by wildbow
They carried me past the barricade, and deeper into the camp. I wished it was a trick, part of Jessie’s ruse. It was a real Academy fortification, one with hundreds of soldiers. People reacted to Berger with surprise and pleasure. They hadn’t expected to get the man they’d been sent in to retrieve, not really.
The grip on me shifted. Berger warned soldiers about the bug as they took custody of me.
“Chain him up,” Berger said. “Again, watch the bug on his back. The shackles will be redundant with the paralysis, but we can’t be too sure.”
“Where?” a soldier asked.
“Where we can keep an eye on everything,” Berger said. He indicated a seat at a table in the middle of the camp. “I have matters to discuss with the men in charge. If you can escort me?”
Mute, unable to move, I was seated on the bench in question. Shackles bound me to the bench, and I imagined they would have been cold if I could have felt them. A box was placed next to me so I wouldn’t simply tip over, and I heard orders given to some rookies, who found seats nearby to watch me.
In that manner, a puppet with my strings abandoned, I sat, staring out into the distance at the red slash in the distance, and perhaps with the help of delusion and the powerful imagination Wyvern had gifted me, I imagined I watched it swell and grow visibly over the minutes or the timeless hour I sat there, breathing my regular breaths.
I had company at least. Mary, Lillian, Evette, Mauer, Gordon, Fray, Helen, Duncan, Ashton. All took their seats next to me. Even the new Lambs. Some sat for longer, some for shorter. Some talked about nothing in particular, to take my mind off the tuning-fork whistle where the near-unconsciousness had hurt my hearing, and others were silent.
Mary sat at the beginning, and she sat at the end. She didn’t do any talking, but I pushed my imagination to its limit, and I could imagine that I could feel her hand as she held mine in her lap, her palm and lap warm and the lace of the black dress she wore was soft.
Together, we imagined we watched the plague spread so fast it swept over the city, and we waited.
Previous Next
Head over Heels—16.9
I was coming to discover that after two hours or so of exploration, I could find the ends of the tracks that my trains of thought traveled down. It was possible to continue down those tracks, but things quickly turned into a smoking wreckage if I did. Past a certain point, there were too many variables to account for, and I started to second guess things I knew I otherwise wouldn’t.
There were animals that needed to keep swimming to keep breathing. I was in the process of discovering that with my body gone and my mind active, my brain couldn’t breathe, so to speak.
I’d always thought it would be the other way around: my brain failing, my body remaining behind.
I couldn’t turn to studying my environment, because I was trying to maintain too many things at once, and my confidence in my memory was shaken. Yes, I could make shallow observations about soldiers and doctors who passed through my field of view, but I didn’t want to go into more depth on nobodies and risk that it would push more pertinent information out of my head. Doubly so when even differentiating the various people in quarantine suits from one another was a task unto itself. I had identified only a few targets to study, and they were only in my field of view for fleeting moments.
The cup spilleth over.
Left with my mind idling, my imagination had painted the world I could see. Plague spread, and it knit together into trees. The city became wilderness, but it was a wilderness of red leaves, of vines that resembled veins, where bodies were cocooned in plague, moving only periodically. The entire cast of characters in my head was present, quietly watching as the world was swallowed up.
The wind was constant, strong, and, I’d realized, it blew constantly toward the plague. We were upwind of it, which was likely why this particular site had been chosen. Weather, geography, and safety from disease.
I was pretty sure my clothes were soaked through. Even though they were weather resistant, resistance didn’t mean immunity. I wasn’t entirely sure if it was the cold or the bug that clung to me that made my breathing more laborious than it had been. When my breathing wasn’t in my control and it was all I had to measure time by, I’d become acutely aware of the gradual decline.
My throat, too, was slowly unfreezing. It was a different thing altogether from the change in breathing, but the sum total was that my hope was diminishing, not growing.
It was in this state that Berger found me. He wore a quarantine suit, now, as did the children in his company. Berger’s suit was black, it fit his body better, and had a kind of coat built in, as if to convey the same sort of silhouette that he might’ve had on any other day.
He was also covered in the vein-like growths that came with plague having matured. It crawled over top of him, and it crawled beneath his suit, the growths digging beneath an eyelid and into an eye socket, threatening to dislodge the orb.
I blinked, very carefully, and the image disappeared—Berger was plague free. I blinked again, and the imagined plague returned.
I was careful to keep the plague situated where it was most effective. It dug into the spots on his suit nearest the vitals, nearest gaps and other weak points. The breathing tube and bladder were bad cases. A way to track the places I would strike at, given the chance.
Eric was gone, I noted. I discarded a plan.
“Well, don’t you look miserable?” Berger said.
I looked up at him, gazed past the lenses of his mask and at his plague-afflicted face, and I wore the best smile I was able.
He set his plague-afflicted medical bag on the bench next to me, leaving it closed and instead reaching for a front compartment, rummaging.
“No need to put on a brave face, Sylvester, I know you aren’t happy,” he said. “As high as my expectations are for Charles and Florence, my wife, staff and peers, for you, even, I do have some desire to minimize suffering.”
I glanced at his children. I tried to read the eyes behind the tinted lenses of the quarantine suits.
“Now, I’m going to check you’re doing alright. I know you have limited movement of your head and neck. You might be tempted to use that limited movement to hurt yourself and try to eke out an advantage,” Berger said.
He pulled his hand from the bag, revealing a thermometer, long and narrow.
“If you do aim to hurt yourself, rest assured that you’ll perforate your eardrum. You’ll bleed. The blood will travel down your eustachean tube and down your throat to your stomach. On ingesting enough blood, the stomach will rebel. You’ll vomit, or try to, and you’ll promptly aspirate your own stomach contents, given the paralysis.”
I looked at the thermometer.
“So please don’t impale yourself on my thermometer. I won’t do a thing to keep you alive, and the eventual death will be an ignoble one. If your friends are watching from a distance, then they’ll feel the need to come save you, and that will be bad for them.”
I moved my head, and I made my ear more available to him. He placed the thermometer in the canal.
“I’m left in a puzzling spot,” Berger said. “What to do when handling a child experiment who has been made as devious as is possible, and what to do with his friends? I have every reason to suspect that if we were to take the fastest route out of the city, we would be intercepted or interrupted. If we strike out at them, we’ll be flanked. I’ve spent a significant portion of the last two hours arguing with the generals in charge about why we shouldn’t take pre-emptive action.”
He made a small amused sound.
“Now I find myself confiding in you, Sylvester, as you’re one of the rare few who would truly understand this tactical dilemma I find myself facing.”
I raised one eyebrow.
“Mm hmm,” Berger said. “It’s ironic. I’ve explained to Charles and Florence, continuing their education, but while the idea no doubt found its way to their heads, I’m not sure they’ve dig
ested it. I wouldn’t say they don’t trust me when I say it—”
I might, I thought.
“—but I do think some lessons have to be taught through hands-on experience. If the two generals lose patience and insist on an exit or a pre-emptive strike, then I suspect we’d see it unfold to your benefit, Sylvester. We’d act, only to be confounded, interrupted, hamstrung, while a valiant effort to rescue you would no doubt occur. Florence and Charles would get a lesson.”
“There’s no need for the lesson, uncle,” Charles said. “I believe you.”
“I’m glad for that,” Berger said. “But I worry it’s a superficial belief, Charles. Seeing the victory or the loss would make it that much easier for you to imagine and conceptualize similar situations for yourself. What does a win for our side look like? A defeat? What does it feel like in the pit of your stomach? You two could easily take away something from watching people die and experiencing the weight of those deaths, enemy or friendly.”
I already knew Berger wasn’t terribly concerned about the deaths of others in a humanitarian sense. I imagined a bit of plague growing over his his heart and dying for a lack of anything to eat.
He went on, “If it comes to that, Sylvester, I expect the losses to be lopsided, on your side or mine.”
I gave him my best nod.
“Let’s see that temperature. A body temperature of twenty-five degrees. That won’t do. Let’s feel your ears…”
He touched the flat of my ear.
“…nose, and extremities.”
His fingers momentarily laid across the end of my nose, and I didn’t feel anything as he manipulated my fingertips.
“We’ll need to warm you up. Charles, if you’d go to the medical tent and fetch some blankets? We’ll cover him. One of the heaters, too. Recruit someone with my say-so if you don’t think you can bring it all.”
“Yes, uncle.”
Charles hurried off, clomping around in a quarantine suit that was too large for him.
Berger mused for a second, and then he said, “I’m not a strategist or tactician, but the man I serve was an ardent one, and I am someone who craves learning. I made use of the opportunity to absorb and observe, and now I’m forced to put the ideas into practice. As for this situation…”
“He who makes the first move loses, father?” Florence asked.
“Something like that, something like that,” Berger said. “In practice, it’s rarely that simple. Think in terms of oblique angles and feints. Sylvester’s friends will start with attacks that cannot be sourced, to begin with. They’ll aim to frustrate, deny, and distract. Their hope is that by the time they do something more overt, the generals and soldiers will be restless enough that they snap at the bait.”
He made a ‘tsk’ sound, then he bent down, and he brought his face level to mine.
I could control my expression. I could use my eyes, I could move my lips. That left me the conundrum, what face did I pose to Berger? I could allow myself to break, to betray doubt and fear, and I could do the opposite, and pose a brave expression that looked supremely confident in the status quo.
I deemed that it was the latter that would get me the results I wanted. I wore an expression of easy confidence, impervious and unbothered. As if I still expected to win.
“Your breathing…” Berger observed. He frowned a little, and then he reached back behind me. The head of the bug moved against my neck, and sensations shot down the trunk of my body and down my limbs as its grip momentarily loosened.
He kept his hand there for several seconds before removing it.
Then he pressed the back of a gloved hand to my throat, hard enough to press the knot at the front of my throat back into my windpipe.
He kept his hand there, and for a long while, I thought he was going to strangle me to near-unconsciousness as he’d done before.
“You might have bought yourself an advantage if you’d studied the Academy science,” Berger said. “You would’ve known that I would know what to look for, here. Even with your natural resistances and immunities, you shouldn’t be recovering this quickly. You’ve gained the ability to speak, haven’t you?”
I didn’t respond, staying mute. I had regained my voice, I was pretty sure, but my ability to study my immediate surroundings was a limited one. I couldn’t have been sure that there wasn’t anyone in earshot, standing a few feet behind me when I tried my hand at vocalizing.
“That tells us, Florence, that he’s hiding things,” Berger said.
“It’s only fair,” she said. “He called it a game, when he was talking to Charles. By the rules of this game, he’s allowed to do what he needs to do to come out ahead.”
“He is, but a better play would have been to reveal he could’ve spoken. He could have eked out a small advantage, surprised me, said something before I thought to shut him up.”
I opened my mouth. Berger clapped a gloved hand over it.
“The right words could have piqued my curiosity, nettled me, or achieved something with you. Past tense. The moment has passed, Sylvester.”
Berger shifted position. He reached back with the other hand and touched the bug.
With that position, he couldn’t see my face. I glanced at Florence and rolled my eyes.
Berger spoke, “You shouldn’t have had this effect on the parasite riding you. Not this quickly. Your Wyvern formula must be different from the standard… or it’s an older, harsher formulation.”
“Effect?” Florence asked.
“He’s killing it. It’s latched onto his neck here, see? And its digits are inserted here, on either side of the gap between the second and third rungs of the spine? Trace chemicals in his sweat, blood, and cerebrospinal fluid are finding its way into the air passages and stomach of the pupa ludibrius. It’s dying as we speak, and as it does, it’s losing its grip on his breathing.”
“What happens then?”
“It dies, and it takes him with it.”
Florence turned her masked face toward me. She watched me. I rolled my eyes again, raising them skyward and rocking them back and forth, as if bored.
I was nervous, though. There weren’t many openings or opportunities.
“Here Charles is,” Berger observed.
Charles arrived, carrying a stack of folded blankets. They were heavy, military issue, and they smelled like horse.
Berger took the blankets, and he unfurled them, before placing them over me, so the corners fell over my shoulders. He leaned me forward, then placed another behind me.
“Ah,” I started, aiming for an ‘I’.
Berger caught my face with one hand, and pushed me to one side. I was sitting on a bench set by a table, and my face was shoved off to one side, striking the surface of the table.
He held me there, face in snow and wet, blankets slipping off of me, for several long seconds.
“Quiet,” Berger said.
I would have liked to sigh, but I couldn’t.
He released me, and I didn’t try to speak again.
Opening his medical bag, he withdrew another bug. Eric’s, I supposed. He moved around behind me, leaving my face still pressed against the bench, and began, I presumed, removing the first bug.
“This will have to do until we’re out of the city,” he said. “It might be that I can revive the first pupa ludabris or devise another method of rendering you more or less harmless.”
The paralysis no longer gripped me. I had nothing below the neck but a morass of pins and needles I couldn’t even make out as a human shape. But I’d planned for this. I’d primed my brain while I sat here in the wet and cold. I’d drawn up an image of my body, complete with muscle memory, and now I went to great lengths to map the strange prickling sensations to the movements of my body.
I jerked, and then moved an arm beneath the blanket.
“Hold him,” Berger instructed.
Charles and Florence approached.
Desperate, I moved what I could. It felt less like the movem
ent of a limb, and more as if I were splashing the surface of water, the pinpricks traveling on the tops of waves. The movements of fingers were painful, but still I tried to make sense of the movements.
The two children seized my arms, pinning them against my sides. In only the last second, I was able to move my right hand. I couldn’t be sure, but I was left to believe that it wound up folded against the pelvic hollow, between where my leg met my hip and my groin, just at my beltline.
Every sensation was a thousand pinpricks, sharp and alarming. Given just a bit of time, it dwindled to a mere hundred isolated pricks.
My lockpicks were clipped to my belt, slipped between my pants and my underwear. Slowly, I went for them, working my fingers, to make my hand crawl.
A layer of blankets protected me, as did the thick gloves my captors wore. It minimized sensation.
I found my lockpicks, and I set them on my lap. I began opening the little wallet that held the individual picks—
And my nostrils flared a fraction.
I could smell it. Smoke.
Berger continued his work for a moment behind my back, caught up in what he was doing.
He would notice. It was designed to draw notice. That put me in an awkward spot.
While I still had some marginal control over my hands, I moved my fingers. My middle finger found itself into a pocket where my rake-bar sat. A slender and flat bit of metal that formed a zig-zag. Used to trip the pins of a lock, it was something I’d move back and forth, until the zigs knocked the pins up. Against cheap locks it was the fastest way to open things, and one of the noiser ones too.
I couldn’t hold onto the picks, and I didn’t want to drop it if the shackles would be a factor. With that in mind—
I pushed my finger into the pocket, felt the stab of pain and then localized agony as I drove the wiggle-shaped bit of metal into the space between fingernail and finger, as deep as I could get it in the moment.
While my attention was occupied, my focus on keeping my expression straight, Charles noticed the smoke.
“Uncle?” Charles ventured.
Berger stepped around the table, into my field of view. He held the bug, with a syringe embedded in its back. “A bad time to distract me, Charles.”