by wildbow
I was rolling dice and playing with numbers and justifying, and even if I considered that the chances of an immediate, unavoidable death were in the single-digits, I was still making that call. I felt like I could taste all of the poison of Wyvern on my tongue as I swallowed that.
But I had an army and there was no way to keep my hands entirely clean forever if I was going to use it as such, Helen needed help, and we needed someone with a black coat if we were going to accomplish what we needed to accomplish. Failure here when morale was low would see students breaking away, looking to find their own way, which would be disastrous as the Academy cracked down, or they would join Cynthia and Mauer and face far worse numbers.
We crossed the rest of no man’s land, and the charge petered out. Students shouted, brandishing rifles and weapons, and wary experiments backed up, whip-hands and meaty Bruno hands with long hair draping from them ready in case it became a melee brawl.
Both sides made movements as if they would throw themselves at the other, but lacked the courage to follow through.
“Surrender!” I called out.
A woman with a fifteen-foot tendril extending from her palm snapped her arm out in my direction. It moved far faster and farther than expected, cracking the air where my head had been. I was already moving, leaning out of the way, with the lean becoming a tilt, then a run.
I broke away from the front of my army, and threw myself into the gas cloud.
I couldn’t see in the thick gas, so I didn’t try. My eyes were screwed closed, my breath held, and I moved through the clustered experiments blindly, shoulder bumping into one, then the other as I rebounded through them like a billiards ball.
Somewhere in the midst of it, I decided to be proactive and drew my knife. I stuck people here and there, making more precise cuts when and where I was able to identify the shape of someone.
I brushed up against one of the long-haired individuals, and was unpleasantly surprised to find that the hair wasn’t hair at all. It stuck to me and my clothes like briars, and it rasped as it pulled away. Gas stung a patch of my cheek and temple in the wake of one such collision.
Another experiment was one with the external organs. On collision, the organ popped, and the fluid drenched one of my sleeves.
I shucked off my jacket, a process that was complicated by my not wanting to drop my gun or knife, and by the presence of some kind of wriggling worms that had escaped the fluid sac when it had popped. In my rush, occupied as I was, I bumped headlong into another long-haired bruno. The collision was with what was likely the middle of his back, which was covered by a clothing, but I felt hair hook and pull on my sleeve and hair as an arm swiped in my direction.
In the rough center of the area, I found the speaker. He had fallen to the ground and had only managed to rid himself of one half of the coat setup with grenades in the pockets.
I jabbed my gun into my waistband with enough force that the barrel likely gouged flesh, grabbed the coat, and pulled. What didn’t immediately give, I slashed at.
I squinted, using light and shadow to try and make out the world, my eyes burning and tearing up, and I oriented myself to make my exit. With some vague sense of where people were, I was able to move faster, departing.
The gas was already thinning out, but as I wrangled the remains of the coat setup that I’d collected, I was able to feel that one side was heavier than the other.
Not all of the canisters had deployed. Between Helen and I, we hadn’t achieved full coverage in finding and activating all of the canisters. I pulled the remaining pins, and I threw the coat into the midst of the enemy. The still-active canisters didn’t have a lot of oomph driving the output, but it made for an expanding haze of fog, disorganization in their ranks as they tried to stay clear while maintaining battle lines.
I also managed to get some attention for myself. I was content to step back into the smoke and move off to the side, while tentacles snapped out. Not whip cracks this time, but lunging, reaching grabs. One swiped across my shoulder, and I grabbed it, cutting it with my knife.
Now their attention was divided three ways. Gas in their midst, however weak, me, and the army bearing down on them.
While I’d been absent, they had pushed forward. Some of the tentacle women had grabbed some students and were dragging them closer by increments. Four students were using bayonets to fend off a Bruno.
But those skirmishes were isolated. Both sides were made up of people who wanted to live, with an exception of the stitched, who were trying to follow orders and losing ground to the chaos of the moment and the lack of their handler. That desire to survive made for a more cowardly kind of engagement. There was shouting, posturing, there were threats, and very few individuals were really stepping forward to act.
On the far left of the enemy group, well beyond my reach, some experiments went lunging for the guns of the fallen stitched soldiers. A contingent of the Beattle rebels pushed forward, and it became a melee instead of a shootout.
I pitched my voice to make sure I’d be heard amid the guttural threats and low cries. I tried to sound imperious. “The next gas grenades go off in thirty seconds! Surrender, kneel, and you don’t get gassed!”
Just as all but a few experiments were reluctant to truly throw themselves into the fray and risk their lives, there was an equal and opposite reluctance to give up the fight.
It had to feel horrible, to be caught in the middle, where there was so much uncertainty in surrender and mortal peril in fighting to win.
One of the tentacle women, as far as I could tell while half-blind, was being particularly persistent in trying to sweep the cloud of gas to find me. She might have been one of the ones I’d cut.
I timed my exit so that I could duck under one of the sweeps and emerge right in front of her before she could pull her tendrils in and assault me.
My knife-tip, by intent, hit her sternum, hard. I held it there, between her breasts, not far from her heart, and intoned the word, “Surrender.”
She brought her arms in, hands seizing me, tentacles following, reaching around my head.
I brought my arms up, pushing the knife with both hands, the blade scratching sternum and clothing, sliding up, and finally finding the soft flesh of neck. The thrust parted flesh from the hollow of her throat to the point where her chin met her neck. The tail end of the thrust might have severed a major vein.
I watched, wary, studying those nearby as the woman tumbled to the ground. One of the tendrils caught on my vest and my injured shoulder as it pulled away, and I was able to keep my face still as it did so, but I wasn’t able to avoid my leg buckling and my grip on the knife faltering. I only barely managed to keep from dropping it.
The experiments closest to me hadn’t lunged to attack at the show of weakness. I fixed my grip, and the bloated fluid-sac experiment I was looking at at the time backed away a step.
I took one hand off the knife, and gestured at him, motioning him down.
He sat down with force, plopping himself down on the road.
People wanted to live.
The one effective surrender was cause for a domino effect. Just as one person pulling the trigger gave others permission to shoot, one surrender gave way to another, and then another.
The experiments that were most hostile and dangerous pulled away, forming a separate group, and they drifted closer to the retreating non-soldier stitched, the laborers and filler, the dumb muscle.
That was it. I hurried over to the coats and grenades, and, grabbing them, I hurled them in the direction of the hostiles.
The first canisters were only just running out, as new ones were flaring to life. They backed away from the expanding cloud of gas, and then retreated wholesale, running away.
“Don’t hurt the ones who surrendered,” I said. It wasn’t an order meant for the ears of my people, but for the ones who had given up the fight. “Tend to the injured. Greens, I want you to surround the building, make sure our professors aren’t run
ning away. Don’t chase or engage, but give us a shout if there’s a problem.”
I watched as Mabel’s group, minus Mabel, went to do as I’d bid.
Some of our people had been hurt. I looked over our group.
“Who’s hurt?” I asked.
I heard a smattering of names, none of whom I recognized. I heard a litany of injuries. Shot, head injury, some medical slang that was probably ex-students retreating into comfortable, easy terminology.
“Nobody died?” I asked.
There was a pause.
“Marcus isn’t doing well, but he should pull through,” I heard. “Some of the others are fighting over who gets to work on him. Davis took over.”
“Good,” I said. “You did good.”
They had, in a way. Not perfect, a lot of hesitation, a lot of fear, but…
“You showed guts,” I said, as if talking to myself. “That was good.”
I saw a smile on one injured person, head injury, and before I could take in more, Jessie and some of the locals were approaching.
“That was bloodier than I thought it would be,” the older man said. He’d gone a little white, while I was probably the opposite.
“There are a lot of answers to that statement,” I said. “But short answer is yes, it was unexpectedly bad. Longer answer is they forced it to be, by how they laid things out. The only approach was one that saw us collide with the defensive force they had in place.”
“You could have chosen not to fight,” he said.
“I think…” I said, and I paused, coughing, blinking, taking a moment to endure the lingering effects of the gas on me. My skin burned with every brush of the air. I was fairly covered up, but my face felt flushed, my skin hurt, and I was probably as red as a robin’s breast. I stopped coughing and stayed where I was, thinking.
“No answer?” he asked.
“More that I’m trying to politely word this, knowing you still have some faith about the Academy and the Crown,” I said.
He stiffened a little at that.
The students around me were watching the exchange. Some of them hadn’t heard the opening conversation between me and the man.
“How about this?” I asked him. “Come inside. Join me for a conversation with the professors who set that giant on your city. Don’t tell them who you are. Just listen in.”
“Why?” he asked.
Jessie spoke up, “Because if you hear what they say when they’re not talking to the public, you might well change your mind about us having to fight.”
The gas behind me was clearing up. I could see Bea’s group, and I could see the experiments. They had largely been pacified, the fight gone out of them as they struggled to see, breathe, and endure the pain of their skin burning.
“Alright,” the man said. “If it means answers, I’ll listen.”
“It doesn’t mean answers,” I said. “In the seventeen years I’ve been on this earth, I’ve spent more than half of them looking for answers to questions. At first it was in the Academy’s service, then it was against the Academy. I have more questions than when I started. I don’t want you to not come, but I don’t want to lie to you either.”
“You’ll get answers to this question, maybe,” Jessie said. “About why they acted here.”
“I’ll listen in and decide for myself,” he said.
I pointed at some people. Helen was among them, hanging back in the midst of the group.
Helen wasn’t supposed to be alive, at this juncture, so it was risky to have her with us, but I knew she’d be upset, insofar as she got ‘upset’ in the conventional sense, if she didn’t get an opportunity to participate. The minor play with the speaker and the Radham badge wouldn’t satisfy, I suspected.
She had her hood up, and she allowed me a small smile as she approached.
I’d picked the able bodied, rather than faces I knew. And I’d picked Helen. Jessie came too, as a matter of course.
I still had the bitter taste in my mouth, and gas was only a part of it. I didn’t like this situation, this city, this attack on the Academy’s part, or this confrontation with Cynthia on one side of it. I didn’t like the tone of it, or the way they had positioned themselves.
I didn’t like that there were a few things that weren’t connecting.
Our rebels kept an eye on the experiments while we entered the building. It was Jessie, Helen and I who led the way, Jessie on the right, Helen on the left, and me at the lead.
The building was square, four rooms each taking up an equal share of space. Stairs led up to the second floor. Once we’d checked that nobody was situated on the ground floor, we made our way up the stairs.
The older man trailed behind in the company of our rebels. He seemed to buy that we could do what we’d talked about doing, and that we could make effective use of the speaker, and I suspected Jessie had built up something of a rapport while in his company.
Helen reached out and stopped us while we were only partway up the stairs.
“What is it?” Jessie whispered.
She reached out and touched our throats. Her hands, still suffering for the damage to her body, twitched.
It took me only a second to realize that she was intending for me to feel the twitch.
“H-h-h-h-h-h—” I made the sound, whisper quiet.
She exhaled, mirroring me. A shuddering exhalation. Then she inhaled.
Odd breathing.
“How many?” Jessie asked.
Helen raised her hand, then knocked it against my arm. She was presumably doing something similar for Jessie. Tap-tap, pause, tap-tap.
“I, uh, don’t have the tap code anymore,” I murmured. “Or if I do, I’m not remembering the numbers these days.”
“Three,” Jessie said. “Three people.”
Helen nodded.
I wasn’t jealous, exactly, but a part of me felt deeply disappointed that I couldn’t claim to be someone who understood Helen when all other communication failed.
We crept up, this new information in mind. Making our way down the hallway, we reached the master room on the second floor. The rooms lacked furniture, but for this one, which had a table and a loveseat, set a distance apart from each other, as if purely an afterthought. There were papers on the table, and there were three individuals in the room. Two stood, slouching, and the third sat on the arm of the loveseat.
All three wore coats. Two grey, a man and a woman, and a man in a black coat.
I could hear their breathing now, and I could read their stances, postures, and expressions. The agitation with seemingly no outlet or momentum to it, the spittle flecking lips, the way they stared off into space. One held a fireplace poker and periodically let it swing left and right, like a pendulum, as if to remind himself of the heft of it.
I gestured. Fight. Drug.
Combat drugs. They had dosed themselves.
Not looking to run, only to fight.
They had to make this difficult, didn’t they?
I gestured, communicating.
Jessie would take one, I would take one, and Helen and the rest could take the third.
Helen knocked my hand aside as I articulated the last bit.
Helen. Group. Together.
She knocked my hand aside, then she gripped it.
I still really didn’t like how weak her grip was.
She took Jessie’s hand too. She held our hands up, and squeezed again, with far too little strength.
I could piece it together, at least. She was using tap code as she squeezed, and Jessie and I let our eyes meet.
Trust. Lambs. I knew what Helen was saying.
I nodded, somewhat reluctantly.
If I’d been able to speak without our whispers potentially drawing the attention of the three people in the other room, then I might have said that trusting the Lambs to perform was one side of the equation. The other side was that we each knew each other’s strengths and limitations, and we covered for them.
She was g
oing to get hurt, and I wasn’t sure how much she had in her, at this stage.
Painstakingly, I communicated everything to the rest, with pen and scrap paper that Jessie supplied.
I would be the bait. It was a role I was comfortable in.
Positioning myself at the top stair, making sure that everyone was ready, stationed in rooms off to either side of the main hallway, I whistled.
“No, no, no, no…” the man in the other room spoke. “No! You’re not taking me alive! You’re not carving me up and making me a stitched, no!”
He appeared in the doorway. “No! I’m a professor, damn it! I’m a professor!”
His voice reached a fever pitch.
“You’re going to have to kill me!” he screeched.
He wheeled around, and he opened fire, shooting into the room Helen was in.
Trust, I thought.
I whistled again.
He shot, this time at me. His reaction times were amped up, and he wasn’t a bad shot either.
Come closer.
He kept firing, and with quick, deft motions, he reloaded. I could see his shadow as he crept closer. A sword in one hand, held close to his leg, a pistol in the other.
“Not making me a stitched! Mommy and daddy said that I’d be made a stitched if I was bad, but I’m a professor now! They said so!”
I was worried the others would panic. That they would attack him, or react in fear of him shooting into their rooms.
Come closer.
He made it halfway down the hallway before I saw a glimpse of him, and he saw a glimpse of me, perched on the stairs below. I’d anticipated it, and he still had the reaction times to nearly clip me.
“I’ve got a pretty black coat, and no matter how much blood gets on it, it never shows,” he said. “Never shows, no, no, no.”
At least the local we’d brought along was getting an earful.
The other two entered the hallway. The grey coats.
They were as quiet as the one in the lead was quiet.
“Mauer burns you at the stake, Fray will drown you, and Cynthia shoves her spear up your ass until it comes out the mouth,” the man in the black coat said. “And all the lesser rebels have their special little torments. Not for me, no, no. If I die, we die together, that’s how the Crown does it.”