by wildbow
I finished up, pulled the chain to flush, and used the bowl of water to wash the rest of the mess down the drain of the tub.
Opening the medicine cabinet, I got the small case of syringes out. There were three.
“I know the spinal injection goes in the spine, but I get the rest confused. Muscle relaxant, it goes in the muscle of the leg or buttock, antidote, it goes in the bloodstream. Or is it the other way around?” I asked.
“You say that every morning, Sy,” Jessie said, from the other room.
“Every morning,” Helen echoed.
“You guys are no fun. I’m doing it for effect.”
“I think you’re the only one that appreciates that effect,” Jessie said.
I made sure there was no air in the syringe, then jammed the muscle relaxant in the woman’s throat. I depressed the syringe. I left it there while I stuck the other syringe into her leg.
“You get to live another day,” I said, leaving the second of the syringes in place.
The syringe that went into the base of her skull, however, needed more caution. I inserted it as gently as it warranted.
“There,” I told her. I plucked the syringes out, and I cranked the tub on. “Now get yourself cleaned up.”
I stepped out of the bathroom, and I joined the others as they prepared breakfast.
Tea, and bacon, and eggs, and mystery meat. I used a hot ring to toast bread directly.
“That’s a fire hazard,” Jessie pointed out.
“Yes, but I really like toast,” I said. “Do we have butter?”
“I remembered the butter,” Jessie said. “Give me some credit.”
We carried on, and Jessie stepped away to get our clothes sorted out. I was letting her pick my outfits, which she seemed to like, and it seemed today was a waistcoat.
A knock at the door made us all freeze.
“Mail!” the voice on the other end called out. “Leaving it outside!”
Jessie signaled. High Building Girl Queen.
Rooftop girl queen. Bea.
Checking first on the woman in the tub, making sure she hadn’t gone and drowned on me, I saw that she had enough wherewithal to sit up straighter and grip the sides of the tub. I closed that door, then quietly slipped out into the hallway. Jessie and Helen made more noise in the kitchen to cover me.
I moved quickly and quietly as I hurried to catch up with Bea. She startled as I put my hand on her shoulder.
“Sy,” she said.
“Bea,” I said. “Everything going smoothly?”
“Smoothly enough. There’s some mutterings, people wondering about new faces, but… better than I thought.”
“Good,” I said, smiling.
She gave me a soft, one-note chuckle. “They were talking to me about it. As if I’ve been here for longer than I have. They were complaining about newcomers.”
“Mailroom is invisible, and it implies status and trust,” I said. “None of this is accidental.”
Bea nodded.
“Keep things on the down-low, don’t try to push people to tell you anything, but do listen. We’ll meet later and I’ll tell you how to get people to want to confide in you.”
“Okay,” Bea said.
“And while we’re at it? Tomorrow, if there’s any mail that looks official-ish, you can knock and insist she sign for it. There’s probably something that looks like it should be signed in the mailroom, but make an excuse to see her face to face and show her your face.”
“Okay. Why?”
“You’re going to build up trust. At a later date, if things go smoothly, which they probably won’t, we’ll want to give her opportunities to try and get a message out. You’ll be that opportunity.”
Bea nodded.
“Happy mailing,” I said.
She rolled her eyes. “Really what I wanted to do with my Academy know-how.”
I scooped up the mail on my way back into the room, and very carefully closed the door behind me. Helen and Jessie were conversing at the stove. I listened, and I could hear the splashing of the tub.
I picked through the mail and found what I was looking for.
“Here we go,” I said. “Took its time.”
Both of the others turned to me, expectant.
“And she said no. Politely, but it’s a no.”
Both looked a touch crestfallen.
“It might have been a hard sell, pushing the Lambs thing,” Jessie said.
“Might’ve,” I said. “I thought my read of Lillian was that she’d say yes, even or especially with that in mind. I wonder if things went badly somehow, or if she got another offer, or…”
“There could have been a hundred different factors,” Jessie said.
“Dang it,” I said.
I sighed.
“Sorry,” Jessie said.
“Probably wouldn’t have worked out that neatly anyway,” I said. I put the stack of Professor Ferres’ mail to one side. “Now. What are the priorities for our Academy today?”
Previous Next
Dog Eat Dog—18.2
“The professor is ambulatory,” Helen commented, as Professor Ferres emerged from the bathroom.
The woman wore a towel and a black silk bathrobe. She looked thirty, though I would have pegged her as being sixty or so, and she moved as though she was ninety, with shuffling steps and clear pain. She had done up her hair in rollers and put on makeup, but it was an incomplete portrait.
“Did you sleep well?” I asked.
The professor ignored me. Clutching the front of her bathrobe with one hand, she used the other to help her ease down into a kneeling position. She pulled the drawer open, and she stopped, staring down.
“We moved in for the long term,” I said. “It made more sense to have our clothes in the dresser.”
“I see,” she said. She was quiet for a moment. “Where are my clothes?”
“Linen cupboard,” I said. “I did dust before I put them away, we can’t have you looking out of sorts.”
“Yes,” she said. She looked like she was going to say something, and then defaulted to, “Can’t have that.”
She was slow in raising herself to a standing position.
“Your day starts at eight sharp,” Jessie said. “Most students get their first glimpse of you by eight o’five. You should hurry, or you’ll be behind schedule.”
“Noted,” the professor said.
She failed her first attempt at standing up, and fell to her knees, hunched over.
“If you’re shooting for pity, you won’t find any here,” I said.
“I’ve been sleeping in the bathtub night after night. If any part of me presses too hard into a part of the bathtub, I bruise, I get sores.”
“Helen turns you,” I said. “She should be, anyhow.”
“Every two hours,” Helen said. “I give her a push or change her position. I slosh water on her if she’s messy.”
I gestured, indicating Helen for the Professor’s benefit.
“Yes. Less sores, but as you might imagine, the sleep quality leaves much to be desired.”
“Tell us what we need to know about the Academy and it’s operations and we’ll get you a cot. You’ll get three square meals a day, and the only injections you’ll get will be the antidotes,” I said.
She turned her head, an she gave me a venomous look. I gave her my best one back.
“I’ll endure,” she said.
“Then endure,” I said. “And do it fast. The clock is ticking, and if you don’t at least look like you’re in full control of your faculties and maintain business as usual, then we have to escalate.”
“As you’ve told me, again and again,” she said. “Is this the same as what you were saying earlier? Are you repeating yourself to try and batter down my mental defenses with repeated blows to the same points? Are you like the Reverend Mauer or the Crooks of yesteryear? Will you threaten me with your best attempts at hell on Earth? Every day almost exactly the same but for the fact th
at it’s a little worse, hope just out of reach?”
Reaching up, she gripped the knobs of the drawers and she hauled herself halfway to her feet. She panted.
“I don’t know the Crooks,” I told Jessie.
The professor hauled herself the rest of the way to a standing position and made her way to the cupboard with the bedsheets and towels.
Jessie supplied the answer, “Crooks as in shepherd’s crooks. Young, clandestine religious group. Mostly farmers. The parents passed on religious knowledge in secret, very fervent in portraying the Academy and its doings as wrong and vile, much like the actual church in its last days. They were found out, the parents were imprisoned, three of the worst offenders were executed. The youths fled, spent a year staging covert strikes on the aristocracy. They made a point of torturing anyone they got.”
“They were quite creative,” Helen said.
“They only lasted a year?” I asked.
“Academy intervened, the Crooks made a move and failed in the face of overwhelming opposition. The captured gave up the rest.”
“Ah,” I said. “That’s a shame.”
“I wouldn’t say that. They were a closer analogue to Cynthia than to Mauer. Mauer has a mission, but the Crooks and Cynthia devolved. No cooperation, not building anything, no beliefs. Only wrath, rape, torture, drawing blood by any means necessary. Even if innocents got caught in the crossfire.”
“They made pretty displays with the corpses and biblical passages,” Helen said. “I wish I could have seen them.”
“Pretty displays or no, it sounds like it’s still a dang shame, just a shame on a different front.”
“Yes,” Jessie said. “They were organized, they were capable, but pressing forward when you’re facing a force this daunting means having to dig deep inside yourself for more strength, more reserves. They dug up something that was awfully ugly and in pain.”
“Why does that sound so familiar?” the professor asked. She had found the clothes for the day in the linen cupboard. “On an entirely unrelated topic, should I dress myself here, in plain view, so you can degrade me further, or should I step into the washroom so you don’t have to see the bedsores and bruises?”
“Sarcasm doesn’t become you, Professor Ferres,” I said.
“If you intended to bait me with irony and force me to keep quiet as yet another form of pressure, then so be it. I can endure that as well.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. I waved her off. “Helen, will you watch her? Jessie and I will get ready.”
Helen nodded.
Jessie and I retired to the washroom. We washed up quickly at the sink, scrubbing our faces and wetting our hair. I dried my hair and then turned, hip resting against the sink as I faced Jessie. My fingers combed through her wet hair and broke it into three plaits, which I set to braiding. She, meanwhile, set to work with my hair, reaching over to a jar without looking and then setting everything in place.
It took more than a little coordination, but it was nice to bond, my fingers were quick with the braiding and my hair tended to stay in place better when Jessie did it.
“Remind me about her schedule for today,” I said.
“You should remember that much.”
“Except I don’t.”
“Do you not remember because I’m serving as your memory?” she asked. “You shouldn’t lean on me that heavily.”
“It’s temporary. I need to focus my brain on other things. There’s a lot to coordinate.”
“There is. I just worry.”
“I’m remembering. I’m just remembering peripheral details. I’m trying to stage the entirety of Hackthorn Academy in my head for the day everything goes to pieces. I’m putting the main thrust of things aside, for you.”
“I’m going to have a bad day sooner or later, Sy. You can’t go to pieces then. You keep moving. See things through.”
“I’ll try,” I said. I reached up and scraped a bit of gunk that lingered in the corner of one of her eyes.
“Trying isn’t good enough.”
My hands still up near her face, I put my palms on her cheeks, holding her face, then kissed her.
Helen and the professor were talking in the other room, I noticed, now that our own conversation wasn’t overlapping them.
I paused mid-kiss, holding the edge of Jessie’s lower lip between my own, and turned my head a fraction toward the door.
Jessie pulled her lip free, then murmured, “Ferres said that the thing that bothered her most about this situation was that it was very possible she’d die at the hands of one of that cretin’s creations. Ibbot’s. Helen took offense.”
“Ah,” I murmured. “How nice to know I have your full attention.”
“Speak for yourself, Sylvester. I pick up on all of the background details.”
“Most, not all,” I said. My fingers dropped from her face, and my hand went straight back up to find a loose thread on her nightgown. I gave it an exploratory tug, and she batted my hand aside. “Now I’ve got to ask, did you tell me the schedule and I completely forgot about it already, or did you forget?”
Jessie used scissors she had picked up from the shelf above the sink to snip the loose thread. “She’s checking in with her pet students and bringing them as a cohort while looking after the master’s birthday party, then she’s meeting with a group of would-be grey coats about their ongoing projects, all followed by lunch, if there’s time.”
“We haven’t seeded the grey coats.”
“No we haven’t,” Jessie said.
“What’s the location?”
“Her office. Which is actually quite inconvenient, because there’s traffic all around it.”
“Hiding under the desk?” I asked.
“Wrong kind of desk for that.”
“What if it was Helen?”
“Not even Helen.”
“We haven’t had many situations come up where we couldn’t seed, spy on proceedings, or verify everything was sufficiently crooked in our favor after she’d passed through.”
“Not any so far. We talked about having her cancel a few days ago.”
“Did we?”
Jessie sighed.
I sighed in the same way she had, mocking her.
“Yes, we did. Your instinct at the time was that things are too precarious for her to break pattern, graduate students are too invested in their projects to suddenly be ignored by the headmistress, she can’t delegate, and people would grumble.”
“And six abstract units of grumbling becomes one abstract unit of difficult questions. My instincts sound about right, so I’ll trust them.”
“Any bright ideas?” she asked. “And did you actually tie my hair in a knot to secure the braid?”
“It’s fancy,” I said, waving the end of the braid in her face. “And pretty.”
“You’re the one that’s untying the thing.”
“Naturally. And yes, I have bright ideas. Not all are applicable to this situation, but give me my due.”
“If she passes on one message by way of the grey coat prospects, all of this falls apart.”
“Yeah,” I said.
I would have liked to have more control over this situation than we had. There was a chance we could come out ahead if we happened to lose control, but I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to go there. Blood would be shed, not all of it theirs.
“What are you thinking?” Jessie asked. “You’ve got this tiny frown line between your eyebrows.”
“I’m thinking… I need to break her down more. If she’s our puppet, I don’t want her pulling against the strings.”
“Break her down how?”
“I might scare her.”
“Whatever you need to do. And the prospective grays?”
“We could take cards we aimed to play later and play them now, audaciously.”
“Is this a normal person’s take on audacious, or is it the take of a certain black haired, shorter-than-average gentleman who has normalized audaciou
s, who is then calling this particular play audacious?”
“Shorter than average?”
“Don’t get hung up on labels.”
“It’s just heartless of you to make a point of it. You called me a gentleman?”
“Don’t get hung up on words. And focus. If you lose track then I have to start this conversation over from the beginning.”
“You don’t ever have to do that. Exaggerator.”
“Focus.”
“It’s something even I would call audacious, when I’m very comfortable with things the average person would call audacious.”
“Right. If someone was to sketch out all of your thoughts as they were right this moment, how large a share of those thoughts are trying to find other solutions?”
“Um. I think the share is the size of a large cat.”
Jessie gave me the look.
“They’re thoughts. I’m not going to assign a number or percentage to thoughts. They get away from me and then I sound wrong. I don’t want to set myself up for failure.”
“Fine. How large a share is already devoted to finding a way to make the audacious happen?”
“Take your pick of any animal large enough to sit on the medium sized cat and kill it in the process.”
Jessie sighed.
“Come on,” I said.
We stepped into the other room, and I headed straight for my pile of clothing. Helen and the professor were still talking.
“—numbness?”
“No. But the gnawing muscle makes a T-shape connection to the biting muscle and the T feels weak, and there’s an ‘x’ connection between the grimace muscle and the snake-mouth muscle group that’s pulling more than it should.”
“You need to make more sense, dear,” the professor said.
“You’re a terrible influence on her,” Jessie whispered in my ear. Helen had turned her head. She pushed her hair aside and drew lines on her cheek, illustrating.
The professor had done good work so far. Helen looked almost like she always had. Her face was intact, no damage apparent, no scars. The only problem was that her expressions weren’t there. Our perfect actress was struggling to act. Her only face was the dead-eyed one from yesteryear.