Twig

by wildbow

  I huffed out a sigh, my eyes meeting Shirley’s. Her expression was almost more afraid, now that the monster was down.

  I recognized why as the Madam lowered the gun and pressed the barrel to my temple.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “The first time we met, what did I tell you?”

  “You told me lots of things, and I barely remember any of them. I don’t have the best memory. The Academy’s fault,” I said.

  “Don’t go out and bring trouble back to my doorstep.”

  “Ah. That. I didn’t take it as being punishable by death.”

  “I’m genuinely debating whether it should be,” she said.

  “I hear you,” I said. “I absolutely get that. I… don’t have an excuse. I had nowhere else to turn.”

  “Mm hmm,” she said.

  I heard her pull the hammer back.

  “They have Jamie,” I said.

  There was a pause, and then she raised the gun, pointing it at the ceiling.

  “I can verify. I wasn’t sure it was anything bad for the boys when I saw it from my window, but I saw it unfold.”

  The Madam looked toward the top of the stairs, at Marv, who’d just spoken. Now, of all times, as half the house was gathered in the immediate vicinity of the front entrance and the foyer, around me and a dead monster, he was smoking a clove cigarette. He also carried a large medical kit. I imagined it being very similar to Lillian’s satchel, but far less meant to be lugged around on the regular.

  The Madam simultaneously relaxed and let a look of concern creased her features. “That dear boy,” she said.

  I get a gun to my head and serious consideration about pulling the trigger, and Jamie gets a ‘that dear boy’?

  “I drew her away because otherwise there wouldn’t have been a way to get him back. Like this, there’s a chance. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “But you can get him back?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. But I have to.”

  “Yes you do,” she said.

  “I’ll make this up to you,” I said.

  “Yes you will,” she said.

  “My house. Jamie’s and my house. I can tell you how to loot it, since there’s a good chance we won’t be going back there. You’ll want to avoid the traps, but if you go where I say—”

  “Stop focusing on me,” she said. “Focus on Jamie.”

  Mute, I nodded.

  “While you do that, I’ll fix that scratch,” Marv said. “If you have a spare moment, you can tell me about this plague. I’m dying of curiosity.”

  I nodded. “Minimize contact with me, just to be safe. I think it spreads through the air after it flowers, and by contact before then, and the rain is helping a lot with keeping that down, but…”

  “I’ve got gloves.”

  “I think it forms spines that stick out. I’ve seen the grown form, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the early stage has microscopic spines that transfer? It feels like it would make sense.”

  “Double layer of gloves, then,” Marv said, talking around the cigarette. My eyes watered from the smoke.

  As he approached, setting down the kit and opening it, I looked over at Shirley. “Thank you.”

  She smiled at me.

  “Stupid girl,” the Madam said, as if to balance out my gratitude.

  ☙

  Shirley had wanted to come with me, apparently because the prospect of the plague I’d described and the mortal risk of dealing with murderous bounty hunters seemed like a safer prospect than dealing with the hard-nosed Madam of the brothel.

  I carried the madam’s rifle, and I had a backpack filled with some basic medical supplies that Marv had supplied.

  I chose my route carefully. I didn’t have Jamie by my side, pointing out the optimal routes to avoid catching a bullet. Catching a bullet, like I was catching a cold.

  The city was so dark. It had been badly overcast before with black clouds overhead and heavy rain, but I suspected it was approaching nighttime now, and so there wasn’t even the dull light of the sun striving to fight its way past the cloud cover. Few neighborhoods in the city had the lights on, and the bioluminescent trees hadn’t taken in enough light in the late afternoon, leaving their glow faint enough that it didn’t really penetrate the rain.

  What I could see as I looked out over the city, was the areas where the plague had set root. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see the patches of red here and there. Those particular sorts of growths, near where people might have congregated or been herded. I could see the places, those same sorts of plazas and busy streets where there would have been more traffic, where the cleansing fires had been set.

  Moving from cover to cover, ducking low, moving fast, the hood of a borrowed jacket pulled down to shield my face from the rain, I made my way in the direction Jamie had gone.

  I’d made it some distance before I ran into Dog and Catcher. They’d left their Bruno behind.

  I hesitated before fully revealing myself. No point.

  “I’m surprised you can smell anything in this rain,” I said.

  “We didn’t smell you,” Catcher said. “We heard you. There aren’t many people out and about, and your bag rattles.”

  I nodded. “The fib earlier about the sniper was Jamie’s, by the way. I only realized—”

  I stopped as I saw Catcher shaking his head. Not that a head-shake really worked when so little of his head was visible. I had to go by the movement of his hat more than the movement of anything else.

  “It wasn’t a fib. It’s where he was. Is. Jamie’s there now too. Same tower you pointed out,” Catcher said, in that gravelly voice of his. He tapped the shaft of his mancatcher against the nearest corner, so the head pointed around the corner, indicating the direction of the tower.

  Not a fib? An educated guess on Jamie’s part that had wound up being right?

  “Alright,” I said.

  “We’re going to take you two into custody,” Catcher said. “But I’ll do everything possible to help you help Jamie. Not just because he’s the real target for the bounty, but because I understand how important that is.”

  He did. After everything, a half-dozen lies and ruses and a dozen tricks at his expense, to make the chase as difficult as possible, he was still a decent guy.

  “Thank you,” I said, meaning it.

  Dog made a noise, his usual mangled gibberish.

  “Dog says—”

  “I got it,” I said, interrupting. “I think I actually understood that.”

  Brother, I thought. Echoing me from earlier. We weren’t family in the same way that the Lambs were family, but we were related. ‘Brother’ had felt appropriate in the moment, so soon after working together to give Dog a bite of Arachne, and it was a sentiment that Dog had apparently agreed with.

  It was reassuring on a deep, primal, punch-me-between-the-lungs kind of way to fall back on hand signals when I felt so anxious. We made our way through the city, careful in how we approached the building.

  The last part of the journey was the most sensitive. The closer we got, the less time the bullets would take to reach us, and the harder it became to find cover with the right angle. We had to rely on one building, instead of being able to take a position where we could rely on the houses down one entire street to bar the sniper’s view.

  We took the longest route imaginable to keep out of view as we worked to be able to approach the base of the tower with the eaves of nearby houses shielding us from view. We reached a point half a block away before Dog had to stop where he was.

  “When we signal, you move in,” Catcher said, barely audible.

  Dog made a noise of agreement.

  Catcher and I moved ahead on our own, hugging the wall, ever aware of the sniper’s field of view. There were points where, if he was leaning out of a window, he might have seen us, but there was nothing.

  “You’re sure he’s here?”

  “I can smell them,” Catcher said.

&n
bsp; Them. Plural.

  I stayed where I was, calculating the chance that Catcher was playing me for a fool, leading me into a trap.

  Would he? I couldn’t say he wouldn’t. He was ruthless, and if he decided that outwitting me by forcing me to play along with this was the way to do it, I could see it happening.

  But, contrary to conventional wisdom, I found that the best questions to ask people were ones where I knew the answer. The best moves to make against an opponent were the ones that would constrain their movements, where I already knew how they would move in response.

  I didn’t have many choices or chances to find Jamie that didn’t involve Dog and Catcher.

  I had no choice. My hands were tied. And when it came to Jamie, of all people, there was no way I was abandoning him. I had a debt outstanding.

  I was relying on our old brother experiments of Radham to handle the worst of the confrontation to come. I wasn’t that good a shot, especially when I was out of practice, and there was still Tentacles, Sanguine, and the gun-toting brute to deal with.

  We reached the entrance, and I reached for my now-meager selection of picks. On touching the door, however, I saw it move, and heard it creak.

  My heart leaped at the sound, fearing I’d hear a gunshot to follow it. I didn’t fear the bullets aimed at me as I feared the bullets from within the tower, aimed at someone within the tower. Aimed at Jamie.

  This was a hostage situation. Kind of. I could calculate their willingness to put a bullet in Jamie, and with Sanguine potentially part of the equation, I didn’t like how high that chance got.

  I went first, touching the door and lifting the weight off of the hinges to reduce the sound of it creaking. We went to the stairs, and Catcher and I went up side by side, me with my gun at hand, Catcher with his mancatcher ready in one hand, a throwing weapon in the other.

  We reached the top floor, peeking over, ready to shoot or be shot, then stopped. We ventured up the last few steps, into a room lit by a lone, flickering bulb.

  Sanguine was there, but he didn’t have a weapon in hand. Calm, his bug-eyes half-lidded, he sat in a window, one leg propped up beside him, gun by his foot.

  Toward the center of the room was Jamie, slouched over, hands tied behind him, and Tentacles, who lay on the ground near Jamie’s feet, unmoving, tentacles limp.

  The traitor Bruno sat in a chair at the opposite end of the round room. He had a hand on his gun, and was tense, but he wasn’t moving like he was going to shoot.

  My eye went back to Jamie. I made sure he was still breathing.

  I made note of the faint and small red dots across the exposed skin of his neck and shoulders.

  Sanguine spoke, his voice a purr. “A part of me hoped you wouldn’t come. That I could leave you a note about where to find your friend. Maybe you wouldn’t be able to reach him, because the disease had overtaken this part of the city by the time you got the message. Maybe you would, and you would find him overgrown.”

  I shifted my grip on my gun.

  “I’m done,” he said, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He even managed a smile. “I’m not a threat. You can put your weapon down.”

  I glanced at Catcher, then changed my hold on the gun. Holding it by the middle, rather than holding it like I might shoot it.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “He’s dead,” Sanguine said, indicating Jamie. “The disease got him. I asked Academy people on my way here, and they say they don’t have a cure for it and they won’t soon. You can cut it out, but that gets harder once it sets root, or once it spreads enough. That, there, your friend? It’s spread enough…”

  My heart sank.

  He hopped down from the window. He crossed the room in long, easy strides, one eye on Jamie, one on me. With one ungloved hand, he pulled back Jamie’s shirt. I could see a fresh wound, left open, by Jamie’s collarbone. The growth branched out from there, extending across part of his shoulder.

  “…and it’s already set root.”

  Jamie stirred a little at that. He looked up at me.

  I couldn’t meet his eyes, seeing the look in them.

  Sanguine spoke, “I thought about taking you in, but I weighed the risks, thought about dealing with Dog and Catcher. I thought, too, about how you and your friends killed my teammates.”

  His voice took on a faint, harder, darker edge, but it still maintained the light, jovial nature at its core. As if he was reminiscing to a friend about a very bad day he’d had a decade ago. “The best justice, it seems to me, would be to let you see this yourself. The swift decline, the loss to the plague. Let you struggle to save him if you want to cut into him. Let you watch if you want to watch. End his life yourself, if you want to show mercy.”

  I let the rifle fall from my hand, clattering to the floor.

  “Unless you’d rather I shoot you?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Then I’m satisfied with this. Seeing the look on your face, right now. I’m not one to hold grudges, but I feel like they would want me to. They would want something more like this.”

  He walked back across the room, picked up his gun and a bag that he slung over his shoulder, and then walked toward me. To the stairs.

  I put out a hand to stop him, and he stopped where he was.

  Reaching into a pocket, I found Melancholy’s ring. I held it out for him.

  “Keep it,” he said, giving me a pat on the shoulder. He sounded smug, too satisfied. “With this done, I’m putting all of that behind me.”

  Catcher and I both stepped out of his way as he made his way down the stairs.

  “I could sic Dog on him,” Catcher said under his breath.

  I shook my head. My eyes were on Jamie.

  “I’m sorry,” Catcher said.

  I nodded.

  “If it would make this easier, I could—”

  I shook my head, forcefully, before he could finish the sentence.

  “Yeah,” Catcher said. “I understand that. I’d want to do the deed myself, too.”

  I walked over to Jamie’s side and knelt by him. I took his hand in both of mine.

  I saw Jamie smile a little as he looked at me.

  “There’s no deal without him,” Catcher said. “I’d take you in, but I’m honestly not sure it’s worth the amount of hassle. Wouldn’t seem right, either way. Out of respect for Jamie.”

  I nodded, hunching forward.

  “Next time we meet, we’ll have another lunch. Have a bit of a drink. With no shenanigans.”

  “Yeah,” I managed. My voice was hoarse. I closed my eyes.

  “Do you want me to pass on word to the Lambs? I can—”

  I shook my head. Too forcefully.

  “Alright.”

  He didn’t say anything more. I heard his footsteps retreating down the building.

  “Was a good few months, Sy,” Jamie said, his voice a whisper.

  “People kept asking, kept telling me—” I started.

  “What?”

  “Were you happy? Are you happy?”

  “Was okay,” he said, voice soft. “Wanted to kill you half the time. The other half, I wanted to—”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  Jamie shook his head.

  I became very aware that we weren’t alone in the room. I glanced across the room at the Bruno who remained behind.

  The man had red spots. He looked defeated, though it hadn’t set in nearly as much as it had with Jamie.

  “If it’s okay,” I told Jamie, “can we talk and say our goodbyes while I help him?”

  “You gotta do something about that streak of mercy, Sy,” Jamie said. “Too kind. You’re supposed to be a bastard, don’t you know?”

  I nodded.

  The man tensed as I approached.

  “Shirt off,” I said.

  “Hurts to move,” the man said.

  “Shirt off. What comes next hurts more. But you’re still in the early stages. I can cut out the infection. I’ll ne
ed to dig in my bag for a scalpel, but for now, let’s get the lay of the land, see how bad it is. Near the spine, I think, would be the worst and most important spots to get, given how it sets up and latches on to your internal structure.”

  He kept his guard up, tense. A turncoat, once Dog and Catcher’s ally, then betraying them, he feared betrayal from all corners, even when that fear could cost him precious time.

  “Do you remember our first time meeting?” I asked Jamie, looking away from my patient.

  “Which meeting?” Jamie asked. “Which Jamie?”

  The Bruno finally relented. He unbuttoned his shirt and jacket, and began pulling them off. I could see the massive slabs of muscle moving as he gingerly worked to pull the clothing free while moving as little as humanly possible.

  Once they were mostly around his forearms and hands, I stepped up onto the back of his chair to get more height, drew my knife and dragged the blade across the man’s throat. I backed away swiftly before he could take a swing at me.

  He lurched to his feet, made it a few steps, and then, between the agony of his condition and the fact that half of the blood that was supposed to be in his brain was pouring out of the front of his throat, he collapsed.

  I put the knife against where the spine met the skull, then stomped on it to drive it home.

  “You Jamie. You and me meeting,” I said.

  “Why?” Jamie asked. “Why him? Like that?”

  “I wanted to be alone,” I said. “You and me. And because I’m supposed to be a bastard, you said.”

  I shucked off my jacket began rolling up my sleeves all tidy-like, a grim look on my face.

  “Why…” he started, now focused on my rolling-up of sleeves.

  I gestured for silence. Then gestured for the listening ear.

  Dog and Catcher could still be in earshot. I moved to the window, looking for them.

  “I don’t understand,” Jamie said.

  I was silent, looking, watching.

  I finally spotted them. Making their way toward the south end of the city. Far enough away.

  “I’m going to save you,” I said, still watching them, as if I could see some hint that they’d miraculously heard my voice.