Twig

by wildbow

  Experiments, all four.

  They made a beeline for Jessie and the others, and my hand went straight to my waist for my pistol.

  The people in red talked to Jessie and the others, and it was the Treasurer who took the lead.

  Crouching in the snow, I took aim, waiting and ready for an excuse.

  The conversation finished quickly enough. Jessie and the others moved on with their course, crossing this stripe of plague that had swiped across the town. The people in red walked along it, as if it was a path for them to travel. They moved from body to body, checking.

  The smiling woman drew a hatchet from her coat—a well hidden weapon, considering I hadn’t seen it. She raised it overhead, then brought it down on one corpse’s neck.

  I couldn’t follow Jessie and the others without crossing these people in red, so I let them go ahead.

  Ducking further into cover, raising my binoculars, I watched Jessie.

  Her hands moved in the gestures.

  Gentle-sugar, gentle-kill.

  My head turned over the connected words. I tried to figure out the meaning, and wished there was a faster way for Jessie to spell the letters out. The system we had worked out wasn’t great for the task.

  She gestured more words.

  More red. Many many. Careful Sylvester.

  There were more than just the four. Considerably more.

  I watched as they moved among the bodies, checking, eyes alert. They searched every single one on the street before they gathered, approaching a doorway.

  The man with the jutting chin kicked the door in, drawing twin cleavers from his pocket. I knew right away that the people he was using the cleavers on weren’t the frozen bodies.

  I almost, almost gave chase, closing the distance, seeing if I couldn’t dispatch them and save the people in the house.

  But I saw two flashes of red, and I saw more people walking down the street. I wouldn’t be able to approach unobserved.

  What were the alternate meanings for gentle in the gestures? Kind? Soft touch? Emotionally careful?

  What was the alternate meaning for sugar? I thought of Helen. My mind stumbled across possible meanings. Sweet. Gentle-sweet? Gentle-sweet gentle-kill? Murder? Execution?

  The ones in red called themselves the Tender Mercies.

  I hoped Shirley hadn’t faced any such Mercy thus far, as I looked for my opportunity to cross the street and catch up with the others. I hoped they wouldn’t find Tender Mercy either.

  Previous Next

  Head over Heels—16.4

  This was Jessie’s show, at least for now.

  Adjustments had to be made. My memory was worse than it had been a year ago, and a good memory was a necessary element in a good set of lies and falsehoods. I could act, and I could manipulate others, but there was a certain point where forgetting a key detail would derail a good deceptive play.

  I was in an awkward position when it came to classifying Jessie.

  Helen was the best actor among the Lambs, but she had trouble on several fronts. By most standards, she was among the most attractive young ladies that anyone she met would have met. She faced an uphill struggle when it came to blending in or avoiding attention.

  Gordon and I were perhaps the best actors, by dint of our ability to appear as young gentlemen, urchins, students, or our ability to blend into a crowd. He was a little bigger than average, I was a little smaller, but we did well.

  Had done well, I corrected myself. He had been a little bigger. Gordon had been, changing to past tense yet again, roughly matched with me in terms of acting ability and flexibility. I glanced at Gordon, who was keeping me company, and reminded myself that he wasn’t really present, that he’d been gone for a while now.

  That thought lingering in my mind, I paused as I ascended the slope of a rooftop. I was by the chimney, and I could use the hot air and smoke emanating from it to warm up while I watched Jessie and the others trudge through the snow from a distance. I wished I could stick my head over it and warm my face, but doing that for any extended period of time struck me as a very good way to pass out, fall down a chimney, and surprise a family that was hiding out from plague somewhere below me.

  Helen was only one half-step behind us, and could do leaps and bounds better than us in the right situations. Could I say Jessie was the worst of the Lambs when it came to acting? No, because I considered Lillian to be a Lamb, and I likely could have picked five random ex-students from among the Beattle rebels and found one or two who were better than Lillian at playing a part.

  I was fond of Lillian, I respected her wholeheartedly, but she had her strengths, she had her weaknesses, and deception wasn’t foremost among her strengths, or even in the top five of them.

  I had to consider Ashton, too. Ashton was about as good at acting as any of the logs burning down in the fireplace below me. Myself, Gordon, and Helen at the front of the pack, Lillian and Ashton at the rear, and Mary and Jamie somewhere toward the middle. Mary was good, and I could have searched and tested the entire Beattle group and found one or two students among hundreds on Mary’s level. She had no particular weaknesses, and she had a number of strengths.

  Jessie was like Helen in that she had some marvelous strengths, but she also had weaknesses. In her case, her weakness was a slower reaction speed, difficulty in adapting to changing situations and crises. It wasn’t much slower, but one to three seconds she needed to find an answer or detail was enough time for someone to second guess her act.

  She was playing to her strengths right now.

  I was feeling the cold, which was the reason for my stop at the chimney, while the others were taking their time navigating the city. Were I the one in uniform, I might have avoided anyone who wasn’t integral to what I needed, but Jessie allowed meetings to happen. I’d been following them for close to twenty minutes now, and she had already talked to two groups of Tender Mercies, two civilians who’d been looking for shelter and one squad of quarantine soldiers.

  She looked confident and unbothered as yet another group of Tender Mercies approached, three men this time. It seemed like the Tender Mercies wore virtually every shade of red but the one that matched the red flowers.

  The man who led this group of Tender Mercies looked like the human equivalent of a wrinkly dog from the East Crown nations I’d seen once in Tynewear, all folds of skin, his features lost amid it all. He wore his hair in a black ponytail, much like Jamie had worn, once.

  I raised my binoculars, and watched as Jessie talked to them.

  The man’s face made lipreading next to impossible. Jessie, however, moved her hands, gesturing as she talked. The thick gloves made nuance difficult, but through some combination of her gestures and the wrinkled man’s mouth movements, I was able to get the main thrust of the dialogue.

  How long? Time gesture from Jessie, as the wrinkled man spoke.

  Head shake from Jessie, a negation hand sign. No updates, no idea. Change tacks, casual, easy. Just want this to be over.

  A sort of smile from the wrinkled man, real smiles the other Tenders with him. We were made for this.

  I filled in blanks with guesswork and cues from Jessie’s hand signs. Is this your first outing?

  No, the Wrinkled man said. I caught that one. Jessie was nodding, as if this wasn’t surprising.

  There was a brief discussion. Jessie didn’t really translate much of it. Places, I suspected. A brief history on this particular trio of Tenders.

  The Tenders said something more, and it was the Treasurer who responded. Jessie followed. Knowledge-expert. The Treasurer got his chance to show his stuff, and in the doing, gave the group some legitimacy. I could see how that translated to trust and back-and-forth with the Tenders.

  Any problems? Jessie asked.

  The wrinkled man gestured toward the train station, said something. Jessie gestured, negation. The equivalent of a short head shake, a so-so. Nothing new there.

  Then he said something else. I waited for the gest
ures. Jessie wasn’t moving her hand, though. I wondered if one of the three Tenders had glanced at her hand in a curious way. I was disappointed in myself if I had missed something like that, binoculars and bad weather or no.

  I hadn’t. Jessie resumed gesturing, as if she was using her hands to make up for the lack of expression on her face while she wore the mask. Slowly, she caught me up, filling me in. I used what I’d managed to pick up from the wrinkled man earlier to fill in the blanks now.

  Stalemate-stalemate. The Tender Mercies are waiting to receive orders. Here for a reason. Rabbit’s doctor. Noble doctor.

  Jessie and her squad started to move, even as she said some parting words to the Tenders.

  Good luck, dog.

  She hadn’t actually said dog, but I knew what she meant. She’d been a little patronizing, adopting the same tone Duncan had taken when talking to us lesser creations of the Academy.

  The three Tenders seemed to take it in stride. If anything, I suspected Jessie had made a good impression on them.

  Jessie, meanwhile, seemed to be standing a little straighter, taking a little more authority with the rest of her group. The hand signals in the meanwhile were for me.

  Castle. Noble Doctor. Shirley. Go.

  I checked the coast was clear, moved away from the chimney, slid down the slope of the roof, and dropped the fifteen feet to the road below.

  I kept my distance so I wouldn’t compromise them, navigated between bloody bodies, and ducked into alleys.

  I was in the process of looking for a way up to higher ground when I heard a sharp knocking sound, a rifle against a wall.

  I changed direction, and I walked toward the others.

  Jessie’s group met me in the alley.

  “You catch all of that?” Jessie asked.

  “Most of it,” I said.

  I drew my handkerchief out of my pocket, and used it to wipe the lenses of Jessie’s mask free of the wet snow and moisture. With her thick gloves, I knew she couldn’t do a proper clean. She hated smudged glasses, which was why I tried to smudge them as much as possible when I sought to annoy her. Easy reflex to hammer at.

  Plus it made it seem all the nicer when I reversed course and did the opposite.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Do me?” Bea asked.

  I started cleaning more lenses, starting with Bea. “Why is this noble professor so important?”

  “You caught all that?” Fang asked.

  “You stop being surprised at these things after a little while,” Rudy said.

  “They aren’t saying why they are so interested in the professor,” Jessie said, ignoring the gallery. “More because I don’t think they have any idea, not because they’re being evasive. But the Crown is deploying the Mercies with specific orders about the professor, so keep that in mind.”

  “It makes sense they don’t know. They’re low level,” I said. “We might have to tap another source, or go straight to the doctor. Hopefully finding him might mean finding Shirley. At this level, we’re just getting dogs following orders.”

  “Dogs? I can’t tell if you’re being unkind,” Gordon le Deux said.

  “I’d be being unkind if I said they were cats,” I pointed out.

  “He’s echoing me,” Jessie said. “I used the word ‘dog’ first, when I was using my hand to communicate with Sylvester.”

  I tilted my head, wiping at Rudy’s lenses. “What was the dog line? ‘You experiments be safe?’”

  Jessie made an amused sound. “Close. ‘Don’t tarry too long, experiments.’”

  “Eerie,” Fang said.

  “Again,” Rudy said. “This is not surprising. They’re good with the hand signs.”

  “I’m more bothered by the conspicuous lack of ‘dog’ in that exchange,” Bea said.

  “This is not surprising either,” Second Gordon said, mimicking Rudy’s tone and speech. “These two are hard to keep up with.”

  Rudy’s masked face turned in Second’s direction. I suspected he was smirking. The two were getting along to some degree.

  “It was nuance,” Jessie explained, patiently, “the word dog implying the tone.”

  I added, “A condescending sort of ‘you are lesser than I, but I like you’ entitlement. Believe me, we got that all the time when we were with the Academy. Once you start hearing it, you won’t miss it.”

  “Oh, there’s tone, too? How do you have tones in hand signals?” Fang asked, looking down at his hand. “Fuckin’ hell. I only know four of these hand gestures and you’re speaking a whole ‘nother language.”

  “You’re supposed to know six hand signals,” Jessie said.

  “Well, I learned five, and I get the eyes, perception sign mixed up with the knowledge, patience sign.”

  “Which means you only really know three,” Bea said. “Don’t go and make me look bad after I invited you along.”

  Fang snorted. “That’s the entirety of who I am, Bea-baby, ruining reputations of pretty girls.”

  Bea made an amused sound at that.

  “Watch,” I said. I held up my hand to show him, three fingers splayed, pinky and thumb tucked in. Then I put the three fingers together for, “Learn.”

  “Fingers apart for watch,” Second said. “Looks kind of like a ‘w’.”

  “That’s good,” Fang said. “That’s the kind of thing I can remember.”

  “Three fingers together for a tower,” Jessie said. “Ivory tower, place of learning.”

  “That’s just going to make me think of a watchtower or something, that only confuses me more,” Fang said.

  Jessie huffed out a sigh, and her mask made it sound odd.

  “Jessie,” I said.

  I got her attention, which distracted her from her failure to counsel Fang.

  “You knocked on the wall to bring me over here. Did you need anything particular?”

  “I wanted to ask, how are you holding up?” she asked. “Cold?”

  “Cold,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind getting indoors soon. The Castle place?”

  Jessie nodded. “The Little Castle. We’ll head straight there. There’s a regiment of soldiers out on the streets. If they poke their heads around the corner here, you make yourself scarce. One of us can make noises about being a little nauseous about the bodies. Treasurer, maybe?”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you’re a student,” I said. “You can get away with being a wimp.”

  “But I’m not,” the Treasurer said. “I’m less of a wimp than anyone here except you two. I’ve seen bodies. I’ve dissected victims of lesser plagues and sci-weapons.”

  “I wouldn’t have used the word ‘wimp’,” Jessie said, aiming that at me.

  The Treasurer was a proud person, it seemed. Maybe he feared that after today, after he burned his suit, he wouldn’t be able to have another day like today, where he got to shine.

  “I wouldn’t either,” I said. “Bad word choice. I saw how you talked to the Tenders, it worked well. If you conveyed yourself as the expert on deck, then admitted you were having trouble dealing, it attaches the lie to the truth, explains away why you’re all talking in an alley, and gives them no reason to doubt.”

  “Hmph,” the Treasurer made a sound. The ‘m’ sound of the utterance was caught by the tube, making a low sound like one might get by blowing over the top of a bottle.

  “I wouldn’t mind getting somewhere warm too,” Bea said. “Somewhere with privacy. I’m wearing pants that don’t fit over ones that do and they’re both—”

  I raised my hand, quick, gesturing.

  Alert.

  I caught a shuffling sound. I glanced at Jessie, and I saw her nod a little.

  I stepped away from the street, deeper into the alley, before I heard the moan. I changed direction, a moment too late.

  She hadn’t made much noise because she was barefoot, walking on ice and on ground without snow. She barely wore anything more than rags in the cold and she walked in a staggering so
rt of way. She was hunched over, moving almost blindly, and was clearly in an incredible amount of pain. Her hands wrapped around her body as if she were wearing a straightjacket, and blood ran down her arms, dripping and streaming from the elbows.

  I realized, as she moved the hand at one side down, fingertips leading the way, that she was digging her fingers under the skin. Sheer tenacity let her carry on the downward process, separating connective tissue by using nails, fingertips, and hands as a wedge. The movement was jerky as she found an in, broke a key piece of tissue, and tore skin, only to hit another stopping point.

  In this manner, the one hand traveled down toward her hip, as she tore her own skin away. I could, even with her standing fifty feet away, see the way her hand trembled, the skin stretched thin and tight against the knuckles and splayed fingers.

  The Treasurer raised his gun, aiming at her.

  I gestured, and Jessie was quick to say, “No.”

  “No?” the Treasurer asked.

  At the sound of the voices, the young lady looked up. Her hair was in disarray, and most of her face was hidden, only one eye positioned to peer through the messy, blood-slick hair. She’d used fingernails to tear off part of her own face.

  “It would be a mercy,” the Treasurer said.

  “It is a Mercy,” Jessie said.

  She’d realized after I’d signaled for her to wait.

  I was subtly changing up my expression and stance to look more horrified, less capable. I made myself smaller, and I retreated a bit.

  Jessie, meanwhile, stood tall, and advanced toward the Mercy. It was the youngest we’d seen yet. Likely inexperienced, too.

  The Mercy, breathing hard and whimpering a little with each breath, shifted her stance, then tilted her body some, back twisting a little. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to curtsy or bow or if she was trying to stand straight without losing any of the ground she’d gained in tearing off her own skin.