Twig

by wildbow

“You’re so rude, Sy,” Ashton said. “Rude people don’t make friends.”

  “I’ve got better people than mere friends,” I said. “I’ve got Lambs. Now keep watching out that window, but cover your ears, please, and give us a moment of privacy.”

  Ashton set Helen down on the table next to me, then raised his hands, covering his ears. He shifted position, so his back was to us, but his body pressed against the table. Presumably he was providing a barrier so that Helen wouldn’t fall or get knocked off somehow.

  “As for you, Doctor, give me your hands,” I told Lillian.

  She put her arms back, and I slid the her uniform shirt over her hands, helping her into it. My hands on the front of the shirt, I brought it forward and around her upper body, until I was hugging her from behind.

  “Whatever happens,” I murmured. “I have believed that you were one of the good ones since I believed that good ones existed at all. I have thoroughly believed, since a short while after that, that you had it in you to bring about a better future. I might not know what Hayle is doing, I might be seriously concerned about the cards Fray is holding up her sleeve, but I trust in the Lambs. I have faith in you. All of you, but you and Jessie in particular. It’s why I can trust you when I don’t trust myself.”

  Lillian nodded. She pulled at my arms, making the hug tighter. “You should have faith in yourself, Sy.”

  “Too dangerous,” I said.

  “You should,” she said, quiet, her voice firm.

  Across the room, Mary’s head turned. A face had appeared in the window.

  I didn’t let go of Lillian. I watched them.

  I really wished they’d open the door to check on us or say something. It would have given us an out. But they weren’t that stupid. They wouldn’t.

  There were few things I hated more than being contained. Being kept. I could remember some incidents after my appointments, where the pain had been too great, the confinement too awful. I’d rebelled against my surroundings.

  “Sy,” Lillian said. “I feel like you’re preparing to sacrifice yourself. That this is the last hug, the last time we really speak, and you’re going to hurl yourself out into whatever reality Hayle and Fray have painted for us.”

  “Avis is sitting in the bowl of the window, next to Ashton,” I said.

  “Is she?”

  “She is. She’s always been the messenger. So that’s what I’m doing, saying what I need to say. Conveying the message.”

  Ashton lowered his hands from his ears. “Sorry, but something’s happening out there.”

  I released Lillian from the hug. I glanced at Duncan and Mary, who were talking at the other end of the room.

  Lillian moved away. I had to extricate myself, with Helen against one leg and Jessie leaning against my one shoulder. I placed Helen in Jessie’s arms, and hopped down from the table.

  The town was being segregated. The people were hard to make out, but they were being forced out of the houses, out into the rain. Others were being gathered. Where the one group was being pushed out, unformed ranks and casual citizens in no organization whatsoever, moved further from the ship, the ones who were being allowed to gather closer to the ship were organizing themselves into rank and file.

  Quarantine, or the premise of quarantine.

  I wasn’t sure it was her, but Lady Gloria appeared to be one of the figures being sent out with the teeming masses. The sick, the ones without quarantine suits and requisite rank.

  Depending on the degree to which that was a thing, it could utterly disarm us. The vulnerable would be our rebels, the key figures the Infante had no doubt run into, Gloria included, who we’d been using to steer things. They were the biggest fish of the small lakes and ponds, but the Infante’s Professors trumped even then.

  I’d expected this to a degree. I hadn’t expected it to be nearly this severe.

  I’d expected them to use guns and fire. We’d seen something like it in… I grasped for the city’s name.

  Lugh. In Lugh. Where Gordon had died. There, the cordon had closed, and everything within it destroyed.

  Here, it was almost more awful. The houses and homes were emptied, explosives shook the town where the inhabitants might not have opened the doors quickly enough or willingly left. People were sent out and left to stumble their way through the streets, trying to cover their heads.

  The battalion of soldiers lowered their weapons in unison, and then they began firing. Those who didn’t move fast enough were gunned down. Those who did move fast enough were forced into the open fields, beyond the town, where the rain could pour on them, where the scattered few harvesters might lurk in the taller grass or the irrigated rows of crops.

  I worried some of those might be ours.

  While everyone fled, it was the tall woman who moved in the opposite direction. Against the flow.

  The tall woman, who marched against the tide, charging at the Infante’s Professors and the elite soldiers they were retaining for the voyage home. She endured the hail of bullets until she was three-quarters of the way to them. She stumbled for the first time, found her feet, and only made it another two steps before stumbling again. Then she fell.

  This was grim. More of the horrors of war, more of a reminder why I wanted to fight where we were fighting.

  I took a step away. I moved Helen aside, and I gathered Jessie up, preparing to lift her.

  My knees wobbled. I stopped. I’d tired myself out.

  “I’ll take her,” Lillian said.

  I hesitated.

  “I’ll take care of her. Don’t worry.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Lillian gathered Jessie up. “She’s light.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t say no, you know,” Lillian said. She pulled Jessie closer to her, and secured Jessie’s grip. “When I guessed you were planning on sacrificing yourself.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Don’t,” she said. “I know you’re thinking about it, I suspect you’re faking being tired, so I take her, and you no longer have that burden that keeps you from throwing yourself into danger.”

  “I’m not thinking about it,” I said. The scenes outside were very clear in my mind. The Infante. The soldiers on the deck. “I won’t.”

  “You said that so easily,” she said. She sounded sad as she said it.

  She moved away, joining the others by the door. They were getting prepared, pulling boots back on, gathering their equipment.

  “Ashton,” I said. “Do you have the light?”

  He raised the light to the window.

  “Are they there?”

  Ashton flashed. The pattern was right for ‘question’. I remembered that much.

  Standing just behind him, I could see the response.

  Yes.

  The response was visible from within the rank and file of elite soldiers.

  “Remind me,” I said.

  “No. Aggress,” Ashton said, moving his free hand in the pattern. “Aggress. They said it twice.”

  “We used to do that,” Mary said. “Blanks. They got our initial message. They knew the quarantine measures were coming. They’re firing blanks.”

  Good. That was good.

  We had soldiers among the crew that would board this ship. They would come to us. We had troops among the ‘fallen’, if they weren’t entirely ours. I hoped they had protected themselves against the acid rain, or that the rain had thinned out enough, this far from the city, that it wouldn’t hurt them too much.

  All we needed was for the Infante’s Professors to let their guards down. They could torch the town and walk away, seeing it as a job well done, and they could leave all of this behind… let their guards down, at least to some degree, and we could turn the tables.

  I almost felt like this was workable. Almost.

  Then Fray made her move.

  Previous Next

  Crown of Thorns—20.13

  Too much forethought to be Mauer, especially with t
he resources that were apparent. Too counterintuitive to be the Crown. Hayle was pinned down and didn’t have the means, the resources, position or forewarning to pull this off.

  A Tangle was emerging from the town. Its overall shape was different; it almost had a color scheme, because the bodies that formed it were all wearing Crown uniforms, and it had something resembling a head, though the angle of our view from the window meant that all I could make out was a singular dark shape. In terms of size, it was as large as the largest Tangle we’d seen in the city itself—large enough to touch the ground and the top of the tallest wall around the Academy itself.

  The Tangle wasn’t the entirety of it. There were people from the town marching alongside with the thing. They had flanked the rank and file of the elite soldiers and the Infante’s professors. Now the Tangle was charging in.

  Our people were in that mess. People we were counting on to get us out of this cell.

  Something like this had taken planning. It had taken premeditation, and it had taken a keen mind.

  Fray.

  I slammed one fist against the window, my jaw set.

  “What happened?” Mary asked.

  I turned to face her. “Some specialized Tangle is being directed, working with a small rebel group. It just attacked the soldiers. It might be going after the Professors.”

  “Oh,” Ashton said. “Oh, that’s not the plan.”

  I turned back around.

  The ‘dead’ were starting to rise, now that many of the guns were being trained on the Tangle. The ‘dead’ that had feigned death after being shot at with empty cartridges turned on the army, with improvised weapons and guns of their own.

  It wasn’t enough. Too few of them compared to the soldiers that had been selected to get a ride home. They were taking the action of the Tangle here to be some kind of cue from us, the sign that they should move in, catch the main army by surprise, and we would crush them.

  The problem being that our rebels and double agents were still in there.

  “Can you concoct anything to get us out of here? An acid, an explosive?”

  “They confiscated everything we could theoretically use,” Lillian said. “I have some packets of poison in my bra and some pills and small blades hidden in my clothing, but that’s not going to do anything.”

  “Fingertip syringes?” I asked.

  “One. They’re too much of a pain to maintain, and it affects circulation,” Lillian said, sounding a little defeated. “It’s nothing we can use.”

  “I used everything I had on that rooftop,” Duncan said.

  I nodded.

  Ashton, holding the light, began flashing the signal for ‘help’. It was a good thought. I wasn’t sure the people positioned to offer that help were close enough to give it.

  There wasn’t much to be done except to watch. The army tried to defend its position, making a fighting retreat into the ship, and the Tangle attacked the ramp. The Professors at the rear lines were among a scant few who made it into the ship before the ramp went to pieces. I could feel the heavy doors below slamming shut. The impact reverberated through the ship.

  “And that would be the doors to the boarding ramp,” I said.

  The others shared looks. Duncan dropped his bag to the floor.

  I punched the metal-reinforced wall. The impact didn’t even reverberate across the wall in question.

  ❧

  The sound of the rain against the side of the ship had changed. The gunfire had petered out, replaced by a periodic dull thud. Twice, we had been hit in a way that had made the entire ship shift, something integral giving way.

  A hand on my head made me stir. I lay on the table, my chest to Jessie’s back. Lillian stood beside me, one eye on the window, one hand on my head.

  “I’m not going to do that, Ashton,” Duncan was saying. I’d missed the lead-up to that conversation.

  “If you don’t remember everything, I could help you brainstorm. You have paper in your bag.”

  “First of all, no,” Duncan said.

  “Yes! If it’s a chance!”

  “It’s not. Believe me. I have spent months of my life poring over the texts, records, and paperwork pertaining to your project.”

  I moved my head, looking up at Lillian. “What’s this?”

  “Ashton being Ashton,” she said.

  I nodded, lowering my head, so it rested on my folded arm again.

  “Get creative, then,” Ashton said.

  “You’re not made of sturdy enough stuff. Also, there’s no guarantee you’re going to go back to the same configuration.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You care. You get fussy when your hair gets messed up. You want me to dismantle you? Take you apart into your constituent pieces, and put something together that can break down a door?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. It’s made to handle Warbeasts headbutting it. It’s not going to work, Ashton.”

  “Then get creative,” Ashton said, exasperated. “Maybe instead of beating it down you can do the opposite.”

  “Pull it down?”

  “Or suck it down! I remember my doctors saying there’s great power in vacuum. It’s part of how my pheromone dispensary works. Or you could make me into something small enough to fit through that window. I could use the handle and get us out.”

  “It really doesn’t work that way, Ashton, and we’d need to break that thick glass first, which might be doable if we rigged you to generate suction, which would probably take a fancy lab to manage, mind you.”

  “Improvise,” Ashton said.

  “No,” Duncan said. “And if we generated you to do that, we could hardly then change your function unilaterally to get you through the window to the handle.”

  Ashton huffed in annoyance.

  “It’s locked anyway,” Mary said. “I paid attention to it as they brought us in here.”

  Duncan extended his hands in Mary’s direction.

  “Sy has lockpicks, at the very least,” Ashton said. “So we’re talking about two minor surgeries and a teeny tiny bit of improvisation to go with it, and I’ll take Sy’s lockpicks with me when I go through the window.”

  “Ashton,” Duncan said.

  “Yes, Duncan?”

  “You know you’re one of my favorite people?”

  “I didn’t, but it’s nice to hear. Thank you, Duncan. You’re my number two favorite person after Helen.”

  “Okay. Well, keep in mind, if you keep this line of argument up the entire time we’re on our way to the Crown Capitol, I’m probably going to strangle you dead by the time we arrive, favorite person or no.”

  “Fine,” Ashton said. “I think that makes you mentally disturbed to a worrisome level, but fine. It’s not like I don’t have experience dealing with that type.”

  I cleared my throat.

  “Oh, Sy woke up,” Ashton said. “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I’m awake-ish,” I said. “Conserving strength, in case we get an opportunity to do anything.”

  “I was just talking about you, you know,” Ashton said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “I think I trust Duncan. I think they have to open the door at some point, and there’s a good chance it’ll be soon, if nobody has claimed ownership of that Tangle. They might assume it’s ours.”

  “That’s true,” Mary said.

  “We’re also overdue for food and water. If they don’t plan to let us expire, then they’ll have to open the door to give us something. That’s our opportunity. Barring exceptional circumstances, though, we’ll hear the locks on that door turn, it’ll open, and we’ll get a chance. We’ll have to capitalize on that chance.”

  “They’ve been careful so far,” Mary said.

  “We’ll—”

  The door handle squeaked, the locks grinding as the tumblers turned.

  “—figure it out,” I said.

  I climbed down
from the table. Mary positioned herself to be behind the door as it swung open. The rest of us moved toward the doorway.

  The door swung wide enough that it banged against the wall. Mary evaded it, then leaped up, climbing the side of the one heavy metal door until she was perched on top of it, weapon in hand.

  It was Emmett, with Nora standing behind him.

  I gestured, and Mary hopped down.

  “Fray?” I asked.

  Emmett nodded.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said.

  “We thought you might need it,” Nora said. She shifted position, and her claws scraped against the floor of the tunnel. “You were gone for a while. We tried to take captives to interrogate, but we’re not very good at that.”

  “We played to other strengths,” Abby said, peering around the door, into the room. “Hi Ashton.”

  “Hi.”

  “Where’s Helen?” Abby asked.

  “She’s here,” Ashton said. He pointed in my direction.

  Abby looked our way, her expression concerned. “I don’t see her.”

  “Ashton,” Duncan said. “Why don’t you go to Abby right now? Keep her calm, as all of this must be very stressful, and Abby doesn’t deal well with stress.”

  “I’m not dumb,” Abby said. “What’s going on? Why does Ashton need to keep me so calm?”

  She stepped further into the room. Ashton approached her.

  Then she saw Helen. Her hands went to her mouth, her eyes moved in different directions, and she tipped over. Emmett caught her.

  “Yeah,” Duncan said, quiet.

  Nora looked very alarmed, peering into the room. She tensed at a sound from further down the hall.

  We collected ourselves and our invalids, acting before our rescuers became too distressed. I helped Lillian get a grip on Jessie, and took her bag to ease the burden. It was too light, too much of it confiscated or spent.

  The hallway was largely empty.

  “What happened to Helen?” Nora asked.

  “She got sick. We cut her down to the healthy bits. Duncan is confident that he, Lillian, and Professor Ibbot can put her back the way she was.”

  Nora, her face barely visible beneath the shroud she wore, was nonetheless clearly displeased at that.

  “Fill us in,” I said.