by wildbow
They stood on the shaky footing of wood and planks and bars and rope and approached the corner. Lara hung back.
Lillian gestured.
Seeing the gesture, Helen translated, leaning close, and only barely vocalizing, such a faint whisper that a normal human throat might not have been able to make it.
“Seven.”
Further below, there was a crashing sound. Scaffolding fell away from the building, disconnected.
Lara felt her heartbeat pick up. She moved closer to the exterior wall of the building, and did her best to dig her claws into the cracks and gaps between stones. If the rest of the scaffolding fell away, she didn’t want to fall with it.
Lillian gestured. Helen translated, “Seven is too many for you and me. Even with a distraction.”
“I can’t,” Lara said.
“And I wouldn’t ask you to,” Helen whispered. She looked at Lillian while talking to Lara. “They’re staying put. Some are taking apart scaffolding where it’s connected to the building. After what happened to the first two to go up… We’re stuck. It would be easier if we had Emmett.”
-Ashton is helping, just so you know. And you need to know lots more things if you’re ever going to catch up, you streak of rectal mucus.—
If I’m a streak of rectal mucus then you’re a pile of rancid cat puke.
-Well, I never!—
Titter.
“Ashton’s helping,” Lara said, as quietly as she could manage.
A shake of the scaffolding drew Lara’s eyes downward. She saw a hand gripping one of the poles of wood, and kicked at it. The hand moved out of the way just in time. It was soon joined by a second. Lara squeaked.
The scaffolding creaked as Sylvester helped himself over the edge, placing himself within a few feet of Helen and Lara. The two of them stood between Sylvester and Lillian.
“Hi, Sylvester,” Lillian said, her whisper very breathy, easily lost in the wind that blew through and around the building.
“Hi,” Sylvester said. He smiled.
“Do us a favor?” Lillian asked, in that same breathy voice.
“Gladly.”
“Would you throw yourself off the scaffolding? Nose-dive for the cobblestones down there? It could be a good distraction.”
Lara clutched closer to Helen.
Sylvester only smiled. “I’ll do you a favor, but it won’t be that one.”
“Drat.”
“Sorry,” he whispered. He looked down at Lara. “You’re not the one I talked to, I don’t think. Meaning you’re… Lara?”
Lara nodded.
“Nice to meet you.”
“Stop flirting,” Lillian said. “Where are Mary and Emmett?”
“First floor, and just above the first floor. I dropped some smoke bombs and gave her a few more. I hoped the smoke would climb more, scare the people further up to give you all some elbow room, ended up having to come myself when I couldn’t. She’s fine for a long while down there, provided she doesn’t get sloppy and the Devil doesn’t stumble on her while blind from all the smoke.”
“Fine. Are you going to help us here, or are you just here to make fun of us?”
“Can it be both?”
There were murmurs from within the building. Lillian bit back her retort, then gestured it instead.
“I’m insulted,” Sylvester said.
Lillian pressed a finger to her lips.
“Seven people in there,” Helen translated. “Helen takes three, Lillian take three, Sylvester takes one, if he can.”
Lillian looked at Lara, and gestured.
Lara didn’t need to know what the gesture meant, or to have Helen translate it. She communicated to Nora, Now.
A moment later, there was a violent rustling, curses, and a gunshot.
Lillian, Helen, and Sylvester rounded the corner, throwing themselves into the tower interior.
Lara remained where she was, clinging to the wall, eyes closed. She could hear the violence, and she had no idea which side was winning.
-Come.—
Lara hesitated.
But then Abby and Ashton appeared at the edge of the wall, and Abby reached out for Lara’s sleeve. Abby gave it a tug.
Lara allowed herself to be drawn into the third floor tower room. The others were all gathered, and the seven men were dead, unconscious, or bound. Only Mary was absent. Even Emmett was here. The path down to the floor below was protected by a hatch.
“Having the time of your life?” Lillian asked, sourly.
“Fantastically good time,” Sylvester said, from the far end of the room. “Devil’s down on the first floor with twelve soldiers. Smoke bombs weren’t toxic, sadly. Mary is keeping tabs on him. Book was a fake, by the way. Obviously.”
“We need to disable him,” Helen said. “Say, by breaking his limbs.”
“Because you messed up, Sylvester. You underestimated him,” Lillian accused.
Sylvester backed away a step, hands raised. “Harsh words, harsh words.”
“There are wagonloads of children en route to this city. Because you baited a lunatic and he took the bait.”
“Would you believe me if I said a gangly white rabbit is handling that right now?” Sylvester asked.
“I don’t know,” Lillian said. “Are you lying?”
“Pierre has already set things in motion. A few letters will slow things down just long enough, before they get vetted and found out to be false. There are only so many points that people can use to access the city. Only a few of those are convenient when coming from other cities, and in an era of plagues and war, it doesn’t take much to lock down travel to and from the city.”
“You’re shutting off your own exit from the city,” Lacey said.
“Yes. And Mary is counting down the minutes before she drops another smoke bomb. She’ll be running out soon, then she’s in a pinch. So… I’m going to go handle that.”
“Sylvester,” Lillian said. She approached him. “Listen, about Jamie—”
“Let’s not talk about Jamie,” Sylvester said. The smile dropped off his face.
“He was close to you. He made a big sacrifice, and then he died because of it.”
“That’s… not kind of you to say,” Sylvester said. “And I see that you’re edging closer to me. I’m aware of what those arms of yours are capable of. I did just see you punch three out of the four humors clean out of a fellow.”
Lara watched the dialogue, somehow feeling very concerned about it all.
“Does this help?” Lillian asked. She undid the parts of the meat-sleeves that connected to her shoulders, letting them dangle from the elbow instead. “I just want to talk to you like a human being for five seconds before we get caught up in everything again.”
“Not particularly, but if you’re going to stall me and say something, then it might as well be now.”
“Jamie mattered, Sylvester. The old one and the new one. We shouldn’t have lost him once, let alone twice. Gordon mattered. And Gordon was very firm about wanting us to keep fighting for good things. You’re acting unhinged, operating alone like this. Putting kids at risk? You’re getting sloppy.”
“You know for a fact that isn’t true,” Sylvester said.
Lillian, close enough now, reached out to Sylvester.
The syringe sprang from her meat-hand, and Sylvester caught it, gripping it. She produced the second a moment later, moving her arm, but Sylvester caught that too.
Emmett started forward, but stopped when Sylvester met his eyes. Sylvester shook his head, before returning his focus to Lillian.
“I can read you like a book, Lil.”
“Don’t call me Lil.”
“Nice try, though. I did see your syringe earlier today, so I knew to look out for it.”
Lillian jerked her arm to try to free it. Sylvester hung on.
“Let’s go help Mary,” he said. “See if we can’t handle the Devil. Then you can hurry to the gates of the city and intercept the carts full of ki
ds before they get delivered to unsavory types, and I’ll make my merry getaway.”
“Of course you have a gameplan, and of course you’re rubbing it in our faces.”
“Of course,” he said. He let go of the syringes, stepping back and out onto the scaffold.
Lara watched as he ran away.
-I like Sylvester.- Nora communicated.
Thinking of the Devil and the ways that he’d seemed so spooky in a way that Lara found so many things spooky, Lara felt the same thing to a lesser degree with Sylvester.
It was worse because she had been put in the ugly position where she had to either stay silent and betray herself or speak up and deviate. Lara decided on the latter.
I don’t.
Previous Next
Black Sheep—13.9 (Lamb)
There was discord, Duncan knew. Too many new faces. Too many people with stakes in things that weren’t even here, on the table. Mary and Lillian were too focused on Sylvester. The Twins on self preservation. Ashton didn’t have a stake, and was very similar to Emmett in that. Abby wasn’t here so much as she was following along and waiting until this was over and she could return to a more peaceful life.
Then there was Helen. Because Helen could so rarely be counted in the same string of thought as the others. Helen grabbed his attention, so often, but she was very rarely included in the same breath as others.
Helen scared him more than she had, before, and that was saying something. The scientist in Duncan wanted to figure out why, to problem solve. He might have wanted to hypothesize and test, but one did not test around Helen, no more than they tested around a snarling warbeast. For now, he was content to observe, avoid giving her reasons to tease him, and keep his fingers well away from the bars of that particular cage. Not physical bars, but ones that Ibbot had instilled, and that the Lambs had created.
He would be glad the bars were there and he wouldn’t do anything to test them.
The group descended to the second floor, where Mary was standing back from the stairway. One of her hands held a length of metal with three threads of wire extending from the middle and each end, each thread taut as it extended down into the area below. The other hand held a knife.
She pressed the knife to her mouth in a shushing motion.
Duncan looked at the stairs, and the thick cloud of smoke below. Why were the Devil’s men staying down there when the stairway was clear?
As if to answer his question, a man came tearing up the stairs, through the hole in the floor. He crested the top of the stairs, aiming his gun, and then lost his balance, a line of crimson appearing across his face.
Mary whipped her knife at him, impaling his throat just as he managed to catch his balance. As he stopped in his tracks, dropping his gun to reach for his throat, she cast out the wire that was attached to the knife. A bearing partway along the wire helped it move where she needed it, encircling his wrist before she gave it a tug, securing it in place. She wrapped her end of wire around the metal bar.
The man, still standing, looked at her, then the rest of the Lambs, then gurgled. Blood foamed around the knife that was still embedded there.
“Emmett,” Mary said. “Would you?”
There was a sound of more footsteps. Two more men were coming up the stairs. Emmett charged the man at the top of the stairs, and gave him the boot. He tumbled down the stairs, and Mary braced herself. For all the weight that was a full grown man falling in the opposite direction, she didn’t seem to have much trouble. And those other strings—
The wire moved as the victim or one of the people he’d collided with on his way down struggled. Emmett hurried to Mary’s side to take over with the bar.
“Thank you, sir,” Mary said.
Lillian gestured. Duncan caught the gesture for noise.
“Yes,” Mary said. “We can talk. I’ve got a few bodies piled on the stairs. When they try to move them, I throw something at them. After I got the first few—”
The Devil was shouting. “Grab the bodies. Bring them down! Clear the way!”
“—They got less courageous about coming upstairs. They got excited and more eager to leave the basement after someone asked what they should do if we use poison again.”
Emmett was fighting to keep his grip on the metal that had the strings attached.
“There are other strings there too. They have to be cutting themselves to shreds,” Mary observed. “You okay?”
Emmett gave her a nod.
Mary stepped past the top of the stairwell, throwing a knife mid-step, before stepping away. Gunshots rang out, shooting up at an angle, hitting the ceiling. Lara and Nora both shrieked, similar cries that were out of sync. Even Abby was hunkering down.
“Be nice if they wasted all their bullets,” Mary said. “But they’re pretty patient. Not all that anxious to get out of there, even.”
“They’re biding their time?” Lillian asked.
“Devil wants to, but he doesn’t complain when his men decide to try to get up the stairs. He seems content to wait us out,” Mary said.
Duncan frowned. “Why doesn’t he just leave?”
“Sylvester handled that. I saw him jump down to the fallen scaffolding. He secured the door before heading back upstairs. Dodged my bola the first time and the knife the second time, and had the audacity to toss me the smoke grenades. If I wasn’t busy with this, I would have hit him.”
“You think he secured the door,” Duncan said. “With Sylvester, we can’t know.”
“I know Sylvester, Duncan,” Mary said. “I know how he operates.”
“Isn’t the very concept of what Sylvester is as an experiment to be someone who can alter themselves and their approach on a fluid level?” Duncan challenged.
“Yes,” Mary said. “And a small handful of things remain constant. He’s here, he’s playing with us, play-acting as if he were still a Lamb, and working with us.”
“The dance,” one of the twin experiments said.
“Dance, Nora?” Lillian asked.
“I told you, when Sylvester talked to Lacey and me, he said something about liking the dance, when everyone cooperates and moves like they’re part of a singular organism. He didn’t use those words, exactly.”
“Yeah. That’s it, exactly,” Mary said.
Duncan gave up. Dealing with Sylvester was like being told to study one thing for a test, only to get a test sheet that covered of everything else.
There was a crash somewhere below them. Furniture being destroyed, or something being taken to pieces.
The work at dragging Mary’s victims away from the stairs had stopped, and Emmett wasn’t fighting as hard to hold on any more. Duncan had no idea if it had succeeded or failed, but Mary didn’t seem bothered.
Mary threw a knife at the floor, so it embedded itself in between two floorboards. She stomped on the end, then used another knife handle to seize one of the wires that extended from Emmett’s bit of metal to the tangle of bodies that she’d piled on the stairs. She transferred the wire to the knife on the floor.
A process of setting the wires down more permanently, so Emmett’s bit of metal didn’t have to be continually held.
Duncan had really not had many opportunities to see her in action. Even when he had gone on his first mission, he had mostly seen the aftermath, not the action.
He’d seen some of Helen in action.
He glanced at Helen, and saw her staring at him. She smiled, demeanor shifting, and he felt a chill.
“I think…” Mary said. She crouched, binding a second wire to a knife she had embedded into the floor, “He’s expecting reinforcements.”
“He said something earlier, to his men,” Lillian said. “It wasn’t about the carts and wagons full of kids?”
“Maybe the reinforcements were being handled by one of the names he mentioned. Either way, I think we need to find a way to handle this. There are twenty people down there with him,” Mary said.
“I can help,” Ashton said.
“I can go down,” Ashton said.
“It’s too dangerous,” Mary said. “I had to cut a few people who were groping around in the dark. I don’t think you’re capable of holding your own, and they’ll likely have their noses and mouths covered.”
“The smoke,” Duncan added, thinking about the plan to mislead Sylvester into thinking that smoke and smoking were a counteragent to Ashton.
Anything that worked.
“I could still try. There aren’t many gaps in the floor, like upstairs, but I could try.”
“Sure,” Duncan said. “Calm them down. Make them less likely to act.”
“Okay,” Ashton said.
Ashton sat cross-legged on the floor.
Hopefully this wouldn’t spoil the ruse, if Sylvester caught wind of it.
Where was Sylvester, anyhow?
As the question crossed his mind, he moved, almost as if he’d been pushed to. As the others talked, Duncan walked around the perimeter of the room. He split his attention between checking on his charges and keeping an eye out for Sylvester.
East of the building-in-construction, there was a sprawl of streets. He could see Corinth Crown, and the various burned buildings.
“Emmett,” Abby said. “Where is Quinton?”
“The ground level,” Emmett said.
“They knocked down the scaffolding,” Abby said. “More things could fall down. If Quinton is down there, he could get hurt!”
“I put a shelter up with the fallen scaffolding.”
“That’s not good enough!” Abby said.
“Abby,” Duncan said. “Calm down. We need to focus on the mission.”
“No,” Abby said, turning on him. “You said. It was a rule. We all make it out of this okay.”
Duncan repressed his frustration. Why did this all have to be so hard?
“We as in each of you, me, the Lambs,” Duncan said. He was going to say more, but changed tacks as he saw Abby’s expression change, “Emmett says Quinton will be fine. He’ll be fine.”
“He’ll be safe,” Emmett said. “We couldn’t have him up here where there might be fighting.”