by wildbow
“I think the wolf that looks right looks deceptively friendly, the one that looks left is scary or especially mean. I forget what up and down mean. Might be position of authority or has friends for looking up, and then ‘is sneaky’ for looking down? Or was there something else? Maybe there were eight directions to look. They didn’t use the wolf in my hometown.”
“Uh huh,” Charles said, sounding lost.
“But if you want to win points with the top city boy, the guy who called you legendary?”
He nodded at that. He wanted to.
“Grab a townie boy, take him hostage or something. Ask him what the signs mean. If nothing else, it’ll give the city boys a better idea of how things work in Peachtree.”
Charles seemed intrigued by the idea.
I left out that maybe, just maybe, it would afford the city boys a kind of empathy for the town boys, once they realized what the town boys went through.
Maybe I could hammer that in a bit.
“In fact, if you wanted to win points and if you wanted to give him a clue into how to look really cool in front of the townies, you could tell him that he could offer help with one of the foxes—” I pointed. “—or one of the wolves. But he’d have to make sure those were signs the boys in Peachtree used.”
“Huh,” Charles said. “Why would we want to help out townies?”
“In war, there is always room for negotiation. What if they captured the top city boy? Or his sister? You need something to offer, don’t you?”
“You’re a lot better at this than I am,” he said.
“I’ve played the game all my life,” I said, smiling. “I’m playing it now, with you.”
“What?” Charles asked. He was suddenly very confused.
Professor Berger brought the third of the rebels to a standing position.
“All done?” I called out to the man.
“We can move on, so long as you’ve found time to come up with a plan while corrupting the children in my care,” Berger said.
“Fantastic,” I said. “I came up with a plan before you even started, but I could do with another five minutes of corruption, if that’s alright? I could hold the strings of that fellow while you used the lavatory, maybe?”
“Best we get underway,” the man said, dryly.
“Fair enough,” I said. I walked past Charles. I approached him, and as I passed him, I turned around, walking backwards as I continued talking in a low voice, “See? Your uncle knows I’m playing townie against city, working my townie wiles on you and your cousin. But he doesn’t care. Soon I’ll find out why.”
“But we weren’t playing,” Charles said.
“People like your uncle and I are always playing this game,” I said.
Charles’ eyes widened, and I could see things falling into place.
Perhaps, in that moment, his world expanded, and the world beyond his immediate experience made more sense. Or less sense.
At the professor’s behest, I took ownership of the third rebel, one of the young ones, while he took the rebel leader. Charles approached me and took the strings. Once that was done, he began instructing the two children in how to puppeteer the men and make them walk. Freeing one leg at a time while being sure not to paralyze a given leg.
I approached all of the men we weren’t using, and, going one by one, I stabbed them in the backs, carefully avoiding the bugs that had latched onto their spines. Charles watched me while I did it, with a quiet and subtle kind of alarm.
He still had a goodness to him, it seemed. His cousin had put that goodness away to seize some influence over her surroundings, and his uncle lacked any. In this, Charles was mostly alone. He wasn’t merciful.
Slowly, they each practiced walking. Professor Berger was a practiced hand with puppeteering, but the puppets and the children weren’t so experienced. It took some doing.
“If they don’t cooperate, let them fall flat on their faces,” Berger said.
“Nosebleeds get in the way of my plan,” I said.
“I can stop nosebleeds,” he said.
“Can you stop them from looking like they’re all trying to push a full-sized tree branch through their arseholes?”
“Push—” Berger started. He gave me a look, as if I was one of his children and I’d disappointed him. “There are children present.”
I looked at him for a moment, then over at the dead bodies. My eye traveled over the blood, piss, vomit, shit, the bugs, the puppets, the children being used to control them, and finally back to Berger.
“Of course,” I said.
“They look strained, you’re right,” Berger said. He withdrew syringes from his pocket. One was spent, the others weren’t.
Reaching forward, he stuck one syringe into the face of the gang leader, moved around to the other side of the face, and injected other locations.
“All of this stuff you’re packing, I can’t hep but notice a big focus on movement, expression, controlling a useless body, making it do what you want,” I said. “I wonder if your colleagues are on a similar page, or if they’re studying brains. Say, a brain riddled with bullets?”
Berger gave me an unimpressed look.
“I had to ask,” I said.
He gave the others the same treatment with a second syringe.
“Watch the stairs, Charles, Florence. They’ll find it tricky, and bodies rolling down the stairs draw notice,” Berger said. To me, he said. “Let me have my turn. A question for you.”
“No objection.”
“Your plan?”
“Ah. The plan is that the rebel leader steps into the doorway, and he points at the people I indicate,” I said. “Easy. We have… two floors to lead our plodding guests down. We can work out a quick system.”
“We need more than that,” Berger said.
“The rest is positioning, knowing the enemy. Look. You apparently know me well enough to know I can probably get you out of this situation. Trust me to see it through. Alright?”
“All I lose if I’m wrong is my life, my daughter’s life, and my nephew’s life.”
“Exactly,” I said. “But if you don’t take this leap of faith, then you lose those anyway, so buck up. You’ll want the rebel leader beside me, and then, cornering you, we have the other two, the ones Charles and Florence are controlling. As if they’ve got you. Maybe if one had a hand on your shoulder?”
“Third string, the one I hooked onto your ring finger, Florence,” Berger said.
It was clumsy, halting, but the hand fell into place.
“The system we’ll use is that he’ll extend his arm. You make him stop when he gets far enough. Or you can paralyze the arm and let it fall. We pick three or four, depending on how smooth we’ve got it. I’ll signal you when you’re pointing at the right person.”
I gave the signal behind the rebel leader’s back.
“As for you, Mr. rebel leader,” I said. “I fully plan to leave you alive. I’m going to make the offer to bring you guys on board with my rebel faction. It’s a good setup, I think. Better than what you’ve got. So decide if you’ll join, if you’ll go your separate way when we’re done here, barely any hard feelings on my end and a little bit of trauma on yours, or if you want to Professor Berger there to pull the middle string and remove the bug, and let you die in incredible kinds of pain. The little details, the little kinds of help you give us, they go a long way.”
The dark eyes of the rebel leader looked down at me. His face was slack now. Almost too relaxed, a little tired looking, but the tension was utterly gone. The drugs had done their job.
The syringes had been applied to the faces of the other two as well. One was a little more slack than the other.
All together, we approached the second floor.
My heart sank as I saw some hanging out at the base of the stairs. They were in our way.
I signaled behind the rebel leader’s back.
The man raised his hand, and made a sweeping motion.
T
he rebel soldiers further down the stairs picked themselves up. They glanced up at us, curious, before heading into the wider space where Shirley and the others were. I, the professor, the children and our hostages made our way down.
All together, we stood in the doorway.
The rebel boss raised his arm, pointing.
Putting me in the situation where I had to pick the key players. In a moment, I had to read the room, spot the people who others looked to when they were confused. I had to spot the lynchpins, the elders and the ones who led individual squads.
I’d already forgotten some particulars and some faces, and matters weren’t helped by the fact that some had moved, left, or changed from standing to sitting positions and vice-versa.
I picked out four.
When the finger found one, I signaled. The finger stopped.
He pointed out two more.
With the fourth, we ran into a snag. The man pointed to himself, as if for confirmation.
Berger’s hand touched the back of the rebel boss’s head.
No string to pull, but the rebel boss nodded slowly.
Before the men in question could come through the doorway, I motioned for Berger and the others to move away.
“You got the professor,” the first one we’d pointed out said, as he drew near. “You can move mountains after all.”
“Nothing so fancy,” I said. “I just asked.”
“Didn’t shoot him, though,” the older rebel said.
“Like I said, we need him. And it was a term of the asking. He lives, for now.”
Talking to the man drew his attention, and it bought Berger a moment to walk up a few stairs and turn around, the bugs securely out of sight instead of just halfways out of sight.
“What’s this about?” another of the four men asked.
“Making sure we have a plan, rounding up all the ones with guns in the windows,” I said.
“Could just give the signal.”
“Nah,” I said. “We want to play this careful. There are still people in the building, and the Crown has resources.”
He made a face.
The four men we’d picked out found positions on lower stairs, looking up at the rebel boss.
The nature of the stairs and my short stature posed a problem. I had to reach over to the railing to find a good vantage point, which occupied a hand, and limited what I could do.
Still, I was silent as I did it, and the men simply waited restlessly for their mute boss to speak.
I knifed the first and the second quickly, choosing to target much the same points the bugs had, slamming my knife between one vertebrae, hauling it out, then slamming it into the next man. He turned as I swung, and then fell in a way that trapped the knife blade between the bones I was aiming between.
It cost me seconds, as I had to haul out another knife. The third and fourth man heard the sound of the first rebel hitting the floor, and turned on me.
The rebel boss, controlled by Berger, reached out and grabbed one of his comrades around the neck. Charles’ rebel might have been trying to do much the same thing, but he wasn’t as well-controlled. His arms went out, and one clubbed the last rebel across the face.
Smacked, grunting loud enough to be heard below, the man tumbled down the stairs. I sprung on top of him, and I buried my spare knife in his chest.
People appeared in the door. Rebels with weapons.
They looked up at us.
Their eyes fell on the boss, who wore a dead expression and had his hands wrapped around another man’s neck. He’d placed his hands right, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if the strength he was displaying was enhanced by the control being exerted on him, pushing him past pain tolerances and normal limits. His eyes were even darker than before. To him, he’d just had to kill a friend. But to these witnesses…
I double checked the children were safely hidden behind the men they were controlling.
“Traitors,” I said. I picked myself up, cleaning my knife. I made myself the picture of calm, as if the ones in the door posed no risk at all. “They gave you guys up. Why do you think the professor here was able to slip away? He knew in advance. Or the Academy surrounded you all so fast?”
That wasn’t why the professor had slipped away. The Academy hadn’t surrounded them that fast—they’d just been slow to exit.
But for these rebels who were looking up at this scene, they wanted to be spoon-fed a story they could believe. They wanted something easy, in an already uncertain situation.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s leave the man alone for a second.”
Behind me, the rebel leader let go of the man he’d just strangled to death. The body tumbled hard onto the stairs.
The rebel leader nodded.
The bugs only controlled him from the neck down. This was of his own volition.
I wondered if he would fight back.
“Let’s leave him alone,” I said, again, to drive the point home. My heart hammered. If this became a question of one group of hostages against the other, well, I was pretty sure we had the upper hand, but I really didn’t want to test it.
The men retreated back into the room. There was some commotion there. Things took on a different tone when I passed through the door.
“Traitors,” I said, again. “There might be more. Be wary. But for the time being, before any groups reinforce the perimeter, we’re going to want to get out of here. The soldiers at the barricade are friendlies, except for the ones who are being held hostage, but more on that later. We—”
I saw the room change. Alarm, on the faces of everyone from young rebel to old, Shirley to Otis.
Behind me, the rebel boss had stepped into the doorway. He had a look in his eyes, like a mother who had just watched her child die, or a man who had lost not just a battle, but a war.
Berger was right behind him, the other puppet-rebels behind Berger.
“We move across as one group. No stopping, no shenanigans. Don’t shoot, you’ll only draw attention to yourselves and draw answering fire. We do this quick, and we do this discreet. And give up my friends already. I’ve delivered, now it’s your turn.”
The rebel boss exhaled, and it was a long, shuddering, ugly sound.
I looked past him at Berger, and I saw the professor’s expression. Tension. He was prepared for disaster.
I had the situation well in hand, I thought. You didn’t have to roll the dice.
The rebel leader, his chest and lungs freed enough for him to speak, gave his order.
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Head over Heels—16.7
“Kill—” the rebel boss started, and the word, though forceful, was mumbled, as if he’d had a stroke. I might’ve taken it to be ‘hill’ or ‘fill’ if I’d not known better. He stopped.
I waited as he stayed where he was, frozen. I was tense but doing my best not to show it. The people in the room were watching me as much as him. I was aware that they were stirring, the harsh word having gotten their attention, and my relative calm and a simple raised eyebrow from me were the only cues they had to go on.
Slowly, haltingly, the rebel boss’s hand raised, finding its way to his face.
“Eric?” one of the other men in the room asked. He was one I’d considered as being one of the leaders—I’d picked out people who looked like they had some leadership ability, to better cull the population of the room and leave them more open to outside influence. I would have picked him, just based on how he held himself and how others looked at him, but I’d been unsure about my ability to get Berger to make the rebel boss point at him, given where he sat and the people in the way.
The rebel boss, Eric, opened his mouth again, and managed only an abrupt, “Ugh.”
He drew in a breath, then exhaled.
I saw an opening. I could read Berger’s thought process here. A hand raised to his face to muffle him, to buy a second to think. Now I suspected Berger was thinking about freeing Eric’s voice again, because that was all
he could really do.
But we didn’t control his voice. We controlled his movements.
I motioned, indicating the arm that was closer to his face. I motioned for him to lower it, two fingers curled in the direction of the arm, twitching down.
His hand dropped. I gestured for Berger to stop and the arm halted midway. Eric looked momentarily surprised when it did.
Shirley was gesturing. Question. She wanted to know what was going on. With Archie having gotten caught gesturing to me, I was reluctant to do with forty or fifty sets of eyes watching me.
We could parcel out control in very limited quantities. With luck, Berger could sense some of the hesitation on Eric’s part.
Slowly, the rebel leader’s arm moved, until it pointed at the one who’d called out and named him. Eric’s expression was blank, his eyes filled with emotion. The other man’s face was anything but, on both counts.
“The hell? Eric, you’ve got it wrong. They’ve—”
The people near the man in question grabbed him. There was a momentary scuffle, and the man was thrown to the ground, then held down.
“Eric!” the man called out. “You’ve—”
One side of his face knocked against the ground as someone threw their weight onto his back. The men who now grappled with their former boss or friend didn’t look like they enjoyed what they were having to do. It wouldn’t take much to make them stop.
“You’re being manipulated! I haven’t talked to anyone! We’re friends, you morbid bastard!”
Eric the rebel boss stood in the doorway, his hand falling to his side. He turned his head and glanced down at me. I tried to read the expression and body language of a man with a partially paralyzed face and no control over his own body. Just behind him, in the large man’s shadow, I could see Berger, the faintest sheen of sweat on his face.
Berger hadn’t trusted me to see the situation through on my own, he’d given the rebel boss the chance to speak, thinking he’d cowed the man, and he’d been wrong. Had the boss’s face not been paralyzed by the syringe to relax his features, he might have gotten a fuller sentence out, clearly and unambiguously.
But he hadn’t. We walked a tightrope now.
There were two ways to go, now. I could try to wrangle things myself, and I could probably fail, in light of the current situation, or I could roll the dice myself.