case, where it would be harder to grab and throw back. Instead, it landed on the far side, clattering over the floor.

  Jer didn’t aim his gun at me. He only stared, saying something I couldn’t make out, as I backed swiftly away, gaining more speed as I went.

  The explosives we’d left in the hay-lined crate were right beside where the grenade had landed, and the resulting combination made for an explosion was a sight to behold, rolling across the ground floor and partway up through the second floor affecting the neighbor to the right of his house, and taking out at least one of the supports. The entire house buckled in the middle part, creaking, sagging, and threatening to fall. Instead, the fall seemed to be slow but insistent, like the grains of sand through an hourglass.

  I stopped running as I caught up with Jamie, falling in step with him as we walked away from the scene.

  “Thank you,” Jamie said.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Don’t keep things from me, Sy.”

  “I’ll keep a lot of things from you,” I said. I thought of the plurality of haunted stitched. “It’s how I operate.”

  He gave me a very displeased look.

  “But I won’t keep matters of conscience from you,” I said. “I promise.”

  “Thank you,” he said, in a very perfunctory way, apparently satisfied. He glanced back at the building, as clusters of people walked past us to see what had just happened. Some shouted of fire and the need for water.

  Others, I saw, were hanging back. I wondered if any were sick and hiding it.

  “I know I asked for it, but this is going to draw attention. They’ll be right on top of us any second now.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Let ’em come. This is our territory, twice over. We’ve been here for months, getting the lay of the land, and, in my preferred way of doing things, the box is thoroughly shaken.”

  “And we have the means of shaking it further,” Jamie said, patting the messenger bag at his side, his chin raising a notch. He pointed. “This way.”

  Previous Next

  Cut to the Quick—11.7

  Jamie nudged me. His hand moved, gesturing.

  We were being tailed.

  Another gesture.

  By the modified ghost. It had to be the hardest individual to shake. Something with keen enough hearing to have something like echolocation, as fast as a buttered cat down a steep slope.

  If she was one of Percy’s, then she’d survived after Percy had been eliminated, she’d been picked up, modified, trained or readjusted, and given new targets. Made from a child, accelerated growth in a vat, and modified with spines and fine hairs that gave her extraordinary hearing and brain structures that gave her incredible reflexes. She was Mary’s successor, in a way.

  I liked imagining the situation as a test run for Mary. It made it easier to frame in my mind. Except it was Mary, possibly without assistance, and with the enhancements. Mary had promised me that she would never let me get the drop on her, and I believed that she’d try, that the anger would push her to train and to throw herself into her work.

  The scenario was the same. There was virtually no way to get the drop on the ghost. She was talented, came from the same creator’s hand, and she’d changed hands, only to be shaped by an organization.

  “A second Jamie, a second Mary. A second Ashton, now that I think about it. Lillian made a leap sufficient to mark a transformation, too.”

  “Hm?” Jamie asked.

  “Just thinking out loud,” I said. “The Lambs keep on leaving versions of themselves behind, or pushing versions of themselves forward. Or… something. Abstract thought.”

  I gestured. Close?

  He made a gesture in a fairly lax, lazy way.

  She was tailing us at a distance, it seemed.

  “Helen?” Jamie asked.

  “Not Helen,” I said. “Not Gordon either, unless you count Hubris.”

  “I’d count Hubris.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But it doesn’t really… hm.”

  “Hm?”

  “Trying to put it into words. Lillian transforming herself, actually becoming a Lamb, the viable Ashton after the aborted first try, then you, and even Mary being inspiration for the Ghosts, in a way… it feels like it’s pushing out, reaching further. But Hubris didn’t feel like that reach. He stayed so close to Gordon and died so soon after Gordon did. Maybe this is why I was so
bothered by Hubris’ death, at the time?”

  “Maybe,” Jamie said. “We had a remnant, and then we lost that remnant of Gordon.”

  “Gordon would have come with me,” I said. “With us.”

  “I think he would’ve.”

  “He wanted to leave with Fray, back when we first met her. I think I convinced him not to? My memories of that period are fuzzy, but I think back and I feel guilty.”

  “I think if you were going to force his hand, you would have. It’s how you operate. You would have told the rest of the group sooner, when it mattered, forced him to choose and manipulated him to stay. Based on the pieces the old Jamie put together, it seemed very much like you let him make his own decision.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But then why do I feel rotten about it?”

  “Because you let him make his own decision?” Jamie suggested.

  Another gesture.

  Closer.

  She was making her approach. That said a lot about her goals. She would lash out, and we wouldn’t know exactly what she could do with those modified hands until she had them on us.

  Dangerous package.

  I needed ways to immobilize her. I didn’t want to kill her, but I would if I had to.

  Putting her in the water? Something to do with the landscape? I imagined shutting her in a room with two locked doors. I couldn’t think of anything resembling that.

  I moved my hand along the side of the messenger bag, considering the options there.

  “Pretty extreme,” Jamie commented. He’d seen my hand move. “You don’t want to put that on yourself.”

  Noise. Light. Smoke. Anger, aggressive, us.

  Yeah. If we blew one up, then they’d come after us hard, Catcher’s request be damned. With a ‘dead or alive’ noted beside my name, that was a bad end result. We might remove the ghost, emphasis on might, but the rest would come after us hard.

  I indicated an alleyway.

  No run building, Jamie gestured.

  “What?” I asked, out loud.

  Death. He gestured. Building. We trap we.

  I grabbed his arm, hauling him along through a tunnel that ran between buildings. It opened out into a triangular space between three buildings, open to the sky. One of the three sides had the tunnel we’d just passed through, a second had a tunnel leading elsewhere, and the third had what looked like a now-disused trough, which had some filthy rainwater in it that was taking its time to thaw out. There was likely only ever direct sunlight in this area when it was noon or nearly noon, and that had been an hour ago or so. The fixtures suggested that this had been used as a place to park horses or keep a pet outside.

  I pointed at the window that looked from one of the buildings to the triangular space. “Need a minute,” I said.

  I reached into my satchel. Already, I was running through most of what I’d packed into it. I’d used two grenades for Jer, and this time, I was using a mine. I turned it over in my hands, investigating it.

  “I don’t know if you caught what I said earlier, but this is a little over the top,” Jamie observed. He dutifully scratched at the glass with the edge of a knife, over and over.

  “Nah,” I said. Looks like it’s based around a cord. I just need to figure out how to use it for something else, without setting it off in my hands.

  Words had been etched into the outer rim, with directional arrows, as part of the casting process. They’d been worn down, however. Weather, maybe.

  Craftsmanship, from the American side, during the war for the Crown States. More focus on machinery and innovation than on the biology side of things. Neatly labeled so the soldiers knew exactly what to do while they were tampering.

  Turn to remove.

  Flip over the bar on the top to arm.

  I raised it up to my face, smelling it. It smelled faintly of earth. With a gentle shake, I couldn’t hear anything rattle.

  Alright then. I tried to turn the top, and found it didn’t budge. I investigated the join, and found it packed with old dirt. Dirt that had been there so long it had practically become a part of the thing.

  “Sy?” Jamie asked, as I shifted my grip on the thing.

  “Minor snag,” I said.

  I kept my thumb over the switch to keep it from flipping over, then banged the side of the mine against the nearest wall.

  “Sy!” Jamie said, alarmed. “What are you thinking!?”

  “All good,” I said.

  “It’s not good at all!”

  I’d cracked the packed earth. I drew my knife out of my boot and wedged it into the crack, and jiggled it along the rim, two seconds of work to remove the worst of the packed earth.

  I worked to turn it until my fingers and wrist hurt. Finally, it made a horrible grinding sound, with coarse dirt getting ground between the two halves as it unscrewed.

  Glancing down the length of the alley, I saw the ghost. She moved with a kind of uncertainty.

  Are you learning how to function without your sisters? I thought.

  This is something pretty new, hearing the sound, having to resist your instincts, being almost blind…

  “She’s coming,” I said. “Go, move fast.”

  Jamie did. We headed into the second tunnel. A dark space, with debris and junk stacked along one side of it, leaving only enough space to squeeze by.

  Jamie collected an empty picture frame from the top of a pile.

  “Go,” I said.

  “I don’t know if you got my hand signal, but—”

  “Go!” I said.

  He left me behind.

  No cloth, which made my job harder. I pulled off my jacket, watching as the ghost appeared at the end of the tunnel, standing in the space with the trough.

  I looked back. Jamie stood at the end of the tunnel, knife and glass in hand. He was working it while I surveyed the situation and prepared.

  Good.

  I pulled the rubbish down, bringing it down into the space, leaving bags of bundled branches, garden tools, and some old construction materials littering the tunnel floor. With the dust that went up, I could no longer see her, and she could no longer see me. Perfect.

  Two garden tools with long handles, a broom and then the mine. I made the necessary adjustment to the mine, snatching up a nail for extra effect, and then set it down, with the cloth partially covering it, using the sleeves to bind the garden tools together, resting them on top.

  “Sy,” Jamie said. “I think this is a bad idea.”

  “Just slightly,” I said. A plank would have been so much better.

  She was making her way over the rubble, now, barely a sound as she adjusted herself.

  “It’s not that I don’t trust you, Sy, but I don’t really trust your brain when it counts. Enclosed space, explosives—”

  I continued to back away until I bumped into him.

  “Oh,” I said. I took in our immediate surroundings. “That’s what you meant. Dead end.”

  Jamie’s voice was tense. “Of all the times to get the hand signals wrong, Sy, you do it now? I thought you knew what you were doing, so I went with it.”

  The dust cleared, and we could see the ghost, perched at the highest point of the fallen rubbish.

  “You didn’t sound all that confident,” I commented.

  The tunnel didn’t actually have a proper destination. Just around the corner to our right were two steps leading up to a door. There was a railing, but the space was little more than a balcony that overlooked one of the city’s canals.

  We were ten feet from the ghost, with nowhere to go.

  Jamie continued to scratch the glass, and the ghost remained where she was, surveying the situation with a hundred times the care she might otherwise have used.

  She was lighter than normal people were. She thrust herself forward, off of the rubbish, one foot extending down to safe ground, clear of rubbish.

  In that instant, I moved, raising my hand.

  She moved as if she’d predicted my movement. With the
way the ghost’s heads worked, it wouldn’t have been a surprise if she considered an attack every tenth of a second, and the movements she’d need to make. A push against the wall, a movement to the opposite side of the narrow tunnel.

  One of her feet came down on the tool I’d laid forward of the mine. It pressed down on the mine, and the nail came loose, flying out to ping against the wall. Jamie and I both flinched, our hands going up to protect our faces. Jamie stopped scratching the glass in that same moment.

  “Don’t move,” I told the Ghost. “You’re standing on a mine. Your weight has pressed it down and closed the connections. If you move your weight off of the mine, then you’ll blow yourself and us into a messy, bloody pulp.”

  She didn’t move her head, but I imagined she was screaming the silent echolocation scream that let her identify her surroundings, down to the materials things were made of.

  “In long and in short,” I said. “You’re in checkmate.”

  Her expression didn’t change. Wind blew through the tunnel, and her blonde hair moved. I had a glimpse of her hands, thicker, with scar tissue down to the elbow, and metal and glass at the hands themselves. Through the glass, I could see yellow-tinted fluid, almost like urine.

  No guarantees, but past experience told me that was something voltaic, the same technology that lit up whole segments of Tynewear in the evening.

  One of those altered hands moved, resting against the wall, securing her balance. Then the other came up.

  She gestured, slowly, with the metal and glass hand.

  I cold you. Big man voice.

  “Right,” I said. I felt silly now, using the gestures to communicate with Jamie. We’d taught Catcher the fool gestures. He, in turn, had taught the recruited ghost some words.

  Not that what she was saying made much sense at all to me. I could understand the words, and I expected most were accurate, but I didn’t get how her head worked, and a lot of the gestures’ interpretation was based on precedent and experience.

  “Winter?” Jamie asked. “I don’t think that’s right.”

  She shook her head. Her gesturing hand moved, very slowly, toward her wrist. She seized it hard.