Twig

by wildbow

  “Stop fidgeting,” Gordon said. “Focus on what you’re doing.”

  I mumbled something that might have approximated ‘don’t tell me what to do’ if I’d actually bothered to form it into actual words.

  “Hm?” Jamie asked.

  I shook my head, remaining silent, and he let it go, letting his head rest against the armchair’s back again.

  My left hand, no longer occupied with holding the skin together continued to toy with the spare needles, despite Gordon’s commentary. I rolled them over and around my fingers, three needles at three separate points, so they moved around the tops of my fingers, over the edge, and around the underside, only periodically using my thumb to adjust one of the ones on the underside.

  Push the bent needle through, let go of it with the tweezers, grab the pointy end, pull it through, remove the slack in the thread. Minimize the blood and be aware of the adjustments and clamping that cause more blood to flow, as we’re assuming this is nourished by blood. Clean, repeat.

  “If the cutting doesn’t work, we could use fire,” Evette said, as she watched over my shoulders. In my peripheral vision, her expression was distorted, much as if I was looking through a fishbowl. Eyes large, hair in a braid over her shoulder, mouth more a slit across her face than a human mouth with lips. I could imagine her leaning on me too hard, invading personal space because she was socially awkward, or because the medical work, no matter how trivial, drew her in.

  That thought made me think about how the other Lambs might have changed to accommodate her. Gordon was the doer, while Evette was the one who held back, waiting in the background, looking for her opportunity to strike, or analyzing the enemy and the situation for a weakness she could amend with her particular distillation of Academy science. He would have taken a more forward, adventurous position, I suspected, if he’d had Evette instead of me. I wondered if, like Gordon had been warm on the surface, with that bastard buried within, only revealed on rare occasions, Evette would be the bastard on the surface, with a kernel of warmth deep within?

  “Burn the red spots with cigarettes?” she suggested. “A cigar?”

  Fire is the go-to answer. A decade ago, it would have worked. Fire scares warbeasts, it scared stitched and burned them like they’re tinder. But things move forward.

  “Cold then,” Evette said. “If it’s a living thing, it won’t like the cold. Acid? Or… what about a voltaic charge? Shock to the system. Hit all of it at once.”

  Maybe.

  I finished stitching, and tied it off. I flourished, dropping the tweezers, needle, thread, and the washcloth I’d had across my lap on the table.

  “You got a lot faster,” Gerald said. “You did almost all of that with one hand, didn’t you?”

  “Were you bored, Sy?” Jamie asked. His eyes were still shut. “I saw you playing with the needles.”

  “More like if my mind was fully occupied on the task, it would have been too much,” I said.

  “Uh huh.”

  I got the cloth. I was careful to pour out the water from the pitcher I’d started using, instead of simply swishing it within and contaminating that water. I began wiping away trace amounts of blood.

  There were countless little moments where I wiped, and the crimson stain remained, and I was certain it was another blotch. Then another cloth, another wipe, and it was erased.

  I rolled up his pants legs further, checked, and found nothing. I examined his feet next, searching for spots. I used the tools to nudge his feet and toes this way and that and see the different angles.

  “Shit,” I said, with feeling.

  I saw Jamie tense up.

  I ran one hand through my hair, and then reached over for the tweezers.

  “No,” Jamie said. “I’m done. If there’s more to do, we’ll use another method, but we’ve got to leave before Dog or Catcher get their feet under them and smell the blood.”

  “Just one,” I said, staring at Jamie’s foot.

  “No. Damn it.”

  “Is that damn it aimed at me?” I asked. “Or the situation, or…”

  Jamie’s head hung. It looked like he’d been wrung out and left to dry. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead and some of it had fallen down onto his glasses. His hair was clinging together in strands from the sweat, by his temples, around his face, and where it brushed against his shoulders.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”

  I used the tweezers. He jumped like I’d stabbed him as they brushed his toes.

  “You’ve got lint between your toes, Jamie,” I said, holding up my trophy. “You should really take better care of your hygiene. Wear fresher socks, wash those feet.”

  “Sylvester…” Jamie said, trailing off, at an apparent loss for words.

  I grinned, so that the feeling of gall would only leave him more speechless.

  “You’re such a dick,” Lillian said.

  But I’m a dick who squeezed a sentence out of you, I retorted to the imaginary Lillian, before banishing the imaginary Lambs.

  “…I really recommend leaving me tied up,” Jamie said.

  I continued to grin.

  He sounded haggard. “Just run. Put as much distance between yourself and me as possible, because I’m going to find you and I’m going to hold you face down in a puddle. Then I’m going to use what little Academy knowledge I have to invent new torments to inflict on you, until you might actually feel sorry for the first time in your life.”

  My mind immediately went looking for a retort or a witty comment, and then stumbled headlong into one of my biggest regrets. My last real conversation with the old Jamie.

  The smile dropped off my face. I turned to Jamie’s bindings and undid them.

  “You’ll feel sorry you exist,” Jamie said.

  “There’s an edge of delirium to your voice. Did the painkillers work?” I asked, hoping to change the subject, forcing my attitude to change by upping the ante a touch, teasing Jamie some more.

  “The painkillers didn’t do a damned thing.”

  “You’re surly, too,” I said.

  “I’m sore,” Jamie said, as I released the bindings around his upper body. “And now we get to see if I can actually walk like this.”

  “I’d give you a hand, but I think I’m contaminated,” I said.

  “You’ve been contaminated all your damn life, you little wart,” Jamie said, as he used the chair arm to stand up.

  “You’re really surly,” I said.

  He nodded, testing his balance. He winced as he set his foot down. He huffed out a breath, then at the tail end, it became something like a chuckle. I saw a glimmer of a smile. “Seriously, Sy. That was too much.”

  I thought about apologizing, but I could see how much closer this had managed to drag him back from wherever he’d been. I made the impulse decision to double down.

  “Boo hoo,” I said. “Poor Jamie, getting impromptu surgery from a helpful friend who doesn’t know jack dick about this stuff. So very difficult!”

  “Jack dick?”

  “What about me, Jamie? What about my feelings, how stressed I feel? Huh? My hand is cramping up.”

  “I would hit you, Sylvester, but on the off chance that you’ve got any spores, seeds, virus, or whatever it is on you, I’m going to wait until another time. I’ll get you back for all of this. I guarantee it. I don’t forget.”

  “Alright,” I said.

  “You won’t know when to expect it.”

  “I get a lot of those threats. When people start acting on them, it’s probably going to be all at once, and I’ll be utterly doomed.”

  “Doomed is a good word,” he said.

  I swept up the satchel of explosives as I passed it and slung it over a shoulder. I headed over to Gerald. “Lemme see yours?”

  Gerald helped me peel away the bandages Jamie had applied, allowing me to minimize how much I touched him.

  No spots.

  “There’s food here, there’s water. Keep the doors and windows clo
sed,” I told him. “You’re probably better off not following us.”

  “Alright,” he said. He drew in a breath, hesitating, then ventured, “Thank you.”

  I blinked.

  “I’m better off than I was,” he said. “I owe that to you. I don’t know what I’m going to do, without—”

  He shook his head.

  “Give me your name and address,” I said, before he could fall too far into that same despair I’d glimpsed earlier.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head.

  “No?”

  “I don’t need anything more. I want to put this behind me.”

  “If you’re sure.”

  Gerald nodded.

  “Alright,” I said. I saw Jamie picking up the other satchel, stepped over to him and snatched it away. I pulled it over my head as well.

  “Greedy,” he said. “Harold. I did what I could, using the knowledge I have. There’s a drainage tube in there—”

  Harold? Right. Whatever. I blocked out the medical speak as I headed to the window, doing what I could to see that the coast was clear.

  Jamie limped with both legs, a very staggered sort of motion that made me feel like he was going to topple over at the slightest provocation. He moved up beside me, joining me in looking out the window, then turned his attention to the closet by the door. He fiddled around inside until he’d found a sturdy umbrella with a J-shaped handle. He leaned on it experimentally.

  “Dapper,” I said.

  “Mm. I just had very vivid mental images of smacking you with this,” he said. He raised it up and slapped it against one palm.

  “Plural?”

  “Don’t ask, and I won’t feel compelled to demonstrate.”

  “So cranky. You are the crankiest patient. Have you always been this way?”

  “I don’t throw myself headlong into danger in the same way you do, Sy, and I haven’t had you as a doctor in any capacity, which is a definite factor.”

  “Ouch!”

  I pushed the door open enough to look, then made my way out into the rain.

  The canal had, choked with wood and rain both, overflowed. Where it spilled out into the street, the builder’s wood was growing rampant. Tendrils of it spread out, weaving its way through cobblestones. Here and there, it found room to set down roots and raise itself up as a twist of wood.

  I was very conscious of how I couldn’t or shouldn’t touch Jamie. Now the wall growths were extending out, with a gentle sloping curve as the road at the canal’s edge blurring into the high wall. Bounty hunters were presumably patrolling the area, looking for some trace of us.

  Now we were slowed down. Paths I would confidently take before, knowing we could duck around a corner or take some cover at one point or another were now longer stretches of no man’s land, where if we hobbled our way to the halfway point and an enemy showed up, there was no guarantee we could hide or escape fast enough.

  I stared up at the wall. Thirty feet high, with a light tumble of thin branches up at the top, brittle enough to break away as others pushed their way up. The long, thin branches formed a loose carpet at the base of the wall, and wood had grown around clusters of them, crushing them as it had expanded.

  Claustrophobic. The city had sprawled so easily and comfortably, before, and now it confined.

  “We’ll use explosives to blow through,” I said. I looked around. “But not here.”

  “No?”

  I pointed further down the same wall. “I led them that way, and that’s also the same general area where I put the traps, so they might still be around there. There’s a good chance they would have tried to make it past the wall to the other side to follow us. If we go to the far side, we might find them thereabouts.”

  “They might be hereabouts.”

  I nodded. “We’ll go the other way. Hopefully we put some distance between ourselves and them, either way.”

  We headed back the way we’d come. Jamie limped, using the umbrella not to shield against the rain, but as a walking stick.

  We slowed as we approached a body.

  It was a woman, sprawled out on the road. She’d been lying there long enough for the wood from the growing wall to creep out to the cobblestones and make its initial forays into crawling over her.

  She was infected. Veins all across her head and the exposed flesh of her hands, back, and ankle stood out as if they were each a pencil’s width in diameter, at the very least. Here and there, they had erupted, and growths that looked very much like veins crawled out and beyond, too red in the gloom. They’d crawled under clothing while the wood had crawled over it, growths extended out and then re-rooted themselves to anchor, and they reached and grasped for aspects of the environment, gripping both cobblestone and the growing branches. A full quarter of her body was covered in the ivy-like growths.

  I could see the parts of the growth that were going to become flowers. Bulbous, red, with striations.

  Her head didn’t move as I walked ahead of Jamie, approaching until my feet were a short distance from her face. She made no sound except for the light rasp of her breathing.

  I lowered myself down until I could see her face, lying in a puddle. I moved my hand, and her eyes tracked the movement.

  The growth, too, moved in response. Not much, but I could see how it jerked and twitched in a way that had nothing to do with the woman’s movements or the weather.

  I pulled my hand back, then pulled my sleeve over it. I tried again.

  Far less of a response.

  Reaching into my pocket, I found a Crown bank-note. Hand still in my sleeve, I waved it in the vicinity of the growth, and saw the twitching movement again.

  “Responds to contrasts of light and dark,” I said, my voice soft.

  “Something to keep in mind,” Jamie said.

  I nodded. I looked down at the woman, and my thumb reached for the ring at my finger, fiddling with it for a second.

  “Ma’am, can you speak?” I ventured.

  I heard only the raspy breath.

  “If not, then I need you to blink for me if you can.”

  Slowly and deliberately, she closed one eyelid. The other couldn’t close completely because of a the vinelike growth at the other lower eyelid.

  “Okay,” I said. “I wish I could help you, but there’s nothing I can do for you right now. I can’t give you much, but if you want to make a choice…”

  Again, the slow, deliberate three-quarter blink. Not quite a wink, not a blink either. Halfway between the two.

  “There’s a chance the Academy will come. It’s not a great chance, I won’t lie to you. But there’s a chance. If you want to try waiting, if you want to take any shot you have at living, I can leave you. Maybe help you get to a position where you won’t drown in a puddle.”

  I waited, watching for another response.

  “Or I can end this,” I said. “If that’s what you want, I’m uniquely suited to give that to you. I can make it pretty painless, quick, and I won’t have any regrets. I can kill strangers without being bothered by it, if I want.”

  The look on her face was a searching one, long and drawn out. She blinked.

  “That’s a yes?”

  A blink.

  I rose to my feet. I checked there was no trouble incoming, and drew my knife, walking around behind her head, out of sight. I bent down, and carefully reached between the crimson growths to brush her hair away from the nape of her neck.

  I brushed her hair with my fingertips, best as I could, until everything was as tidy as I could manage. I hoped it qualified as a last moment of human contact, because even with my Wyvern-altered mind, I couldn’t think of good words to offer her in her final moments. A part of me suspected that if I’d asked, she would have said to make it quick.

  With that in mind, I did. Using both arms and a fair portion of body weight to help drive things home, I pushed the knife between the base of the skull and the spine, shifted position, and levered the knife to be sure I’d seve
red it.

  The raspy breathing had stopped in the instant I’d pushed the knife in. The brain, with luck, would remain aware for only a few moments. Given the nature of her breathing prior and the surprisingly slow movement of blood from the wound I’d created, I didn’t expect she would persist for much longer than that.

  I wiped the knife off as best as I could on her wet sleeve, then sheathed it. I had to back away as the growth simultaneously drew in closer to the host and reached out further with the extraneous, reaching parts. It was slow enough to move that I had to watch it over seconds to see that movement for sure, but I wasn’t about to play games.

  “Sorry to delay,” I told Jamie.

  He walked around the woman, giving the body and the growth a wide berth, falling in step beside me as we continued on course. “I won’t say I haven’t seen this side of you, but I haven’t seen your peculiar sort of empathy this… distilled? ….Intense?”

  They’re you, I thought. What you almost were. I just think about how you might have ended up, if we’d split up.

  “I think…” I said. “I think I hate whoever did this. I’d think I’d be willing to go after them like we were thinking about going after our targets.”

  “Yeah,” Jamie said.

  “I think this thing, what it’s looking like, it’s cruel, and it’s bad enough that there needs to be rules about it.”

  “Rules? Like quarantine?”

  “Like, if I found Tentacles and Arachne busy administering this kind of mercy to people, I would stand back and let them finish, instead of capitalizing on the opportunity.”

  Jamie nodded. “And you’d hope they would do the same?”

  “If they didn’t, I would change how I handled them. No holding back.”

  “You threw a grenade at them the last time. You just threw really terribly.”

  “I threw fine, he smacked it out of the air,” I said. “And that was me holding back. Obviously.”

  “Obviously,” Jamie said.

  It was painful to have to slow down my pace to allow Jamie to keep up. This was hard. The pressure was too high. Unless we put some distance between us and them, our enemies would find us. We needed to get out of the city. That, in itself, was hard to do.

  I had a sick feeling that the only way out would be the way that the Academy allowed us. That we would have to set up camp somewhere safe enough, and wait out the quarantine measures. We would be pinned down for a month or longer.