by wildbow
“You two, take the bathroom while Jessie and I get dressed,” I instructed. “Leave the door open. I want to talk to you, Helen.”
“What about?” Helen asked, as the pair stepped into the bathroom.
“How is my father doing?”
“Your father is… coming together,” Helen said.
“I kind of want him today.”
“Your father would decline any invitations today,” Helen said.
“I kind of really want him today,” I said. “What if he was drunk?”
“Your drunk father would possibly show his face for a short time, not staying for too long out of fear of embarrassing himself,” Helen said.
“That’ll do,” I said. “Maybe he could be morose drunk.”
“Shall I fetch him when we’re done here?” Helen asked.
“Dab some whiskey behind his ears.”
“He’s a scotch man,” Helen said.
We dressed, with Jessie donning a uniform while I dressed up in the clothes she had set aside. She made sure my hair was fixed, then gave me a peck on the lips.
The professor emerged from the washroom, donning her black lab coat. She looked well put together, and except for some small issues in how she moved, nothing looked amiss. Helen practically flew out of the Professor’s apartment.
“My dad was probably enjoying the good life, sleeping in,” I said.
“Probably,” Jessie said.
“He’s in for a rude awakening.”
The professor was quiet. I saw her eyeing the stove. Only scraps and scrapings remained.
“What time is it?” I asked Jessie.
“Seven fifty eight.”
“Two minutes to eat,” I told the professor.
There was no hesitation. No grace, either, even for a woman who was normally immaculate. She paid no mind to the fact that some fruit had bites taken out of it or that the pieces of meat too small to be worth picking out now sat in seas of congealing grease.
It was the eye of a surgeon in a moment of crisis, now turned to picking out the least bad pieces of food. Her steady hand focused now on keeping any mess from dripping on her clothes, stripping meat from a length of bone. She did what she could and then turned to the largest offerings. A hunk of bread end-piece that I’d burned and left aside after toasting my bread, a glass of milk that had been mostly finished. She alternated the two to get the bread down.
She didn’t finish either before Jessie cleared her throat.
Ferres hesitated, and for a moment, I wondered if her composure would break, if she would snap at us, or if she would abandon sense and go for the food.
Instead, she drew a handkerchief from her pocket, and she gathered herself together. A lady in the non-noble sense, as if composure in the present could erase the desperation of moments ago.
She was in the midst of daubing at her face when her body rebelled. She gagged, bending over, and froze, holding that position.
Twice more, she gagged, but managed to keep from retching.
Not the food so much as the gorging, if that could even be called gorging.
She straightened, resuming her act as the lady, and she gave us a nod.
We left the room as a trio. It was a short trip down the hallway, and then we passed through a set of doors.
Spring air blew in our faces, but it was a mixed thing. A breath of fresh air, but with a bad aftertaste. Flowers and dewy grass and bitter death on the wind.
Hackthorn had been constructed with a particular aesthetic, because it was an Academy very focused on the aesthetic. A project from many years past had been placed as the centerpiece of Hackthorn, and if it had ever been truly alive, it would have been a half woman, half spiderweb counterpart for Helen’s brother. As tall as any building I’d seen, she was a connection of strands and shelves that supported one another, some shelves vertical and others horizontal, akin to a bookshelf, but always with the outer form in mind, and the outer form was that of a woman. Akin to builder’s wood, but no external walls had been put up to guide the growth. The story was that it had all been calculated in advance.
It was her crowning achievement, her master stroke. She had pitched it as her specialist project and they had allowed it with the expectation she would fail. Instead, she had stepped up the scale. A work so impressive they had no choice but to give her a professorship, despite the fact that she was a woman. To say no at that point would have risked her walking away and leaving the edifice to fall to pieces.
It hadn’t been her only play over the years.
Care had been given to the face, which turned skyward, and it looked like a pale woman’s face, eyes closed. The shelves were now beds for plant life and growth, or walls had been put in place at the exterior, allowing for them to be used as pens or prison cells. Bristling plant growth and walls formed her exterior skin, while trees that grew down formed her hair. She draped back, with the buildings of the Academy itself as her recliner, and we walked along the bridge that was one of her arms, reaching out to the main Academy office and the apartments of headmistress and visiting dignitaries.
Even from a distance, I could see students and staff already at work with tending to this and that.
Green and thriving, against a backdrop of cliffs and ocean.
But looking in the other direction was something else entirely. The walls of hackthorn, and then wasteland, out to the horizon. Once forest, burned and then patrolled by beasts grown just for this purpose, who found everything that the blaze hadn’t utterly destroyed.
The black woods were only just barely visible in the distance, unable to reach Hackthorn with the wasteland of ash between us and it.
We were isolated, and entry to Hackthorn meant traveling through the woods and wasteland or it meant visiting by boat and ascending the cliffs to access Hackthorn by way of the reclining woman’s backside.
I’d gotten a good laugh out of Jessie the first time I had pointed that out.
The headmistress of Hackthorn smiled at students, and she greeted some by name. That in itself wouldn’t have been surprising, as the students on this bridge were both early risers and notable students. I could see the light in her eyes, and while I could see a weariness that hadn’t been there when we had first appeared in her bedroom, I believed that she was doing a good job of playing it off.
Students liked her. They respected her. They knew her in the sense that they could greet her. We hadn’t stopped long enough for her to do it yet, but I knew she was willing and able to make small talk with them. Each of those things was to her credit on its own and surprising when taken in tandem with one of the others.
But oh, that wasn’t what I was watching for.
No, it was when we stepped indoors again, off the bridge and into the armpit. The labs. Students were waiting. Professor Viola Ferres’ select. Her favored students, taken under her wing.
They were the closest to her, they were sharp, and they were very unhappy with our existence.
“First thing this morning, we make sure all is on track for the young master Baugh’s birthday celebration,” Viola Ferres said. “First lab.”
She indicated with her hand, and the gaggle of students formed a herd around her. Jessie and I walked side by side, joining them. I could see her talking to the students. More important than any of the students’ views or reactions to the professor was the professor’s reaction to her students.
She was built for this. However much we ground her down and applied pressure, so long as she had this, I wasn’t sure I could truly break down her defenses. We were positioned, we had laid out the groundwork for a move on the largest scale, but we lacked information, and so we groped in the dark.
Helen had taken too long. We descended the stairs to the first lab. It lay at the heart of the complex. Students who ascended and descended the stairs to reach any other part of the facility passed by the lab, and in the doing, they passed by branch-framed panes of glass that looked at the work in progress.
Fa
iry tale monsters and monsters of fantasy done to scale. The sea serpent and the maiden, the big bad wolf and red riding hood. The larger members of the cast remained in the vast, open-concept laboratory with its arched ceiling. The big bad wolf rested with the half-goat, half-fish of the zodiac. A horse as large as any I’d ever seen stood with spine bared, burn scars on either side of the bloody schism where its mane was supposed to be. Its bone of tail flicked left and right as it ate from its feedbag. A giant—hardly giant in comparison to Helen’s brother—slumped against the wall, using his long-fingered hands to shovel mountains of loose, dry cereals into a wide mouth.
Playthings. Toys.
I didn’t mind those ones, not in particular.
I wandered, and I heard one of the members of the group comment at my wandering, though I didn’t catch the words, as my focus was elsewhere. For all its fairy tale nature, all I could smell were sweat, blood, and offal.
“Leave him be,” Ferres said.
“I don’t see why he’s even here. No offense, miss Montague.”
“I’ve heard all the complaints a hundred times already,” Jessie said. She ignored the implicit meaning in his statement that he didn’t see why she was there either.
“I have as well,” Professor Ferres said. “I’ll hear no more of it, unless you have other projects you’d like to be working on.”
“I—no,” the student said.
“It’s politics, Damian. And forcing a superior to justify her politics is not good politics on your part.”
I didn’t listen to the rest. Most of the members of the group had commented in some fashion already. If everything was the way that it was supposed to be, she might even have welcomed the questions and challenges. She was unconventional in a variety of ways, and her treatment of subordinates was one of them.
Even now, she was turning the topic around, talking about the delegation of tasks, and posing challenges to Jessie and her favored students.
I passed around a wall that blocked part of the lab off from view of the stairs. Hidden in plain sight, a thousand students would walk by and look through the windows with excitement and wonder, but actual access to the lab was more limited.
Actual access to this area was rarer. I had the keys to unlock the doors.
I passed by the cells. They hadn’t all had cots before Jessie and I had arrived. At our insistence, Professor Ferres had ordered them to protect her investment and work.
I passed by red riding hood, who would have been at home among any mouse of Radham or West Corinth. No older than twelve, her face had been altered into something to resemble a deer or a rabbit. An attempt at contrasting to the wolf. Something had been done to her arms and legs. To better enable her to run when and if the scene called for it, I supposed.
I walked past goldilocks, who was closer to my age, who had locks of actual gold. Rapunzel reached out to touch the bars of her cell with one hand and a lock of hair. Past Jack and past ones I couldn’t put names to.
We had sought her out because of her tie to Ibbot, and because Lillian had been taken with her. A part of me had hoped the woman would vindicate Lillian’s opinion of her. In some respects, she had.
In others, the complete opposite. As bad as Ibbot, as bad as Hayle. She was a major purveyor of the Block, an artist who worked with children.
Now playthings. Toys.
I looked up and saw Helen standing in the shadows. If she was here, so was my ‘father’.
I turned my eyes to the people in the cells.
“Soon,” I said, and even though my voice was soft, no less than thirty pairs of ears listened.
Previous Next
Dog Eat Dog—18.3
“If you want it, you have to tell me. Water,” I said. I moved my hand, three fingers extended, in a horizontal direction.
Poll Parrot looked down at his wings. No hands to gesture with. I waited, expectant, as he moved his wings.
Finally, he extended a wing, twisted so only three of the pinion feathers at the tip extended. He swiped it sideways.
I smiled, and he smiled back in a nervous way. I gave him a little salute and backed away from the bars, saying, “Give me a moment.”
There was a sink at the far end of the little alley of cells. I headed to it, glancing and paying attention to each of the experiments along the way. Little Bo Peep got my attention, palm out, hand toward me.
She did the gesture for water, then touched her mouth. Her facial construction was different, with a pronounced groove of the philtrum at her upper lip, a faint darker coloration there and at her upper lip. Her hair was a shaggy growth of wool.
“Coming right up,” I said.
I rinsed and filled two cups. Helen was just off to my right, reaching through the bars and playing some finger game with one of the smaller ones.
Bo Peep took her cup, then paused before gesturing. Aggression. Then she pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead, wincing.
“Headache?” I asked.
Bo Peep managed to nod at me while drinking from her cup. Then she moved her hand. Three fingers together, pointed up, she waggled her hand as she shook the tower to pieces.
It wasn’t the way a Lamb would’ve done it, but I quite liked it.
Given a chance, people were damned good at finding ways to communicate.
“Thinking, thought, brains. Gone to ruin. You can’t think clearly?”
She nodded. She raised three fingers, separate this time.
“Can’t see clearly? Senses fuzzy?”
She nodded.
“That’ll be the drugs. Just like the ones they used to keep you from speaking or making noise. When they stop experimenting on you and start getting you to practice, they’ll cut back on the drugs. They might give you others, if they need you to be able to speak so you can act or sing, or to make you more compliant.”
She made the gesture for thinking, except she pointed it down, reversing it, and she made a confused face.
“What confused you?” She couldn’t answer, so I tried the scattershot approach. “Did I get something wrong? Was it the mention of practice? The drugs? Do you want to know what the other drugs are? The singing? Making you compliant—”
At that last bit, she gestured again. She used the other hand to drink more, greedily gulping water down, one eye watching me.
“Compliant. It means obedient, doing what they want.”
The reversed ‘tower’ of three fingers flipped up. Understood.
I reached through the bars and gave the three fingers a squeeze. “Need anything else?”
She shook her head. The mop of white wool flew left and right.
“Alright,” I said. “Give me the glass back, or people will wonder how you got it.
She gave me the glass. As I turned away, she reached for and grabbed my sleeve.
“Hm?”
She gestured. Alert. You. Body. Mind. Alert.
The look in her eyes was dead serious.
I reached through the bars and brushed my hand down the bangs of her mop of hair and the front of her face. “Stop fussing. I’ll be fine.”
Fingers brushed down my sleeve and fingers as I withdrew my arm. Prolonging contact.
Not because of any attraction, I was pretty sure.
Just a desire for a friendly face to stay a little bit longer.
I headed for Poll with his glass of water. Mentally, I made a note that I would have to be careful, lest I develop a fondness or soft spot for any of them. Bo Peep was a frontrunner, and the stylistic tie didn’t help. I’d already run into that snag with Mary.
I put my hand and the other cup through the bars for Poll Parrot, and tipped the cup back for him so he could drink.
He snorted, and I moved the cup away.
Hand made a blade, I held it up at my sternum. “Means I’ve heard you, I recognize you, I understand, or thank you.”
He did his best with his wing-arms. He was like Avis in her outfit, but without the ability to lose the outfit,
no hands hidden in the rigging of his wings. Better to have him do his best and if all went according to plan, perhaps there would be an opportunity to teach him tap code later.
“Good lad,” I said. I turned, showing others in earshot the gesture.
I heard Helen speak, and I saw her making the same gesture. Passing it on to others who couldn’t see me, closer to the end of the hall.
He curled his wing, setting his jaw. It was hard to track what I’d taught them, but I knew that I had taught them the core gestures that the Lambs had used to generate all of the rest. It was fairly simple to work out what gesture he was attempting by process of elimination.
“That might not be so clear to the others. Try your foot,” I said.
He shifted his weight to one foot. He clenched his talon in a particular way. Aggression, pain, force.
“Soon,” I said, echoing my statement earlier. “And honestly? I don’t plan to use you guys to fight. I don’t want a battle in that sense. Even in the best case scenario, if I had ninety percent control over the situation, I don’t know if you’ll be in cages, drugged, fresh from surgeries, or whatever else. Okay?”
He didn’t look happy at that. He clenched his talon again. He struck at his chest with the leading edge of his wing, what I might otherwise have called his forearm.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Believe me, I know.”
He had been altered to be beautiful, and he was. The ruby red and indigo feathers only accentuated the image. He was twelve and he was very much an idealization of a boy his age. If Lillian and Jamie had found something attractive in me when I was younger, then it was present in Poll. He was fine boned and athletic, and could have been a ballet dancer in another course of events, and all of that stood in stark contrast to how very angry he was.
If I hadn’t grown up with equal parts beauty and bloodthirst, I might have been given pause by the image.
There was a stirring at the end of the hall closest to the entryway. Rustling of arms against bars, movement, scuffs and light bangs.
“Want to help?” I asked Poll.
He nodded.
“Can I throw water at you?” I asked, showing him the cup.