Twig

by wildbow

  It was horror because I knew who waited for me, just steps down this particular road. I’d told the others to kill me if I fell that far, and they weren’t here to execute that particular standard.

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  Lamb III (Arc 18)

  Jessie peered through the binoculars. Her vision was hampered by the fact that her view was through windows and that those windows had branches dividing panes of glass.

  The Infante had cornered Lillian and Mary. His soldiers were gathering in the area surrounding the building. The Helmed, Jessie termed them. Beast and biped, they were moving out through the city, alongside soldiers and doctors leading teams of warbeast and stitched. They moved with a mission, securing major points, the gates to the city, the intersections of major roads, and the larger institutional buildings, like the hospital, the schoolhouse, and the merchant’s hall.

  They were securing the city. The fact that the city was surrounded by refugees complicated matters. If the populace realized what was going on and fought back, they would have to contend with a fight within their city and enemies outside the gates. Jessie had seen this play out in too many permutations to have any illusions about what was really happening.

  The Infante intended to squash this city, and from his body language, he intended to do much the same to Lillian and Mary.

  Jessie would need to help.

  Her mind was architecture, every memory a brick set in place. She thought of her memories as ‘cards’, coded in placement and color and in terms of what they were, but the mental construction wasn’t a house of cards—it was far more stable.

  Taking stock of everything she had collected since visiting the city, touching on all points of reference, she reoriented her memories as if they were a pop-up book coming to life, the individual rows and columns taking a geographical position in her head.

  She could, at the speed of thought, move through the city, analyzing the details she had catalogued. She had noted details about houses and what she had seen when looking through windows, and she could cross reference that to make educated guesses about which houses might have guns on display or in places she could access. She could think of four places where munitions or things she could turn into munitions were stored. There were places she could set fires, if she wanted to alert the populace and change the tone of things. There were places where civilians would be gathered, and she could go there to make an appeal. In rural areas, the Crown had a different image.

  She thought of Jamie’s writings about Mauer and his rhetoric, about Sylvester’s rhetoric, and she had some tenuous ideas on what she might try to say.

  Her recent failure to get Lillian and Mary on board sat heavy with her, casting doubt on her ability to actually execute those ideas.

  None of those things were likely to stop the Infante.

  Enemy forces were drawing too near. The Infante had stopped, only periodically taking a step forward. He was talking.

  Jessie focused on his mouth.

  -control—

  The Infante spoke the word as the last utterance of a longer line, and then he smiled. He held up his hand as if he had something in it, but it was empty.

  Eighty feet away, at the other end of the expansive office, Mary kept one hand on Lillian’s shoulder and held a knife in the other. The Infante didn’t even seem to recognize the knife as a weapon.

  Jessie stood straight, drew her gun, and aimed high. Her brain worked through countless similar cases, times when she had aimed high, aimed low, the various wind conditions, and the places the bullets had struck home.

  She aimed, and she fired, wincing at the sound, binoculars still held in place.

  She didn’t see the bullet strike home so much as she saw the white dot appear on the building’s surface, a short distance to the left of the window.

  She aimed again, adjusting, then fired twice in quick succession, before dropping the binoculars. Soldiers in other areas were turning their heads at the sound of gunfire. They hadn’t seen her, but she was concealed, tucked into the shadows between a window that jutted out of a rooftop and the rooftop itself.

  In the distance, the window shattered. She might have hit the Infante but she doubted she’d accomplished anything.

  It would have to do—a distraction, and a signal to the other Lambs that she was here. There were two ways to read the tap code, depending on if they’d heard the initial shot or just the two follow-up shots. If it was just the two follow-up shots, the code was ‘no’. No, she wasn’t here, no she wasn’t able to help just yet, no they couldn’t rely on her.

  If it was the first shot, then two in close succession, it was the same meaning as the sixth gesture, the flat hand with fingers curled in, a sign that meant to hold position, patience, to wait, to guard something.

  Protect yourselves. Hold on. I’ll try to help, just give me time.

  Jessie moved from her hiding place at the side of a window on a rooftop to the ground, and then wove her way through the streets. She hadn’t decided on a destination or answer yet, but she had a sense of where the greatest number were. It was a path that took her directly away from the other Lambs.

  “Hello,” Lillian’s voice was hesitant.

  He wasn’t confident enough in his speech to give a proper answer. The memories and instructions in his head were sparse, lessons learned over the past several days, and he was inexperienced in bringing them to bear. It was slow going, ensuring everything was organized in ways that wouldn’t get in his way later, slower going to reflexively tap that information. He knew the words, but bringing tone into things was complicated. Even thinking about gestures, the simple act of raising his hand in greeting, it was hard.

  “Yeah,” she said, and her voice broke just a little bit. She was sad. “Hi there, Jamie. I thought I’d stop in.”

  She wasn’t the only one that was sad. Jamie was miserable and lonely, and the way the doctors talked past him without actually talking to him had made it far worse.

  “I’m guessing you’re overloaded,” Lillian said. “You’ve had too many lessons today, and you don’t need me putting anything more on your plate?”

  He wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

  Lillian kept talking, “I have homework. I thought I’d sit, keep you company. I—I brought candy, from this shop downtown. You liked it, before, and it makes good medical sense, sugar for the brain, and…”

  She held a small paper bag, raising it like she was going to hand it out, but then she stopped short, hesitating.

  She broke through whatever was holding her back, pushing herself, and handed him the bag.

  “Don’t—don’t chew it,” she said. “You’ll break your teeth.”

  He nodded, reaching into the bag, retrieving a hard candy, and putting it in his mouth.

  Lillian took a seat at the desk, moving papers aside, getting her bag, and taking books out. She rubbed at one eye and swore under her breath.

  “I told myself I wouldn’t cry. Except, as Sy keeps saying, I’m a bit of crybaby. I hope you don’t mind,” she said.

  Jamie would have gestured, but Lillian was sitting so Jamie was to her left and behind her. Instead, Jamie ventured a, “No.”

  “Jamie was a good friend. He was gentle, well read, patient, and all around lovely. We all miss him terribly. I didn’t want my visit to be all tears, you know. It’s why I waited just a little while. Turns out I’m crying some anyway.”

  “It’s okay,” Jamie said.

  “I’m sure you’ll be lovely too,” Lillian said. She managed a smile.

  “I hope so,” Jamie said. His overtaxed mind was working hard to catalogue all of the things about Lillian’s words and movements, the little details about her, the taste of the hard candy, even the ambient changes in the room. It was too much stimuli, but Lillian’s presence in the room helped on other fronts.

  Jamie stood from the bed that had been placed next to his ‘throne’, the edifice that connected him to the greater Caterpillar. He approac
hed Lillian, watching over her shoulder as she penned out her homework.

  She looked up at him, and she smiled again. She raised one hand, and rubbed his upper arm. Warm, kind, unsure.

  If this was what the Lambs were, then things might be okay after all.

  She hated leaving Lillian and Mary.

  Jessie might as well have put her foot through a tripwire as she rounded the corner. She’d tracked the movement of the soldiers throughout the city, watched as they mobilized, and she had a sense of how fast they moved, ideas on where they could go. It was, for example, very unlikely that they would backtrack. It was unlikely they would take winding courses through narrower alleys and roads. They would move along main roads unless the narrower paths took them to a place of interest.

  From there, it was simply a question of keeping track of timing, adjusting the cards and knowing the most likely positions of the enemy. People were predictable.

  The tripwire, so to speak, wasn’t a person. Jessie had chosen speed over silence as she ran, shoes tapping the road, and something had heard. She recognized the snort, not from this creature, but one very like it, and she recognized the snuffling, the drum of paw on road.

  Sniffers. The warbeasts were canine, large, and covered in rolling locks of white fur, their eyes large and unblinking, their noses like something sculpted, highlighting wide nostrils with ridges of tissue and flesh.

  They had gone to great lengths, working with Mabel and the rest of the Green team to produce a countermeasure to these warbeasts and things like them. They had released their own warbeasts, ones that carried scents almost indistinguishable from their own, and on sending children to West Corinth and other locations, they had had the children release the countermeasures.

  Jessie’s leg hurt where she had been shot. It had been a graze, barely an injury at all, but now that she was running it was worse. Worse still when she was running with renewed intensity. The warbeast was faster than her.

  Her mind’s eye still held the likely positions of everyone present, blurrier in parts where their objectives or paths were less sensible.

  She made a beeline for a covered wagon she had seen two minutes ago, trusting it would be present. She would be able to reach it before the warbeast reached her, but what happened when she got that far was a bigger question.

  She could remember the construction of the wagon, and drew correlations to wagons like it. She’d seen the exteriors and interiors. She’d seen the wagon-driver’s bench, and the steps leading up to it.

  Even before it came into view, she was mentally reciting the steps she would need to take. She rounded the corner, coming face to face with the wagon and the stitched horses that drove it. She saw the driver, who was craning his neck to try and peer past obstacles and see what was going on elsewhere in the city, with soldiers and the Helmed fanning out.

  She’d very nearly been run over in crossing paths with the wagon that in dodging the trotting horses her shoulder brushed with one of theirs.

  “Get down!” she shouted, as she leaped, setting foot on steps at the side of the wagon that she’d barely had time to verify were indeed there. As the sniffer shied away from the horses, she stepped up to the bench, climbing over the driver. She stepped onto the bench, the back of the seat, then the covered part of the wagon.

  It would have been easy to set foot on cloth and have her foot go through it, but wooden bracing kept the cover in place, giving it a nice arch shape. She carefully set foot on the places where the bracing was likely to be strongest, hidden beneath the canvas cloth, and hopped over to the low-hanging roof.

  The sniffer, in hot pursuit, crashed into the side of the wagon, demolishing a share of it where the steps were. The driver had thrown himself down into the groove where his feet and bags normally rested, sheltered by the overhanging bench. He yelled as the sniffer clawed and clambered up, an awkward vertical climb onto a moving vehicle on the sniffer’s part. Four hundred pounds of warbeast managed to climb up so it was partially astride the seat and bench, lunged to follow Jessie’s route, and collapsed into a heap of canvas cloth, shattered wooden bracing, and whatever supplies the wagon had been carrying within.

  “Go!” the driver shouted, “Git!”

  The instructions coincided with him hurling himself off the side of the wagon. The horses galloped, carrying their cargo away—the cargo being a warbeast that was fighting to free itself of cloth, netting, and uneven footing.

  It would get free and it would be back. It was what the sniffers did.

  She wished she was brave enough to follow it as it collapsed onto the wagon, to fight it there, while it struggled, and to put a blade through a vital spot, but that wasn’t her strength. Sy might. Mary would. Gordon could’ve.

  She would have to do something bold to answer the Infante. She was of little use in a direct confrontation and getting involved would potentially risk Mary and Lillian. It wouldn’t do to step in in their defense only to find out that they were negotiating, downplaying their involvement with her and Sylvester, or taking another course.

  A gun wouldn’t work, and neither would a knife.

  There were other options.

  The city had been aware and prepared for war against the refugees beyond the gates for some time now. That meant they’d needed soldiers, guns, weapons and stockpiles for a potential siege. There would be banks of stitched waiting and charging in case they were needed, and there would be chemical weapons of war.

  Wiring systems had connected the banks of stitched and the biovoltaic generators in nearby buildings, and Jessie had seen those wires, noting them. Buildings that housed the soldiers who were on call for confrontation at any time were located in specific areas, with certain required dimensions. There were regulations, and Jessie could think back, go over the books and papers she had read, and recite them by heart.

  From there, it wasn’t terribly difficult to work out which buildings held other stockpiles. Close to the gate, certain building sizes, reinforcement, set with a certain distance from other critical buildings and infrastructure, in case of accidental or intentional detonation…

  Her enemy here was watching for trouble from the refugees beyond the gate and focused on a potential war with people within the city. They milled throughout the area surrounding the gate, but it wasn’t with an eye for danger.

  She found the lock, and she recognized the make and model. She didn’t pick it—settling for jamming her knife into the lock itself.

  Once within, she immediately went to the mortars, collecting one, and a strapped-together stack of rounds in tidy wooden boxes. Both the mortar and the strapped-together crates were arranged so they had wheels on one end and handles on the other, so they could be pulled along. Checking the coast was clear, she hauled them behind her.

  Minutes passed as she got from the gate to a point close enough to the government office that Mary, Lillian, and the Infante were in. Forty precious seconds were wasted, waiting for a patrol of ten men to jog down the street. She could have chanced thirty, but there was a risk they would have heard the wheels of the mortars clicking and clattering over the wooden road.

  She kept an eye out for the sniffer as she got to where she needed to be. She climbed a fence to stand on it, looking clear of shrubbery and short trees.

  Her heart pounded, and it wasn’t because of the exertion of hauling a ninety-one-point-seven pound contraption and the rounds behind her.

  I’m too used to working with Sy, trusting he’ll scrape on by, find answers, and manage while I’m getting things organized.

  She almost didn’t want to look. There was no architecture, tag, or system of threads that really touched on why she had such a bad feeling.

  Only her knowledge of the threat the nobles posed.

  The Infante had barely moved from where he stood, but his forces had closed around the building. Mary was holding one side of her face, moving unsteadily. She had tried something and been struck, at a glance.

  Two men stood on
either side of the Infante. They looked like soldiers, but they weren’t officers. Both stood in ways that made them lopsided, as if they couldn’t hold themselves entirely upright. Both were coughing, or doing something like coughing, with whole-body jerks. As unsteady as they were, their upper bodies almost flopped around with each of the jerky little motions.

  Lillian looked so very scared. She had a pistol in hand, not pointing it at anything.

  The Infante spoke, his lips moving. “Obedience in action alone is worth nothing to us.”

  Mary responded. “Obedience has to be earned.”

  The Infante smiled, arms wide. “Obedience is taken, clearly.”

  Lillian shook her head. Then, as she mouthed the word ‘no’, she put the barrel of the gun to her temple.

  It said a great deal that Mary didn’t stop her.

  Shock gripping her, her senses shaken to the point she could barely track her own breathing and heartbeat, Jessie hopped down from the fence. The mortars were in an older style, but she was happier with that, knowing they were similar to the ones that their rebels had been devising. She had a larger catalogue of memories when it came to those, to trajectories and patterns of fire, and they weren’t so old that the barrels weren’t rifled.

  It was fast to set up the mortars, to deploy them. She hadn’t actually performed the task herself, but she had seen it done, knew the motions. Only once or twice did she run into snarls, moments where her shaking hands didn’t cooperate.

  She cut a strap, tore open the wooden box with its lone shell within, and loaded the mortar.

  She couldn’t see the Infante from this angle, couldn’t peer through the window. But she could extrapolate, imagine where he would be if he’d advanced at his typical slow pace, she could place him if he’d remained where he was.

  He wasn’t one to step back. He wasn’t one to meander. It was a narrow range of possibilities, and she chose an angle that aimed to put the mortar in the middle of that range.