by wildbow
Lillian shook her head. “I’m not trying to make you out to be fragile, I’m interpreting things through Sylvester’s very warped perspective—”
“Hey!”
“—and trying to work backwards to work this out. Corruption of a deeper scale could matter,” Lillian said. She looked to Mary for confirmation.
Mary, who had taken a seat on a branch, looked lost in thought.
“Sylvester said you were liable to defect,” Ashton pointed out, for Duncan.
“Can we please stop entertaining Sylvester’s delusion as if it’s fact?” Duncan asked.
The group continued talking. I turned my attention toward getting more tea and cake from Helen. If I didn’t eat something resembling breakfast now, I’d be useless later in the day.
“Thank you,” I told Helen.
“Mm hmm,” she said.
I met her eyes, taking a look at her, trying to see if anything about the current discussion resounded with her. I didn’t find anything resounding, and that wasn’t too much of a surprise. What I did notice was that one of her fingers was moving. It was like an involuntary muscle twitch at one ring finger, the finger moving so little that it was barely noticeable. Had it been a pencil instead of a finger, that small range of movements might have sufficed for a single small punctuation mark.
Helen could control her body on a fine level in order to perform her acts, that was ordinary enough. She had masterful control over every single part of her body, over tension of skin and how open her pores were. Her circulatory system could deliberately slow down or speed up. To better serve her when she was the beast rather than the beauty, she was able to fall still.
On the flip side, however, being too still and perfect posed a danger if it broke her cover and made her look less human. She was too good for that. In most other circumstances, I might have explained that tremor away as an affectation on someone who was almost entirely affectation.
But it was so small and isolated it shouldn’t have mattered. Why only that part? And it was here, in the company of the Lambs, where she could be more herself, insofar as she was ever herself.
I looked up at Helen. I studied her, in contrast to the phantom that lurked just behind her shoulder.
A dozen deviations and odd elements added up. They lined up like a constellation—
“Sylvester,” Lillian said.
I turned my attention away from Helen. I hated that Lillian was using my full name like that.
“Yes, Lillian?” I asked.
“I’ll bite. If there’s a deeper explanation, now’s the time.”
“Bit of a rabbit hole,” I told her. Putting it mildly.
“Sure, Sylvester,” Lillian said.
“I think the thing to do, then,” I said, checking again with Jessie for confirmation. “Would be for two intrepid volunteers, perhaps Helen and Ashton, to block the ears of our two guests, ensuring they don’t hear anything.”
Helen got up from her seat, wordless. I visualized all of the details and factors, the fact that her nails were worn down, when they were supposed to be pristine, the way she was hovering near me, when there were others deserving of cake and tea. Yes, she gave Jessie some. But she gave me her attention.
“See me?” I heard Helen, but Helen hadn’t spoken.
I turned my head.
She was dressed in charcoal grey-black. Helen, hands clasped behind her, her expression dead in a way she rarely wore anymore. She wore a slip of a dress in a strange rendition of the flapper style, with hose that was patterned in a fancy way. More importantly, however, the Helen I was looking at was only eleven years old, if I had to guess.
Fray stood just behind her, one hand on each of Helen’s shoulders.
“Save me,” the dark, childish Helen said.
What am I supposed to do?
I could look at her, and I knew that she was a figment of my imagination. Countless underlying elements, snippets of conversation recalled as only the sentiment, broad-strokes memory becoming intuition becoming a sense of cadence, approach, and muscle memory toward her and those things relating to her.
She was familiar to me on a level words couldn’t fully articulate. I’d molded myself around the Lambs, to better assist them, to move in lockstep with them. I had made mention of the keypress before, of the wax imprint that a keymaker would take into his workshop. Then that same keymaker would file away at the real block of metal until it fit the imprint and matched the key.
I’d filed away at parts of myself since I could remember, to better work with them. I had adapted and worked hard, and I’d attended classes, and scarcely five minutes ever went by where the Lambs didn’t cross my memory.
“It’s not confectionery,” the little Helen said.
I looked away from her to Fray.
Why are you here? I asked. Why again, Fray? Is it the rule that when you show up, things go ass-backwards in short order? Last time you were trying to tell me about the Lambs being in town, signaling the dress colors. Or you were interfering and distracting, clouding matters. But whether you were helping or hurting, I can’t see why you’re here, when it’s clear the little Helen is already trying to communicate a message.
“Sy?”
Another prod from Jessie. Another jerk back to reality, taking my focus off of Helen.
They were waiting, expectant, even looking a little concerned. Helen and Ashton were ready to cover the ears.
“I would have given the okay, but you usually like to handle this,” Jessie said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Go ahead.”
The hands went up, blocking the ears of our hostages.
“Mary Cobourn, as we saw her, was the Falconer, a young noble in the charge of the Lord Infante, modified heavily.”
“What?” Lillian asked.
“Not unique to her. It’s the case for all nobles. Selected from the crop that’s sent to the Block, modified, indoctrinated. There is no family tree, they get allocated to locations with histories made up based on how high quality they end up. There is no Crown, really, because the Academy controls the process. Many of the nobles don’t know, and if they were to find out, it’s not out of the question that it could spark an internecine conflict between Crown and Academy as they cease working together with the top dogs each feeling smugly superior of the other.”
“Sylvester, wait, stop, let me interrupt you.”
“You’re not interrupting. I was more or less done.”
“You can’t—no, Sy,” Lillian said. Then she corrected it, “Sylvester.”
“That’s it?” I asked. “No? Alright then. That’s that. Helen and Ashton can put their hands down now.”
“Sy, be fair,” Jessie told me.
“It’s not done,” Lillian said. “You’re just not making sense. It comes across like a headgame.”
I knew that if I argued, Lillian would push back. There was a wall between us and too many things threatened to make it taller and wider.
I focused on the others.
Mary was lost in thought, and to all appearances, it was a deep well of thought. I tended to think of Mary as being a wild animal barely tamed. The hawk was a common parallel, but I could also think of her as a cat, or a wild horse brushed and beautiful. Movement, power, danger, and nobility were all inherent in those interpretations. She wore an adult woman’s winter coat and a violet dress, her dark brown hair done up with a brooch and ribbon at the back, her makeup was light but effective.
If she had a failing in how she portrayed herself, it was that she could be rigid if she wasn’t mindful of it. She could act, given a push to do so, and she was fair at it, but she wasn’t emotive, and she didn’t betray much when she fixated on the job.
But I could remember Mary sleeping beside me, her face almost completely different, or the look on her face back in the day when she’d changed while I was in the room, the lines of her mouth and neck and shoulders all relaxing in a way nobody else got to see. I could look at her now, and I cou
ld see the facade breaking, but there wasn’t a smile on the other side.
This time, on the face of someone who killed without a second thought, a kind of recognition of death?
Mary had always yearned for family. More than I did, in a way, because what I sought wasn’t family, exactly. She had been a member of the Bad Seeds and that hadn’t hit the mark. She’d sought out the Lambs, and she might have found something there, except Gordon had left her, then Jamie, then me.
I was put in mind of the very young girl who had been in tears as she sought consolation from her puppeteer. He had said a command phrase to induce something—Hayle’s interpretation of it had been a kind of mini-seizure, interrupting the processes and trains of thought at work. I remembered how she’d reached out for my hand. How very lost she’d been.
That was still there, beneath the surface. It was perhaps the fuel that kept her particular furnace burning.
“I was taken with her from the beginning,” I told Mary, fully aware I was giving clues to our hostages. “It took me a while to figure out why.”
Mary looked away, her expression one of concern. Then concern became faint upset, and she turned her back, hands straightening her clothes, as she ostensibly made sure nobody was drawing close.
“You’d wanted to dance with her,” Jessie said.
“I did.”
I gestured. Lillian, attention pointed to Mary, hurried to her best friend’s side, putting an arm around her, another hand taking Mary’s in her own. When she spoke, it was into Mary’s ear, in serious whispers.
I could have eavesdropped or pried, tried to lipread, fine-tuned my hearing. I didn’t.
I looked at Duncan.
“I’m not going to defect,” Duncan said.
“I’m not even pushing you to,” I told him.
“Okay,” he said. “Thank you.”
Briefly, his expression was the closest thing I’d seen to a natural, not-smug smile from him in the time I’d known him.
It didn’t seem like a happy smile. Maybe that was why it looked more natural? If so, what did that say about me?
His eyes, too. I watched as they moved left and right, as if he was taking it all in. Not the things most pertinent to him, but the greater picture.
And then there was Helen and Ashton. I wanted so badly to go to Helen, to hold her hand, and to try to figure out what I’d been caught up in earlier, when my thoughts had run away from me. Unfortunately, I was tied up, quite literally. Ambiguously figuratively.
As for Ashton…
“This is a secret, by the way, Ashton.”
Ashton nodded.
“Feeling very out of the loop,” Mabel said. Her ears had been uncovered. “I know the least here.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do to gently fill you in later.”
“It’s dangerous knowledge to have,” Jessie said, stressing that for the Lambs in earshot.
“For now, though, I’m kind of hoping the Lambs understand where you and I are coming from, Jessie. When it comes to Berger, we need him. We need him for project Caterpillar.”
Jessie took that in, looking very concerned in the moment.
“I never asked for that.”
“But we need it,” I said. “And we need him to get leverage and have access to the tools we need. We have a faction, information, and a game plan we’ve been working on for a year, that’s ninety percent complete. I want to make a better future. We don’t get that with the Crown being what it is.”
“Okay,” Lillian said It didn’t look like Mary wanted to talk. Lillian considered for a moment, then said, “I don’t want to speak for the others, but I’m reasonably confident in this. We need Berger more.”
“This issue you referred to earlier?” Jessie asked.
“The Infante is declaring parts of the Crown States unsalvageable,” Lillian said. “Whole regions, because they have plague, or they’re close to places with plague. Or cities with high rebel populations, out of concern that they’re deliberately spreading the illness.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “It doesn’t feel rebel. Timelines don’t match up.”
“They don’t, and it doesn’t,” Lillian said. “At least, we don’t think so. We talked to the Duke, insofar as he can talk. He told us he was concerned the Infante wouldn’t stop until he had all of the Crown States. Sealed and burned to the ground.”
I looked at Jessie. We’d heard something like that.
“The Duke told us the Infante might loose every single last one of the superweapons in the Crown States.”
My heart dropped out of my chest at that. Every city and every town within a short distance of the Academies themselves has one.
That wasn’t what we’d heard before.
“If we can get Berger to the Duke of Francis, he can revive him, and there’ll be an effective voice of dissent in play,” Mary said. “The Duke is of a lower station but not so low he can be ignored. He has resources, and if the Infante wants to preserve any appearance of propriety, he’ll have to stop or wait. That’s the mission.”
“I think we get dibs,” Duncan said.
Previous Next
Gut Feeling—17.4
We walked, Helen keeping one hand on me and one hand on Jessie, guiding us. Instead of disappearing into the thickest part of the woods, we were working our way into more open space. It meant I was walking face-first into less branches, but it also meant the snow was a little bit deeper. Not that it was deep, but my hands remained tied behind my back, the ground was wet and fairly soft, and it took only one misstep for me self to slip and fall.
“You’re really going to fight us on this?” Lillian asked.
“I’m not fighting,” I said. “I’m stressing that it’s not as cut and dry as you’re saying. Berger is a commodity at this point. His knowledge, his expertise, his access.”
“He may be the only person who can help the Duke, and we need the Duke to sway the Infante,” Lillian said.
I had to watch my footing. From an exhaustion standpoint, I was at a stage where everything felt deceptively light and airy.
“May be, I said, “sway. No guarantees. You don’t sound certain.”
“Listen, I understand that you want to help Jessie,” Lillian said.
“Which is something he didn’t actually discuss with me in advance,” Jessie pointed out.
“Either way, you can’t equate trying to stop the Infante from going crazy and leveling half of the Crown States to… whatever scheme you had in play.”
“I can,” I said. “I can even favorably compare the two ideas. The Duke is a lunatic. He might be the most sane lunatic of the bunch, but you won’t get more control over the situation by throwing him into the mix.”
“What would you propose?” Lillian asked. She didn’t ask it in a way that sounded like she was very receptive to anything I might suggest.
“I’m proposing that you have a sit-down with Professor Berger. Get the details on how to help the Duke, pass it on if you absolutely have to, and let other doctors put it into practice. We keep the Professor, and maybe Jessie and I escape your custody and bring Berger with us.”
“There are so many things wrong with that,” Lillian started. She paused. “Even the question of how much it would hurt the Lambs to have you slip away again, during such a sensitive time, put that aside, what about the fact that they probably wouldn’t even let us near a doctor or let those doctors near the Duke?”
“Do you think they’ll let Berger near the Duke? If the man could be fixed, they would have fixed him already. They’re keeping him sick and brain-dead for a reason. Because the Infante wants free reign. Giving you Berger so you can hand Berger over to the Infante would threaten the man, if he can even be threatened. It would introduce a complication and a hassle he’d sooner remove from the picture.”
“That’s a lot of self-serving assumptions on your part,” Lillian said.
“May—” Jessie started, at the s
ame time I said, “I’m—”
We both stopped, and we looked at each other.
“Floor is yours,” I said.
“Thank you,” Jessie said. “I’d like to interject and ask for the discussion to stop and cool down. It’s been the two of you going back and forth for a little while now. We all know there are feelings in the background that are playing a role here.”
“That’s unfair,” Lillian said. But she said it too quickly, emotion in her voice, and she seemed to realize that her denial had only proved the point, given how it was posed. She made a face and fell silent.
“Take a minute. We’ll discuss before we get Berger, or even after, and I’d very much like to do it as Lambs, if Lillian, Mary, Helen, Ashton and Duncan are okay with that. As a singular group.”
“I don’t know if that’s possible,” Mary said.
“If it’s not, then I understand,” Jessie said. “But I’d like to give it an honest shot. After we’ve cooled off.”
Jessie’s calm was of a very different sort than Helen’s or Mary’s. Helen’s calm was that of a predator, settling in before it struck out for its prey. Mary’s calm was colder, borne of restraint, discipline, and confidence.
Even back with the first Jamie, there’d always been this sentiment that whatever else happened, he was the rock I could cling to in stormy seas. A constant in uncertain water. At least, he had been until he’d been the rock I’d broken myself against.
Jamie and now Jessie had alternated between being the rock to cling to and the rock I was flung against, with a tendency toward the ‘cling’ part in recent weeks and months. Jessie’s calm was, as I saw it, borne of experience and careful assessment with all of the facts in hand. It was a calm that was very easy to share with others.
Lillian and I put our debate aside for the moment. We walked, each of us on different sides of the group.
I looked back at where Duncan and Ashton were managing Archie and Mabel, keeping an eye on them while keeping them out of earshot.
Duncan looked so down. Poor guy.
I was sincere in thinking it, but it still felt weird, because it was Duncan. He was a Lamb, but he was still a pain in the ass.