Twig

by wildbow

Mary looked as though she wasn’t even bothered. Seeing how very cold her best friend was in this moment, Lillian was spooked. Mary was getting dressed, her movements precise and practiced as she used ribbon and razor wire to position the knives she hid on her person, the ribbon protecting her body from the wire.

  We’re all so far apart right now. I don’t think we come back together so much as we crash together in a heap. Some of us might not even walk away.

  “They’re coming in through the building,” Mary said, as she placed a knife in the midst of her hair.

  “Yeah,” Lillian said. She reached out and touched the wall with her hand. The building creaked, and the impact of footfalls traveled.

  “I’ll need help with this, if it’s no trouble,” Mary said.

  “You shot Jessie!”

  “Yes,” Mary said. She donned what might have been called a necklace of razor wire, ribbon, and knives. She must have pulled it off as one interconnected piece before her bath. “Can you hold this ribbon?”

  “You do realize I’m mad at you? I’m—I’m not even mad. I’m appalled!”

  “That’s allowed,” Mary said. “But I would still appreciate help. What I was saying, what Jessie was saying, is there’s no time. They’re coming upstairs as we speak. Save me some time and hold the ribbon. Please.”

  “I don’t like this side of you,” Lillian said. She took the ribbon.

  “Jessie is stubborn,” Mary said. With the one ribbon secure in Lillian’s hands, she was free to weave threads and more ribbons into it, “It doesn’t shine through very often because she’s also soft spoken and she doesn’t tend to take center stage. It takes unreasonable amounts of force to make her change her mind. It’s why she can weather Sy as well as she does. What breaks another person only chips away at Jessie.”

  Breaks. Lillian weighed the word in her mind. She didn’t like how it sat.

  “But by that same token, if she says she’s not going to leave, she won’t leave,” Mary said. “Hold this knife? Careful, there’s wire attached to it.”

  “I know she’s stubborn. I know who she is. Who Jamie was, anyway. I still don’t understand any of that Jessie-Jamie thing, except maybe wanting to leave it behind. But you shot her.”

  “Her mind is like a fortress. Carefully constructed, and very hard to change,” Mary said. She said it very patiently, but she managed to avoid sounding condescending. “Unless the foundation is shaken.”

  “You shot her,” Lillian repeated for emphasis.

  Mary sighed. “I can handle the rest myself. Get ready, and bring your gun.”

  Lillian let go of the knife, letting it fall between Mary’s shoulder blades.

  She turned her back. Getting herself ready was as simple as gathering the clothes and kit she had set aside and getting everything on. Socks, waterproof boots, hairband, belt pouch…

  She hesitated as she held her lab coat up.

  Mary gestured. Incoming.

  “Yeah,” Lillian said, still looking at her coat.

  She still jumped a little as a knock came at the door.

  “We’re getting dressed!” Mary called out.

  Soldiers pushed the door open, as if that was more invitation than deterrent. Mary was buttoning up her shirt, her back to the door. She had no boots on, and her jacket was closer to the door than to her.

  “Ma’am,” the lead soldier said. He was only a few years older than Lillian and Mary. He looked at Lillian, and appraised her as she pulled her coat on. “Doctor, ma’am.”

  “‘We’re getting dressed’ is not an invitation to enter,” Lillian said. She wanted to project authority. “We could have spoken through the door.”

  “Yes ma’am,” he said. “What was the gunshot? There’s blood on the door.”

  “That was me,” Mary said. “We had an intruder. An acquaintance. She’ll be on the run, and she’s bleeding. I’d follow the blood trail now, because she’ll staunch it or she’ll disappear into the rain, and then you won’t be able to find her. You’ll want to signal the sniffers as well.”

  He took stock of that, then glanced at Lillian.

  “Please do as she asks,” Lillian said.

  That was as good as an order. He turned about-face, and he and his men jogged off, following an apparently distinct blood trail.

  Lillian gave Mary an unimpressed look.

  “If the Infante is coming, we need to look like we’re doing our job,” Mary said.

  “I just wish that we could look a little less like we’re doing our job when nobody’s looking,” Lillian said. “They—you—the Lambs as a whole, if I discount myself, you have so much to deal with, I don’t want us to make that road harder for each other.”

  Mary picked up Lillian’s bag and handed it to her. “You should count yourself among us. You’ve earned that place.”

  Lillian wanted to say something to that, but she wasn’t sure what.

  “And while you’re doing that, remember that we’re strong, we’re capable. Be proud of your strength, Doctor. Recognize our strengths. I can make Jessie bleed and set the dogs on her and trust she’ll manage.”

  “And that’s different from Sylvester putting a bullet in your knee?”

  “Only barely,” Mary said. “We should walk.”

  Lillian held her medical bag, the strap not yet over her shoulder.

  “What are you thinking?” Mary prompted.

  “That you made the decision without me.”

  “Postponed it.”

  “And that something happened to make you change direction like this. What are you thinking? What even happened Mr. Gage?”

  Mary smiled. She gestured, and Lillian nodded, slinging her bag over her shoulder. They exited the apartment, and Lillian locked it behind her before placing the key in one of her countless pockets within the lab coat, buckling it before withdrawing her hand.

  “I don’t know. We had a nice conversation,” Mary said. “I told him some of the truth, and some lies. I think I put his heart at ease.”

  “There are only a few times I’ve seen you this…” Lillian floundered for a word. She felt flustered, sleep deprived and anxious, too unprepared to tackle everything that was being thrown at her in the here and now.

  “Unpleasant?” Mary asked.

  “No. Yes, but that’s subjective. I’d almost say cold, but that’s wrong. You’re this… hard.”

  “To think I was saying much the same about Jessie.”

  “You’re alike, you two. You don’t budge. You set something in place and you hold fast to it. Except for you it’s something felt, it’s practice and routine and execution. It’s something constructed, like you say, when it comes to Jessie.”

  Mary thought about that. Before she could say anything, more soldiers appeared. Mary pointed down the hall, in the opposite direction she and Lillian were traveling, and the soldiers hesitated. Lillian, for her part, was already drawing her badge from her pocket. She flashed it to the group. The Radham crest and a paper with signatures, both in a tidy little leather package.

  The soldiers marched off.

  Lillian continued, “Where things are flipped around is that it’s normally you on the offense, trying to achieve the goals, while Jamie was always the one on the defensive, being careful, one eye on the clock and on all of the little details.”

  “You said Jamie,” Mary pointed out.

  “I meant Jamie. I can’t be definitive about Jessie, because I can’t say where Jamie ends and she starts. But I know that when they were acting the way I remember them acting, they were Jamie.”

  Mary nodded.

  More soldiers approached. The fact that others had no doubt come this way was enough of a point in Lillian and Mary’s favor that they barely glanced at the badge. There was a lot to be said for image, for the white coat and the medical bag.

  “I’m not good at this, for the record. Wrapping my head around whatever that is. Jessie’s business.”

  “You’re doing fine, I think.”

/>   Lillian was still upset about the way Mary had handled things, about the hardness, that her reflexive impulse was to say something negative back, to snap about being condescended to, maybe. She bit it back.

  She hated being upset with Mary as much as she hated the reasons for being upset.

  “If I had to give you an answer, then in talking to my dad, I was thinking about what I wanted. Something beyond wanting to support you,” Mary said.

  “If it’s something I can help you find—” Lillian started.

  “You leading an Academy, me training the soldiers there. Making them elite. Something honed, that gets the respect of other Academies and imparts some of it on you. I like to imagine you’re kind, you’d lead an Academy that would do good things, and I could offset that.”

  “By being—” Lillian started. She almost said unkind. “—hard?”

  “It’s not like that. That’s not the road I want to take to get there. But I’ve only barely started putting the idea together. Then Jessie showed up and she asked us to abandon everything.”

  “You reacted.”

  “No. Not like that,” Mary said. “But I don’t like the idea of not getting to think about it and then regretting it.”

  The exact opposite for me, Lillian thought. I’ve sat with this idea in my head since I could write. I’ve worked at this so hard, built it step by step, assignment after assignment, terrifying day after terrifying day working with the Lambs, bleeding to make headway, my heart breaking to make headway, hurting and helping to kill people to make just another few steps of progress.

  Her fingers reached for and clutched the front of her white coat.

  They stepped out the front doors of the building, and they stopped there. Others were approaching.

  “What happened?” the Head Doctor asked. Lillian’s de-facto superior for this whole exercise with the refugees.

  “Someone else got in,” Lillian said. “Someone we might know.”

  The Head Doctor’s face transformed as he took that in. It looked like he was going to say something.

  “We told the soldiers to track our intruder, to rouse the sniffers and put them on the trail. Half the city’s going to be active and looking shortly, especially with the Infante’s arrival imminent.”

  “You should have come to me first,” the Head Doctor said.

  “Time was of the essence,” Lillian said. “The kind of intruder this is, the trail goes cold in less than a minute. A handful of seconds, even. We specialized in dealing with this kind of threat for a long time.”

  The Doctor frowned.

  He was a proud man, but he wasn’t an unreasonable one, she hoped. Which won out? She had a sense of how others like Helen or Sy handled these things, and confidence was often key. Showing no hesitation, driving forward.

  “The problem with those who specialize is they often miss the big picture,” the Doctor said.

  “If your socket-graft patient is facing a cardiac ejaculation and you have a heart and a graft specialist offering you assistance, it would not reflect well on you if you turned them down,” Lillian said.

  She was happy that she’d found the word choice mid-sentence, focusing on how things would reflect on the Head Doctor.

  “Carry on then,” he said, and he almost sounded like Mary as he said it. Mary when Mary was being much too focused and intense.

  She departed in a way that made it look like she wasn’t fleeing the scene. She executed a half-dozen little tricks that the Lambs had painstakingly taught her, that she had turned into something natural, and now almost did without thinking. Quirks of body language, of pacing out her movements. Mary matched her, and the matching of character and intention without overtly observing Lillian was something exceptional Lillian couldn’t have learned if she had another ten years with the Lambs.

  “He wasn’t happy about that,” Mary observed, once they were out of earshot “You’ll have to end that particular fight later.”

  “We know how,” Lillian said. “We know about the refugees.”

  “The value of biding our time with that particular chip, then?”

  Lillian smiled.

  Things were picking up. More people, more de-facto guards, soldiers, and military. Everyone who had a uniform to put on to join the local forces was outfitted or getting there, a gun in hand. Preparation for the Infante on one hand, not to mention that the local forces had already been on high alert from a few scattered individuals making their way into the town and stirring up trouble or trying to secure accommodations. There had been fire and sabotage, and now a gunshot from one of the buildings.

  “The net is closing,” Mary said.

  “I know,” Lillian said.

  “I don’t want to go with Jessie,” Mary said.

  “I know. You made that very clear.”

  “I wanted time to think.”

  “You seem very decided.”

  “No,” Mary said. She sounded exasperated. “Don’t let me decide. I can go where you go. What are you thinking? You and Jessie were talking about Sy.”

  “I don’t want to go to him if it’s just to see how very bad he is on a bad day. I—” Lillian started to speak, then paused to take note of where she was. “It’s complicated.”

  Her hand moved in a series of gestures. Reflecting status, then the basic sign for emotion and socialization, all followed by a series of descriptors. High heart small poison man.

  I love him, she thought, translating it.

  Add high heart cutting metal dancer, Lillian added. I love you as well.

  Mary reached out, taking Lillian’s hand in her own, giving it a squeeze.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Lillian said, whispering. “I can’t make a decision like this on short notice.”

  “No,” Mary agreed. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? But this isn’t a short notice decision either, is it?”

  Thoughts whirled through Lillian’s mind. She felt as scared as she had felt when she was new to the Lambs, when Sylvester had been so very nasty, and when the monsters had been so much more incomprehensible. That had changed over time, seeing some monsters on operating tables and others lying dead on battlefields. They were still scary, but she understood them now.

  She didn’t understand this.

  The rain was pattering down, and the water traveled in tiny contained rivers, between the folds and slats of wood throughout the city.

  Soldiers were everywhere, patrolling, scouting areas for possible trouble, hunting for Jessie, or hunting for any refugees that might have gotten in. Others had collected near the gate, with a bulk of them being stitched forces, massed in case the refugees beyond the gates used the opening of those gates to rush within.

  There was a barking sound, then a bark of gunfire further down the street. Lillian felt her blood run cold. It ran colder still when she saw the soldiers in question. They’d raised and fired their rifles, almost casually, tagging their target. The barking—a sniffer?

  Jessie?

  She did her best to hide her emotion, to bury the tells and walk like nothing was particularly wrong.

  The target was one of the refugees, it looked like. They had been dashing down the street, going by how the blood splatters were spaced out, as if they’d continued to run for another five strides, with a bullet hitting them each time their foot touched ground. Now they lay in a heap, bleeding.

  She wanted to help them. She wanted to do something so badly.

  “It all feels so far away,” Lillian reminded herself of what they’d been talking about. “I want to be there, at the destination, but I’m so very sick of this journey. I’m… I know I could do it, but I don’t know how much longer you’ll be with me. The others too. It becomes me and Duncan and Ashton, with the new Lambs. It’s so much mud to wade through to get to the end. So much looking past the bad, telling myself I’ll be able to fix things when I get to the end.”

  “You’re worried you’ll change before the end.”

  “I’m wor
ried a part of me already has,” Lillian said. “I’m worried I won’t have anyone with me by the time I get there, and then who keeps me on the straight and narrow? Who keeps me sane?”

  “You’re looking to the Lambs for sanity?” Mary asked.

  “Yeah,” Lillian said.

  The gate at the north end of the city cracked open. There was shouting from beyond the gate, of refugees.

  But the Infante was making his entrance in style. Along his trip to this town on Radham’s very periphery, the noble had picked up an entourage.

  The entourage had been changed to be uniform. Lillian recognized the work, and connected it to what she had seen written about in articles as theory, only months ago. The Chrysomallon. Drawn from an effect seen very rarely in nature, they ate rust and they absorbed the metal into their bodies.

  In practice, they were quadruped warbeasts and biped soldiers. All were large and muscled, though the muscle wasn’t always symmetric. Shells formed around heads, making the soldiers resemble gladiators, the warbeasts appearing to be great reptiles with heads encased in helmets. All of them had shells crusting their bodies elsewhere, a mingling of actual iron, mollusc shell, and keratin, like that of the fingernail. The metal was black, the keratin pale, and the combined effect something like a translucent marble.

  They walked in procession, and almost effortlessly beat back or struck down any refugees or other troublemaker who ventured too close. It gave them a kind of aura, where people backed away from their presence.

  Out of time.

  It’s not possible to make this decision, is it? There’s no magic answer.

  “I haven’t seen my father,” Mary remarked. “It would be nice if he got out alright.”

  Lillian glanced at her friend.

  “If only because he’s a contact we could use,” Mary said.

  “I suppose,” Lillian said. “He’s been kind, all considered.”

  “He has,” Mary said.

  The parade was making its way into the city, and the Infante’s carriage appeared. It was drawn by the largest of the warbeasts, one twice the size as the other reptilian hulks with its helmet and patches of grown-in plate mail.

  Lillian turned away before the Infante was so far into the city that she would be obligated to bow and to stay bowing until he gave the go-ahead to stand. She didn’t want this to be the deadline. She wanted more time and she wasn’t sure if she could even come any closer to an answer if she had it.