Twig

by wildbow

At which point they’d realized we were Lambs.

  I missed the days we were a clandestine project.

  “We stay,” I said.

  “What?” Jessie asked.

  “They expect us to leave, so we stay. There isn’t much light. We’re in the shadows up here. Use the glass, Jessie. Helen, you and I, we attack.”

  Jessie started scratching the glass. Helen and I shifted position, and Helen took partial custody of Jessie, wrapping one arm around her.

  They would come up the stairs. They would look up.

  I tried to wrap my head around the scene, then stabbed my knife into the beam at an angle.

  Damaged, bandaged fingers gripped the beam, my other hand gripped the knife handle while I prayed the blade wouldn’t break and the tip wouldn’t pry free. I bought good knives, but…

  My body stretched out along the length of the beam, hugging it, but I didn’t perch on top of it, because doing so would mean being in plain view of anyone coming up the stairs. Instead, I clung to the side, my calf, foot and knee hugging the surface. I was hugging the side as much as I could without anything dangling or being visible beneath.

  Helen mimed me and did much the same, but she used her hands and feet, and she supported Jessie, helping to hold Jessie up, while Jessie scratched the glass.

  My throbbing fingertips and the damage to my back made themselves felt within seconds. I could hear the tromping footsteps, and I was aware of the first people making their way up, checking.

  “There’s a window,” one said. “Did they leave?”

  “They can’t have gone far. Carm and Daisy are still having fits like they do when we use the sharpening wheel.”

  I was trembling now. It wasn’t a lack of fitness. It was that pain and damage I’d sustained was forcing parts of me to work in ways and degrees they hadn’t before to compensate for what would’ve been a decent amount of strain on any other day.

  More boots. They were gathering below. Checking, chattering.

  “Where’s the boss?”

  “He’s with Carm.”

  “What do we do? Tear this place apart? Look for their hiding places?”

  “Sounds like a start.”

  Oh, they were staying for a bit, then.

  Problem was, it wasn’t a question of if I was going to slip and fall. It was a question of when. I didn’t have it in me.

  I looked at Helen, then at Jessie, who was doing a fine job of etching the glass without making audible noise. I looked the other way, at Mauer, who stood on the beam I was hanging onto.

  It was as if he was standing on my hand, grinding down on the injured fingers, intensifying the pain beyond what I would’ve felt if he wasn’t participating.

  There were three people directly below me. I wondered if I could set up my landing so I could stab one and cut another two before they realized what was happening.

  I was pretty sure I couldn’t. Not with my back being injured. Not with my fingertips ruined.

  The knife moved a hair, and the pressure on my fingertips increased.

  I looked over at the others, ready to signal them. What I saw, however, was that Jessie was no longer scratching the glass.

  She wasn’t scratching the glass, meaning the ghosts were in the know. Ghosts being in the know meant they’d alert the people who needed to know, which meant—

  A long shot. Throwing a rope to thread an anchor.

  “Heads up!” a voice called out.

  I peeked, and I only did so because every eye turned away from where we might be. The man who came up the stairs was wearing a military coat. It wasn’t in the long style favored by Academy military, but short enough the belt was visible, double-breasted, with four large buttons. He was young, as his sort went, thirty or so, but had the wear and tear of a man twice his age, in scarring and pockmarks and old burns, with a bit of hair at one side of his head that parted funny, as if it had grown in different around an old wound. He had a beard that mingled blond hair with a chestnut brown, making him look as though he was prematurely greying, and it wasn’t a good beard, more the kind grown out of happenstance and necessity than out of the fact that his face produced good hair. Scraggly on the cheeks and thicker at the chin.

  He had a clone on his arm. One of the ghosts of the redheaded variety. ‘Carm’, I presumed.

  In moving my head down to look around the post, I’d put too much pressure on my hands and back. I tried to move back to a comfortable position and I found myself lacking the strength or the robust, uninjured muscle.

  I dropped. I landed on my feet, took a half-second to get my bearings, and then put a knife to the throat of the most important looking man in arm’s reach.

  I wasn’t sure, on seeing all the people stare my way, that his importance ranked even among the top five or ten of the fifteen men and one woman present.

  I could have sworn.

  But I’d served as the distraction. Helen had found her perch, leaving Jessie where she was, and now Helen jumped.

  Not a pounce. A jump, almost lazy, skirt flapping, hair freeing itself of the close curls and pins Helen had used.

  The ghost reacted, and being a ghost, she reacted fast. It was only in the last second that the ghost winced, head turning away, and Helen was free to crash into both Carm and the man in charge.

  They went down in a heap, all three together, and with Helen in the mix, I knew before I even saw the outcome that she had this in hand.

  Guns were pointed at Helen, and blades were drawn. More blades and guns were pointed at me.

  But Helen had their leader by the jugular, her legs holding the ghost by the throat.

  “Sylvester Lambsbridge here. That would be Helen G. Ibbot embracing you right now.”

  “Good afternoon,” Helen said.

  “I’m Franz,” the man with the beard said.

  “Can we talk, or are you going to follow Cynthia and refuse all negotiation?” I asked, my voice carrying through the open space and past the crowd of thugs and soldiers.

  “I’m tempted to refuse,” Franz said.

  “Even if you die?” I asked.

  “That’s why I said I’m tempted. I’d like to be the leader who holds to his word.”

  I made a point of not looking at Jessie. She was a good card to hold in reserve.

  “Where’s Cynthia?” I asked.

  “Dead,” the man said.

  “Dead?”

  “The giant has her scent. She ordered us to leave her while she deals with it. It tracks her wherever she goes, and it can move faster than a horse runs by walking. If we can’t find a way to kill it, she’s gone. If she isn’t gone already. We haven’t been able to find a way. If we get too close, it reacts to the lingering scent of her on us.”

  “Designed to rip out the power structure in entirety,” Helen observed.

  “What if I was willing to offer my help in saving her, in exchange for our freedom and safety?” I asked.

  “You could,” the man said.

  Cagey. Why, when I was offering something essential?

  Did they not like Cynthia? Was an accidental death a good end that wouldn’t tear their organization apart? Or was there something more at play?

  “You made a move,” I said. A vague statement that opened doors and made me sound smart a hell of a lot more than it made me sound stupid. In this kind of game, assuming someone was up to something was simply a fact of life.

  “Yeah,” Franz said. “I made a move. We found the rest of your little army. Our people are in the process of marching and tracking down your people, while they’re busy unpacking their things and getting settled.”

  Previous Next

  Gut Feeling—17.11

  The fact that Cynthia’s people knew where the others were and what they were up to was a pretty good sign that Franz here was telling the truth.

  I’d grown too attached to that crowd. The idea of them being on the bad end of a group like Cynthia’s was unpleasant, to say the least. They served as my su
rrogate Lambs in many ways, and the idea of bad things happening to Lambs was always something that concerned me as much or more than any risk to myself. That was very much why there had been multiple rules and many a reminder about who could sacrifice themselves and when.

  “That’s all very unfortunate,” I said. “I hope your people end up alright at the end of it.”

  “Sure,” Franz said, sounding like he wasn’t buying the bluff at all.

  Helen tightened her grip on Franz a fraction. Her legs were folded tight around the red-haired clone’s neck. They constricted, tightening on the young woman’s neck. Helen’s voice was calm as the clone’s eyes widened, one hand going up to Helen’s leg, “Carm, honey, stop talking. I can hear you.”

  There were people outside. If the clone had communicated anything, then the enemies we were dealing with now might have reinforcements.

  We’d walked right into the hornet’s nest, and now we didn’t even have the queen hostage. We only had one of her top soldiers.

  “Let’s talk cooperation,” I said.

  “I think if I cooperated, then Cynthia would have my head,” Franz said.

  “If you don’t cooperate, then Helen would have yours.”

  “Could be,” Franz said. He looked eerily relaxed, considering his situation. I was willing to bet that it was fifty percent bluffing and fifty percent that he wasn’t wholly there, emotionally. He added, “Worse ways to go than being embraced by a pretty girl.”

  “What if I told you I wasn’t a girl?” Helen asked. “I’m not even human.”

  She extended her tongue as she finished the sentence. People with guns tensed.

  “You’ve got—” Franz started. He stopped as he saw the end of Helen’s tongue in his field of vision, when her head was beside and a little bit behind his own. “Tits. You smell like a girl.”

  “Mm,” Helen murmured. She arched her back a little bit.

  I couldn’t wholly see, but I could guess, by the way she was moving. She had flexed her ribs, opening up her ribcage, and now the points were likely digging into Franz’s back and side. I could see at one point where a rib was digging into his ribs, starting and halting as it tried and failed to find purchase.

  He was in a position where he couldn’t even look and see what was happening, exactly. It made him less certain than he’d been, with strange appendages prodding and grabbing at him while he tried to focus on me.

  “You okay, sir?” one of the bystanders asked.

  “I’m just fine,” Franz said.

  Helen’s tongue moved closer to his face, draping itself along cheekbone.

  “I think that’s up for debate,” I said. “As is Helen being a good way to go. But let’s put that aside. Cynthia is running. Consider her out of the picture until things settle down. If we take you out of the picture and you retaliate and kill us, or vice versa, what happens to your soldiers here? I know you guys probably have a chain of command, but I somehow don’t see your guys doing well and keeping to the mission. There’s a reason so many rebel groups hinge around personalities. They disintegrate if they don’t have a face.”

  “We’re a little—” Franz started.

  Helen’s tongue moved, the tip shifting up to his eye, then abruptly slipping past eyelid and between eyelid and socket.

  He twisted his head as much as he was able to with Helen’s hand and arm around his neck. He didn’t escape the tongue.

  “Stop that!” one soldier called out, raising his gun.

  Helen mumbled something, then turned her eyes toward me. She shifted her grip, so she was holding Franz with one hand and one arm, the other hand free, and gestured.

  “She can’t stop,” I said. “It’s a liability of sorts. She backs off, or she takes her prey. So… this is how this goes. We should move this along. You were saying, Franz?”

  “We’re more tenacious than… that,” Franz said.

  The tongue was moving in the space of his eye socket. Helen made a small choking sound, and freed up a little bit more of her tongue, extending it further into the socket.

  It was putting him off his game.

  “Here’s the deal,” I said. “We have a mutual enemy in the Crown. I’m as ready to take them on as any of you are, and we’ve been building up our numbers to mount a proper attack. I’m willing to let bygones be bygones, past murder attempts and threats can be left by the wayside where they belong, provided Cynthia is willing to. You guys can call off your buddies, Helen and I go rescue Cynthia, and we collaborate.”

  “We tried the collaboration thing. It’s not—”

  Franz stopped.

  “Sir?” the soldier from before asked.

  “Eyeballs can be replaced,” Franz said. He looked at me with the one eye that wasn’t fixed in place.

  “I don’t understand,” the soldier said.

  “She has leverage on my eye. If she wants to tear it out, let her. I’ll live. I’ll find a replacement.”

  I saw the micro-movements of Helen’s hand as she tensed her grip. Her fingers were digging into the side of Franz’s neck, gripping it for purchase. There was an artery there, and she wasn’t wholly stopping all flow, but I had reason to believe she was constricting it. It wasn’t quite enough constriction to cause symptoms like numbness and a drooping face, but it had a good chance of impairing him, making it harder to put words together and string together thoughts.

  “You can cooperate with us,” I said. I could transition this argument into the kind of course I might take with less intelligent opposition. Hammering in facts, expecting they couldn’t refute.

  “I’d sooner order you be—”

  Using her tongue, Helen pulled out his eye. It wasn’t a quick jerk, a sudden hauling of the eye and connected detritus free of the socket. The eye bulged as the widest point found its way past the lids themselves, and then seemed to grow larger still as pressure was put on it from behind, the eye pulling free.

  It was slow, excruciating, and Franz grit his teeth, lips contorting against teeth and gums in the same way a hand might scrabble against a wall in vain hope of finding purchase, finding a place to grab on that would allow escape or relief.

  “He said don’t shoot,” one soldier told another.

  “But—”

  “But he’s tenacious,” I said. “Don’t you see?”

  My own hostage moved slightly. I pricked his neck with the knife to remind him I was paying sufficient attention.

  Franz, meanwhile, endured the slow, tearing disconnection of eye from head, individual components stretching out to their limits and then snapping or rending apart. Fluids flowed out of the socket, vitreous and crimson.

  Franz was a veteran. He’d likely dealt with horrible things before. He might even have been tortured, once. He was a tough one, and I was now getting the impression that it was a toughness he had to prove. Not to the room, but to himself. It was the kind of trait that drove a good student to study harder, because being a student was so ingrained in their personality that going against it would have meant a blow to their very being.

  The flip side of that observation, however, was that for the student who put so much of themselves into that identity, if the identity was taken away, the person usually crumbled. The top students who had a bad semester quickly became rooftop girls or delinquents, looking to experience everything they had been missing.

  Could the defenses of an emotionally numb soldier and leader be penetrated? Would the dam breach, the emotion flooding out? Would he snap?

  Helen claimed the eyeball and almost a foot of extraneous material that trailed behind it. She drew it into her mouth, and she bit down, very intentionally making a wet sound in the man’s ear.

  “You can just buy a new eye as a replacement. I’ve been there,” I said.

  His hand shook a fraction as he held it against the eye socket.

  “Indeed,” he managed, after a momentary delay. He’d needed a second to gather composure.

  Behind him, standing in the c
rowd, I could see Mauer.

  What did the crowd want? They wanted to be validated. They looked up to their leaders, the faces of their faction, and they wouldn’t intervene so long as Franz here had a chance to show his muster.

  This was a balancing act. It was a standoff shooting, and pulling the trigger first meant getting shot, barring exceptional circumstance. Manipulation was key here, and the power remained almost entirely with the rest of the people in the room.

  People were coming up the stairs. The stairwell itself was already packed with people, so the incursion more or less stopped there.

  “There’s the reinforcements,” Franz said. He was hunched over as much as Helen would let him hunch over, one hand to his eye. He raised his voice. “Ho, reinforcements!”

  This was bad. I’d been aware I was working with a time limit, but there hadn’t been much I could do.

  “Seems like they’re tied up,” I said, when the discussion carried on in the stairwell with no response for Franz.

  “Seems,” he said.

  “Work with us,” I stressed. Hammering in the same point, ignoring the fact that he’d tried to refute it. Helen was carefully listening for every one of his objections, refusals, and any sign that he was about to say or do something like order his men to shoot us. The treatment of his eye had been one step among several in an effort to interrupt him and throw him off his game.

  There was a secondary hand being played here by our Helen. I wasn’t sure it was the best hand to play, all considered, but it was one that suited her. Most living creatures, if reprimanded with enough consistency and effect, would develop an aversion to whatever it was they were doing. Most parents didn’t get the opportunity to be perfectly consistent, and other parents didn’t have a clue, so many children slipped the leash.

  Embraced by what he’d described as a very attractive girl, Franz was being sternly reprimanded in the form of losing his eye and being clawed at by Helen’s ribs. It took willpower to press on when each attempt was punished so, and future attempts promised to escalate.

  I could see it in how he was taking his time to formulate a response.

  Finally, he spoke. “We’ve tried the cooperation thing before. Didn’t work out. I don’t think we’re interested in trying again.”